Divine Warden

Andy awoke to bright light in his face. He wasn’t sure where he was, but the cobblestones around him informed him that it certainly wasn’t his bedroom.

He got up shakily and looked around. He was in a hall of some kind, with high windows that light poured through. Everything seemed impossibly bright, and impossibly clean. It was beautiful, wherever he was. He realized he was looking at a big, stone double door that no one person could possibly open. Slowly, he turned around to see the rest of the room.

That’s when he saw her sitting on a large throne at the head of the room. A vision of ethereal beauty with tanned skin, long dark hair and a white toga. She was examining him thoughtfully.

She opened her mouth to say something, and Andy’s head split. It was as though he were being spoken to in every language at once, in a voice so loud it made his eyes water. He let out a scream, slapping his hands to his head as his mind tried to comprehend what he was hearing.

“Woah, shit…” the goddess said, that maddening multi-voice quality dropping away. “You okay, dude?”

“Yeah… fine…”he breathed. “I think? What just happened?”

“Godspeak,” she said, striking her forehead with her palm. “I forget you squishy mortals have a hard time with it. No biggy; I’ve recalibrated so you understand my words in your own language.”

“I… see…” Andy said, straightening up as she absorbed what she’d said. “Wait… are you God? Is this heaven? Ohmygod, am I dead?”

“Woah, woah… easy…” the woman said, standing up. “Relax, you’re not dead. I’m just borrowing you. You’re in the Etherealm. It’s where all the gods of creation and life live.”

She paused.

“I am a goddess, though. Name's Lyeria, the goddess of creativity and imagination.”

He shook her outstretched hand. This was a dizzying amount of information. Andy found himself suddenly calling into question a great many things. Either his sanity was fucked, every conception he had of the universe was wrong, or he was in some kind of extremely vivid dream. At the moment he wasn’t willing to rule anything out.

“Uhm… okay. That’s like, kind of a lot to take in,” he admitted. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to be a hero,” she said.

She was approaching him now. She looked young; barely older than he was. She was so beautiful that he was having trouble focusing on anything else. He was rock hard, too, though neither of them seemed to notice. The goddess paced around him, studying him.

“You and I have something in common,” she said.

Andy wondered how he, an 18 year old kid who rated himself a solid 4 out of 10, could possibly have anything in common with the ethereally beautiful goddess in front of him.

“Uh, we like to world build?” he asked, grasping at straws.

Lyeria surprised him by clapping her hands together with a huge smile.

“Exactly! In fact, we’ve even created the same world.”

He blinked, taking that in. Then his eyes widened.

“Are you saying you turned my World Anvil website into an actual world?”

She wrinkled her nose.

“Yeah, I’ll pretend I know what any of that means,” she said. “I took your writing and manifested it as a planet. Surprise! You’ve been creating a real world this entire time.”

“Oh God… oh god, oh god, oh god…” He muttered as the vast and existential implications of that washed over him.

He hugged himself. Lyeria just seemed to puzzle that over.

“Yeah, I guess you were kind of a god, in your own way. You just didn’t know it.”

She stuck her face down into his field of vision.

“Congratulations, little demi-god!”

He stepped back, and almost fell.

“You’re telling me that my… my work was so good that you made it real?”

She gave him a slightly pitying look.

“Listen, I wouldn’t get too big a head, here,” she said. “Me and the goddess of libations got drunk, and cruised through earth stuff. We found this Anvil of Worlds, and your… what did you call it?”

“A website,” he said, disheartened by her response.

“Yes. Your ‘website’ jumped out to me. Mostly because you’d done so much work to it,” she said. “And because it was kinda smutty. Pretty childish, really, but my Mom’s the goddess of lust, so I’m kinda into it.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Three years ago. You’d have been 15, I think?”

The answer only gave Andy more questions.

“But wait… that was a long time ago. I’ve made, like, hundreds of character sheets since then. And cities and custom spells and plot points. So much stuff!”

She gave him a look that seemed to say “Yes, and?” I took him a moment to articulate what he was trying to ask.

“I guess if you made a world out of my site three years ago, what happened to all the stuff I added?”

Understanding formed on her face.

“Oh! It manifested into the world. Retroactively, too.” she said, “Really, just like it had always been there.”

“Oh my god…” Andy whispered. “I’ve literally been playing God.…”

“Yes, we covered that already,” Lyeria said. She seemed irritated with him. “Not just playing, either. Can we move on to the point here?”

“The point? What’s the point?”

“Okay! Good question!” she said excitedly. “You’re here because I need your help fixing our world.”

At this, Andy felt a flutter of excitement. Our world? He was sharing it? With a goddess? Existential dread about what he’d done notwithstanding, the idea of the actual goddess of creativity needing him for… well, anything, really… was intoxicating.

