When the stars once again aligned on the equinox, and Lunaris made the call to everyone, Oroza knew she could not ignore it, much as she would like to. She had too much to share about the evil that was currently drowning the world from one sea to the other.

It had even started to assault her river again with bizarre poison monsters that had been dredged from the deep and altered. So, even with the scars of her recent battle with a cholorium-infused squid serpent she’d torn to pieces still fresh on her serpentine body, she made the long swim into the darkness of the night sky and joined the gods at their conclave.

She felt much better than she had time, even if some part of her was still ashamed to be seen by her fellows. Despite the fact that her constant fighting and the salt water that the darkness had flooded her river with had done her no favors, she was grateful that she at least felt clean now. The scales of her river dragon form were still patchy and lusterless, but every scar she earned in her endless war with her former captor was a badge of honor that she would wear with pride.

As she approached the moon, she briefly wondered how the Lunaris could be both the person that carried the moon across the sky as well as a place where she could also visit, but she didn’t think too much of it. Those deep thoughts were for someone else to decide. Whether the moon was a shield, a lantern, or a place, it did not matter to her. All that mattered was that here was the only place where the people who could actually do something about the ongoing tragedy dwelled.

When she arrived in the divine amphitheater, it was more crowded than it had been the last time, but even so, she could see many seats were empty, and the pattern of those absences disturbed her. Nature spirits like her seemed the most likely to be missing, followed by the other small gods of places like cities.

None of that surprised her. The world was on fire with war.

Despite the absences, Oroza could see the scars on so many of her fellows easily enough. Hers were obvious as well, no matter her form. As a river dragon, they took the form of dark scales and long scars, but even as she turned back into a woman in a dress of grey spray and white foam, the sudden streaks of grey in her hair were easy enough to see.

For centuries, she hadn’t aged a day thanks to the river’s constant power, but now that she was being poisoned in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, she was withering. She doubted she’d be much good at fighting anything in a decade at the way things were currently unfolding, but she couldn’t let that bother her now. There was too much to do and too much to say.

Only the greatest of the gods seemed untouched by the war. Siddrim’s seat still sat empty at the high table, but Niama, Lunaris, the All-Father, the veiled goddess of death, fox-faced Ronndin, along with the other animalistic gods, and even the twin gods of sea and storms were in attendance.

As their strange meeting started, much of the discussion was on how far the damage had spread. The Lich had stained much of the continent with its long shadow. Worse, it had stopped simply killing all who opposed it and was developing a terrible sort of flock in its own right.

So, even while its destruction weakened the gods that supported the natural order, it grew and strengthened, and all the while, the world grew emptier and emptier. Niama was happy enough to see the wild places starting to reclaim so many fallow fields, but even she acknowledged the need for humanity.

“The children of the forest can never hope to grow to the numbers needed to fight this monster,” she confessed.

Still, others had better news. Lunaris promised them that even now, there was a swarm of stars working hard to reunite and herd his horses so that they could once again be yoked to a new chariot the All-Father was building, which was already nearing completion.

The god of dwarves and craftsmen seemed to be working on a great many plans, but each time one of them was talked about, the stone man stopped the conversation. “By the ancestors, woman, these are not secrets to be shared yet. Not until all is in fruition!”

It was frustrating. Most of the gods in attendance felt that way. Each of them was working on their own small plan or their own secret vengeance, but because they were so used to it, few seemed inclined to share them. There were mentions of a secret weapon here and a clue about the history of the monster they faced there, but each mention would be trampled on by disagreement or impulses of secrecy.

All of them argued for a time about where the need for help was greatest and which part of the world was going to fall next. The All-Father confessed that even his blow by unleashing the Hammer of Banath had done little good despite how many of the Lich’s dread servants it had crushed.

There just didn’t seem to be anything stopping the darkness’s advance. Even their greatest victories only slowed the thing down. All they could agree on was that the next city to fall was likely Rhakin. Despite the heroes they’d sent to try to help with that growing siege, the storm clouds that gathered around that doomed city grew ever darker. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

When it was at last Oroza’s turn to speak, she shared all she knew. She had nothing half so brutal as Niama’s forest ambush against the darkness to share, but she described how it had almost trapped her again and was willing to bend whole geographies and ruin entire regions just to get its way.

A forest being burned to ashes and a river being poisoned were both terrible tragedies, so the great marble amphitheater was nearly silent when the terrible laughter began to ring out from the stands. As one, the Gods turned to see what mockery this was and saw only the slender form of the dryad Breeandwyn.

