More ethereal music echoed out around me as I strode through the woods. People danced and sang in the distance.

"Where's the deadfall?" I muttered. There were no drifts of leaves, just short-cut grass that sparkled in the winter chill. Behind me, dark footprints showed where I had been, the warmth of my feet melting the heavy frost and snow.

Two women and a man, all three of them exquisitely beautiful, recited poetry in a lilting language I didn't recognise under a skeletal tree as I passed them by. They glanced over at me and smiled, waving for me to join them, but I walked on.

Jeremy had the same issue I did before the ritualistic dagger-markings became popular. When so many Soulbound are in one place, you hardly notice the scarlet letters over their heads. The fact that mine were all S-ranked and above just meant I was assumed to be a highly valued servant of the lord of Roses.

I could imagine this place in spring, or even better, autumn. At the start of the year, the blossoms and newly grown leaves would make this place a natural wonder, the cold snow around me replaced with the warm colours of falling petals. The dancing and the singing would be more energetic, I supposed, with new life all around them.

But in autumn, when the buds had turned to fruit and hung heavy on the branches above, waiting to be picked and eaten, that would be when it was the most divine. These lotus eaters would be occupied with their art and music, oblivious to the millions of corpses left behind by the poor bastards flanking my army through the winter.

This was false, a mirage. For all the beauty I'd seen in the city and its inhabitants, it wasn't real. And not because of whatever flesh-sculpting magic they used to remove imperfections in their bodies, or the managed ecology of the orchard, but due to the incongruence with reality itself.

My nomads were short, dirty and violent. They washed themselves in barrels of water outside their yurts, the same water they would then drink from, or in the streams that ran across the steppe. Music involved simple instruments and atonal chanting, and dance was all about learning to move in a fight.

Literacy was frowned upon, and generally only found among the high-caste women of a tribe. Their clothing was colourful, depending on what dies were available, but that was about their only concession to aesthetics. They were function over form.

Here, it was the other way around. Form was triumphant, and everything, first and foremost, must be easy on the eye. I had come to believe that Aphrodite was something closer to lust and desire, rather than pure aestheticism, but I wondered if I had been mistaken. Whatever happened here today, she would be my enemy afterwards, and would be joining whatever alliance Poseidon was forming against Aresk and me.

The heavenly battle lines were forming up. War, Killing and Winter, against Time, Death, and Ocean. I doubted the Mother would officially join my side, but her battle with Death that I had instigated with the Sunking's knife should at least weaken the otherwise primordial power of Death when the time came. And I had my secret weapon against Poseidon: Prender and his rapidly growing control over the element of water.

The big tree grew closer, dominating the sky. Redwoods had nothing on this thing. The Beauties became fewer and farther between as I got closer to it. I passed the last of them as I dropped down a low rise and saw Jeremy's home for the first time.

Mortimer had turned Urkash and half the shit-shitter cities north of the Black Sea into charnel houses to fuel his abominations. Amir had built a city of pirates and a fleet of ships. I supposed my own capital was Riverwheel, far in the north, filled with innovation and a blending of culture from the Huskar craftsmen and the artisans we forcibly relocated there to drag the nomads out of the stone age.

But in reality, my capital was wherever my wandering army happened to be.

Jeremy had built himself a lonely space in the midst of a gorgeous community. At the foot of the big tree lay a perfectly oval lake, a few hundred metres long, and to one side, he had sculpted the tree into a home. The bark stretched out to form an elegant canopy, and roots had grown up through the soil and then been shaped into furniture.

He lay stretched out on a couch lined with green moss next to the water. One hand propped up his chin as he stared into the water beside him. I pulled my aura in close. He probably wasn't a threat to me anymore, not since I gained access to my divine portals and the ability to chop people apart with invisible blades, but I still approached cautiously. I had no idea whether he had access to a Source, or his patron would break the rules and actively intercede.

He looked almost sad, a melancholy hanging over him as he stared at his own reflection. I was twenty metres away from him before he noticed anything amiss. He glanced up, looking around in confusion before his eyes settled on me.

"We need to talk," I said. He sat up, adjusting his silk toga and spinning the bracelets on his wrists as he glared at me. The bracelets were thorny rose stems, twisted into loops so there was always a flower facing away from his skin.

"You've won. A fucking criminal, a murderer and a villain, but you've won. Patricia will fight you, but I won't," he muttered, standing up and taking a goblet from a nearby table. He tipped it back and set it down, resting his fists on the shaped-root table and turning his back to me.

"If you won't fight, that is going to make this next part a lot easier. How are you controlling the people you've got stalking my army?"

"Aphrodite's Source. It's in the tree. Patrica has Thoth's. You were the oddity, not getting your patrons," he said, turning to face me.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He looked younger than he had that night in Mortimer's home on Earth. He was a little taller was well, and the flesh of his arms was toned. He hadn't put on muscle mass; he had refined his body to appear as perfect as possible.

"You're just spilling everyone's secrets, eh?"

"What's the point in lying now? You're here. I was wondering when you'd come. You can go anywhere now?"

"Not quite."

"She told me I could become a god, back at the start. I got sucked into her dreams. Such an odd clash. The carnal and the poetic merged into one. A bit like my Beauties, really. Sophistication masking more animalistic desires."

"Call off the people dying in the snow near my army, send them to their homes. Call your field army back and break it up into smaller units."

