when is here?”


    What…the table was made of a material, but this was neither stone nor wood, nor even that newfangled metal that some smiths called bronze——


    her paladin.


    Paladin…? The word went and came; slipping through the maze of their mind.


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    I know thee.


    she had never cared for the stuff of dead earth. It had been bone of her enemies that had served as her protection. And the bone was just that; bone, whereas her [Affinity] had made the ivory glitter like ice in the fullness of winter.


    The grass wasn’t golden, but hard for the Windy Plain had been aptly named. Their trek had been long and arduous; great entertainment from watching the old dance of stars that could at times become tiresome. They were Goblins, with thick horns and their skin of bright colors.


    Not like the usual Persephoniacs who came to the henge for visions, these. They were new.


    Here is an islet near the Worm Forest, on the island of Hheso.”


    Could…


    “This is to be the end of the Crusade, my god.”


    They walked with the paladin, carried within as all gods must be, feeling the [Affinity] that had so long ago endeared a small little Goblin girl to the god of Dreams.


    Oh, when had it all gone wrong? It hadn’t started like this.


    Together, both god and paladin gazed out through the tower. Arrayed against them was a host out of a legend; Humans bedecked in shining bronze, horned Goblins wearing staffs of living wood, attended by their half-blood kin. Great mulching titans, Persephoniacs, strode in the corridors of the ranks only halting before men and women who carried great certainty in them, all gazing up at the tower. Paladins.


    A Human, a herald made his way up to the foot of the tower.


    “Hear me, [Black Paladin], bringer of madness, who brought low empire of man and the tribes of goblins. Godslayer, treeburner. Today you die.”


    “We can still escape,” they said.


    “No.”


    “They must pay,” the mad paladin declared, issuing forth out of the window.


    Stirred seas, was it true what the healer had said?