Chapter 422: Ariel, Found

Aige had turned down Ezdolo's offer, but Ambrose found himself respecting the pirate captain more for it. She had made her position clear: once she became a deity, she would favor the Elegiac Society without reservation, and Ambrose would naturally be first among her favorites.

What promise could be worth more than that?

All his running around, all his scheming—wasn't this the point of it all?

Given her stance, Ambrose had every reason to support Aige.

The path ahead was more troublesome than before, but the gains would be just as significant. And the timing, as it happened, could hardly be better.

The Sea of Volcanoes had appeared out of nowhere. As brand-new territory, it had yet to be claimed by any race.

Anyone could move in. Anyone could stake a claim. That was the beauty of unclaimed land.

Better still, this particular patch of sea had no indigenous inhabitants to contend with. It was almost too convenient.

So: speed was everything. Ambrose immediately dispatched Aige's Silent Sea Pirate Company to the Sea of Volcanoes. Whoever else might be there, they had to secure the prime territory first.

Standing on the ghost ship's deck, Ambrose addressed the core crew gathered before him: "I'm sending you off to stake claims, but not for territory that's good for the undead. I want the regions that are ideal for living creatures to thrive and reproduce. Understood?"

Phil frowned. "Why's that?"

"Because territory that suits the undead is territory nobody else wants. There's nothing to fight over in the first place!"

The undead could thrive in extreme environments. Water at a hundred degrees was a death zone for anything living—a few minutes inside and most creatues would be cooked through.

But for the undead, it made no difference whatsoever; their flesh had rotted away long ago. Unless the heat was enough to reduce bone to ash, it simply didn't register.

The same logic applied to any harsh conditions in the new sea, any place lacking food and where marine vegetation couldn't grow. No plant life meant no small fish; no small fish meant no large fish; and without large fish, even fish-people couldn't survive.

Those zones tended to harbor substances actively harmful to living things: excess sulfur, extreme acidity, and the like. They were death zones for the living but entirely irrelevant to the undead.

No one competed for places like that. The undead already owned them by default.

Ambrose's target was the good territory, the kind that could sustain a large population of followers.

Aige needed believers to ascend, and she couldn't poach them from waters that had already been divided up among the gods. But a brand-new sea was entirely fair game.

The kouto, in particular, were perfect raw material for followers. As long as Aige didn't mind having a lobster-headed prow, she probably wouldn't mind luring a mob of kouto into worshipping her either.

If you could overlook their looks, the kouto were the ideal congregation.

Dim-witted but devout, the kouto generated faith an order of magnitude faster than most races, which was how their deranged goddess had clawed her way to intermediate divinity through sheer numbers alone. And they were extraordinarily easy to impress. Show them the slightest display of power and they would drop to their knees and call Aige divine: their own goddess couldn't even hold on to their loyalty once something shinier appeared.

After all, she was erratic by nature, too unstable to systematically build a religious following, let alone a proper church.

Ambrose's initial plan was straightforward: claim territory, claim the kouto, build up the flock, then address the question of faith from there.

The moment the Silent Sea Pirate Company heard that action was coming, they erupted into enthusiastic action. Even Aige looked faintly excited. She was a warship, after all, and a taste for battle was woven into her nature.

While Ambrose was busy staking his claim, Aiolos, whom they had been tracking not so long ago, had vanished entirely. No trace of him remained anywhere in the surrounding waters.

The ungainly, newly-born son of a god was now over a thousand kilometers away.

He had followed that strange voice in his head to swim steadily onward. The ocean itself worked with him rather than against him, currents shifting to carry him along at tremendous speed, until at last he arrived at a desolate underwater cavern.

There, Aiolos encountered a congregation of bizarre fish-people, each with an enormous, oversize head atop a small body, their faces fixed in expressions of permanent, bovine vacancy.

It was a grand gathering of the kouto. They packed the cavern in their thousands. Aiolos counted over ten thousand in a single glance, with still more shapes lurking indistinctly in the darker recesses.

Dim as they looked, their devotion was absolute. They clustered around a peculiar idol, chanting prayers without cease.

Aiolos listened for a while and realized, to his bewilderment, that not a single prayer was repeated. The words seemed entirely improvised, each kouto making it up as they went along.

It was a thoroughly strange sight. Compared to the merfolk's magnificent, solemn rituals, the kouto's worship looked deeply amateurish, almost comical.

And yet, faith visible to the naked eye was gathering above that idol in a dense, roiling column.

