Rowan hurriedly ran through the knowledge he knew about Minerva while pairing it with the impression Boreas had about this goddess.
The most likely result that he derived was that she was the creator of the Order of Broken Eye, then which meant she was in league with his father. There would be no other reason for her Anima to be present deep inside the Nexus where she was overseeing a page of his Primordial Record while birthing a mysterious clone that Rowan had slaughtered.
Rowan looked deeply at this goddess. She sat with her hands folded primly on her thighs, her eyes looked down and away from the gods, others might call it a sign of reservation but Rowan recognized it for what it was. Contempt. Although she tried to hide it, Minerva held nothing but contempt for the gods.
There was also something different about her, Rowan could not place his fingers on it, but it was mostly because of her eyes, they were cracked like glass that had been shattered but still forcefully held together, and there was a fierce intelligence hidden inside it.
Rowan caught glimpses of Boreas’s impression of this goddess, and he saw that he hated her. Amongst them all she was the most mysterious, she was not a team player and her objectives were unknown. She did not fight for power or influence and she always had a smile that made Boreas think she thought of him as nothing but an animal.
The temptation to hurl a thunderbolt at the goddess anytime he saw her was so strong, that he made a statue of Minerva from Davross that he destroyed after their meeting. It was a pale imitation, but it would have to do.
From what Rowan could dig from Boreas memories, he found out that the reason she was not burdened with a vault was because she helped the God King in the past, and as a reward she was given an entire continent on Trion.
This was most likely not the full story, but it was a start.
Trion had seven continents, two of which were dedicated towards the great battle against the Demons and Mages, leaving five inhabitants continents.
Of those five continents a single one was given to Minerva, and the rest of the gods shared the remaining four continents between them.
For an entire continent to be given to Minerva was suspicious, but unlike the other gods, she did not hold any worlds outside of Trion. This was another reason the rest of the gods accepted this proposal, as Minerva had been forbidden to ever own a planet outside Trion.
Boreas remembered that she did not fight this decision. Only smiled that stupid smile of hers and nodded her head in acceptance. .
There was also another reward given to her—Telmus. A genius like none other, whom they granted the possibility to become a god of Trion, but had refused. A glory that no one had ever received or will ever receive.
Rowan was impressed, who was this man that refused such great power? Was Minerva the one behind his decision or was he just that freaking stubborn?
His inquiry dragged whatever impression Boreas had about him to the forefront and he saw a white-haired man with strong features and a confident bearing. He was an Ancestor of the Minerva family and he had been supposedly imprisoned for a long time and he was recently freed.
Rowan would bet that this imprisonment was because of his refusal to become a god of Trion. He was interesting, but nothing to be concerned about, Rowan looked away before he hurriedly paused this memory.
He called up the image of Telmus and analyzed it for a while. He had detected something about him that drew his attention, he did not know what it was, but at his level, every single indication of something special was most likely to be the case.
Rowan could not shake the feeling that he had seen Telmus before. Not just seen him, but he had consumed him.
‘I have eaten you before… when? Where?’
When the answer came to him, he almost smiled. The reason it was so hard for him to recollect where he had seen Telmus was simple.
This was inside the Nexus, at that time Telmus was nothing but bones inside a crystal coffin, and one of his serpents had consumed him.
At that time Rowan had limited control over his serpents, not understanding their purpose or how to properly meld and control them.
He had directed his serpents to consume the entire Nexus, and one of them had gone beneath the river and entered Lamia’s lair. At the bottom of the river was a field of bones and the serpents had consumed them all, one among those bones was a winged skeleton inside a crystal coffin.
It was by consuming this skeleton that Rowan had managed to accumulate such a large amount of energy that led to the accelerated evolution of his Chaos World Engine.
Without Boreas memories, it would have been impossible for Rowan to find the connection here. .
Minerva was the goddess inside the Nexus and one of her bloodlines Ancestor Telmus, must have been imprisoned inside the Nexus, maybe as punishment or for whatever reason.
Rowan had consumed the body of Telmus. Yet If Telmus was an Earth god, he would have been able to survive such drastic injuries as being fully consumed.
Rowan’s powers as a Soul Reaver at that time were still too weak, he had not even activated the ability of that bloodline, and consuming Telmus’s body did not lead to any further complications, because he would have not been able to digest him.
This was a lucky event for both Rowan and Telmus, for at that stage of his life, Rowan still had a soul, and if he had consumed the soul of an Earth god, the strain would have shattered his fragile mortal soul to pieces. It would most likely leave him mad or worse.
If the rest of the gods were puppets, his true enemy among them was this white-haired goddess. Was it possible that she might be another aspect of his father? Or was she something else?
His contemplation was arrested by what the God King said next,
“The end of days is nigh.”
Rowan paused this scene and looked at the expression of the gods, especially Minerva, he would like to flatter himself but somehow he doubted that Golgoth was referring to him. This seemed different, he did not say the end of Trion or the end of the gods, he said the end of days.
His intuition was screaming at him, that whatever was going to be said next was vitally important. His father had spent billions of years or even more inside this universe, what had he been planning?
Golgoth continued speaking after Kuranes knelt before him while saying, “Would you be finally free… brother?”
‘Brother?!’ Rowan thought in shock, did the God King see the rest of the gods of Trions as his siblings? Perhaps this might be the root cause for the disagreement between his father and the God King.
If Rowan understood the character of a Reflection, and he should, because he created multiple Reflections, then his father should not see any value for the gods of Trion beyond them being a resource to him.
Maybe Golgoth the God King had grown defective, or perhaps like his Berserker Clone left in the Underverse, was it possible for the God King who was previously a Reflection to develop a unique soul of his own, and therefore was no longer bound to the wishes of his father?
Could it be as simple as this, that after multiple billions of years, an Aspect of his father had developed a soul and had gone rogue?
‘Wait, perhaps I’m going about it all wrong, what if it was not Golgoth that had developed a soul but his father?’
𝘪𝑎.𝘤𝑜𝘮
