"W-what are they?" Idom asked, voice small and brittle. He had seen death before, but never anything like those figures. They were wrong in every way life should be right—distorted, as if creation itself had hiccuped and spat them out. Their limbs were too long, their hands too large; their movement was a staccato, jerking parody of human gait. The sight of them carried an instinctive dread that made the air in the room seem thinner.
"Haven't I told you?" Zigeyr answered with a smile edged in amusement. "They are my servants."
Idom's eyes burned with a sudden, inward panic. He tried to process the last half of Zigeyr's sentence and found he couldn't—his mind recoiling from the image on the screens. It was then that a simple metal bucket appeared beside his chair as if summoned by the room itself. He didn't remember moving it; it was there, an absurdly practical object in the middle of god-work and ruin.
On the feeds, panic spread like spilled ink. At first the insurgents ran—some sprinted blindly from their posts, boots scrabbling across dirt and rock. Others stood and raised rifles, faces tight with the stubborn courage of the desperate. The monsters met them with an efficiency so alien it felt ceremonial. Men were ripped from their feet, thrown aside, swallowed in a handful of moments. The women's were getting brutally raped by them, their bodies violated in the most brutal manner imaginable. They screamed for help as their body experience the things of those monsters inside them the first time in their life.
Where sounds should have been—commands, gunfire, radios—there was only the thin keening of those who realized they had no escape. The cameras cut from movement to still, then to static.
Many of the brutalities were left to implication: screams, the way a single shot gave way to silence, overturned ground and scattered belongings where people had fallen. The feeds showed the aftermath more often than the act—the collapsed bodies, the shattered camps, survivors staring into nothing with their souls gone. Whatever those creatures were, they left ruin in their wake and did so without mercy or purpose beyond the command they were given.
An hour later there was nothing left to watch. The last live feed faded to an empty landscape littered with the traces of violence. Fighters who'd been on missions outside those areas were neutralized by other means—struck down in sudden, inexplicable ways miles from the camps. Then the things that had descended vanished as suddenly as they had come, folding back into whatever dark the gods conjured them from.
Back in the prime minister's chamber, Idom was shaking. He clutched the bucket and vomited again and again, each retch a physical reaction to images his mind could not un-see. He had expected blood and battle; he had not expected a silence so absolute, nor the depth of the collapse in people's eyes.
"Heehee," Zigeyr said, amusement cold as a blade. "How was that? Tell me—did you find… pleasure in watching men fall and your nation broken?"
"Pleasure?" Idom's voice broke. "Do you take me for a monster?" He tried to straighten, to summon the dignity of his office, but his hands trembled. He could not scrub the images from his head. No human could go unchanged after that.
Zigeyr rose slowly, the picture of casual power. "Now that the insurgents are gone, there should be no further threats. You will focus on rebuilding. Secure the people. Restore order." He paused, studying the prime minister as if appraising a chess piece. "You owe me obedience."
Idom hesitated, then bowed his head, the gesture half-gratitude and half-compulsion. "Thank you for your guidance and protection, my lord."
Zigeyr's smile was small and appreciative. "You adapt quickly." He watched Idom's face, all the while assessing what could be used and what could be broken.
Idom's voice, hoarse from the night's shock, found the last sliver of respect he could manage. "May I—may I know your name?"
"Zigeyr." The god's reply was simple. He folded space to leave but stopped long enough to issue one final command, his tone an unambiguous edict. "Remember this: Aliana is under my protection now. The other gods will begin to stir. The world will see more chaos. Aliana is the successor of Yani, and I will safeguard it. Do not oppose me. I will not destroy your religion or your country with my own hand—unless you leave me no choice."
With that, he vanished.
Idom remained bent over the bucket, the room quiet but for the echo of what had come through the screens. Outside, the capital would begin to reckon with a new order—one enforced not by human armies or ballots, but by a god who called monsters to do his work. The thought of it sat in Idom's chest like a stone.