Chapter 3: Origins

It was almost a year since the event that came to be known as “Reella’s Sundering.” Colloquial tongues had shortened the title from what she wanted, but she let it slide. She only ever sundered the one continent, after all.

The important thing was that war was over, and it seemed to be so. Hotera knew she meant business now. She watched over everything, and there were no signs of escalating conflict. Things were settled with trade or compromise. One year was hardly any time, but she gleamed prevailing sentiments world wide from all the talk she listened to.

It was ingrained in her people now that war an egregious sin. From experience with similar edicts in the past, she probably wouldn’t have to remind them for 10,000 years: if even.

Thus, she went back to status quo.

Reella answered prayers here and there, but it wasn’t as easy to curry her favor anymore. Peasants rebuilt their cottages and small towns. The Lady of Hotera was hardly interested in the whinging of nobles about broken castles or other more fanciful things.

A distant approach was always best, she found. It kept expectations low. She didn’t want a high workload after all. Besides, even if something was trivial for her, her people needed to be strong.

The theology of Hotera was simple. Reella was everything and always was. She stewarded the planet and watched over the humans that called it home. You did the least amount of evil possible, visited her churches often, and you’d be rewarded. The wicked would be punished. Eternal life was promised within her.

She knew better and was better. If something bad happened it’s cause she chose not to prevent it, and thus probably had a good reason. All punishment was just in that sense. Yet, one could still pray for her aid. In Reella’s mercy she might make an exception for you. If she didn’t, well, maybe you did something wrong? Maybe you had a dumb request?

She never answered those questions, but rather let them stew in mortal minds and be topics of debate.

Even her priests believed all this, despite being the few living mortals she spoke with directly on occasion. They knew about an even higher fate for the best of them, sure, but there was nothing else hidden.

That they knew of...

Reella had secrets. Like how long ago she was much like them. A lost, scared young human who abandoned her tribe at a time when the world was young. Back when grunts and hand signs were the way to talk, a slim blonde woman stumbled upon a hole in the ground.

There was a great yellow glow at the hole’s center. It came from something amorphous and fluid that floated in the middle. It gave warmth on a chilly night. Reella was cold. So, she slid into the hole and embraced it.

Reella was not prepared to become what she did. This was back before swords. It back when humans hid from animals and not the other way around.

She felt strange. There was bliss, but also dread. Where was she now? She couldn’t pin it down. It seemed like she was all over the place: even places far away she had never been. Places with white cold fluff for miles, or places where the ground was mud and the trees shadowed all. If she focused too much, her senses kept zooming in on things till was looking at single fibers of bark millions of times over.

Desperate, she tried to clench her fingers and toes to find where her body was. This panicked action of hers formed new mountains from all the terrain crushed aside.

The planet quaked as she tried to suss out what was going on. She tried to move her arm like she used to, but stopped as she heard screams. Familiar sounds ringing in her mind. Humans, much like those of her tribe, but coming from everywhere and all over her. They were on her. They were in her.

She was absorbing what was left after they died. They were moving within. She felt others too: they must’ve been there before in that glob of light. Other things were inside her: lesser creatures so small and dim they were hard to feel except in clumps.

Reella was freaking out. Her breath increased and gusts of wind ravaged the land. The rise and fall of her ‘chest’ translated to quakes. Her sorrow and confusion created black clouds which down-poured to flood canyons and wash away islands. One of the first extinction events on Hotera was the novice god getting her bearings.

Thankfully, some wise part of her grew. The boon of power came before that of intelligence, but both arrived in time. Reella settled down and relaxed. The storms did too. She had begun to understand what had happened and what was going on.

The planet’s energy was hers. That light was it, and just there for the taking. She wasn’t the planet so much that she had bonded with it. Subjugated it, perhaps. At the time she was less concerned with labels and more with finding out how to get her body back.

Reella knew moving what she was would only cause more problems. She instead imagined a proper self forming. She thought only of a single finger. That seemed an easy start. She pushed all other thoughts out of her mind. The screams of the people in her were hard to ignore, but the fledgling deity managed.

From the northern lands a pale pillar rose miles into the air. It erupted from a mountain range and took out the high altitude tribes who made the their home. Fur-draped humans lower and safer stared up at the sight, unable to comprehend that it was a finger. They thought it was their end. It might’ve been, had Reella not noticed an influx of souls.

That wasn’t working. She brought the finger back. That was a good deal easier than making it.

Reella was onto something though; if she could just make it smaller...

The planet-woman focused on that hole she fell into out of all the places she saw. She again tried to exclude other sensations. The people within her were getting restless. They were screaming in the dark and vast confines of her body. In her haste, she filled their minds with her desire: silence. They obeyed as it was at the forefront of their being now.

She tried again. A finger, but smaller this time. Then a hand. That small indent in Hotera became a great crater as her arm shot out of the ground in an explosion of dirt and rock.

There was progress: the arm she made was smaller than her finger earlier. This still wouldn’t work. she’d tear the planet open prying herself out. She was just too big to make a small enough body like this.

So she didn’t, and she didn’t think of one part at a time. She imagined her whole self, standing above that crater where she became whatever she was now. She settled on the smallest size she could get, which had her feel a forest beneath her toes. She also felt what that forest did as her immaterial form was still just as pervasive.

Reella knew she was being watched. She was connected to the land now. She never knew the land was so large before, or so round.

The people watching her were her old tribe. Looking down at them, her doubts were fading. She felt the cool wind blow against her naked frame. It was chilly up here, but it didn’t bother her.

They began to bow at her toes. How could they not? They saw everything since her hand burst forth from the land. They saw her might.

The tribe spoke and signed and prayed. They wanted her to lead them. Her old tribe wasn’t the only one. Anyone who saw a part of her, or who witnessed those species exterminating storms prayed to something, begged someone for aid: all that went to her.

It made sense to Reella. She could see, hear, feel, and know everything on this world. She could control everything on this world and a bit more. She even knew mortal thoughts if she focused hard enough.

Some thoughts disturbed her. They came from the tribe below. By now, the whole lot of them were pressing themselves against her big toe as if to please her.

One woman marveled how one they called a friend could become this giant. The tribe’s leader, an older man, thought, “With Reella on our side, our enemies would crumble!”

It wouldn’t work like this. If humans knew she started as one, then there’d be too much expectations. Perhaps they’d even think they could attain this themselves. Both were problematic. She had to have always been here, guiding them.

With few regrets, Reella lifted her foot up and hovered it hundreds of feet above them.

She stomped them out and felt their spirits flow into her. She couldn’t have them sharing what they knew, so she had to wipe their memories as well. They were blank slates, drifting aimlessly in her being. At least they didn’t whine as much the others.

With that out of the way, she reached into every human’s mind to let them know she was watching over them. She gifted them the language she made up for them. She told them the name of the planet: Hotera, which her tribe had used. She told them that it and they were hers. Then, she dissipated her physical body to better explore her new potential.

She mastered that incorporeal form of hers. Reella learned fast now, even the stuff she had to teach herself. She learned to ‘move’ it without also moving the planet. She made it a body similar to her old, with variants of the parts and innards she enjoyed. With that, she figured out what to do with all those souls. Her former tribe become her first ‘angels’, and what little guilt she had for them was assuaged.

That was Reella’s first secret. That Hotera’s god was once mortal.

Reella’s other secret was that she didn’t control as much as they thought she did.