Chapter 909
Zephyr, having spent long months meticulously preparing for this moment, did not hesitate to issue the command. The expansion had been underway for months now, with hundreds of apelings streaming out of the safety of their ancestral kingdom every single day to map and colonize the untamed territories beyond.
Zephyr at the sametime, aware of the rising volatility and the sharp, invisible lines being drawn between the Kingdoms of Osita and Omadi, he enforced a strict law on human interaction. He forbade his people from approaching the human lands, knowing that any entanglement now could prove disastrous.
His vision was clear, they would wait. The apelings would remain observers until a victor emerged from the human struggle. Zephyr refused to risk his people being caught in a divided loyalty, where individual apelings might find themselves forced to take up arms against their own kin depending on which human kingdom they chose to settle in or support. For now, they were expanding unexplored lands which in the coming future will play a big role.
The mortals in the world of Nana found themselves in a subtle but unmistakable shift. To their non-supernatural eyes, the alterations in their environment were difficult to notice, appearing more like a series of inexplicable anomalies than the workings of greater hands.
For a period, Ikenga’s return had been heralded by a season of miraculous, overflowing harvests, a time of surplus that validated his presence. But that prosperity was short-lived, and the land had reverted to the same state it occupied during the long years of his absence. The mortals, having already learned to adapt to those lean times before, initially attempted to apply the same survival strategies, yet this time, they had severely underestimated the severity of the regression.
The primary difference lay in the absence of a stabilizing hand. During the years Ikenga had been away, Jaus had quietly assumed the mantle of caretaker, maintaining the world’s vitality with precise, clockwork intervention. It was Jaus who had woven the weather, commanding the rains to fall with perfect cadence, ensuring the soil remained fertile even when the primary deity was elsewhere. Now, with Jaus’s quiet guardianship also withdrawn, the mortals were not merely returning to a familiar state of hardship, they were facing nature that had lost both its master and its maintainer, leaving them to struggle against a cycle of nature that had ceased to be benevolent.
The transformation of Nana was turning from a slow decline into a visceral struggle for survival. The rain, once a rhythmic blessing, had curdled into a destructive force when it finally descended, it fell with a violent temperament that drowned the earth in floods or scoured the topsoil away with gale-force storms. The land itself felt exhausted, the soil slowly losing its vibrant, responsive vitality, growing brittle and parched. Where crops once surged to life overnight, they now languished in the dirt for a week, stunted and lacking the sweetness of the era of divine favor.
The decay was not limited to the fields. The harvest itself, once gathered with ease, now withered in the storehouses. Mortals, long sheltered by the divine hand, had lost the ancestral knowledge of preservation, and they watched in helpless dismay as rot claimed their meager supplies.
The absence of Keles hands, or her herlad.The deity whose domain of death served as the world’s silent sanitizer, left a vacuum that was quickly filled by catastrophe. Without that stabilizing, purifying force, uncontrolled mold and blight spread like a plague across the monoculture fields, which possessed no natural resilience to repel such sickness.
Even the rhythm of the day had betrayed them. The evenings, once defined by a gentle, temperate embrace, now bled into a biting, unnatural chill. As the night lengthened, the people of Nana huddled together in the darkness, shivering against a cold they were unprepared for.
The moon, once a reliable beacon, now flickers and hides itself, plunging the world into a suffocating darkness that strips away the glint of civilization and awakens a dormant, primal terror in the hearts of men. In this time, the wild beasts of Nana, no longer quelled by nature abundance press against the borders of human settlements, drawn by a ravenous, instinctual hunger that no longer recognizes the sanctity of human territory.
At the same time, a silent invisible plague has begun to ravage the populace. With the rot of unpreserved harvests tainting the food supply and the once-magical purity of the water sources now compromised, illness has taken root. Because the mortals have lived under the blanket of protection for so long, their immune systems are utterly naive to pathogens. What would have once been a minor ailment now cascades through communities, spreading with a relentless, wildfire speed that leaves the healers of Nana paralyzed and desperate.
Even the sea has turned hostile. Those who consider themselves masters of the sea have had their arrogance stripped away by the reality of the open water. For generations, the ocean remained a docile, glass-smooth path maintained by the influence of Jaus, now, it is a volatile, unpredictable enemy. Sailors watch in disbelief as erratic swells rise from nowhere and winds shift with a malice that defies all navigational tradition.
The sky itself has abandoned its schedule. The cycle of the seasons has devolved into a volatile oscillation, weeks of oppressive, blistering sun turn the earth to cracked ceramic, only for that dry, fragile topsoil to be scoured away by sudden, cataclysmic downpours.
The world of Nana was rapidly learning the weight of the word "struggle," yet the humans were far from yielding. While the environmental collapse threatened to stifle them, it simultaneously acted as a forge, pressuring the status quo until it cracked, revealing a path for those bold enough to seize it.
This transformation began in the western continent with an old man who had once lost everything due to the reckless whims of the godlings. He had been a casualty of high-stakes politics, a mere pawn maneuvered to test the delicate and often volatile relationship between mortal kingdoms, the ascended gods, and the godlings. Yet, through the intricate web of these political machinations, he had secured a singular form of justice.
It was not the crude justice of vengeance or blood, his enemy lived on. Rather, it was a more pragmatic justice, the granting of agency where he had once been a victim. Xerosis, in a act of impartial adjudication, had provided the old man with clarity and a path forward where he could leave his mark in the annual of Nana.
Refusing to return to his former life of ignorance, the old man took the chance and pivoted with unexpected resolve. Driven by a desperate, intellectual hunger to understand the forces that had once treated him as a plaything, he turned his tormentors into his tutors. He demanded that the very godlings who had wronged him instruct him in the divine laws and hidden currents of the world. He was done being a pawn for those who preached justice while exploiting his suffering, he was learning to navigate the reality of gods, intent on not being a pawn to be sacrificed on the altar of divine politics.
Initially, the relationship between the old man and his godlings mentors was brittle and marked by cold indifference. The godlings provided instruction only as a mandated penance for their past transgressions, a begrudging duty they extended to all the mortals they had previously discarded or harmed.
However, as the seasons turned, the perception of their "student" began to shift. The godlings found themselves unnerved and eventually disarmed by his unwavering humility. Despite his advanced years, he approached them with the patience of a child, never demanding, and always willing to wait for their temperaments to settle before he resumed his studies.
This unexpected fortitude gradually eroded their disdain. A begrudging respect took root in the godlings, who began to view this frail mortal, a mere youth in the eyes of the long lived race with genuine esteem. They ceased their hollow recitations and began to unveil the complex doctrines of the Ascended Gods, mapping out the theological architecture that governed the sky of Nana.
The old man also expressed a desire to grasp the nature of the Origin Gods, The godlings halted him with a warning. They explained that there were no scrolls or dogmas to study regarding the Origin’s. they possessed no doctrines to follow, for they were the architects of Nana itself. To comprehend them was not a matter of study, but of solitary insight. They cautioned that such a understanding could only be reached through a foundation built first upon the study of the Ascended, for only by mastering the reflection of divinity could a mortal hope to eventually endure the brilliance of its source.
There was a lot to be thought, with nine Ascended Gods currently existing in the world of Nana, the old man faced a monumental task. Seven of these deities had established doctrines the godlings could impart, but the final two, those who had ascended only recently, following their own trials of imprisonment and penance remained largely enigmatic, their paths still unmapped by traditional scripture.