"Love makes us do terrible things, sometimes. I was adored back on Earth, you know that? I had a lot of haters as well," he chuckled dryly. "But whenever some forum thread started up about the things I'd done that were perhaps less well-motivated, my fans would swarm and shut them down. I never asked for them to do that; they just did. Sometimes they took it too far."

"Call them off. Break up your field army. It won't win in a battle against my giants and nomads."

"I don't have any control over what they do, not anymore. Those kids who killed themselves back home… I didn't go after them. The first time I knew about them was when I got accused of orchestrating the hate campaign. Which I hadn't! Poseidon was wrong on that. I may have gotten them killed, but it was only because they attacked me."

"They're walking themselves to death in the snow. People don't do that of their own free will. Call them off," I growled, taking a step closer to him. He looked up and smiled nervously.

"Have you ever loved someone, Raymond? You don't seem like the sort."

"I have. I do." Faye and the squishy blob of hungry, crying flesh that was my young son flashed through my mind.

"What would you do to protect them?"

"I'll chop you into fucking pieces, for a start."

"True to form. Well, all those people love me. Most of them can't fight, so they are doing what they can. I didn't ask them to. Aphrodite's Source has them."

"Which you control."

"Hardly. Do you think the water or war is easier to control? Well, matters of the heart are worse. It's happened again, here in this world, just on a much grander scale."

"Jeremy, whatever happens here and now, your life is mine. There is no reason to doom all those people out of spite."

"You aren't listening. Typical thug, it's partly your fault as well. Poseidon warned us of you; we were all terrified, except maybe Gallagher, and you killed him first. I do not control them. I made them love me, but that is all. I needed more Souls, so I needed more love, more followers. Now they will do what their love demands of them."

"You can't stop them. It's not the cold that's killing them, it's you," I growled.

"I know," he said softly. "And I must try to be worthy of their love."

The grass around me erupted, green fingers reaching out to wind around my legs, lumpen fists of wood breaking out of the curb to hammer down at me.

I stepped forward, ripping free of the grass as more tried to trap me again. The wooden clubs exploded as my aura turned them into chips and sawdust. Jeremy was backing away, his face locked in concentration as more parts of the huge tree behind him came alive and moved towards me.

"I'm not here to kill you," I ground out, sending my blades flickering around myself ot protect my mortal form.

"I'm sure," he sneered. "But I won't be a slave either; so this is how it has to be."

He extended his arms towards me, and his bracelets squirmed to life. Thorny stems shot towards me, scattering rose petals in their wake. I slashed them apart with my aura.

"I don't even need magic anymore, bloke. But you've made your bed, now you can lie in it."

I reached through a portal I tore open beside me and stretched out an arm to snatch Jeremy up by his collar. The vines from his wrists writhed out, tightening around me and pricking through my skin, causing blue-gold blood to trickle out as I yanked him next to me and threw him to the ground.

The wood and grass lurched towards him, beginning to form into a suit of living armour, but before the wood could close over his face, I made my move. A lunge, a jump and a solid right hook knocked him out cold.

I used my aura to strip away the now inanimate roots and grass and looked down at this fragile form. Stooping to brush the detritus off him, I scooped his body into a storage bead. There was nothing else in that space; it was to be Jeremy's eternal prison. Slipping into a pouch on my belt, I moved around the giant tree until I found what I was looking for.

A tunnel lined with gnarled roots leading underground. I took out an enchanted stone and activated the light spell, stepping into the darkness.

Why were they always underground? Except for Poseidon's Source, every one that I'd stumbled across had been deep in the damp dirt. With my earth-moving spells, it wasn't a big deal, but I would appreciate a little variety. Maybe Patrica had Thoths in some high tower over her academy? I could only hope.

The tunnel turned several times before it let out onto a wide hall. Water dripping in the distance, and roots that had been carved with perfect depictions of animals and people in various stances of lovemaking, held up a roof that was hung with silks. It was softly lit from behind the horizontal drapes above me, the light diffused and multicoloured according the the material it passed through.

At the far end was a chaise longue, and at either end of it sat a pale yellow Source. Aphrodite had a pair of them, it would seem. I approached cautiously. Amir had rigged his Source room with traps, but nothing crumbled or leapt out to attack me. My tattered tunic, ripped by Jeremy's thorns, looked out of place next to the delicate finery around the Sources.

"And what the hell am I supposed to do with two of you?" I muttered, kneeling down to look more closely at the pair of them. I hadn't triggered any sort of challenge yet, so I would take my time before touching either of them.

They seemed identical at first, spheres of yellow pearl or ivory about the size of my fist, but I noticed some slight differences. The one on the left had faint pink lines that swirled over the surface; the one on the right had green patterns.

Two types of love? Eros and agape? Or possessive and selfless, perhaps. Green would imply jealousy, and pink intimacy, perhaps?

Before Faye, I'd been single for a long time, never letting anyone get too close to me due to my line of work. Even here, I doubted that habit would have changed until I saw her hazel eyes at my first animal sacrifice. It wasn't the most romantic story by the standards of the old world, but among the nomads, it was probably Shakespearean.

I snorted. What to do? Aphrodite was going to try and fight me for control of them. When I was a mortal, it had always involved a struggle, one that threatened to kill me, at least up until Death sat me down and played me my possible futures. I didn't see the God of Love making me armwrestle her for control. Nor was I still merely mortal. Jeremy should have been impossibly powerful. He was SSS-ranked in both body and mind, but it had been like fighting a toddler.

I reached out and laid a hand on both sources at the same time.

Emotion swirled through my usually stoic mind, and the world faded around me.

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