The Luminous Court was empty of all save two.

  Nicholas had dismissed his attendants. This conversation required privacy. The kind of secrecy that could only exist between powers who understood, on a fundamental level, the weight of what was about to be discussed.

  Nicholas’ form expanded, unraveling from the humanoid shape he had worn for the convenience of lesser beings. The threads of his being—those countless strands of Fate and Magic and War that composed his essence—spread outward like the roots of a cosmic tree, reaching across the Luminous Court, across the World-Mountain, across the entirety of the Atrium.

  He became a dome.

  A hemisphere of multicolored light, each strand a different hue—silver for Fate, gold for Magic, crimson for War, and a thousand other colors for the lesser authorities he had absorbed. The strands wove together in patterns of impossible complexity, forming a canopy that covered the World-Mountain like a sky made of living destiny. Stars—actual stars, born from the concentrated faith of billions—sparkled within the weave, each one a point of awareness, a node in his consciousness, a window through which he perceived reality.

  The World-Mountain, vast beyond measure, was now beneath him. He was its sky. Its heaven. Its context.

  And in the heart of that mountain, Odin responded in kind.

  The All-Father grew.

  From his domain in the Halls of the Ascendant, his essence expanded—not aggressively, not as a challenge, but as a response, an acknowledgment that this conversation would occur between equals, between beings who had transcended the need for forms.

  His tree-form, already vast, became vaster. Its roots delved deeper into the mountain's substance, tapping into the flows of refined faith that powered the entire Atrium. Its branches reached upward, toward Nicholas's dome-canopy, not quite touching but almost, creating a space between them that was charged with potential.

  Odin became a planet-sized tree, his trunk a continent of ancient bark, his leaves galaxies of memory and wisdom, his single eye a sun that burned with the accumulated knowledge of eons.

  And between them—between the dome of stars and the world-tree—the conversation began.

  You wish to know of the East, Odin's voice resonated. It was not sound—it was meaning, vibrations in the fabric of reality that Nicholas's consciousness interpreted as speech. You wish to understand why we, who have faced Titans and Primordials and the very wrath of creation, speak of those lands with... caution.

  Nicholas's response was a pulse of light across his dome-canopy, a shifting of colors that conveyed assent and curiosity in equal measure.

  Tell me.

  Odin's branches rustled, and for a moment, Nicholas felt the weight of ages—the accumulated memory of a being who had watched civilizations rise and fall since before history was written.

  The way gods came to be in the East is... different. Fundamentally, irrevocably different from anything we experienced in the West.

  A pause. Then:

  In the West, we were born from the worship of the world itself. The sky, the earth, the sea, the storms—these were the first objects of human reverence. And from that reverence, from the belief that these forces had will and personality, the Primordials were born. Uranus. Gaia. Pontus. The raw, untamed powers of existence made conscious by human faith.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Nicholas understood this. He had learned it from Circe, decades ago, in what now seemed like another lifetime.

  In the East, Odin continued, it began differently. They did not worship the world. They worshiped their ancestors.

  The words hung in the space between them, heavy with implication.

  The first divine beings of the East were not mountains or storms or rivers given consciousness. They were people. Mortal men and women who had lived and died, whose descendants honored their memory with such fervor, such devotion, that their souls did not fade into oblivion. They ascended. They became gods—not through theft or conquest or the accumulation of authority, but through the simple, powerful love of their children's children.

  Nicholas's stars flickered with understanding. This was... different. Fundamentally different from the Western model, where gods were born from concepts and only later developed personalities.

  These ancestor-gods, Odin said, were the first pantheon of the East. They were called the Shang Di—the High Ancestors. And for millennia, they ruled. They guided. They protected.

  But, Nicholas interjected, and the word was a shift in the color of his dome, they encountered the same problem.

  Yes. Odin's branches drooped slightly, a gesture of ancient weariness. The same problem. Faith—the very substance that elevated them, that gave them power and form—began to corrupt them. The ancestors became... distorted. The loving grandfather became a tyrant. The wise grandmother became a capricious queen. The prayers of their descendants, filtered through millennia of human hope and fear and desire, reshaped them into something their mortal selves would never have recognized.

  Mad gods.

  Mad gods, Odin confirmed. Just as in the West. Just as Uranus became a monster of rage and irrationality. The ancestor-gods of the East suffered the same fate. And for a time, it seemed that they would follow the same path—that they would be overthrown by their children, just as Cronos overthrew Uranus, just as Zeus overthrew Cronos.

  But they did not.

  No. Odin's single eye blazed with something like admiration. They found another way.

  The tree shifted, and Nicholas felt a new presence in the conversation—not a being, but a story, a memory that Odin was carefully, deliberately unfolding.

  Among the descendants of these ancestor-gods was a mortal. A demigod, in our terms, but the East had no such concept. He was simply... special. His name was Zhuanxu. He was the grandson of the Huang Di—the Yellow Emperor, one of the Three Great Ancestors, a primordial god of immense power.

  A demigod ruler.

  Yes. And more than that—a solution. Zhuanxu was born of divine blood, but he was mortal. His body, his flesh, his very existence as a living, breathing human being... it insulated him. The faith that corrupted his ancestors could not touch him in the same way. It flowed through him, powered him, elevated him—but it could not reshape him. He was anchored to mortality, and that anchor held.

  Nicholas understood immediately. It was the same principle the Olympians had later discovered—using demigods as filters, as conduits, as living shields against the corrupting influence of faith. But the East had discovered it first. Millennia earlier.

  Zhuanxu looked upon his ancestors, Odin continued, and he saw what they had become. He saw the madness in their eyes, the capricious cruelty that faith had carved into their once-loving souls. And he made a decision.

  A decision that changed everything.

  Yes. Odin's branches trembled. He performed the Severing of Heaven and Man.

  The words resonated through Nicholas's dome-canopy, and for a moment, the stars within him seemed to dim.

  He cut the connection, Nicholas realized, drawing upon mythology he had read in both this life and the previous one. He separated the divine realm from the mortal one.

  Completely. Permanently. Irrevocably. Sealed them in amber so that they may fade away in a dignified manner instead of growing ever more insane as generation after generation passed.

  Odin's voice carried the weight of ages.

  Before Zhuanxu, the gods of the East walked among mortals. They were present, visible, just like we were in the ages passed. After Zhuanxu... they were gone. Not destroyed. Not diminished. Simply... separated. The divine realm became inaccessible. The gods could not descend. The two worlds were cut apart, and a great gulf was fixed between them, that is for a time.