>>5159293You turn to face what approaches, and have to steady yourself when you see the source. Before you is an unassuming figure, cloaked in black. It is no taller than you, no great figure like the towering winged serpent which granted you your Divine Favour and your mission to end the Yosef bloodline. And yet…
“A Dark God?” you gasp, clinging to Irinnile for stability. For her part, the succubus looks terrified, as if she too would like to cower or run… But for your sake, she does not.
“Once, maybe,” the figure replies.
It pulls back a hood, revealing… Bone. A skull, but not a human skull—not wholly. It is warped, deformed—horned and fanged on one side, like that of a dragon, but almost mockingly mundane in its humanity on the other side.
“Now,” the figure says, “I am without faction in wars of providence, and I am recognized as such. When the others from before the dawning of the light retreated beyond the stars or buried themselves deep into the world to hide away and bide their time, I remained. In time, even the Gods of Light saw the need for me. Life cannot exist…”
“…Without Death,” you finish, recognizing the figure before you.
“Yes,” it speaks, and you fall to your knees, unable to stand tall in the face of its presence.
“The succubus is right,” it says, “you do not belong here—.”
“Y-yeah,” Irinnile stammers. “Um, so just like… Let us get out of your, uh, hair or whatever, huh, Big D?”
“—yet,” Death finishes.
Irinnile shuts her mouth, afraid to say anything more for fear of provoking this grim spectre.
“Still, you come bearing a token,” Death speaks eventually, with what might be curiosity. “Do you come to bargain.”
You’re about to ask what he means when you remember: the soul coin! The silver token which, so the Akashic Record told you, can be used to buy the passage of one soul to or from the afterlife—any part of it!
As if calling to you, you hear a familiar voice—barely within the range of hearing, faint, unintelligible, but in great pain and despair.
“Chika,” you say quietly, remembering the last moments of your fellow Degenerate, your comrade-in-arms. An Infiltrator, servant of the Dark Gods and a fellow traveler, trapped forever in this place and beyond the glorious dark paradise to which dutiful Reptilians aspire—a slave entrapped in a place of torment, fed upon by devils rather than in her rightful place. Her fate could so easily have been yours…
“But it wasn’t,” Irinnile urges, “so let’s fuckin’ GO, babe!”
What do you do?
>Leave this place, and wake up>Ask Death something [what]>Offer up the soul coin, for Chika’s passage to the divine realm of the Dark Gods, or back to the living world [specify which]>Use the one-time Divine Favour to demand soemthing from Death [specify if you ahve something in mind]>Write-in 