Chapter TwoGod Answers Their First Prayer!Time seemed to compress as Isi basked in the abaster brilliance of the human's prayer. She had not realized just how cold she was before the unknown human's words tickled her with their desperate plea.

  "B-but what is this?" Isi said as she shook the stupid look from her face. She tried to peer through the pinprick of light, but it was too small.

  The human's desperation continued to bleed through the hole and into the abyss, however, like the intoxicating smoke of a burnt offering. She chewed on her lip as the human's distant voice filled her head. She had never felt such a compulsion to answer a prayer before!

  Isi tried to pry open the hole, to widen it just enough for her magnificence to pass through, but the abyss refused to budge.

  "And just when I was about to take a nap!" Isi huffed irritably, and her arm transformed into a spear of blinding light. She stabbed at the small hole, forcing it to open for her...

  ...but the hole did not widen as much as a millimeter. All the while, the human's prayer grew all the more desperate.

  "Pleeeeease! I d-don't w-w-want to diiiiiiiiiie!"

  "Curse this godforsaken veil!" Isi hissed, and she cwed uselessly at the bnket of bck.

  The hole was too small to pass through, and she could not widen it. She had made herself as small as she could, but she was still too rge.

  What else could she do?!

  "Oh." An unusual sensation shook her essence. A horrible idea suddenly tickled her thoughts as she continued to bask in the unknown human's desperation.

  Because she was too rge to fit through the hole. She was far too magnificent.

  "But if I... I wasn't quite so magnificent..." Isi licked her lips nervously as she squinted at the pinprick of light.

  She hesitated for the briefest of moments... and then she drew a fine line across her forefinger, severing the divine appendage from her vessel.

  "Th-this better work," Isi said, feeling somewhat disoriented. A dizziness commanded her thoughts as she picked up her severed finger and shoved it through the pinprick of light.

  Or at least tried to.

  "How small is this godforsaken hole?!" Isi roared. Fiery tendrils of frustration tickled her lips, but she was committed to this horrible idea.

  She drew a second line across her severed finger, leaving only the tippy top left. She bent over and, feeling even dizzier, pinched the minuscule snippet of flesh.

  "Let me out!" Isi demanded as she shoved the fingertip into the hole. It started to squeeze through, and Isi could feel the warmth of the world.

  "I will not be contained!" Isi shouted even louder, and the sliver of her essence popped through the hole and into existence. The hole closed quickly behind her, and she blinked in confusion.

  The bck of the abyss had disappeared... but her sight remained obscured. It was as if she had fallen face-first into a pool of mud. The sticky ichor dripped slowly past her eyes, making it hard to understand exactly what she was seeing.

  Isi seemed to be in a rundown temple. It was not that the walls were adorned with iconography or that the floors were crowded with supplicants. The only indication that the derelict building was a temple was the ancient faith caked into its crumbling stone walls. The building radiated long-dormant power.

  A very familiar power...

  "Pleaaaaaaaaaaase!"

  Isi's attention snapped towards a voice, and her heart skipped a beat.

  While much of the world remained cloyed and hidden with muck, she could see a human with crystal crity. It was an older man, and he was trembling at the foot of a crumbling altar.

  Her altar.

  "What is this...?" The words left Isi in a hiss of breath. She looked around with new eyes. Everything but the human remained obscured, but she... she recognized this pce.

  And in her recognition, a white fury blinded her.

  "Trespasser!" Isi roared as she looked down on the lowly human. He stood within the deepest depths of her temple! Only her High Priest was allowed entry here!

  Fury left her momentarily dumb to the temple's disrepair as she raked the trespasser with a mighty cw of divine light. To the fool who dared invade her inner sanctum, she sliced off his skin yer by yer, just as a cook would peel an onion, until all that remained of the vermin was a pile of bleached bones and sopping red meat!

  Or at least she tried to.

  "Eh?" Isi blinked in confusion as the human remained unharmed. He continued to offer up wordless prayers, but she was too furious to listen.

  She grabbed hold of the very breath that entered and fled his lungs. Like an invisible cord of rope, she wrapped it around his throat and began to squeeeeze until... until...

  "Why isn't this working?!" Isi demanded, stamping her feet angrily as the human remained very much unbothered by all her attempts to smite him.

  Overcome with confusion, Isi simply snapped her fingers and willed that he burst into fmes.

  Not even a single hair on the human's shaggy head caught fire.

  "Muna? Yoki? Ib?!" The Three Holies continued to ignore her summons. It all felt like a nightmare. Her temple was in disrepair. Her temple was a ruin. She had escaped that bck abyss, but she still could not hear her believers.

  The only voice she heard was...

  "Please, preserve me! Please, preserve me! Please, preserve me! Please, preserve me!"

  "What are you even whining about?" Isi demanded, and she willed herself beside the miscreant.

  The man was unwashed and foul. His bck hair was an uncontrolble tangle that obscured most of his face. A thick frazzle of beard fell all the way down to his waist. His clothes were threadbare and simirly unwashed.

  Isi followed the intruder's stare and felt another flicker of frustration.

  "This awful day!" she shouted as she saw a dead human sprawled out less than five meters from her altar. At least she assumed it was a human. A hideous beast, its fangs speckled red with blood, was snacking on the mangled corpse.

  "To desecrate my inner sanctum!" Isi willed the creature burned to a crisp. She was too furious to even imagine a more fitting death!

  The beast looked up sharply. It almost seemed to make eye contact with Isi, but then it returned to its meal, not the least bit crispy.

  Isi's chest swelled with frustration... and then she squinted.

  "That's... That's impossible?"

