Chương 20: A Brief History of Patricide

Most of the books had held up remarkably well for their rotting environment, courtesy of the kind of rag paper they were made from and at least a modicum of care from the ghoul lord, who had likely owned them in life. One of them was his journal. It was thus revealed that his name was Rinando Pierglias, a wizard and once a member in fine standing in the magical community. That had been hundreds of years ago, not long before the Silence of the Gods.

I went through the books with Comprehend Languages, Scholar's Grasp and Truth firmly in my forebrain, separating fact from opinion and delusion as I went through the collection.

An assortment of histories, books on philosophy, ruminations on the natural and supernatural world, references to events of this world's past before the Silence of the Gods and the Rise of Women, along with some magical treatises, what looked to be a prized student's primer on the basics of magic, and several books on magical theory and wild dissertations on research from some increasingly desperate men trying to solve the lack of ability to Level, and were unable to do so.

They'd been trapped into thinking only of Class Levels, and hadn't known Racial Levels were even a possible thing for humans… The despair in their words, the silence of most of the gods, and especially those in Heaven, ran through a lot of the writings of desperate men who could no longer gain power… and how the women were moving to take all that power from them, waiting for the older men like Rinando who actually had some Levels to die or get out of their way so they could take control.

That was the spite that had driven him to undeath. Not wishing to cede his place to a woman, especially after watching his sons fail to grow stronger and knowing they'd be doomed to mediocrity, never advancing beyond Fourth Initiate. A Ghoul Lord was a big step up from a true ghoul, more able to control their hunger and their decay, and he hadn't trusted the dispensation of his soul to the goddesses who remained behind.

It was a step by step descent into hatred and madness, fueled by regret, disappointment, and anger at what the future held. Of course, later chapters noted the names of those he had dealt with in the past, leading up into the present. Family names, their heads… and his victims, taken from time to time, devoured to feed the hunger he could control, but never eliminate, and of course his demented pets had to be fed as well.

He had only been in Easleton for twenty years, hounded out from four other lairs over the centuries by pogroms led by women… and finally, he'd had his head chopped off by one and was now Feeding the Land, soul off to its fate. Or was it? With no gods of Death or the Dead around, could the souls of the dead even move on? I had my severe doubts about that matter, and the implications of it were pretty bad.

The rumors and tales coming down from the North indicated that matter of the mass undead was only getting worse, so it was plain I was going to have to be heading up there at some point. Like, when I actually grew up and didn't have to play at being a brownie so I could walk around. Rinando had definitely had dealings with the witches of Easleton, of whom Lord Mayor Donquito was their leader.

This surprised me not in the slightest, given how she was acting and the Purple of her spiritual Aura and Blackness of her magical one. She was basically bound to some dark powers, and had enough brains to realize that the ghoul lord could be a useful tool or resource, even if he had been male once. She could also probably drive him out again just by allowing the graveyard to be re-Consecrated by a strong enough Priestess passing through and thus uproot him and force him and his pet ghouls to move on.

His writings, and those of several others, seemed to claim there was an underground kingdom of the undead in the southern parts of the Empire, and his traveling north from his conquered homeland of Ielosia was all part of an attempt to locate such a place and move there.

The books described numerous underground cults still venerating the missing gods and goddesses, the faithful sure that their deities would be free of whatever was keeping them away and would return in glory at some point, rewarding those who remained faithful.

Unsurprisingly, said cults usually grew smaller and smaller by the year, until it was only the most desperate or most serene who remained behind to carry on what their ancestors had done, the rest losing faith or being discovered and executed as traitors and heretics talking about those who had abandoned humanity and the mortal races like they had.

The missing gods were proclaimed unworthy of worship, and to remain faithful to them was a great sin and sacrilege against the goddesses who remained behind to watch over us, of course! Which might have been a great selling line if people were total idiots who couldn't figure out there were shenanigans going up, especially since none of the goddesses of the Heavens had been able to remain behind, either!

The spells in the Ghoul Lord's spell book were complex and grounded in solid mechanics, a fairly broad array of hedge, battle, and later necromantic magicks whose expansion had also stopped once the Silence came down. He hadn't been able to add any spells greater than II since the Silence began, vastly restricting what spells he could wield and again frustrating him greatly as no amount of research or study could help him learn new spells.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Frozen at undeath, unable to Level despite being free of the strictures of the living, retaining enough male-ness that he couldn't even add anything a Four wouldn't be able to wield to his knowledge. The bitterness came through pretty strongly in his writings and those of many of the others.

Yet there was no one to point the finger at, other than the goddesses who remained, and maybe all the women who were taking the roles men had held throughout history from them. There weren't many contributions by women in this collection of books. It appeared that a lot of the men with knowledge of the higher skills simply refused to pass their skills down to the women if they couldn't teach them to the men, preferring they'd all be lost rather than used to dominate their sons and grandsons.

