“I told you cultists that I wanted your lives given to me in tribute, but all you’ve given me is deaths. Deaths won’t buy me a cosmic loaf of bread. You don’t even pay with your own so any blessing I’d be inclined to grant would go to the people who actually paid.”
Murder is murder. I don’t have any specific rules about not committing murder. It just seems pretty obvious, and equally obvious that I’m not getting anything from it. Death is useless to me, that’s why I specified life. I started as a tribal god that became a warrior god with connections to specifically war magics and somehow that turned into sacred poetry. From there you get shamanism, herbalism and “forbidden arts” as I was lost and found a few times. Somehow. I love my humans but they need to be more careful with mushrooms and also dream walking.
(Now, self-sacrifice can be useful. I can get some good stuff for that, though I have some pretty heavy obligations afterward. Nothing I can’t handle, just care, maintenance, and enrichment but there’s an extra weight and responsibility.)
These chuckleheads though…It was a mess. These were the stupidest, greediest cultists to every stumble on my Name or one of my hidden temples. (Which were mostly only hidden because I had an Aesthetic couple thousand years ago and I never got around to letting the mortals know I changed it.) After the initial introduction I made my needs clear, or so I thought.
Turns out I hadn’t. They kept asking me for things without fulfillling their end of the contract, and seemed confused when I kept reiterating what I wanted. Then I checked up on them and saw how they were attempting to fulfill their end of the contract. I was not happy.
“Tell me the truth,” I say to the cultists who’ve taken cover in the alcove behind the altar. Most of them had gotten there by crawling, a few had gotten there after I’d thrown them. They were all very beaten up. “It’s the horns right? The claws? Did they say ‘murder adolescent girls’ to you?” I asked as I loomed over them.
“Dread Lord you demanded sacrifice,” their leader says in a whiny voice as he cradles his broken arm. “All we did was obey.”
“No, you decided to do that,” I say as I break the chains on the altar. I try not to sigh at the “Dread Lord” thing. One of my titles was Lord of Madness, but it was the sacred wisdom kind. A later religion kind of forgot about the sacred and wisdom parts and I was suddenly also the god of homicidal rages. (Which was occasionally useful.)
The girl’s drugged up to her eyeballs, but her mouth and finger nails were red. I had a feeling a few of the cultists had nasty bites and scratches. “Oh, you’re a fighter,” I say approvingly, and lift her up, wrapping my fur cloak around her shoulders. She practically drowns in it. She struggles, mumbling a protest, but I shush her as I pick her up. Her angry, sleepy frown is adorable. “Let me deal with this,” you tell her.
She mumbles some more, and I decided to take this as agreement. “I said life. Meaning I wanted dedicated moments of your time. I wanted art. I wanted poetry and possibly music. I wanted fighting, I wanted hunting and horse racing. Hell, for nostalgia’s sake, horse theft would be fine.”
“’M a horse thief,” the girl says sleepily. “Thought I was gonna hang but ended up here.”
“You are fucking adorable,” I tell her. “Would you like to be my High Priestess?”
“What’s the pay like?” The girl asks. She’s so high she’s barely bothered with my appearance.
“Dread Lord,” the cultist protests.
“We can talk about that after I collapse this temple,” I tell her.
The cultists whimper.
“Only I can’t read or write, so no poetry,” she says. “And I don’t sing to well.”
“We can work on the reading and writing, and obviously the horse theft,” I tell her, and carry her out of the temple. Behind us, we can hear the cultists scream as the underground temple falls on them.
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