He stood up a little straighter.

“Uh, yeah. Sure. It’s been growing in my head for years, so I know it pretty well. What do you need help with?”

She took a deep breath.

“Sooooo, how to explain this?” she asked. “Okay, let’s try this: I used my powers to make your Anvil of Worlds epic come to life.”

“It’s World Anvil,” he said.

She looked annoyed.

“Whatever. Your writing became real, that’s the point here,” she said, “and anything new you added became part of the world, like it had always been there.”

“Okay… I guess I can follow that so far.”

She made a sweep with her hands, and suddenly he could do more than follow it. It was as if the room around him was fading. Now, he could imagine his world, Talvaria, as clearly as if he were floating above it in space. Cities rose from the earth, mountain ranges and rivers sprung into existence, all based on his whims. On his writing.

When Lyeria spoke now, her voice seemed distant.

“Think of your creations as mechanical dolls in a playhouse,” she explained. “All wound up and, when you set them on the floor, they start walking…”

Andy watched as heroes rose from the ground, their lives established, the world shifting retroactively to reflect their deeds. He could see them fighting monsters and evildoers in his mind’s eye.

“...and they go where they may. You created their deeds, the impact they’d made on the world, and the skills they’d built over the years. But once they were in motion, they took their own course.”

Now he could see the heroes falling, slain in battles he felt they should have won. Some were dead as soon as they’d been born, their timelines having started and ended before they had a chance to do anything more than live out some preordained destiny.

“And there's darkness spreading. You created that, too. A powerful, organized empire of superhuman monsters, reality bending wizards, and fiendish soldiers. They command legions that grow with everything they conquer.”

He could sense it; almost watch it in real time, like a movie playing out in his head.

“What were your heroes against all of that? Lone, wandering rabbles and small parties? They may have been capable of great things, individually. But what are individuals when confronting nations?”

Dead, was apparently the answer; stones crushed beneath the wave of the powerful empire he’d created for them to fight. He’d never imagine the bad guys winning. But, he supposed, it just made too much sense when he stopped to think about it.

The vision he was in ended abruptly, and he found himself standing with Lyeria back in her… wherever they were.

“Anyway, that’s why I need you, buddy,” she said, her narrative tone suddenly gone. “I took your ideas, put them in motion, and now everything’s gone to shit.”

Andy couldn’t really process that, however, as he was too caught up on whatever it was he’d just experienced.

“What the hell just happened to me?” he asked.

“Huh? Oh, right,” she said, “I used my God powers to make you experience your own creative vision. It’s a whole thing I can do. Really, anyone who’s ever been inspired to write something has experienced a mild version of it.”

He felt a little heartbroken. He’d created, what he felt at least, was a really interesting world of swords, sorcery, and heroes standing up against a dark empire. Now, he was learning that he’d done all of it just to create a scenario in which the bad guys had already won. What was even the point?

“How do we fix it?” he asked. “The heroes are dead, right? Or at least most of them? Should I write some new ones or something?”

“Little late for that,” she said. “But don’t worry about the heroes. I brought them all back.”

Andy blinked.

“You just… brought them back? Just like that?” he asked. “If you can do that, what’s the problem?”

“Well, I can’t just do it indefinitely,” she said, as though she were a teacher speaking to an especially slow student. “I need souls, and a transfer like that from one world to another is pretty much a one time deal.”

“Souls?” he asked. “Where’d you get the souls from?”

Lyeria gave him a proud grin, locking her hands behind her back.

“That’s the best part!” she said, “I got them from your world! Everyone who’s dead, I just pulled a soul from your world to do the revive. All the heroes are back in place.”

Andy’s eyes went wide.

“My world? You took a bunch of people from Earth and sucked them into my horny roleplaying game?” he asked, “Who did you take?”

“The 627 closest people to you,” she said, looking a little taken aback. “Is that bad?”

“Is it bad?!” he asked, near panic, “They’re humans! Most of them don’t know anything about magic or fantasy or game mechanics or any of that stuff! Lyeria, they’re all gonna die!”

Lyeria looked confused.

“How can they not know about the world you created?” she asked. “Surely a writer as prolific as you must be extremely popular.”

Andy felt like he was going to throw up.

“Popular?! I write on a private web server. There’s like, 30 other people in a fantasy porn Discord who’ve even ever seen anything I’ve written!”

She took a step back.

“Wait… you spent hundreds of hours building this world so 30 people could read it?” she asked. “What the fuck, dude?”

He ignored that. Everything she said was sinking in.

“Oh my god… my Mom was just downstairs. My friends. 600 people close to me is like, everyone I know…”

Lyeria was looking almost as distraught as he felt.

