Horatio folded his hands together, fingers interlacing as if settling into a familiar passage. His voice did not rise. It did not sharpen. It carried the gentle cadence of scripture recited a thousand times, each word worn smooth by reverence rather than repetition.

  “Aeterna was founded during the Fifth Providence War,” he began. “To understand what that means, you must first unlearn the notion that a god simply appears. Gods are not accidents. They are not miracles that fall from the sky. A god is something that is become.”

  He inclined his head slightly, as though acknowledging an altar only he could see.

  “In that age, a young boy named Stanton discovered the means to ascend. Not through birthright, nor blessing, but through authority. He claimed dominion over a concept so basic that no civilization can exist without touching it.” Horatio paused, allowing the weight of the idea to settle. “Fire.”

  His tone warmed, almost fond.

  “Fire brings light. It brings heat. It brings life. It brings destruction. We fertilize our fields with volcanic ash. We burn our enemies’ homes. We forge our tools in furnaces and fire our clay in crucibles. Our lords and ladies are burned for treason. Our wounds are cauterized to keep death at bay.” He smiled faintly. “Fire is not one thing. It is many.”

  Horatio looked at me then, not to test me, but to ensure I was following.

  “When a mortal becomes the authority over something so simple, so universal, it causes… friction. Domains overlap. Claims collide. One god must challenge the others who already hold dominion over that space.” He exhaled softly. “Stanton was, in many ways, like fire itself.”

  He counted them off gently, as if naming virtues and vices alike from a holy text.

  “He was prideful. Arrogant. Emotional. Brash.” A beat. “He was also intelligent. Brilliant. A beacon in the dark. He embodied fire not only in power, but in temperament.”

  Horatio’s eyes softened.

  “Stanton succeeded. And in doing so, he shed his name and took another. He is now Divine Lord Astartartion. God of Fire, Dawn, and Language.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from raising an eyebrow at the last.

  Horatio noticed, of course.

  “Tell me,” he said kindly, “at night, can you read without light?”

  I hesitated.

  “Astartartion is lord of the Morning Star,” he continued, answering for me, “the final star to vanish when Lady Ang’s Light rises and grants us haven from the shadows that lurk beyond her reach. He is lord of language because without his light, we cannot comprehend our scrolls, our books, our tomes. It is to him we pray for guidance in darkness, for Ang cannot pierce the veil of shadow. Where her light ends, his dawn begins.”

  He lifted a hand, palm outward, a quiet apology woven into the gesture.

  “Forgive me. I stray. Old habits.” A small smile. “Providence Wars.”

  His voice returned to calm recitation.

  “When a god claims a primal force, they must challenge the existing lords and ladies of that domain. The nature of that challenge varies. Some are trials. Some are contests. Some are… wars.” His expression grew solemn. “The Fifth Providence War was among the least devastating, considering the nature of fire.”

  A pause.

  “That does not mean it was gentle.”

  Horatio lowered his gaze.

  “Thirty-three thousand died. Burned. Almost all by Stanton’s hand, before he became Astartartion. Of those, only a little over half were servants of profane lords and ladies of fire.” He looked back up, eyes steady. “The rest were simply caught between divinity and inevitability.” His voice did not accuse. It did not condemn. He simply kept a neutral tone, explaining the history.

  Horatio continued without haste, his voice settling back into that measured, sermon-soft cadence, the kind meant to be heard by candlelight and remembered long after.

  “Aeterna does not exist alone,” he said. “It has many planes neighboring it within our manasphere. In this telling, the land that matters is Torren.”

  He lifted a finger, as though marking a passage in an unseen text.

  “Torren is now a volcanic plane. Rivers of molten stone. Ash that never truly settles. Firestorms that bloom without warning.” His expression did not harden, but something mournful entered it. “It was not always so. Once, Torren was grass as far as the eye could see. Seas of green. Wind moving like water across the land.”

  Horatio exhaled slowly.

  “Today, Torren portalists come to Aeterna to sell fertilizer. Ash enriched by divine flame. In return, we sell them what their world can no longer sustain. Fruits. Vegetables. Livestock. Husbandries and domestic crafts lost to heat and stone.” He folded his hands again. “This exchange exists because Stanton, now Lord Astartartion, burned Torren in his pursuit of ascension.”

  His gaze met mine, steady and instructive.

  “Do not misunderstand me. Not every ascension is a conquest. Fire is not kind by its nature. Other concepts… are quieter.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  He paused, just long enough to be sure I was still with him, then nodded once.

  “Let us speak of something far less destructive.” A faint smile. “Trees.”

  “This ascension occurred here, on Aeterna, and is recorded as our six hundred and seventeenth. Her name was Jalla.”

  Horatio’s tone softened further, as if telling a bedtime story rather than a holy account.

  “One afternoon, Jalla fell asleep in a tree. And while she slept, she dreamed.” He tilted his head. “What is a tree? To a squirrel, it is shelter and food. To a bird, it is refuge, territory, and hunting ground. To the plants below, it is shade, fertilizer, and growth. To a farmer, it is fruit. To a carpenter, it is livelihood.”

  A small, knowing smile.

  “To Jalla, it was none of these things. A tree was a tree… because it simply was.”

  He chuckled softly.

  “Jalla was, by most measures, lazy. She envied the trees for their stillness. Their swaying in the wind. Their ability to rest beneath the sun without apology.” His eyes glimmered with fondness. “She would skip her afternoon duties as a baker’s daughter and vanish into the forest, hiding where she could not be found.”

