The war, that monstrous, god-fueled engine of faith and suffering, finally shuddered to a halt. The divine calculus had shifted. With the Great Prophecy held in frozen abeyance and the threat of Lucifer extinguished, the desperate, greedy hunger that had prolonged the conflict gave way to a colder, more strategic imperative.
The Olympians and their allied pantheons, their fear of the prophecy now outweighing their hunger for the war's dark harvest, finally coordinated their influence.
Mortal historians would record a series of critical turns: critical intelligence breakthroughs, the sudden, inexplicable failure of key German supply lines, a rise in dissension within the Nazi high command that bordered on the supernatural. The Allied push became inexorable.
Berlin fell not in 1945, but in the early months of 1958. Hitler did not die in a bunker by his own hand; he was torn apart in a chaotic street battle by a swarm of Furies, sent not only by Hades but by the collective will of the Olympians, a final act of brutality to close the chapter.
The war ended not with the dawn of the atomic age as a military tool, but under a sky still echoing with the recent, contained clash of a host of angels and antichrist. The peace was fraught, the world scarred, but the divine hands guiding the board had withdrawn, their immediate feast concluded.
For Nicholas, the end of the war meant the completion of a different harvest. The Order of Eternity, under the direction of his Ascended agents, had worked silently for years. As the battlefields fell silent, their true work intensified. Under the cover of relief efforts, memorial construction, and "war grave consolidation," they gathered the fallen. Not just the heroes, but the vast, anonymous masses.
The charnel pits of Europe, the sunken ships in the Atlantic, the frozen battlefields of the East, all were quietly scoured. Millions of bodies, the physical residue of the gods' feast, were collected, preserved through a blend of advanced mortal techniques and subtle stasis magics, and transported to secured, interdimensional vaults within the Hall of the Ascendant. The scale of the collection was beyond any mortal cemetery; it was a necropolis of continental proportions, a raw material of profound existential weight.
In the Luminous Court, Nicholas received the final report from the Keeper. The harvest was complete. The reservoirs of preserved mortal remains were full. He stood before the shifting panorama of the Atrium, his gaze passing over the burning sea, the desert of time, and the new, echoing domains of the Unknowns.
"The timeline has shifted," he remarked, his voice a calm vibration in the divine air. "The war ended fifteen years later than the crude outline of history I once knew. The pieces are moved. The distractions are concluded." He turned to his attendants, their immense forms radiating quiet power. "The materials are prepared. The first true phase of our design can now begin."
e sent the summons inward, through the bonds of authority that connected the Atrium's pantheon. It was a call, not to Olympians or Allfathers, but to his own. The four attendants manifested first: the Cupbearer with his chalice, the Keeper with his book, the Witness with his prism, the Warden with his pillar. Then came the Unknowns, the first fruits of the Ladder: Axiom of the Crystal Reason, Ignis of the Forgefire, Telos the Silent Cartographer, Skia the Stone-Whisperer, Cordelia of the Weeping Chalice, and a growing number of others, each a focused note in the harmony of the Atrium. They gathered not on the Shore, but in the heart of the Luminous Court, beneath the radiance of Nicholas's throne.
"The age of clinging to a single, scarred rock is beneath us," Nicholas began, his voice the sound of threads aligning. "We have spent years building the apparatus of refinement. We filter faith. We define aspects. We grow our authority with precision. But this is management. It is not transcendence."
He gestured, and an image coalesced in the air between them: a schematic of reality, with the mortal Earth as a central, troubled node, and the Atrium as a burgeoning, attached realm. "We are tenants. We are gardeners in a borrowed field, however well we tend it. The recent war proved the field can be salted. The panic of Olympus proves the lease can be threatened."
His gaze swept over his gods. "We have the system. We have the purified faith from your labors." He nodded to the Unknowns. "We have the concentrated authority." His eyes met his attendants'. "And now, we have the raw, existential potential." He pointed upward, toward the vaults. "The harvested essence of millions of lives, ended. It is not just material. It is cosmological weight. A foundational sacrifice of monumental scale, a price that is required for an alteration of reality on such a scale."
He unveiled it then, not as a proposal, but as the next logical step of their shared design. "We will not just refine what exists. We will create what should exist. We will forge our own worlds. As the Norse Allfather fashioned his nine realms from the bones of a giant, we will fashion new realities from the principles we embody and the potential we have gathered."
The vision was not of conquest, but of genesis. "Each of you embodies a purified aspect, and each of you shall form a plane, a world built on the foundation of that aspect, and then together we shall form beings for each of those worlds, built to sustain us forevermore."
He was not asking them to follow. He was showing them their inevitable function. "The Unknowns will provide the refined essence, the specific 'matter' for these worlds. The attendants will provide the overarching divine framework, the spacetime, the vitality, the secrets, the stability. I will wield Fate and Magic to weave it all into being, using the harvested mortal essence as the sacrifice needed to give it substance and history."
"This is our urgent task," he stated, his voice leaving no room for debate. "We do not wait for the next crisis from outside. We outgrow the very plane where crises occur. We fortify by becoming multiplanar. Your power, now tied to a single cosmic address, will soon be anchored across multiple realities filled to the brim with creatures who will sustain you forever. You will become unassailable not because you are strong in one world, but because your essence is the law of several."
He looked at each of them, his creations, his instruments, the growing body of his divinity. "The war is over. The harvest is in. The refinery is operational. Now, we become architects of universes."
He turned from his throne and led them, not to the Shore of the Unconscious, but to a place deeper within the Atrium, a vast, empty chamber at the root of the World-Mountain where the raw potential of the harvested essence was stored, a dimensionless nexus humming with silent screams and extinguished dreams. The very air was thick with unformed destiny.
He stood before that immense, silent potential, his pantheon arrayed behind him. He raised his hands, and the threads of his being extended, not to weave fate, but to define it from a null point. "Let us begin."
--------------------------------
If you want to support me, read 5 work-in-progress chapters in advance, visit my P.a.t.r.e.o.n at
p.a.t.r.e.o.n.com/atanorwrites
I appreciate all comments and take suggestions seriously! Thank you for your support!