“Okay… so that’s really fucking bad,” she said. “I was really hoping all the knowledge of your work would kinda carry them over the hump.”

“You can’t go through with this!” he pleaded. “You’ve gotta get your souls from somewhere else!”

“Kinda late for that. I already pulled the trigger,” she said. “The deed’s done. The reincarnations have already happened.”

He grabbed her shoulders, shaking her slightly.

“They’re gonna fucking die, Lyeria!” he repeated, desperately. “My own mom is in there! My friends! Probably my sister, too!”

She immediately him off her.

“Calm. Down.” she said, with a firm command that he felt in his soul.

He took a deep breath and struggled to relax.

“First of all, they’re not helpless,” she said, “they have all the skills, abilities and instincts you gave the characters. They can access the characters' memories, too.”

That was a relief, he thought. He didn’t tend to fill out his character sheets at anything less than level 15. Most everyone they were reincarnating as would admittedly be pretty awesome.

“You mean they can fight and stuff?” he asked.

“And use magic,” she said. “They’re fully capable of understanding what they can do. So just chill out a bit.”

It was good news, but hardly a guarantee of any kind.

“But how will they know where to go? Or what to do?” he asked. “Even if they’re badasses, they’re still going to be lost.”

Lyeria’s grin returned, if only slightly.

“That’s where you come in. You’re going to be my emissary,” she said.

“Your… what?” he asked.

“My emissary. Angel. Messenger. Whatever you wanna call it,” she said. “You’re going to fly around, and let everyone know what the situation is and what they need to do to fix it.”

He nodded. This actually had some promise.

“So… I’ll be kind of a field commander too, then?”

She nodded.

“It’s your world, man. You probably best know how to beat the baddies in it.”

“Okay… so I can just like, magically find everyone?”

“Yes! You’ll be drawn to them, even. You can even teleport yourself directly to them,” she said.

“Okay. Understood,” he said. “But what happens to them? Are they stuck here?”

“Nope. Complete the quest and beat the empire, they get to go home,” she said.

“And if they… y’know…” he drew a finger across his throat.

She frowned, then drew a finger across hers. That raised interesting questions about the afterlife, but he didn’t feel he had time to ask them.

“When do I get started?” he asked

“Now, basically,” she said, “but I need to do one thing first.”

She lifted a finger, waggling it around. Andy felt power surge through him. Power to travel quickly, to fly, and to appear only to those he wished to see him.

And then, he began to feel strange. Something else started happening…

Andy tried to ask a question, but couldn’t find his voice. He struggled to even move as the goddess’ power flowed through his veins. A rush of lightheadedness hit him, leaving Andy feeling like he had stood up too fast, and his vision blurred. As the stars cleared from his eyes, everything around him felt larger. Even Lyeria seemed to be taller than she had been moments earlier.

He went to bring a hand to his head when he became keenly aware of the absolutely massive breasts that seemed to be blocking his path.

“What the…” he gasped, realizing his voice wasn’t his anymore. “No…”

Andy brought his hands under the large, gravity defying boobs he was now sporting. He looked down only to be greeted by an absurd amount of cleavage as he cupped them. A part of him was half expecting them to vanish like another one of Lyeria’s illusions. But, instead, his hands were dwarfed by the sheer size of his boobs.

He padded his body, finding that his scrawny boyish frame had seemingly become that of a curvaceous beauty not unlike the one standing before him. His non-existent hips and flat butt had both swelled out into a full hourglass shape capped off with a perfect peach of an ass. A quick check had confirmed that his manhood was gone as well, a puffy pair of lips greeting him underneath the form-fitting white robe he was now wearing.

Finally, he brought his hands up to his face, finding only soft, radiant skin where his scratchy stubble and acne scars once were. One final check found that his shaggy, flaxen hair was now a mane of vibrant red waves that seemed to go down to the small of his back.

He… no, she now stood wobbly on her feet, trying to find a new center of balance.

“What…the hell did you do that for?!” Andy asked.

“I’m sorry,” Lyeria said in a sympathetic tone that sounded fairly insincere, “but I’ve got a reputation to keep. I’m a hot lady, and so are all my heralds.”

“Okay, but why the red hair and these,” he lifted his breasts for emphasis.

“Well, because you like redheads, right? God powers, remember? Besides, I’ve seen the women you’ve made, you’ll fit right in with those,” Lyeria said with a bit of a coy smile on her face.

“Please change me back…” Andy said. “I’ll be better if you do.”

Lyeria shook her head.

“Objectively untrue,” she said. “Heralds are way better if they match their deities. It’s a synergy thing.”

She shrugged.

“Anyway, time’s a wastin’!” she said. “If you need me, give me a psychic call!”

With that, she clapped her hands. And Andy started falling…