The idol itself was an ungainly assemblage of rock, coral, and lobster shells, shaped into an enormous, crudely formed nude female figure with a lobster for a head, articulated shell-plates across both shoulders, and lobster claws for forearms. Altogether, it was a thoroughly unsettling piece of sculpture.

Around the idol's base, lobsters of every size lay prostrate, the smallest no bigger than a palm, the largest dwarfing whales. These ancient crustaceans appeared to be worshippers as well, offering their own inaudible prayers to their deity.

The scene was so bizarre that Aiolos was genuinely shaken until the strange voice returned to his mind.

"Come. Come to me, child. I have been waiting for you for a long time."

Aiolos answered carefully, "Waiting for me? But I don't know you at all."

"No," the voice replied, "but I have known you for a very long time. I was already sentient in the chaos by the time the universe was born. I foresaw this meeting from the very beginning."

The lobster-headed idol seemed to stir to life. Its head turned slowly toward Aiolos, its antennae waving back and forth as though beckoning him forward.

Aiolos felt no fear. He stepped past the ranks of devout worshippers and approached the idol.

The moment he drew close, a vortex opened in the stone and swallowed him whole.

When he came back to himself, he was standing in a dripping limestone cavern. There, the lobster-headed goddess materialized before him in shimmering light and shadow.

"May I ask who you are?" Aiolos said.

The lobster head introduced herself: "I am Blobdilpulp, a deity born of primordial chaos. I existed before the world was made."

Aiolos frowned slightly. "But weren't Selene, Lady of Moonlight, and Shara, the Dark Goddess, the ones born from the primordial chaos?"

"Those two are mere children," Blobdilpulp said dismissively.

"I am older than either of them. My power is beyond anything you could imagine. I command ancient sorceries that even the Goddess of Magic cannot comprehend. Every plane, every sea in existence—all of it belongs to me."

Aiolos's frown deepened. He wasn't particularly clever, but he did know the ocean pantheon, and he was fairly sure the kouto goddess ranked somewhere near the very bottom of it.

Still, a mortal owed a deity respect. That was simply his place in the order of things.

So rather than pointing out the obvious, Aiolos asked politely, "What is it you want from me, Goddess?"

Blobdilpulp said, "You are a son of Thanos, aren't you?"

Aiolos started, then immediately shook his head. "No, I'm not. I am simply a follower of the Lord of Storms."

Those were his divine father's orders: he was never to call himself the son of Thanos, not to anyone.

"What? You're not?" Blobdilpulp sounded genuinely taken aback, then furious. "Impossible. I remember you—you were created from his thunder... Wait. No, that's wrong. Why is your power over the sea?... No, no, that can't be right—"

Aiolos watched the lobster-headed goddess spiral into a fit of self-contradicting frenzy. Water vortices erupted in every direction, gouging deep grooves into the cavern floor.

Finally, Blobdilpulp roared, "No, no! You ARE a son of Thanos. Don't try to deceive me!"

Aiolos said nothing. He was already looking for an exit. This goddess was clearly unhinged, and staying any longer would only get him killed.

But then, as abruptly as the outburst had begun, Blobdilpulp seemed to brush it all aside. "Well, it doesn't matter, either way. Whether you are or not, you've been deceived, and I can't just stand by and do nothing. Divine blood flows in your veins. I will not let you be swindled in my ocean."

Aiolos immediately pressed, "Goddess, what do you mean? Who has deceived me?"

"Need you ask? The lich, obviously. That despicable, scheming, malicious, greedy... lich who should have ascended to godhood long ago. He calls himself your friend, but he has deceived you over and over. He wants to make you his instrument, to use you against Thanos."

Aiolos went rigid with shock. "That's impossible! The Lord of Storms stands above all things. What power could a mortal have over a god? And Ambrose is my friend. He has no reason to deceive me!"

"Oh, he has power, all right. Little one, don't you know? Loss, Shara, Sariel, Tiamat, Levitra... he has made a fool of countless deities. Loss is half-destroyed. Shara has vanished entirely. The others have fared little better. Think about it: this lich can deceive the gods themselves. What makes you think you could escape him?"

Aiolos still didn't want to believe it. Ambrose had been good to him, and had even gone out of his way to help find his wife.

But Blobdilpulp seemed to see straight through him. "You still don't understand, do you?" she said, her voice dripping with contempt. "The Ariel he found you is fake."

"What gives you the right to say that?" Aiolos shot back, agitated. "I haven't even seen the high priestess's face."

"Because the Ariel you're looking for is right here with me."

Blobdilpulp raised one claw and swept it through the water. A creature with a human head and the body of a lobster materialized, wearing a face identical to the memory Aiolos had of Ariel.

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