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Mid Evening - Late Fall : The Tree of Prayer | Valtivar

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*Woooosh* A steady breeze blew through the forest that evening. With the moon hung high, and streets lit by the warm glow of lamps and the sounds of activity, it was a day like any other to the people of Valtivar.

With people traveling to and from work, spending time with their family, or idly chatting about the latest news over drinks in the tavern, there was nothing unique about that day for most.

However, there was something about the air that evening... It just felt.. thick...

*Vwoop* Then, in the smallest instant one could fathom, a being's eyes snapped open.. and the sky fell... *VWOOOOOMMMMM-RRRRMMMM*

*tap* *tap* Firmly standing up with so much aura emitting from my body it caused the air to vibrate, I spread my weight out on the area around the Tree of Prayer, and laid my eyes on a comparably tiny white fenrir standing before me.

"Brother..." I hung my head as I spoke from my chest. "I'm surprised you waited..." My gaze was dull, but his was sharp.

"I just wanted to see my brother one last time.. but it seems he isn't here..." His expression was dark and his tone laced with poison.

"Is it just that your mind is clouded by jealousy? Greed? Or is that truly what you believe?" I paused as I looked through his eyes and into the colossal, surging soul possessing Ilios's body. "If Mother were here-"

"You keep her name out of your fucking mouth..." His pupils dilated as he grit his teeth.

But my gaze only darkened with detest. "As if you even remember it."

*ZIP-Blink* Instantly disappearing from where he was, he solidified a block of divinity around his paw and slammed it into the side of my snout.

*Crack-WHAAAAMM* But as indirect moonlight seeped through the canopy and lit the Gods' Abode, it only revealed my face slightly turned to the side with my gaze locked on Dagr.

"You're just as miserable as you were back then. .."

*Thwap* A faint sound instantly rippled through the mana-dense air before he suddenly vanished again, this time plowing through the edge of the Gods' Abode before zipping to the ground as a streak of light.

*CRRRRAAACKKK-WHHAAAAMMMM* He hit the ground like a meteor, kicking up a wave of molten rock as colossal, building-sized wooden splinters rained down on the surrounding forest.

It was a hit even he, after strengthening Ilios's body to its limit with his own divinity, couldn't handle.

By the time he started standing up, I was already looming over him.

"Dagr.. do you know why I chose a human?” Lowering my head toward him, I spoke with an annoyed growl.

“It was because I needed to change the lens I looked at the universe through.

In order to grow, I needed to go back to square one, and rebuild everything from nothing. "

His expression tightened as he forced himself up onto broken legs.

"But look at me now." Lifting myself up with a mocking confidence, I held my fenririan head nearly eighty meters over him, spread my wings, and touted the two sets of dragon horns on my head.

"I am a new type of being with infinitely more room to grow!

I chose a dragon's body so I could evolve, a human's mind to rid myself of a worldview tainted by mana, and fenririan blood to fuel my growth. . and now look at me."

His expression warped with anger and jealousy.

"I made the same progress that took us twenty millennia, in a measly twenty-four years."

"You only did it that fast because you had my help..." He spoke with a rasp.

But as I relaxed my posture, I gave him a look of disgust. "The only things I needed were the Acardi artifact and time. At worst, I would have taken five hundred years to reach this point." Lowering my snout next to him, my gaze sharpened. "Meanwhile, what have you done?"

*CRRRUNCH* The solid ground beneath the molten rock shattered as I crushed him under my paw.

"You've just become another god who has fallen from grace, and instead of looking for your own body to reincarnate into, you chose to wait and steal mine.

" *CRRRRUNCH* His ribs snapped as I progressively put more weight on him.

"You've grown lazy, and insecure, slowly descending into madness watching me grow while your strength has done nothing but stagnate. "

He had every opportunity to look for a fitting subject to reincarnate into, especially now... He could essentially pick any creature he wanted. With a single elixir from me, he could start anew as anything he wished.

Yet he still chose to refuse my help and demand my body. "Just why…” My angry tone suddenly eased as confusion washed through it. “The last time you let your greed get a hold of you, our parents were killed, and we very nearly followed."

He remained still and unmoving as he spoke with a softened tone. "You still wish to blame me for that..."

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"Because you refuse to learn from it!" My voice, laden with disbelief instantly echoed through the forest. "How can you even tell yourself that just because you couldn't understand the theories I wrote, that I couldn't either?! If you had simply given those books back, I would have-"

"~Shut up...~" His tone was instantly lined with daggers as he started speaking through divinity. "~Their fate wasn't something either of us could have changed...~"

"Fate… Hah… Did you seriously just use that word?

" Watching his soul slowly leave Ilios's body and form in front of me, my expression washed with a mix of disbelief and anger.

"Is that what you've used as an excuse to cope with your mistakes after all these years?

