A very strange creature, the Tammolian God-eater is what you'd get if you had a black mountain goat, of which one horn, always the left, had been replaced by a 1.5m long curved, single-edged sword of tampered steel, whose hilt starts at the root of the horn.— All creatures in Totaliti, great and small, James Burdnett Bond. Chapter 5.
"Hey Angie!"
"Hush, that's one of Sylvania's chosen."
"What, that scrawny goat?"
"Look on her head."
"Her?"
"She's too powerful, too favoured, to be an it. Notice the runes carved into that sword?"
"Sword? What, that's a... Oh, my, that's not a normal goat, is it?"
"No, it's a God-Eater. It's probably Lemieux Bryant, in fact."
"How can you tell?"
"Their names are written in the runes on the sword, and I can read Ankh-Nikt-Tukkum."
"That's bad, I heard
Blue Rose got into a fight with a God-eater, and lost."
"Blue Rose?"
"An elect of Balphegor."
"What's so special about him?"
"He once defeated fourty fighting men, armed only with a pair of rowing oars, a silk scarf, a stein of beer, and chopsticks."
"How'd he hold all that at once?"
"He didn't, the scarf was on his neck, the stein in his hand, he used the oars from within the boat, he didn't even disembark, and the chopsticks were for his lunch, for he was peckish."
"Did he kill them?"
"No, he left them alive, but for the first one, whom he hit so hard with the stein, he broke his neck. Anyways, he lost to a God-eater, and he wasn't drunk in a boat with no weapons when he did either. He lost in full armor, that sword you see? It would cleave the worldstone, it wound sunder the armour of Mondi, himself, and come for seconds."
"Blasphemy! Take that back!"
"Who are you?"
"I am Blue Rose, the elect of Balthamel, you have called me, called me by name! I am lives spread like chaff from the grain thresher, I am thousand chrysantemum petals spread from a single blow from a sword. I am death. Take that back!" Only when he said the last few words did his voice rise above a whisper, his muscles straining, as if he was trying to hold a whole world inside his skin, contained, the fury of which would abate storms.
"Fools, duck!" Angie yelled as they squared off in the clearing, the Elect of Balthamel and Candice, the Gift of the Sun.
Both would-be duelists reflexively obeyed, saving both their lives, as the Goat started spinning, almost in a dance, circling itself, the sword describing helixes and parabolas, spinning faster and faster, until it flew, a whirldwind of spinning, raging, thundering death. A cloud of danger and cutting blade, red with the runic might of its sword. Only barely did the goat miss, and two oak trees, laying over the clearing, possibly eight hundred years old each, now creaked, and keeled aside, their immense trunks sliced and divoted, a piece the size of a small room missing from each. Only then did the goat stop spinning, high in the air between both threes, singing its low, siren's song. A call to battle, to madness, fierce, unconquerable. It was the song first heard when the first mortal killed another, repurposed, grandiose, to call even Gods to battle.
"I am not yours to call nor command!" Blue Rose screamed, his fury incandescent.
"The Sun's Fire will not be unleashed this day, this I vow!"
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