The 'Tale of the Gods' was a famous story, perhaps the most famous, standing over every other of its kind.
The fable was well known to Astrid, the story about how the eight mortal men rose to power, reaching a 100% synchronization with a singular page of The Book.
These men and women later came to be known as the eight gods, their story inspiring millions across the world to strive for more, to be a better version of themselves, stronger and unshakable.
As is with all that is divine and profane, cults and temples eventually rose in their names, righteous men serving the four Gods of Order, deities that reached the pinnacle of power in their respective Page: Spirit, Serenity, Fate, and Will.
As someone would expect, the side of order's views conflicted with the followers of action, those who believed in the Gods of Mind, Body, Dominion, and Ruin. A catastrophic war ensued, and millions of lives were lost every day.
What followed was lost to history; most scholars believed that the middle ground was found, others believed that the sons of order won, that the forces of chaos were eradicated, removed entirely from the equation.
Astrid did not particularly care about the specifics; she was a detective, not a historian. It wasn't in her job description to exhume traces of a useless past; she was supposed to protect the peace of today. The past is history, but today is a gift; that's why it's called present.
However, what Astird cared about was what the resolution of the war led to: the birth of a unified church, adorning the banner of all eight gods.
The Sanctum of Solace, a sanctuary created for equal worship of the gods, a place free from mortal concepts and desires, free of greed and lust, free of corruption. A haven for the poor and useless, the abused and abandoned, the homeless and ill-fated.
Alas, reality was cruel and merciless; ideals were meaningless when there was no one to uphold them. Astrid had learned of the truth of the Sanctum at the ripe age of 13, the day that marked the death of her hope in people.
Stella had shown her the true nature of the Sanctum, how it was run by greedy men, men who held no morals, men who had crossed every line imaginable. The Sanctum was corrupted to its very core, from the lowest cleric to the highest pope.
It offered people salvation in the name of faith; it offered them a way to reach their dreams, to breach the walls they thought to be unbreakable.
Every man, woman, and child held expectations. They had dreams—from the humble and innocent dreams of a child wanting to see their parents happy, to the dreams of ambitious men, men who wanted to reach the pinnacle of power.
Faith was a very dangerous thing. It gave people the one thing they desired the most: Hope.
And hope when weaponized could change the course of history, that control over a conceptual weapon was one of the Sanctum's strongest cards, along with two others. Namely, the brainwashed commoners they held under their control.
Every peasant was required to go through mandatory school, where, along with basic education, they were taught the greatness of the gods, but more importantly, that the Sanctum was all-knowing and all-powerful, that it could do no wrong. They had brainwashed the populace into hating the Null, blaming all their problems on them.
It worked wonderfully; every person, demon or human, hated the Null with a passion that could only be described as fanatic madness.
The third, and by far the most effective card, the Sanctum held against the nobles of Gracesium was their military might. The highest authority in the Sanctum was the man acclaimed as the Apostle of Solace, a human said to be loved by the gods above all. Blessed by four Pages of The Book, not three like the general population.
Eight knights served under the apostle, answer to him and him alone. All of them at the fifth or sixth stage of all three blessings: body, mind, and spirit.
Alone, a knight would be enough to erase a city from the map, but together they could take over a minor empire in one night. While the knights and apostle made most of the heavy hitters of the Sanctum, it didn't mean that it lacked in the infantry department; in fact it was quite the opposite.
The Sanctum had almost a million members from the second to the fourth stage. While alone, a second-stage warrior was nothing impressive, just a person with below-average talent, when there were over a million of them, even a stage 5 might find it troublesome facing all of them.
This was the enemy Astrid was planning to destroy. She intended to obliterate an organization capable of literally razing the world to the ground. Today was the day the Sanctum would come to kill her parents and burn the dukedom of Diavolo.
Astrid, finally realizing that she had been staring at her father's smiling face for far too long, quickly averted her gaze. Without a single word to her father, Astrid started walking. She stopped in front of the chair on Erik's left, where her mother sat.
Unfortunately, Astrid was too small to actually look her mother in her eyes, without tiptoeing, so she opened her arms, making a gesture that said 'Hurry up and pick me up'. Her mother laughed at what to her seemed a harmless display of childlike defiance. Freya grabbed Astrid by the waist and hoisted her up, placing her onto her lap.
Astrid stared into Freya's unfathomably deep sea blue eyes that seemed to hold the answer to every question Astrid ever had and would have. With every passing second, it got harder for Astrid to keep her composure. The gentle expression on her mother's face was too much for her.
She was close to breaking down, but she held on by sheer will; I won't taint mother's memory by my weakness and inability to control emotions.
Plap.
Freya's hand came down on Astrid's head, lightly rubbing it, rocking her face. Her soothing voice entered Astrid's ear like a whisper from Satan himself. "My dear, would you tell mother what's on your mind?" Before the word could even properly register in Astrid's mind, she found her mouth moving, words stumbling over each other.
"I-I..."
Drip.
Drip.
Just like that, the villainous detective broke down in the arms of a memory she had conjured herself.