Goodbye, the First World — 2

Beneath the gray walls that divide the royal castle from everything beyond them lies a broad stretch of open ground.

Only yesterday, Tisha's coffin had rested there, come full circle from its procession around the capital. Now a high altar stands in the middle of that emptiness.

Everyone who lives within the walls knows what it means.

An execution platform.

When a criminal of the most heinous kind is found, this is where their crimes are cried out for all to hear, and where their head is struck from their shoulders before every watching eye. The rite is carried out in the name of setting the kingdom's law to rights, but those who actually savor it take the thing rather differently. And the people who stage the spectacle know that perfectly well.

An execution is a circus. It offers the citizens an entertaining show.

Human blood excites. Watching a guilty person slaughtered in a wretched state gives a human being a pleasure of the rawest, most bodily kind.

Heard on its own, that may be difficult to understand. One might even decide these people are simply uncivilized. But think a little further, and you know. On our private screens, don't we thrill at the sight of a crowd lunging in to tear someone apart the instant they slip?

This is not a question of whether people are good or bad. It is closer to a trait acquired in the course of becoming social—because in a primitive society, if you do not condemn the one who has done wrong, the society cannot hold. Outsiders are cast out. Those who will not follow the rules are killed, or driven away.

And if you fail to do that?

The primitive age was an environment far too harsh for a human being to survive alone. When a society came apart, the group went under. We are the group that lived because we clung together, so there is nothing strange in that trait coming down through the blood.

And so, the moment there was any sign that a festival of blood was about to begin, people followed their instincts and began to gather, one by one and two by two, in the square before the royal castle—delighting already in the question of which villain would wail their way to death today.

The funeral had been a gloomy affair, and the backlash against it drove an enormous crowd pouring into the square.

Someone looked upon that packed ground and was satisfied.

The priests, and the holy knights.

Seeing how many had assembled, they rejoiced that here was a chance to display before the Kingdom of Anselus the majesty of the Church of the Holy God. They even consulted one another on how best to torment the girl they called an evil god, and what might wring from her a plea for her life.

Under the logic of this world, anyone declared an enemy of the god is a target upon whom truly anything may be done. Even had it been no evil god at all, but a human being, they would have done the same without a flicker of guilt.

There are, as a rule, two ways a person becomes truly and extremely cruel. They feel that they are in the right, or the other stops looking like a person to them. And when the two overlap, something still more terrible follows.

If one reaches for an example from the early modern age, the witch hunt will do. Nations came later that turned the phrase idyllic days of slaughter into something literal, but as a likeness for what is happening now, the witch hunt fits best.

Of course, an Outer God deserves to be hunted as a witch. It is no human child, after all, but a beast.

In any case, while the people of the Church of the Holy God were busy pondering how they ought to cook her, there was one more soul waiting in pleasure.

None other than the Outer God.

It did not show on her face, but as she looked over the crowd packed shoulder to shoulder, she was turning over how she ought to speak from here on, if she wanted to screw the god over even harder. Most of that leisure, of course, lay somewhere else. Out in a mansion on the edge of the capital, three men were bent diligently over their pages, and through their eyes the Outer God was watching them.

To a truly admirable degree, no one was thinking about them at all. Least of all because Hyungkesuni, the greatest danger among them, stood in the crowd hoping to see the Outer God put to death.

If Hyungkesuni changed their mind again, decided the Outer God was a threat after all, and took it into their head to erase every trace of her, there was a good chance they would dispose of the ones reading so far away. There was no way to stop it. The only contract Hyungkesuni was bound to honor was the making of the book. Nothing at all had been promised about what came after, and the Outer God knew that very well—because if the worst came, she would have needed either to bless Hyungkesuni, or at least to arrange for them to die at the hands of someone who already bore her blessing.

Stall until those three had read the book through to the end, and the victory was hers.

Thinking so, she looked at her arms and her legs, and at the chain around her neck. The holy knights of the Church of the Holy God had locked the restraints onto her when they brought her out, insisting her escape had to be prevented. Cut into the metal, in a script the Church alone employed, were characters that borrowed the power of a god, and those characters were in fact exerting that power, binding her.

No. Binding was too small a word. They were attacking her, as if a little spoon were scooping the flesh out of her body.

The pain was horrific. An ordinary person would have felt what it is to be torn to shreds alive, over every inch of the body, and that was precisely the pain the Outer God was feeling. She did not even find it ticklish. What tormented her more was the cold that kept boring into her, on and on—past the flesh, past the bone, endlessly digging into something more important that lay within, and hurting her there.

That was why she could not help clinging so hard to warmth. For warmth, she could do anything. She also knew that warmth taken as a stopgap, if she could not keep hold of it, would leave this pain to go on forever. So even with an impulse on her that felt like madness, she did not look at what stood directly before her. She looked a very long way off.

Had she been a little simpler, she would have moved like an insect. To escape a pain without end, she would have run, thoughtless, straight at the warmth in front of her.

A ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠great many people labor under the illusion that pain is something one can grow used to. The human body has no such function. Biologically, pain possesses no mechanism of habituation. You cannot adapt. Were that the whole of it, it might be bearable, but as with certain illnesses, the suffering only deepens.