" *Vwoop* Wrapping Ilios's body in a gate, I quickly moved him behind me and looked at Dagr.

But he simply hung his head to bite his tongue.

"Hah..." I almost couldn't believe it...

I wanted to laugh. "Is that how you could reason wanting to kill me and take my body?

Because that's what you believed you were 'fated to do'?

" Silence filled the air as I waited for his response before suddenly accelerating my own divinity with an ever-darkening expression.

*Vwowowowowooom* "It seems you've been led astray. .. You've forgotten who you are."

As my voice suddenly ran cold, a sphere of the ground beneath him was flipped upside down before violently exploding into a mass of mana, instantly solidifying the liquid divinity floating in his soul. *VWOOM*

"Since you appear to need it, allow me to give you a refresher.” *FWIP* Instantaneously closing the distance, I slammed my paw into the endless web of black strings filling his body with everything I had, and almost instantly, it seemed to simply disappear, being relocated thousands of kilometers away so quickly his soul couldn’t follow it.

Before he could react, his soul fell from that of a fallen god, to a mortal.

But.. he didn't react at all, even after more than enough time passed for him to notice.

He simply.. didn't resist it...

But perhaps that was because he too noticed the errors in his mind.. stemming from a mess of wires that had become tangled over thousands of years...

*Vwoop* Jumping through the void with him in hand, I exited inside the Tree of Prayer's canopy, just beside the colossal skeleton of a multi-headed dragon that had laid dead for several millennia.

Dagr had been without a body for far too long, so.

.. "It's time you step back into the world of the living, Brother.

" *Vwoop* Using a gate to release his soul inside the dragon's skull, where the corpse's crystallized divinity was centered, I forced his soul to cling to it before adding a tuft of Ilios's fur to the mix.

-It's time you untangle the mess in your own mind, Brother. ..-

*VWOOOOOOM* An unholy mass of mana instantly erupted from me as countless runes were engraved into the outside of the massive dragon's skull, and several of its teeth were vector-flipped to submerge his soul in liquid mana.

I was going to reincarnate him... Properly... Just as I had when I chose to be reborn as a hatchling.

Even though my memories were still fuzzy, he wasn't acting like himself.

It was almost like his time as a fallen god caused his personality to become twisted and exaggerated.

-Perhaps without a physical brain to keep his rationality in check, he drifted farther and farther away from the lessons he learned from his mistakes over the years. ..-

With his greed and jealousy going unchecked, he had turned into a mess. -But it seems even he has started realizing it...-

Look down into the dragon's skull as the reincarnation rune I carved started ramping up, I watch his soul slowly lose its form before returning to an amorphous cloud, eventually revealing the tiny solid core at the center of it all.

It was tiny.. even smaller than the likes of Hera, and given his age it was even worse.

However, that didn't surprise me at all...

It was all because of our blood.

The type of fenrir we were weren't creatures meant to evolve.

With an unlimited life span from birth, we had no spark for evolution outside of essentially being killed, so it caused our souls to not grow with our bodies, and make evolution harder the longer we lived.

Creatures like dragons on the other hand, who were forced to evolve every so often, cultivated much stronger souls because of their dragon sleeps, acting like small-scale self-reincarnations every time they happened.

It was a major weakness of our race and one of the main reasons I stepped away from it and chose to become a dragon. -I just hope that tiny core has enough of his memories logged for him to find his sense of self again...-

It was risky, but there was no other option... "Good luck, brother..." I spoke somewhat softly, knowing he could no longer hear me. "I will pray you rediscover who you are..."

Lowering my head and injecting some of my own mana into the runes as a method of prayer, I eventually turned around and looked at the gate holding Ilios's body.

-Now for the sweet child who got caught in our quarrel.

..- *Vwoop* Jumping through the void again, I moved into the Gods' Abode before opening the gate and laying his heavily damaged body on the center of the reincarnation rune.

His body was completely beyond repair, and his soul was so weak it wouldn't survive reincarnation... -If I leave him be, his soul will end up being eaten by one of the souls being cleaned and reentering the reincarnation cycle through the Tree of Prayer...-

But there was no chance I was going to leave him be.

Sitting down next to him, I used my aura to grab the orb of divinity that the bastard in the void hit me with and moved it over to Ilios.

Almost immediately, his tail started happily thumping against the ground and he reached out to grab it with his broken paws before pulling it into his chest as if thinking it were a toy.

But before he could even realize that wasn't the case, the countless strings of divinity in the sphere's shell started moving like countless slithering snakes before breaking down from under the monstrous beam of mana, divinity, and souls from the reincarnation rune, and flowing into his chest.

As if being put to sleep, a wave of drowsiness instantly started washing over him. “But I need you to stay awake, okay?” Gently nudging him, with my snout, his tail started thumping the ground once more.

But I didn’t have time to think about anything happening around me. -It's time for me to try and make an elixir...- *Snap*

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