Thousands of years ago the gods waged an epic war. The effects of it were visible in the mortal realm in the forms of earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues, forest fires, and hurricanes. Civilizations fell and the mortals were plunged into chaos.

Even then, they still worshiped and prayed for help.

Nobody knew what started the war, but everybody knew that it ended when the Gods descended to the mortal realm. When they first arrived, they were treated with reverence and awe. They were given the finest clothes, the freshest foods, the most lavish homes, and the love of all. They had temples and statues built in their names and so many stories that every generation grew up with knowledge of each of the hundreds of Gods that lived among them.

Living beside their creators, the mortals thrived.

At first, the mortals travelled across the world to only ask for the Gods’ blessings. Then they created pilgrimages and started asking for the Gods’ advice. Then they invited the Gods to their homes and lavished them with gifts while asking for help. And then they demanded the mahee – the source of all magic, the core of the Gods, the one thing that raised them above humanity.

The first three were easy to give and each of the Gods loved the mortals enough to always answer their prayers. The last was impossible to share.

The mortals did not believe them.

Neither did the mahee.

* * *

Demons did not exist. They were gone. Demons did not exist. They were gone. D’Argen had to keep repeating this to himself as he ran away from the creature chasing him, otherwise, he would have completely ruined the task at hand.

He opened his mahee – the source of his magic – a little wider, putting more speed under his feet, as the cheetah chased him down through the open planes of the Oltrian region. The sun was high in the sky, beating down on him and making him sweat under his layered robes, and the flat ground was dry under his feet as he ran, sending flecks of dust and stalks of grass up with every step he took.

He was approaching one specific spot with a single rock, barely large enough for him to stand on, sticking out just above the grass. It was the only visible indication of where his three companions were hidden. D’Argen sincerely hoped it was the right rock because there were at least three more not that far from it and with the angle of the sun changing and him running around in circles, he was starting to get confused.

“Can’t I just—”

“No!” The shouted answer interrupted him before he even finished his question as he passed by. It was the right rock.

The answer also worked in distracting the cheetah as it slowed to a stop and looked back at the seemingly lonely object.

D’Argen took the moment to slide to a stop himself, creating two deep furrows in the dry ground from his momentum, and then turning around at the last moment to face the wild cat. It blended perfectly into the background, a coat the same light shade as the ground with dark spots that looked like the dappled shadow from the single tree D’Argen and his companions passed hours ago when they first came to the remote Oltrian region. The two dark stripes from the inside of its eyes running down to frame its jaws only reminded D’Argen of the demons from millennia ago that opened mouths larger than him to try and eat him whole.

Demons did not exist anymore. They were all gone. D’Argen was there when the last of them fell and drenched the ground in their foul blood more than five thousand years ago.

The cheetah’s ears twitched and its nostrils flared.

D’Argen flinched.

D’Argen’s hidden companions kept quiet with the cat so close.

Abbot, God of Light and the most talented artist in all of Trace, was able to use his mahee to bend the light around him and the other two in their party to keep them completely invisible to the naked eye. When D’Argen heard the quick scratches of chalk on paper, he realized that it was not Abbot using the magic but Lilian using one of his spells instead.

The group was in these fields so the artist could draw the cheetah for the castle records and with the creature standing right in front of him, he was clearly concentrating on that. Although Lilian, God of Spring and one with the wind, could not hold the spell as well or as long as Abbot, they were clearly doing a fine job of keeping the small group hidden from the cat.