So the Outer God longed for warmth. But there was a reason she could not move simply, a reason she did not break at once for warmth in order to flee that terrible pain. Beneath that surface, even death had been impossible for her. That terror, and that despair, were the force that held her impulses down.

So she used her head as far as it would go, and she looked far ahead, and she did not expect much. The only treasure to be had in this world was the art of summoning herself into another. She had fixed on that alone, and expected nothing else. Which meant that here, now, until the download finished, she would torment the god the way a person watches short videos on a phone.

How much good it actually did was beside the point. If she could walk away satisfied that she had simply screwed them, that was enough. If obtaining the method of summoning was the main quest, then what she meant to do in front of these people belonged not to a side quest but to a minigame—something it hardly mattered whether she did well or badly, so long as it killed the time.

So she decided to commit to it without restraint.

A good long while passed. Right up to the moment the platform was finished and she was dragged onto it, the Outer God went on thinking that way. Then, with a vast crowd looking on, she was forced to her knees at the front of the execution platform.

A holy knight stepped forward first and gave his name. Anyone with even a passing interest in rumor knew him at once. He was the most famous holy knight of the Church of the Holy God in the present age. After a short, clipped introduction, he read out once more the letter from the Church's pontiff that he had already read before the king. Then, announcing that the evil god was this, he drove his foot into the cheek of the girl on her knees.

Set aside the fact that the girl was an Outer God, and it was a thoroughly cruel sight. The people roared their delight. An evil witch, over there. To ordinary folk an evil god and an evil witch were much the same thing, so the language was being somewhat abused. The meaning was identical.

A creature one was permitted to kill in agony.

For a moment the square went silent. This was an enormous thing. Tisha, hero of the Church of the Holy God, had contracted with an evil god. Everyone wanted to call it nonsense, but off to one side of the execution ground stood a number of people with purple hair. As far as the crowd knew, purple hair was the mark of royal blood. The confusion only deepened.

The holy knight looked them over, smiled with satisfaction, and—just as planned, the better to drag Tisha down—brought out an old story. He told of an event more than eighty years gone, one that no one still living in the capital truly knew. Heretics of an evil god had invaded the Kingdom of Anselus, and in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the end they had smashed the capital. And every one of those heretics had worn purple hair.

The holy knight shouted it.

That, he declared, was Tisha's sin, and he denounced the man they had sent off in tears only yesterday.

To the holy knight and the priests, it was nothing more than a speech meant to belittle Tisha and lift the standing of the Church of the Holy God. However great a hero Tisha had been, he was an old man dead of old age. Tell the truth, they thought, and the people of Anselus would ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠naturally think less of him, and look up all the more to the Church.

But in the capital of this Kingdom of Anselus, Tisha had been a great king. He had raised the ruined kingdom back onto its feet and built a realm larger than any that had come before. The adults standing here knew that king's rule. The children standing here had grown up on that king's legends.

Just a little.

Something cracked.

And unfortunately, hoping to make the execution show still more entertaining, they gave the Outer God a chance to speak. The holy knight brought a long sword, drove it into her shoulder, jabbed a finger out at the people, and bellowed at her to tell the truth.

A technique for forcing a confession of one's own sins. In certain countries it is called self-criticism. It is a method of gaslighting.

A person would have found it hard to bear.

If they were a person.

The Outer God opened her mouth.

"That's right. I gave Tisha a blessing."

And she meant to speak nothing but fact. A lie, she had told herself, would certainly be seen through by a mind like hers, and so she did not lie at all. A policy like that shows its worth only when a stretch of time this long opens up.

"He was raised in a cult called the Church of Future Hope, and he was good by nature, so he had come to doubt a cult that killed people and offered them up as sacrifices."

Slowly, Tisha's past began to come out—a past truly known to only a very few. The person in this world who perhaps knew him better than anyone living started, unhurried, to unwind his story. Not to make the truth known. To loose upon the world a poison filled with nothing but malice.

"He was dragged before me by force, and he was forced to receive a blessing. If he hadn't, he would have been killed. There was nothing he could do."

Thrown by words he had not expected, the holy knight drove the blade in her shoulder deeper, trying to stop her mouth. To the Outer God, pain of that sort was nothing but a signal.

"Blessed that way, and past the danger to his life, Tisha watched for a chance and escaped the cult. To put a stop to a cult that did nothing but immoral things, he went to the Kingdom of Anselus. And by his own goodness he won the recognition of the Kingdom of Anselus and of the Church of the Holy God. And the Church urged him to convert, and he accepted."

This was a good story for the Church of the Holy God. The holy knight thought so, and eased the strength behind the sword he had planted in her back. At a glance, it sounded as though the Church had forgiven a heretic and taken him in. The priest behind him thought the same of that part. They were thinking entirely from the Church's point of view, and so they could ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠not begin to guess what she would say next.

No—who, of all people, would ever have predicted it? That a god would say, in their own voice, that human beings are free to choose their religion.

The Outer God had not spared a thought for the waves those words would raise. Let them suffer, sorting out some religious nuisance. That was the whole of what she felt.

A monster wearing the mask of a god began, in earnest, to loose her poison on the world. She did it to buy the three still reading time enough to finish the book—or, in the leisure that bought, to torment a god.