Reborn As The Barbarian God

"A god. Or something close to one."

"A god." The soldier considered that. "We had gods once. They did not save us."

"I'm not here to save anyone. I'm passing through."

"To where?"

"The outside, the Abyssal land."

The soldier was silent for a long moment. Around them, the marketplace continued its eternal commerce, oblivious to the conversation happening in its midst.

"The Abyssal land lies beyond this city," the soldier said finally. "Through the Valley of Betrayal. But you know this already, don't you? You can feel it calling."

Galthor nodded. The pull of the Abyssal had been growing stronger ever since he entered the city, a magnetic attraction that tugged at his divine essence.

"I will not stop you," the soldier continued. "My purpose is to guard against those who would disturb the dead for profit. You seek something else. But I will warn you."

"Warn me of what?"

"The city remembers." The soldier gestured at the frozen marketplace, the endless loops of haggling merchants. "It remembers everything that happened here. The joy and the sorrow. The triumph and the tragedy. And at its heart, it remembers the betrayal."

"What betrayal?"

But the soldier was already fading, its awareness withdrawing, its body settling back into the stillness of the truly dead. The last words it spoke were barely a whisper.

"Ask the temple. It knows."

Then it was gone, just another corpse in a city of corpses, and Galthor was alone again.

He continued toward the city's heart.

The buildings grew even grander, but also more damaged. Whatever had drowned this place, it had struck hardest here. Walls were cracked. Roofs had collapsed. Entire structures had been reduced to rubble, though even the rubble was preserved in its falling, frozen in the moment of destruction.

And the people here were different.

They weren't frozen in loops of daily life. They were frozen in death.

Bodies lay everywhere, in the streets, on the steps of buildings, piled against walls where they had tried to shelter from something terrible. Their faces were contorted in expressions of agony and terror, mouths open in screams that had never ended.

But the worst part was the children.

Galthor found what must have been a school near the city's center. The building was partially collapsed, its walls torn open to reveal the classrooms within. Children sat at desks, their small bodies rigid, their faces frozen in expressions of absolute fear.

And they were screaming.

Not with their mouths. those were closed, sealed by whatever force had killed them. But with their souls. Galthor could feel it, a constant psychic shriek that resonated through the corrupted water, a chorus of terror that had been playing for millennia.

He stopped.

'...I can't save them. I don't have the power. Even if I destroyed this entire city, their souls would just scatter into the corruption. They need something I can't give them...'

But he could acknowledge them.

Galthor moved to the center of the ruined school and knelt. He closed his eyes and opened his divine senses fully, letting the screaming souls wash over him without resistance.

It was agony. Pure, concentrated terror, multiplied by hundreds of small voices. The children had died not understanding what was happening, not knowing why the world was ending, not able to comprehend the forces that had snuffed out their lives like candles in a storm.

Galthor absorbed their pain.

Not their souls, as he couldn't do that, not here, not without destroying them entirely.

But their suffering, the accumulated grief of centuries of endless dying. He took it into himself, added it to the weight he already carried, let it sink into the depths of his expanded consciousness.

The screaming didn't stop. It would never stop, not until the Abyssal land itself was cleansed. But for a moment, just a moment, it seemed to soften. As if the children knew, somehow, that someone had finally heard them.

He rose and continued toward the city's heart.

The temple was magnificent.

Even ruined, even drowned, it dominated the cityscape. A massive structure of white stone and golden trim, its spires reaching toward a ceiling that no longer existed, its doors thrown wide as if welcoming all who would enter.

The symbol he saw carved into the door at the very top was q huge mountain and just by looking at it, Galthor could feel something stirred inside of him.

The temple's interior was surprisingly intact. The water here was clearer, as if the divine presence that had once filled this place still offered some protection against the corruption. Galthor walked down the central aisle, past rows of pews where worshippers had died in prayer, toward the altar at the far end.

The altar was empty. Whatever sacred objects had once rested there were long gone, stolen or destroyed or simply lost to time. But above the altar, carved into the wall, was something that made Galthor stop.

A message.

It was written in light, actual light, preserved somehow against all the laws of nature, glowing with soft golden radiance that illuminated the surrounding water.

The script was ancient, predating any language Galthor knew, but he understood it nonetheless. Divine comprehension, perhaps, or simply the entity's memories translating what his eyes couldn't read.

THE CORE LIES BEYOND THE VALLEY OF BETRAYAL.

THE PATH IS OPEN TO THOSE WHO CARRY THE MARK.

TRUST NO ONE WHO WALKS BESIDE YOU.

THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT WILL OPEN THE WAY.

WE DID WHAT WE HAD TO DO.

MAY THE HE FORGIVE US.

Galthor read the words twice, three times, letting their meaning sink in.

What is "the blood of the innocent will open the way." That matched what he'd read earlier, about barbarians being used as sacrifices to access the land. His people, marked somehow by the Supreme Deity's death, serving as keys to locks that shouldn't exist.

But it was the final lines that disturbed him most.

"We did what we had to do. May HE forgive us."

This wasn't a warning left by survivors. This was a confession. Whoever had written these words hadn't been trying to help future travelers. They had been trying to justify something. To explain why they had done whatever terrible thing this message commemorated.

'...The city didn't drown by accident. Someone drowned it deliberately. Someone who knew what they were doing, who planned it, who felt guilty enough to leave an apology carved in divine light...'

But why? What could possibly justify killing an entire city, trapping thousands of souls in eternal suffering?

Galthor didn't have answers. He wasn't sure he wanted them.

He turned away from the altar and walked back down the central aisle, past the dead worshippers, out through the temple's grand doors. The drowned city stretched before him, preserved and suffering, a monument to atrocities he was only beginning to understand.

Beyond the city, he could feel the Valley of Betrayal waiting. And beyond that, the Abyssal land, pulsing with power that called to him like a siren's song.

"Trust no one who walks beside you," he murmured, remembering the message's warning.

It was good advice. But at the moment, he was walking alone, with nothing but shadows and grief for company.

The path to the core continued.

Galthor moved through the city's far edge, leaving the drowned streets behind, ascending through tunnels that gradually shed their corrupted water. The weight lifted from his body, the dense medium giving way to ordinary air, and he emerged at last into a canyon that cut through the underground like a wound.

The Valley of Betrayal.

He could see it stretching before him, a narrow passage between walls of dark stone, its floor littered with bones and rusted weapons. Ancient battles had been fought here. Ancient promises had been broken.

Galthor squared his shoulders and walked into the valley, the drowned city at his back, the future unknown before him.

Whatever he found ahead, he would face it as he had faced everything else.

Alone, angry, and unafraid.