  “She was found eventually,” he continued, “by the village hunter. And rather than scold her, he was impressed. Jalla was quiet. Patient. Nearly impossible to detect. She concealed her presence as naturally as breathing.” Horatio nodded. “So he took her as an apprentice.”

  He smiled wider now.

  “She was dreadful with a bow. Worse with a spear. What she excelled at were knots. Traps. Waiting.” A gentle laugh. “Forms of hunting that required the least effort.”

  “All of her traps,” he said, “relied on saplings. Young trees bent just so. Branches tied just right. And so it was that one day, entirely by accident, she caught a divine rabbit.”

  Horatio spread his hands.

  “And in that moment, Jalla became more.”

  “Lady Yulli,” he intoned reverently. “Goddess of Trees, of Traps, and of Dreams. No war followed. No conquest was required. Her ascension task had already been fulfilled. She caught the rabbit that was meant for her.”

  He shook his head, smiling.

  “She is now patron deity to foresters across Aeterna.”

  Horatio’s expression grew solemn once more.

  “Here, within these halls, Divinity and Profanity are both respected. Gods and Goddesses. Demons and Devils. They stand equal beneath the telling.”

  He looked directly at me.

  “A Demon is simply a god who rejects the sapient life of their plane. A Devil, a goddess who has done the same. Names change. Authority does not.”

  Horatio did not speak immediately after that. He let the silence settle, the way priests do when they want the weight of doctrine to sink into bone rather than ear. Then he clasped his hands again, knuckles creaking softly.

  “To understand why salt is rare,” he said gently, “you must understand water. And to understand water, you must understand loss.”

  He looked toward the torches, watching the flames bend and waver, reflected faintly in his eyes.

  “The ascension I speak of is not numbered among our celebrated providences. It is recorded, yes, but in margins. In annotations. In warnings written by those who survived it.” His voice lowered. “This was not a god who loved mortals. Nor one who despised them outright. This was a god who withdrew.”

  He inhaled.

  “Her name, before ascension, was Selacha.”

  “Selacha was born on a coastal plane long since erased from modern cartography. A place of tides and estuaries, where rivers braided into the sea and the sea gave back life in fish, rain, and storms. She was not a queen, nor a priestess. She was a desaliner.”

  Horatio smiled faintly at my confusion.

  “She removed salt from seawater so her people could drink. Clay basins. Slow evaporation. Crude crystallization. It was monotonous, patient work. And it meant survival.”

  “Selacha learned water the way few ever do. Not as a force, but as a cycle. She learned how it moved through flesh. Through soil. Through clouds. She learned that water carried memory. Taste. Weight.”

  “She learned,” Horatio said softly, “that water takes, but it also leaves something behind. When the ascension call came to Selacha, it did not arrive as fire or lightning or revelation. It came as drought. The seas receded. Rivers thinned. Rain refused to fall. And Selacha, desperate to save her people, did what no mortal before her had dared. She claimed authority over water’s absence.”

  Horatio’s eyes sharpened.

  “Not water as sustenance. Not water as life. But water as withdrawal. As erosion. As thirst. The moment she took that mantle, the manasphere trembled. Selacha did not challenge the gods of rain, nor the lords of tide. She simply stepped around them. She became the authority on what water removes when it passes through a thing.”

  He lifted a finger.

  “Thus she ascended not as a Goddess, but as a Devil.”

  Her domains were threefold. Water. Depletion. And Separation. When Selacha rose,” Horatio continued, “she drank. Seas across neighboring planes lost their salinity. Oceans grew thin, fresh, unstable. Entire ecosystems collapsed as creatures that relied on salt balance died screaming in silence. Where water flowed under her influence, it took everything soluble with it.

  “Minerals. Electrolytes.” He sighed. “And salt.”

  “Salt,” Horatio explained, “is not merely seasoning. It is a stabilizer. A boundary. A ward against dissolution. In the manasphere, salt anchors form. It resists entropy. It tells water where it must stop. Selacha hated that. She believed salt was arrogance. A defiance of water’s will to move, to erode, to claim. So she stripped it away. Planes touched by her influence became lush briefly, then sickly. Crops grew fast, then failed. Flesh swelled, then ruptured. Magic destabilized. Healing spells backfired. Blood lost its balance. When mortals begged her to stop,” Horatio said quietly, “she did not rage. She simply… turned away. That, more than anything, marked her as a Devil. She rejected sapient life not out of malice, but out of indifference.”

  “The other gods moved too late. Fire could not burn water that refused to carry minerals. Earth cracked and sloughed into mud. Air scattered clouds that no longer knew how to rain properly. The only thing that resisted Selacha was salt itself. Thus began the Salting Crusades,” Horatio said, voice solemn. “Where gods and mortals alike hoarded, sanctified, and weaponized salt. Entire planes were preserved by sealing coastlines with crystallized barriers. Priests learned to carry salt pouches as wards. Demons learned to fear it.”

  “And Selacha?” I asked quietly.

  Horatio closed his eyes.

  “She remains. A Devil of Water, Depletion, and Separation. She drinks rivers dry between worlds. She strips mana of cohesion. And she hunts salt wherever it gathers too densely.”

  He opened his eyes again, fixing me with a steady look.

  “That is why salt is rare, Morgan. Not because it cannot exist. But because something in the manasphere actively removes it.”

  He folded his hands.

  “And that,” he said calmly, “is why your Sphere frightens the Queen.”