The new Symbols hummed with latent power. They were not just tools; they were extensions of their gods, perfect conduits and filters.
Nicholas gave a silent, mental command. The vast reservoir of faith, the accumulated belief of millions, stirred. It was time for the final preparation before the solstice.
"Channel it through your Symbols," his voice echoed, a calm command in the psychic space they shared. "While you grow your authority allow your artifacts bear the strain."
The four attendants obeyed. Marcus, the Cupbearer, raised his Chalice. The roaring torrent of faith, desperate prayers, fervent hopes, dark fears, poured into the sacred vessel.
The flaming blood within churned, boiling violently. Impurities, the chaotic and corrupting emotions laced through the belief, rose like black scum to the surface, where they burned away in the holy fire. What remained was a semi-pure, potent energy of devotion and vitality, which flowed back into his being.
Jonathan, the Witness, focused faith through his Prism. The chaotic light of mortal belief entered, and the crystal artifact split it, isolating the nature of each prayer. The frantic urgency, the clinging to past regrets, the terror of future doom, all were refracted out, leaving only the semi-pure clean energy that strengthened his control over the time authority.
Julian, the Keeper, opened his Book. Faith streamed across its living pages. The symbols writhed, absorbing the tangled, filthy nature of the beliefs, the hidden doubts, the selfish desires. The Book contained these corrosive elements within its boundless pages, purifying the energy that he absorbed.
Hercules, the Warden, simply stood as his Pillar flared. The faith washed over the spatial distortion it projected. Through the fracturing of space around the artifact the faith was smoothed into cleaner energy.
And as they did this, Nicholas enacted the core of his design. Through the soul-fragments he had implanted, he issued a second, hidden command.
A portion of that perfectly purified faith energy, the cleanest possible power, was silently diverted before it could they could absorb it. It flowed back along the psychic connection, a brilliant, undiluted stream, and poured directly into his own essence.
He felt the growth immediately. His authority yearned to expand, to steal from the domains of Fate, War and Magic held by the other Gods. That would be the most cost affective plan, pure plundering.
But his strategic mind vetoed the impulse. Such a direct theft would be an act of total war. It would shatter the fragile truce and unite every pantheon against him. Odin, in particular, would not stand for such a blatant theft of his domain. The game would be over before it truly began.
So, he split the massive influx of pure faith. One part he directed outward, toward the conceptual space where the Authorities themselves resided. He focused on the construct of Fate, the vast tapestry he had already claimed a portion of. He did not try to steal the threads held by the Morai. Instead, he used the faith as a divine tool, a loom and thread of his own.
He began to weave a new part of the authority constructed solely by him. He could see it now, how the Morai shaped this authority into what he saw before him the threads and scissors found within were their work, they wove a majority of this construct themselves.
And now he was adding his own touches. He added new, brilliant, golden threads to the very concept of Fate itself. In the construct he added symbolism of the birth and death of worlds, of creation of humanity, of the birth of reality itself.
These new symbols represented the raw force of Creation that he added to the Fate authority, not just weaving the birth, life and death of beings, but the active, deliberate writing of the very purest forms of creation.
It was the power to spin new possibilities from nothing, to seed potential where none existed. He was not taking a bigger slice of the existing pie; he was baking a whole new piece, making the pie itself bigger and then directing the second portion of his faith to claim the entire new portion.
As soon as this new aspect was woven into the cosmic construct, his consciousness surged forward, occupying it completely. His share of the overall Fate authority did not just grow; its nature changed, becoming more fundamental, more potent.
He now held forty percent of the total domain, and his portion held the ultimate, executive power. He could, in essence, overrule the decrees of the three Fates, if the Fate authority was a company, then he became its largest shareholder.
But that wasn't all, before he could only control the fate of planet earth however as he sensed his new powers, he knew that now his authority extended far beyond the planet into the entire solar system.
He was now on par with the God-Kings of the Major Pantheons, if only in pure power. The only thing he still lacked was the subordinate Gods that made up the majority of their forces.
This staggering feat was only possible because of his four attendants. Their artifacts bore the immense burden of purifying the faith, a task that would have driven a lone god mad.
There was no single God-King with absolute dominion over Fate to stop him, and the sheer volume of faith from the modern world, billions of souls versus the millions of antiquities, gave him a resource his predecessors could never have imagined.
The result was a visible, physical transformation. Within the sanctuary, their divine forms swelled with newfound power. The Shaper grew, his tapestry-body expanding until he stood four kilometers tall, the threads of his form glowing not only with the elemental powers but now also his form resembled the spinning of galaxies and birth and death of stars.
His attendants grew in concert, their own true forms reaching a formidable two kilometers in height, their auras solidifying into tangible forces of nature.
Nicholas was careful. He left a full five percent of the faith reservoir untouched. It was an emergency fund, a lifeline. He now understood the intimate relationship between a god and their faith intuitively. Faith was not just power; it was sustenance.
Their magnificent true bodies were literally constructed from it. Without a constant flow, a god would not simply weaken; their soul would grow exhausted, becoming brittle under the colossal weight of the authority it carried, until it finally shattered into nothingness. Fading was a slow, agonizing starvation of the soul.
He looked at his pantheon, now towering and radiant. They were armed. They were fed. They were unified. The hum of global prayer was a constant, reassuring presence in his mind. The winter solstice and the meeting on the moon were no longer a distant threat, but the next logical step.
"We are ready," the Shaper declared, his voice the sound of destiny itself being woven. "It is time to claim our seat. It is time to build the Atrium."
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