Snaggle_Tooth

  Chapter OneGod Lost Their Believers!Isi blinked away the iron weight of sleep and looked around.

  "Hmm?" She scratched herself absentmindedly as she noted a heavy veil of bck. The abyss crowded her like a group of unwanted paramours.

  Isi snorted, still half-asleep, and waved away the abyssal darkness...

  ...but somehow it remained.

  "What...?" She straightened up and shooed away the bck that blinded her with the smallest flick of her hand.

  But the abyss remained. The st of Isi's sleep abandoned her.

  "What is this?!" she demanded of the endless nothingness. "Muna! Muna, attend me!"

  Isi waited in irritable silence...

  ...and then she realized.

  "Eh? What?!"

  Isi forgot Muna's irreverence for a moment as she tried to find her believers. Their prayers should have been like cnging bells in her mind. Their fanatical faith should have filled her with the warmth of blood.

  "What is this godforsaken darkness?!" Isi shouted. She began to cw and tear at the abyss with tooth and cw.

  Because Isi could hear no prayers. She could feel no faith. It was as if she had been struck me and deaf, and it filled her with a white dread.

  "Not dread!" Isi banished the weak human emotion as easily as one would spit. "Yoki! Muna! Ib!"

  The abyss swallowed everything and returned nothing.

  "Fine then!"

  Isi raised a hand high into the air, and it transformed into a sword of blinding white light. To look upon the bde was to look upon the sun itself. A furnace heat radiated off the sword with such intensity as to banish the waters of the sea and the rain of the clouds.

  "I demand sight!" Isi roared, and she cleaved the abyssal darkness in half!

  Or at least she tried to.

  Isi stared and squinted at the impenetrable bck for three days. Her bde of light had not so much as cracked its impenetrable dark, however.

  She snorted in irritation and called forth an even brighter bde. Her entire body transformed into a totem of light. To simply look upon her would be to invite death.

  "I cast you aside!" Isi shouted in vicious victory. She pierced the bck veil that so feebly sought to restrain her!

  Or at least tried to.

  Isi stabbed and sshed for thirteen years, but she could not so much as scratch whatever darkness blinded her. Yoki did not answer her summons. Ib remained hidden from her senses.

  She was alone. And she was scared.

  "N-not scared!" Isi spat the weak human emotion into the bck nothingness. "Simply... confused. What is all this?!"

  The bright white of her body faded, and Isi considered the strangeness that trapped her. It did not seem as if her servants could hear her through it. They must have been destroyed.

  "They better be destroyed," Isi hissed as she y down across the pillowy bck. "But why can't I even hear my faithful...?"

  She had never felt so... alone in all her existence. Her mind should have been a busy marketpce made noisy and confused with a hundred dozen different voices asking for this or for that.

  She had never felt so... cold in all the centuries she had reigned. The faith of her believers should have tickled her body like a hundred dozen little candles.

  "Muna...?" Isi called out weakly into the abyss. There was no response. "I'm... I'm not that mad... Muna? Please? Attend me...?"

  She called out to her servants with increasing ferocity and worry for three weeks, but none answered her. It was as if she had been severed from the world. It was as if she had been... forgotten.

  "Oh." The thought pierced Isi with the force of a human spear. Forgotten. It was not something she wanted to consider, and so she quickly banished the worry from her head.

  Unfortunately, there was not much to do in the abyss aside from worry. Isi almost fell back asleep. There seemed to be little reason to torture herself with consciousness. Her irreverent servants refused her summons. Her weak-minded believers had lost their voices. Perhaps in a hundred years the bck would part. Perhaps a thousand.

  "And then there will be retribution!" Isi said with a satisfied smile. The floods she would send! And the famine! Her believers would be squealing out prayers like pigs once she escaped this abyss.

  The violent imagination filled her with a pleasant warmth as she settled down for sleep. A hundred years. She would wait a hundred years.

  Isi's eyes slowly fluttered shut. When she next awoke, she would send enough hellfire and brimstone to fill the oceans. She would banish the rain for seven generations. She would have fun.

  She was about to drift away into the senseless paradise of sleep when she saw it.

  Isi leapt to her feet. In the far distance, she could make out the smallest pinprick of light.

  "Muna?!" She blinked and willed herself beside the light. It pierced the bck bnket with only a needle's width. "Ib?! I am trapped!"

  But she could not feel her servants from the miniscule hole. Isi willed herself smaller and smaller until she became less than a dot. Even then the light was so horribly meager.

  "Hello?!" Isi bit her lip. She thought she could... could hear something coming from the hole.

  Isi pressed her ear against the pinprick of light and listened. A moment passed and then her entire essence vibrated with electric excitement.

  "O Nameless God of th-these ruins! P-please, save meeeeee!"

  It was a prayer.

  Snaggle_Tooth