I couldn't say I blamed them, because that was exactly what had happened, starting with the female-dominated worshipers of the goddesses who remained and spreading out from there. The center-point of political power seemed to revolve around who dominated the Amazons, and who overall had the most clerical power now.

Arcane power on the continent was completely subjugated by the various Churches, with the Witches of Ruilvei dominating that particular aspect of things with Her witches, although Rue dominated both sorceresses and wizardesses, and Mhyst was, as ever, the Patron of illusionists and shadow-weavers and the like. Still, it looked like Eryl had the clerical power of at least any two of the other goddesses, claiming to represent all women as She did.

She was also at the absolute heart of the Amazons whose Pacts all the other goddesses wanted to claim, and thus had to go to Eryl to be allowed to issue them. Hell and the Glooms and all had their own Pacts to offer to Amazons who wished to change, but not to start. Only the Heavens had also been able to issue their Pacts to new Amazons, likely because of Aethra more than anything, and so there were none around to challenge Eryl's authority on that matter now.

Thus, Eryl retained the maximum numbers of Amazons allowed Her, the full five hundred, at any time, and only allowed perhaps that number again besides, split between all the other grasping goddesses… including what was rather obviously another daughter trying to take over Amana's role as mother-figure, and most especially, Healer. Eryl's priestesses were made for battle, leading and taking charge of others, and did not want to be stuck with nursemaid duties.

Sure, emergency Healing in the field was possible and useful, but tending to the hundreds of injured, especially the men, was simply not something they wanted to be bothered with, even if they relied on those men as the core and hearts of their armies. Thus the Sisters of Saint Sanguina had popped up about fifty years after the Silence, and grew with astounding speed compared to the battle-hungry and highly competitive Church of Eryl as an alternative for pious women.

Their colors of white and red crosses were worn by women who didn't have the same problems with men as the Church of Eryl, and men even served as junior priests in fairly large numbers under Her, mostly among the legions as more Healers for the male soldiers.

While they employed more Good souls than all of the other Churches combined, the upper ranks of the Sanguina priesthood were all women, all pragmatic, and all subservient to the Church of Eryl, knowing that they Healed the men to provide more soldiers and laborers for the Empress and the Church.

It was even noted that their mastery of reversed Healing magic surpassed that of any other goddess, including Rue and the Witches of Ruilvei, and they were fairly merciless to their enemies and were very good at keeping victims of torture alive, too. The Healers who'd wanted to leave me to die had been of Sanguina, blaming the elves for my birth when their own forces were the ones inciting such behavior first and doing the conquering.

I wasn't impressed by them, although it was bloody true that the Empire and mortals as a whole needed a LOT more Healing magic after the Gods of Heaven were lost, as the Heavenly Churches typically took care of that need for the common people. The vast majority of public Healing items were of Heaven, too, and had stopped working after the Fall, unable to be replaced without Amana's approval. Everybody competed to help the nobles and the wealthy, after all.

It was the Good churches who took care of the average person off the street or farm. The journal of Rinando also made it plain that the Inquisition, such as it was, was also made up of servants of Saint Sanguina. This particularly included investigating any men who seemed to have Leveled up too high, and any proclaiming they were messengers or Chosen of the banished gods. Crime, corruption, treachery? Those were mostly for others, especially Rue's servants, who particularly loved investigating political crimes.

No, tamping down the old gods was done by the newest goddess who benefited the most from them being gone. Blue Auras, despite their colors of white and red. Here, the Red Cross was as much a warning as a sign of Healing available. I had to wonder about the ghoul's words concerning Blood Magic, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was true.

I read through biased tours of history new and old for the surrounding lands and noble families, records of the many battles and wars fought across this place trying to defy the expanding Empire of House Vaneyl and failing. Eryl unabashedly backed the House, which meant the power of the Amazons was with them, and the most powerful Church in the world was backing them, not any of the formerly male-dominated other realms.

Eryl's priestesses had worked in all realms to overthrow male-dominated nobility and royalty, and had largely succeeded. Once the older men with Levels were dead or too old to fight, there was little they could do to defy the women with more Levels, far more spellcasting ability, and often the ambitions of their own wives and daughters, who knew their time had come. Kingdom after kingdom had fallen, and queendoms under the Empire of Vaneyl had risen to replace them, one after another.

According to these books, the last kingdom dominated by men in the civilized world had fallen over a hundred years ago, and what might remain were now also queendoms, separated by terrain and distance, or simply wild and barbaric places to the south where there were no nations, only tribes now dominated by powerful women, too.