156 Freedom

One of the powers I had gained right before I went to live in my tower and actually begin to make use of my powers was the ability to create copies of memories and absorb them from willing targets. I also possessed a power that allowed me to take memories from unwilling targets. This power was one that I knew that I'd soon grow addicted to using even though it had just been hours since I learned of it and how incredibly powerful it was sure to be.

In the time that has passed since I first acquired these abilities, especially the later, I had used them to quickly and intelligently learn about the solar system and the universe I live in. By positioning myself as a god of healing, health, life, and freedom I managed to gain countless worshipers who were willing to share their memories with me and thus actually acquiring new memories was far from difficult.

I spent a considerable amount of time in my tower over the course of the past few weeks targeting creatures, approaching them, and then acquiring their memories. This had led me to finally beginning to feel as knowledgeable as I suppose a god ought to feel and very slowly becoming as knowledgeable as a god ought to be not long before I left the tower with Ava and inadvertently led her to her death at the hands of an angry echo of the distant, nearly forgotten past.

In the most spectacular cases, especially regarding the war-torn planet of Salifinos, I had managed to acquire the collective knowledge of entire civilizations. This was because of the exceedingly strong impression I left on the inhabitants of a number of civilizations, coupled with quiet schemes like my decision to continually provide the inhabitants of some civilizations with food.

The truth was that my ability to influence those who ate the food that I created, be it divinely or magically created, allowed me to easily gain worshipers over time through mortal consumption of food. One of the most subtle yet incredibly powerful tools I possessed was a combination of my ability to create unlimited amounts of food and one of my other abilities to acquire influence over creatures who ate food I created. These two powers allowed me to gain influence over civilizations passively if I felt like it.

That said I wasn't lazy enough to do that. So I had always opted for a more active approach, even while quietly ensuring that I acquired followers by using food freely. And even this led to discoveries concerning the nature of influence and how it altered minds. But in the time since I entered my tower, knowledge of the inner workings of mortal minds had not been the most important thing I had discovered.

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As a chaotic-neutral being, I was both neutral, as in I was motivated by my own self-interests rather than sadism or altruism, and chaotic in that freedom fascinated me and I preferred to let others generally be free so long as they didn't use their freedom to usurp the freedom of others or stand in the way of my objectives.

I had by and large managed to stick to the basic principles of self-interest while pursuing the overall motivations of protective and contagious liberty. Many of my most evil acts had been done to acquire new powers and to secure the worship and service of evil beings, such as the destruction of Florida or the declaration of war against the mortals who inhabited Salifinos.

Perhaps the most important knowledge I had begun to gain was knowledge of the various alignments. I had begun to understand the various aspects and forms of the chaotic alignment. Not only could I now think of my own desires to see the multiverse free from one of the few things I hated, slavery, but I could begin to understand how it was that other chaotic entities felt about various moral issues.

Chaotic good beings viewed things from a freedom-oriented perspective and believed in the best of people all while standing in opposition to oppression and oppressive societies. This was an annoying perspective, and such creatures would probably often stand in my way since I myself leaned towards chaotic evil and was actively embracing chaos in its darker form to exact my revenge. Chaotic evil entities acted purely based on their whims, and their impulses. In their cases, the whims and impulses in question were often destructive.

Chaos itself as a positive force was interested in growth, freedom, and creativity. But as a negative force, it was a source of disorder, entropy, and confusion. As a neutral force, it was one of the grand causes of change, mutations, and inspiration.

Chaos stood in stark opposition to the rigid hierarchies and false order imposed on people by law. Chaos, at its core, was about freedom and in many ways about truth whereas law was about artificial organization and lied to people to get them to abandon chaos in favor of what they felt made them safer. They gave up their freedom to enjoy an artificial and superficial sense of safety.

Morehammer exemplified law's propensity towards rigid falsehoods. He created a rigid structure with him at the top of it so that he could control his creations under the guise of protecting and caring for them.

It seemed that whenever a dwarf began to step too far from his commands and his rigid sense of morality he'd abandon them but what's worse is that he apparently prevented any god from turning to these abandoned dwarves and becoming their god. Morehammer was a dictator, though I had no doubt that he viewed himself as a benevolent or at least neutral one, rather than some evil and oppressive ruler.

A chaotic pantheon chief would have been fine with dwarves choosing their own path. And such a figure would have accepted a god turning towards the dwarves who left the main fold and seeking to become the god of the wayward dwarves. Dwarves deserved a god who accepted their free will and who let them make morally complex choices like what god to worship or how to worship their chosen god. And such a pantheon chief wouldn't have killed Ava for daring to choose to pursue vengeance.

