God vs God

Renee was preparing to ascend towards the heavens when she was finally brought back to reality, what she had done finally processed by her mind. The reddish-earthy scale armor was still around her. The ground was still reshaping itself, closing the fractures that had swallowed the giants. She stopped, startled by what she had done. She sat in the middle of the sidewalk, struggling to breathe. She had exerted a power over nature that didn't seem to belong to her. But it was hers, that power was hers, more than that, it seemed that that power was her. She was confused. She didn't know if there was something inside her that had awakened after contact with the divine, or if that feat was a spark that Moradin had seen before her and helped to awaken, or if it actually had something to do with Moradin, although it seemed ridiculous to say that it didn't.

She closed her eyes and tried to speak to Moradin, but like a child waiting for her father to finish working, she became frustrated at not receiving an immediate response. The rain fell on her face as a reminder of the promised destruction, but also a relief from the many questions that plagued her.

While Renee stood there, she opened her eyes and looked at the sky. As if seeing more clearly, she could discern two figures clashing, like Saint George and the Dragon, with the moon itself as a backdrop. She could easily tell what was happening, even though no one could see clearly. People didn't dare leave their homes, worried about the rising water despite the rapid drainage the craters were still providing. Those on the upper floors of the buildings didn't seem so concerned, but some saw cars begin to move as the water grew stronger, almost mystically. The water rose rapidly, enveloping Renee up to her waist. In her trance of vague questions and answers (a reasonable effect after wielding such power), Renee looked at the sky and witnessed the struggle.

Without realizing it, she hummed a song, one that she had heard on the radio at some point.

"I can tell by the look in your eye, you've never seen the man with nothing to say, I can tell by the look in your eye, you'd better watch yourself, St. George is on his way..."

The moon hovered like a pale eye over the apex of the world, its light slicing the scales of the serpent that writhed among the torn clouds. Poketnaru, the mad god of the waters, was a mountain of muscle and moving viscera, each ring of his body as thick as the walls of a forgotten city. His scales did not gleam like those of a common dragon; they were opaque, viscous, covered by a film of rain that flowed forever without ever drying. From the serpent's open flanks, waterfalls rose and died in the air, feeding the deluge below. His eyes, two black suns, had neither iris nor pupil – only the darkness of an abyss that stared back.

Moradin did not retreat.

The god of the dwarves floated in the stormy sky like a hammer suspended before its fall. His beard, now with a new aspect, braided in veins of iron and solidified lava, fluttered in the wet wind. In his right hand, the Brutal Pick sang. Not a song, a metallic groan, the sound of a collapsing gallery, of a vein of ore splitting in two. The pickaxe, in his hands, adapted to its original wielder and, by right, was greater than any tool forged by mortal hands; its handle was a column of black basalt, and its head, a crescent of steel that seemed to absorb the moonlight. Each sliver of the blade held the memory of an earthquake.

The rain fell in diagonal sheets, but Moradin did not get wet. The drops that touched his armor of rock scales turned to vapor with a hiss, as if the god's own skin were a red-hot forge. Around him, the air distorted into waves of heat that collided with the damp cold of the serpent, creating swirls of boiling mist.

Poketnaru moved first. Not an attack, a stretch. Its tail, which disappeared into the clouds to the east, swept across the sky in a slow arc, and the mere displacement of air knocked down the lightning rods of the hotel below, ripped the roofs off parked cars. Moradin dodged with a sharp, almost imperceptible movement, like a blacksmith pulling his hand from the anvil at the exact moment the hammer falls. The tail passed inches from his chest, and the wind that accompanied it carried the smell of rotting seaweed, of ancient shipwrecks, of drowned people who never found the shore.

The serpent laughed. Not with sound, but with the grinding of its scales rubbing together. It was the sound of a ship breaking in two.

Moradin attacked.

The Brutal Pick descended like a vertical lightning bolt, and the sky split in two. The impact missed the serpent's body. Poketnaru coiled itself upon itself with an agility that belied its size, and the pickaxe plunged into the empty air where its head had been an instant before. But the blow was not in vain. The shockwave that followed tore a fissure in the fabric of the atmosphere, and the rain around the fissure froze for a second before exploding into a thousand needles of ice. The serpent howled, a deep sound that made the hotel windows tremble and shatter into shards that rose instead of falling.