She was a frail, sickly little thing compared to the woman she’d been before the Lich had burned down her wood for daring to ally with Lunaris and Niama, and for a moment, Oroza’s heart went out to her as she realized the poor woman must be sobbing under the weight of despair. Oroza knew that pain well.

She wasn’t, though. The dryad stood, and as she did, Oroza could see that she was definitely laughing. She thought the other goddess’s mind must have finally given way, but as soon as her laughter subsided and she started to speak, Oroza began to transform back into her true form.

“All of my enemies here in one place, and yet you can agree on nothing!” the Lich gloated through someone else’s mouth. “This is why you have lost so much and why you will lose the rest. Do you understand that?”

Some of the warrior gods were already standing and unsheathing their weapons, as they understood the danger, but Oroza was faster. She was already halfway there to where the thing that had once been, Breeandwyn stood, mocking them. She was still too late, though.

“That fiend must be destroyed!” Lunaris shouted, but by the time she stood and denounced it, the thorns were already growing.

The dryad started to come apart. What was a woman one moment became a flowering plant, and each blossom unfolded into a yawning void of infinite darkness. That horrible sight unraveled further into a thicket made of shadows and plants so dark they drank even every last ounce of light.

They grew fantastically, and even as Oroza approached the dark oasis and began to tear into it, they’d already involved several of the small gods that had been sitting near her. Phlioiel, the goddess of spinners and other crafts, had been sitting next to Ferden, the young god of shepherds and herds, along with a few other nature goddesses from the same region as Breeandwyn.

All of them disappeared into the darkness, leaving only the Lich’s echoing laughter and taunting words behind. She bit and tore and the impossible flora even as it cut into the gaps between her hardened scales. Such pain meant nothing to Oroza, though. She’d had much worse.

It was only when the shadowy abominations of things that might have once been animals began to pour their way out of the tiny thicket that the fight was truly joined. Oroza had slain many undead at this point. Few, except for Siddrim, could probably have exceeded her in that regard, but that’s not what these were.

These were terrible shadow monsters that she could barely harm while the chill of their every attack went right through her scales. Even that she might have been able to deal with were the forms not so abominable. These were not wolves and bears; they were elk with snakes for horns and foxes with mouths as large as the rest of their body. There were birds with two heads and five wings, along with bulls with horns bigger than their own emaciated bodies. The whole thing was a singularity of pure madness.

The flaming swords or glowing claws of her peers had more luck. Despite that, though, Oroza could feel the brambles engulfing her long, sinuous body like bladed ropes. Despite how hard she fought, she was ensnared, like several other gods and goddesses, and she was slowly being drawn into the maw of whatever abomination it was that the Lich had unleashed.

She could feel it, grazing her mind and taunting her even as she struggled and switched from trying to kill it to simply trying to flee from it. Welcome home, my pet, it whispered in her mind, making her skin crawl as she bucked and raged against it.

That was when Lunaris finally joined the fray. She never moved from the dias at the center of the amphitheater. Instead, she watched and drew on her power for almost a minute before releasing it as a single lance of light that wasn’t much larger than Oroza’s scaled form.

Despite its intensity, it didn’t hurt her. Instead, it felt warm and comforting as the light passed through Oroza and the other warrior gods, dissolving the chains that bound them, along with a good portion of the terrible thicket that had appeared so violently.

It would have been better if the light had banished the shadows. That wouldn’t have given her nightmares. Instead, as the shadows withered under the moon's intense gaze, they exposed the physical form of these monsters, which were stitched together from an uncountable number of people and animal parts for a moment before those, too, burst into greasy violet flames amidst the moon’s onslaught. It was vile and made Oroza flashback to her time in the heart of the swamp dragon, freezing her in place for a moment even as her allies continued to fight.

The moon goddess did not strike at it again. Instead, she stood by while the rest of the gods pounded, cleaved, and chopped it into ruin. The fight took several minutes more, but by the time it was done, there was no trace of the darkness, the dryad, or another half a dozen Gods and Goddesses that had been there moments before.

“How could this have happened!” a demigoddess of song cried.

No one had any answers for her. Indeed, most of them were thinking the same thing. Oroza was sure of it. The moon and the goddess that carried across the sky each night existed to literally ward away evil. If it could somehow make its way even to here, then what were they supposed to do about that?