The Angel Of Deception
As a literal god, I possessed an endless array of formidable abilities. One power that I possessed that I hadn't really been utilizing all that often was my power to manipulate the senses of mortals around me. It was a power I acquired when I gained the first tier of influence over the subdomain of enchantment.
As I activated it my eyes suddenly changed from their usual dark color and abruptly became a striking shade of blue. I felt the shift and noticed it for future study. Odds are this was a natural consequence of making use of enchantment magic or abilities. As I activated the power cerulean colored energy began to radiate out of my hands, casually leaking into the air around me.
I fused this energy with the magical illusion I was creating to begin to tell an incredible lie. A truly dazzling and ambitious one. One that I knew these dwarves wouldn't see through.
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The truth of what the god was up to was simple. He was performing a mass false resurrection. This was a simple technique for dark gods, one that allowed ancient gods of evil to create surprisingly sizable cults in a number of worlds quite easily if they could train even a few cultists to become assassins.
Althos himself moved with pomp and circumstance as a strange and grim grin began to pull his lips upward in a dark sneer. His eyes were fixated on the dwarves before him as he quietly readied the strange energy that was about to explode out of him. He felt it well up within him and shivered as the potent energy primed itself for release.
It was a dark miasma of necromantic energy mixed with the bright spark of life. Together the two disparate types of energy felt very odd and distinct within the god. He could feel each of the dozens of sparks of life well up within him as if they had always been there and had only been waiting for release instead of being odd things he had created within himself only moments ago.
The odd god quietly read the descriptions for a few of his abilities that had received upgrades while he dwelt in his tower. He gave them once-overs to ensure that he remembered them correctly.
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[Body creation: You can create bodies. This power is a synergistic one that fuses biology and life. Bodies that you are that are left without a life-giving spark are just inanimate corpses, but if they are given a soul and a life-giving spark they come to life. That said, we're sure you can find something to do with lifeless bodies.
Currently, you can create bodies for all types of animals found on Torus, and plants, assorted abominations, elves, humans, dwarves, and orcs.
Soul creation: You can create souls. Your souls are now stronger than they once were, but you still can't create specific types of souls. Once you absorb more souls you will be able to create souls that are designed to maximize the potential of specific types of bodies.
This is a logical ability: if you absorb dwarven souls you'll eventually gain the ability to create dwarven souls. Absorbing elven souls gives you the ability to create elven souls. And so on and so forth.]
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I quietly chuckled as I read over those descriptions. The ability to create corpses of creatures like humans, elves, and even abominations was an incredibly powerful ability. It was one that I could quite easily abuse as a dreadful god of necromancy.
I had the power to create an army, and what made that an even better ability was that I could use it remotely. With it I could unleash terror anywhere I could detect. Tragically, my detection-based abilities were limited. I couldn't detect everything in the universe. Not yet anyway. That was something I was going to change in the near future. With the help of my "Stellar awareness" power. But it wasn't time to do that just yet. I refocused on the scene in front of me.
I took a deep breath and I targeted not just the dwarven corpses, but all of the corpses near me. I kept my eyes on the living dwarves, and maintained the illusions that I had already begin to inflict on them.
The illusions were surprisingly simple. I was simply creating a number of illusions that together made it look like there was a radiant aura around me, an aura of golden light. This aura would soon, in their eyes anyway, begin to seep into the fallen dwarves and revive them. The true nature of what I was doing to the dwarves was far less pleasant than a true resurrection, and it was also far more useful to me than a true resurrection would be.
In performing a large number of false resurrections I was gaining loyal, and evil worshippers who'd slyly infiltrate this community. A part of me recognized the viability of using this approach on every dwarven community. It was definitely tempting, and I had the servants to do it if I opted too. That said, for now, I'd use this community as an experiment. And I'd plant the seeds to create an evil cult of life and earth in this community.
I closed my eyes and expelled the shards of life and necromantic energy that I had placed within myself. I felt odd as they left me, and as a wave of cold entered me in their place. They swiftly flew out of me, imperceptible to the naked eye, and flew into the fallen dwarves in front of me. Even with my eyes closed I could "see" the warm, deceptive energy they radiated.
The shards sank into their targets, easily seeping into them and beginning to repair the grievous damage the orcs had inflicted on them. I opened my eyes and I could see the horrific cuts that the dwarves succumbed too begin to mend themselves and swiftly coming undone before my eyes. I watched as arrows were pushed out of dwarven skin, as flesh began to regrow, and even as limbs began to rejoin dwarven bodies. In the most extreme cases heads began to regrow from once headless neck stumps.
Even I had to stop for a moment to admire the sheer potency of my own powers. This was beyond what I had expected, even though I knew that one of my most powerful powers, true resurrections, were capable of forming new bodies and I had the power to bring illusions to life. Even with those sorts of abilities under my control, I sensed the sheer power of my "False resurrection" power as I watched it heal the wounds that had once ended lives.
The actual appearance of the power was visually striking and distinct. The bodies of the dwarves were shrouded in dark energy, and the healing that was going on wasn't beautiful and gloriously but instead eerie and unsettling. Flesh spontaneously regrowing and stitching itself together is never a nice sight. I watched as the dark energy repaired the bodies, and then as the eyes of the dwarves shot open. Right when they did I received a notification that caught my eye. It asked me something.
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[Alert: One of the quirks of the "False resurrection" power is that it allows gods to have direct power over the cults that the resurrected beings will try to establish. What sort of cult would you like for these supposedly resurrected beings to create?]
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"Oh? How... intriguing." I thought, a smirk on my face as I read through the notification. This was a neat opportunity for me. At the moment this definitely guaranteed that I'd use this power many times in the future.
But for now, I had a challenging decision I needed to make. One that would definitely influence the future. That said, this was a nice sort of challenging decision and one that I was quite happy to have to make.
I silently considered what to do next. One of the particular quirks of the powers of a god was that for us to gain greater influence over many but not all domains and subdomains we had to build cults dedicated to ourselves and the thing we wanted to influence. So right now the decision I was being asked to make was one of considerable importance.
As I paused to make this decision I quietly amped up the illusions the dwarves were seeing, and as I did so the very first of the resurrected dwarves began to shake violently. Life was beginning to violently surge into their bodies.