Poketnaru counterattacked. Its mouth opened into three jaws, each articulated like that of an abyssal eel, and from its throat gushed not fire, but living water. Not a torrent – ​​a jet of liquid so pressurized that it cut through the air like a laser. Moradin raised the handle of the Brutal Pick horizontally, and the water struck him like a sword against a shield. The god recoiled five meters into the sky, its feet scraping the clouds, but it did not fall. The jet of water split in two, encircling his body, and behind him the water struck a commercial building, piercing it from side to side like a needle through a piece of fabric.

The moon, a silent witness, bathed the struggle in cold silver. Moradin advanced again, now in a zigzag pattern, his movements as calculated as those of a goldsmith carving a rough gem. The Brutal Pick spun in his hand like a steel weathervane, each turn cutting the raindrops in half. Poketnaru contorted itself to follow him, its immense body forming concentric rings that closed like traps. Moradin entered one of these rings and felt the scales tightening around him, the pressure of a submerged mountain.

He plunged the pickaxe into the nearest scale.

The metal sang. The scale didn't break... but it chipped. A sharp sound, like a cracked bell, echoed across the sky. Poketnaru shuddered all over, its black eyes narrowed, and for the first time something that seemed like surprise... or perhaps pain... distorted its serpentine face. Moradin pulled the Brutal Pick back, tearing off a fragment of scale, and in the empty space a trickle of black water gushed down the serpent's flank like blood.

The beast raged. Its entire body lit up from within, a phosphorescent blue glow emanating from liquid veins beneath its scales. The rain around it stopped falling. Not that it had ceased; the drops remained suspended in the air, each frozen in its motion, like a million tiny lenses reflecting the moon. Moradin felt the pressure increase, the air solidify, the moisture condense on his armor. Poketnaru was trying to drown him in the sky itself, transforming the atmosphere into an invisible ocean.

The dwarf god planted his feet in the void and laughed. A dry, humorless sound, the creaking of a forge spitting embers. He raised the Brutal Pick above his head with both hands, and the pickaxe began to glow not with light, but with heat. The metal turned white, then blue, then transparent. The air around the blade crackled in electric arcs. Moradin was the god of storms, and the storm obeyed him.

The lightning didn't fall from the sky. It sprang from the pickaxe.

A jet of bluish-white plasma struck Poketnaru's chest, and the serpent arched its back like a worm caught on a hook. The suspended raindrops evaporated instantly within a hundred-meter radius, and the moon seemed to tremble in fright. The stench of ozone and burnt flesh filled the air. Poketnaru recoiled, its three jaws gaping in a silence more terrifying than any scream. The hole in its chest smoked, and from the edges of the wound oozed not water, but a thicker substance, the primordial blood of the mad god.

But the serpent did not fall. It rose even higher, ascending toward the moon, and when it reached its maximum height, it stopped. Its body stretched like a bowstring, and then it crashed down upon Moradin like a mountain that had learned to fly.

The god did not flinch. He planted the Brutal Pick in front of him as an improvised shield, and the serpent's head crashed against the basalt cable with a sound like a continent splitting apart. Moradin was hurled down, piercing layers of clouds, his beard ablaze, his armor cracking in ten places. He fell long enough for the moon to move a hand's breadth in the sky. And then he stopped. With an effort that made his bones crack, he rose into the air, spitting out a stream of lava that solidified into black glass before touching the ground below.

Poketnaru descended now, its triple mouth wide open to swallow him. Moradin saw, at the bottom of the serpent's throat, not entrails, but an entire ocean, a submerged world where coral cities grew upon the skeletons of titans. He saw Atrahasis, the first drowned one, waiting at the bottom of that abyss.

The dwarf god spun the Brutal Pick in a flourish that drew a circle of fire in the air. And he lunged into the serpent's mouth.

The moon watched, impassive. The rain, which had stopped, began to fall again, but now it was hot.