Chapter Text
The Queen of Monsters had awoken.
Continents cracked and shifted, spreading out across the seas and reshaping the landscape- altering what the Queen's blazing purple fires had failed to burn. Terrible monsters, children of Cain, crawled their way out of the Underworld faults, their claws carving canyons into scorched soil. The earth quaked as dragons and infernals rose; deviled wings blotting out the sun. The Queen, in all her death and disease, watched this all unfold with too-eager eyes.
When the thirteen seals of Chaos were broken by the Champion, the wave of pure energy- mana in its most unstable and primal form- was enough to strike fear into the elemental hearts of the Avatars as they kid like frightened children in their respective planes. Prayers were still thrown heavenwards by their disciples in the brief, fleeting hope there might be a sign, a word, anything from their gods. But for the first time in centuries, the mortals were completely and utterly alone. In the face of an ancient and powerful evil, the gods had abandoned them.
The Queen was not the only one woken in this newfound apocalypse. In turn she herself raised the Titans; creatures that once embodied the primal elements in the age before the Avatars, during the time of the old gods (gods now only worshipped by the heretics, hermits, and the odd necromancer). They rained havoc upon Lore's shattered remains, their cries and roars echoing and spreading fear in their wake- proving that the Queen's time had finally come, and the end was at hand. At least... that's what she and her servants thought, anyways.
The old gods heard the calls differently. As the Titan of Fire, Phedra, smoldered and extinguishes, they softly stirred. When Earth, the one named Gaiazor, fell and cracked the ground it came from, they began to shift. Imprisoned for millennia by the Avatars deep within the earth and oceans, in the hearts of volcanoes and trenches, their movements caused disasters brushed off as the Queen's doings. Elsewhere, cloaked mages huddled together among dusty tomes and debated in hushed tones, a rising fear demanding their action. The mother of all monsters was terrible enough a foe, but with the threat of the ancients awaking, perhaps the end times truly were at hand- and impossible to prevent. Sigils were written, wards put in place, and spells cast. Lore's finest mages did all they could, but still were not sure it was enough. They could only hope. The stirrings beneath the ground stopped, and with a sigh of relief, focus was reaffirmed to the monsters swarming the land.
But the mages, in all their knowledge, missed something- the one god who stayed dormant, who did not move at the death throes of the Titans. Thought to be weaker than the others, more easily contained- this god was easily overlooked.
Far away on an island shard, the ruins of a once great temple lay, slowly being reclaimed by the nature it had been brought from. Bats roosted in rotting rafters, green sprouts appeared in the cracks of stone, and shadows of mice scuttled along the collapsed walls, projected by the rising sun. Fallen pillars with worn engravings of great battles and fearsome beasts formed makeshift shelters for animals unaware of their meanings, the enchantments once painstakingly carved into the marble. Kneeling blocks and pews were overturned and broken, their remains haphazardly thrown about the foundations. The only constructions seemingly untouched by the passage of time was a humble wooden bowl and, standing above it and towering taller than any man, was a statue. Stone, like everything else; coated in moss and with a family of pigeons nesting in the crook of one immobile arm. Time had dulled the once awed shrine, but it was still oddly peaceful... a window showing the briefest glimpse of the era before the Avatars. T'was quiet, until the earth gently shuddered- sending the birds and bats to wing, and dislodging old clouds of debris.
Seemingly as soon as the shaking started, it had stopped, and all stilled once more.
And then the statue's eyes cracked open.