The truth was that that loss still stung. I wasn't about to let myself get overly emotional with regards to the death of my servant, but I quite liked Ava. I had plans for her, and I actually enjoyed her company. Her death was a real blow to my plans. Morehammer's decision to kill her, and to snatch her soul from me was a decision I wasn't planning on forgiving. I would exact my revenge on the annoying vestige. One day, hopefully one day soon, I would not only kill the vestige but I'd also become what it hated: a god who ruled over the dark dwarves.

While opening a portal that led Sombra and I out of the new home of my orcish followers, I quietly rechecked my chaos domain abilities, looking specifically for new powers that I had gained since I last checked my chaotic abilities.

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[New Chaos Domain Passive Powers:

Discord detection: Gaining greater awareness of chaos, and gaining powers over the war domain as well as the knowledge domain allows you to detect discord. This is a potent power that you can use to exacerbate conflict.

Discord manipulation: You can manipulate discord and cause it to feel worse for those who are experiencing it. This power allows you to more easily transform disagreements into battles or worse. Alternatively, you can also lessen the impacts of discord, which is useful if you want to cause chaos by making peace possible.

Disorder disease: You can create mutative plagues that cause the infected to act chaotic and to undergo mutations you pick at will. Synergistic power intersecting the disease domain and the chaos domain.

Disruption: This dangerous power can be used to disrupt the functions of things. If it's used on a clock the clock stops, if it's used on a bow the bow stops firing arrows, so on and so forth. It can also be used on the limbs and organs of mortals, but not yet on other types of living creatures.

Freedom: You can grant creatures freedom from effects that would impede their movement, or usurp their wills unless such effects are caused by you. This power also retroactively cures them of any conditions that were affecting them in the aforementioned ways.

New Chaos Domain Active Power:

Paradox causation: This is a potent upgradeable power that grows in might as you gain more influence over chaos. You can ignore or overturn logic or established rules of reality when it comes to mortals, undead, and lesser extraplanars. This is a once-a-day power that allows you to, for example, turn a demon good or lawful, or cause an undead creature to stop hating life.]

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"These abilities are... nice." I mentally muttered. Two of them, "Disruption" and "Freedom" were especially useful even at a glance. At the moment I was with Sombra, but the nicest part of being a god was that my abilities didn't often have range limits so long as I could detect the targets I wanted to use them on. And in this case, I could.

"Freedom" was an incredibly useful power when going up against another creature with auric powers. Especially since I was rapidly learning that true mastery of the law domain came with an assortment of powers related to dominance and hierarchies and Morehammer's vestige still possessed one of those, an auric one at that. But with "Freedom" I had a potent counter to that power.

I swiftly targeted all of the dwarves in the world, and activated the power, thus ensuring that dwarves would, for the time being, be able to resist Morehammer's unconscious ability to enslave them. This, coupled with a notification I was preparing, would no doubt complicate any plans the tyrannical vestige had in mind.

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[Alert: Ensuring Freedom

Althos, in his kindness and wisdom, has used one of his powers to ensure that all dwarves retain their free-will. As a deity who possesses powers over chaos and freedom, he is naturally opposed to the dying echo of the secretive and dictatorial demon-lord, Morehammer. Morehammer fooled dwarves throughout history into believing that he was their creator. This allowed him to gain power from their worship and love, and he ruled over a group of creatures like him who also benefitted from the worship and love of the dwarven people.

Morehammer's vestige is still powerful enough to possess an aura that captivates and enslaves dwarves. Althos' latest intervention, through the usage of one of his powers, ensures that dwarves are immune to the enthralling effect of this aura. Morehammer is a tyrannical foe of freedom and an enemy of free will.]

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He is considerably powerful but if he has it his way all dwarves will be under his thumb forever, even in death. For the sake of the future of all dwarves, it is important that he be resisted and fought against whenever he can. Althos is currently in the process of preparing to defeat him, but he was harmed during their first clash and is still recovering from the damage he endured.

All over the world, dwarves were surprised to read the notification as it intrusively crept into their minds. And though not every dwarf believed it, they all felt the power of Althos' quiet ability seep into their minds and souls and grant them immunity to the devastating and sinister power possessed by the specter of the creator of dwarves.

Unbeknownst to them, they did in fact benefit from Althos' power as it offered them a needed defense against the will-eroding abilities possessed by the echo of their long-dead creator. Whether they were in Atlantis, Humana, Iredale, or elsewhere, they were now given necessary protection to retain their free will from the invasive powers possessed by the unsettling, driven vestige, mere hours before he would have attempted to use them on the world's dwarves.

Morehammer himself was ignorant to this development, but the vestige was so connected to the dwarves that he surely sensed a troubling and vague development that threatened his connection to his children. And this filled the eerie, stoic echo of an ancient age with dread. Something he hadn't felt for a long time.

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Sombra and I stepped through an open, one-way portal and in doing so teleported ourselves from the depths of the new home of the orcs and into the Rodan forest. It was time for Cosecha to make another appearance and for me to begin to more directly manage the communities I controlled.