  The human continued to spit out prayers, but Isi had no mind for his bthering. Her entire being was focused on the hound-like creature that desecrated her inner sanctum with unclean blood.

  It was hard to clearly see much of anything with the mud-like ichor that slid past her eyes, but this... this was one of her Guardians. She set them to patrol the temple court, as well as other quarters of her earthly abode. But... but something was wrong with this Guardian. She could sense the stamp of her hand across the scaled horror, but it... it was transformed.

  "S-stop that!" Isi said, her face twitching with sudden worry. She had been able to push aside the temple's disrepair, but she could not remain in ignorance any longer. Something bad was going on.

  The broken Guardian looked up from its snacking just like before. It seemed to have the vaguest awareness of Isi's presence...

  ...but it quickly returned to devouring the human without a care.

  "You insolent little worm!" Isi hissed, and she grabbed the creature by its slender head. Its eyes were two enormous bck dots, and she ripped out the fleshy orbs! She sent snakes of fire inside the bloody holes left behind and cooked the creature from the inside out! The fiery tendrils wrapped around the insolent creature's heart and delighted as it slowly died!

  Or at least that was what should have happened.

  The broken Guardian remained unharmed. It actually rose from the mutited corpse it had been feeding on and turned towards the disheveled man beside the altar.

  "Stop that..." Isi gnced nervously between the two mysteries. She suppressed a hysterical ugh.

  Blood dripped from the beast's maw as it pawed past the dead and towards the living. There was a subtle intelligence to the creature's bnk bck stare that Isi recognized. She had crafted it herself, after all. Not human, but not simply beast.

  "I demand that you stop!" Isi shouted, and she tried to destroy the Guardian in several hundred different ways. Each was crueler than the st, but the beast remained unashamedly alive.

  The human bowed his head. She could feel the exact moment he accepted death. A faint warmth had been tickling her feet ever since she had first heard his prayer in the abyss.

  But now the cold had returned.

  "You can't kill him!" Isi said as she threw herself over the trembling human. Her believer. The only believer she could still hear. "This human is mine!"

  She waited for the broken Guardian to lunge. The silence would return. The cold would cim her. Would she be returned to the abyss? Would she ever be allowed to understand?

  But the beast did not attack.

  The ruined temple was deathly quiet... except for a heavy sniffing.

  Both Isi and the human turned slowly towards the broken Guardian. The scaled horror's breath must have tickled the human's face. But it did not bite. It sniffed. Over and over, the Guardian filled the temple's inner sanctum with a hundred dozen snorts.

  And then it turned away, satisfied.

  "Th-that's more like it!" Isi said in vicious victory as the Guardian padded away from her altar.

  She gnced over at the human. He watched the beast disappear with bated breath. Only when it had disappeared from sight did he allow himself to shudder with relief. The human colpsed onto the dusty temple floor and wept.

  Part of Isi wanted to join him. Watching the Guardian spare the human had filled her with only the briefest satisfaction. Allowed a moment to think, Isi quickly realized she was weak.

  "I could only push my fingertip through the hole..." she muttered to herself as she looked around once more at the obscured ruin of her temple. "What happened...?

  Isi jumped as the unwashed human loosed an emotional howl. It was not immediately clear what he was saying or how he felt.

  "Praise! P-praise be! Th-thank you, Nameless One! Mercy!" Snot and tears rolled down his haggard face." O Merciful God of th-these ruins! Praise be!"

  Isi felt a rush of warmth at his prayer. She could not help but coo with delight... but then she noticed the change that had come over the human.

  "When did I do that?!" In the same way that she could sense the stamp of her touch on the broken Guardian, the unwashed human now carried the faintest whiff of her essence. Somehow, she had accidentally given him a [Boon].

  Isi had little time to consider the mistake. The human scarcely even gnced over at the red mess close to him. She watched him run around the vast hall of her inner sanctum. She found that she could see clearly wherever he went. Her altar, though cracked and in disrepair, also remained clear and unobscured.

  "What are you doing...?" Isi asked, and despite the prayer that warmed her, she could not help but feel a darkness in her belly.

  The human was quickly collecting debris of different sizes and stacking the shattered stones atop one another. She knew what he was doing, but shame and disbelief kept her from admitting it.

  After the human had stacked around ten stones atop one another, he finally turned to regard the bloody mess. The human's face twitched piteously, and with much trembling, he covered both his hands in blood.

  "Don't you dare..." Isi hissed as the human smeared the blood across the topmost piece of debris. It formed a bloody little totem in the middle of her sanctum.

  "O Nameless God of these ruins," the man said, his voice suddenly low and reverent. "I give y-you thanks for your protection. May th-this humble shrine- "

  "You little lout!" Isi roared, her cheeks crimson with embarrassment. What sort of ckwit god did this human think she was?! To stack a couple pebbles and call it a shrine! The shame! The shame was more than she could bear!

  Isi reached into the deepest depths of her essence. She gathered every speck of prayer that she had been offered. She demanded that the insulting shrine be reduced to ash! She willed the fires of the sun itself to burn these bricks!

  "Hiiiiiii!"

  The unwashed human loosed a horrified howl as the slipshod shrine burst into fmes. Isi's smile was victorious as she watched the pile of rocks burn... though it became clear very quickly that she did not have enough strength to reduce it to ash.

  "Hmm?" Isi tilted her head in confusion as a new warmth filled her body.

  The human had been bowing low in prayer before Isi had set his pitiful shrine alight.

  Now he was on the ground. Prostrating. The human pressed his face into the floor and trembled.

  "Ooohoh." Isi cooed as the far more powerful form of worship tickled her arms and legs. "This... This is more like it..."

  Snaggle_Tooth