Free Web NovelChapter 150: The Fallen Goddess
Liraya opened her eyes to dirt and dead leaves.
The ground pressed cold and wet against her cheek. She lay face-down in the middle of the forest, arms spread out like someone had dropped her there and walked away.
She did not know how long she had been unconscious. Her body gave her no information about time. That small, missing detail annoyed her more than the dirt in her mouth.
She stayed still for a moment and let the sensations arrive one by one.
First came the cold. It crept through her thin dress, which she was now wearing, and into her skin. It was a kind of deep, steady cold she had watched mortals complain about for centuries.
Now she felt it from the inside. It made her shoulders tighten, and her fingers curl into the leaves without her wanting to.
Next came the hunger. It sat low in her stomach, a dull, heavy pull that refused to be ignored. She had known the word "hunger" for thousands of years. She had seen it twist faces and drive people to do desperate things. But never in her imagination had she expected it to feel this stupid and this loud inside her own body.
Just after these two came the weight of her own limbs. Her arms and legs felt way heavier than they should. Just moving them took too much effort, something she had never needed before.
She pushed herself up onto her elbows. The motion sent a sharp ache through her back and shoulders. But she sat up slowly, brushing dead leaves from her loose hair. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
She looked around.
The trees here grew taller and closer together than anything she had seen and paid attention to. Still, she knew this was deep inside the Gaiya forest. She also knows this part of the Gaiya forest has no maps. No hunters ever came this far. No one from the nearby village ever stepped past this point.
She knew every plant, every creature, and every hidden path in this forest from her divine viewpoint. She still knew all of it. But knowing and doing were two different things now. She was about to learn that lesson very soon.
She had complete maps in her head. She understood which berries were safe and which mushrooms would kill her. She knows how to build shelter, how to find water, and how to avoid the larger predators around here. After all, she has been watching over this world for a long time, a time mortals from this world would fail to grasp with their understanding.
But even though she had all that knowledge, what she did not have was power. No divine strength. No floating. No snapping her fingers to make fire or food appear.
Her power to manipulate fates was brutally taken (according to her) by her own people just moments ago.
Now she had nothing but this body.
She stood up. Her legs held her weight. That was the first thing that went correctly, as she thought. She noted it without any special feeling.
She looked up at the trees and tried to figure out something. Night was coming fast. The light between the trees had turned gray. So, soon it would be full dark.
She understood quickly that right now what she needed very urgently was fire. She had watched mortals die from cold, predators, and even monsters just for sitting ducks inside forests like these at night. So, if she wanted to survive, she had to make fire anyhow.
Luckily, she had watched mortals make fire tens of thousands of times across her existence. She had seen the exact motion of stone against stone, the way they arranged dry tinder, the angle of the strike. So, she felt confident that she could do it herself.
She gathered what she needed. Dry leaves and small twigs for tinder. A flat piece of bark to hold the sparks. Two stones that looked hard enough. Finding them in the forest was not very hard for a person like her.
She knelt in the wet leaves and arranged everything the way she had seen so many times.
Then she struck the stones together.
But nothing happened.
She adjusted the angle and tried again.
Still nothing.
Then she changed the way she held the stones and tried a different pair. The leaves stayed cold and dark even after countless times she struck the stones together. But still, she didn’t give up that easily.
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Thirty minutes passed after that. Her fingers grew sore. Two of them even burned from the repeated scraping of the stones, as she kept striking nonstop.
After a long time of what felt like almost eternity for her, the flame finally caught on the twenty-seventh try, with her whole body aching and sweat drenching her body.
A tiny, weak spark landed on the tinder and grew into a small, shaky flame. It flickered and threatened to die with every breath of wind. But without doing anything about it, Liraya just stared at it, feeling too exhausted to even lift a finger now.
She sat back on her heels and watched the little fire struggle to stay alive. The smoke stung her eyes. The heat barely reached her hands with this tiny fire she made after all this hard work for the past half an hour.
She had once held dominion over fate itself. But now she knelt in wet leaves with burned fingers and a fire so small it would not scare away a rabbit, let alone a predator from this deep inside the forest.
She spoke quietly to herself, voice flat and dry.
"I am the Goddess of Fate. I should not be scraping stones together like a common beast. Damn you, Kronos. I hope you are watching me now and enjoying this."
After two more minutes of bickering to herself, when the fire was about to die, she got up and added a few more twigs to it. The flame grew a little stronger, but still looked pathetic compared to her effort to make it. She sat there and let the reality settle over her.
This mortal body she was in now did not come with any shortcuts she used to have. She had no power to command the forest. And she certainly had no followers to bring her food or warmth deep inside the forest.
She had only what her hands could do and what her mind remembered. And right now her hands were clumsy, and her mind was learning that theory and practice were not the same thing.
She looked down at her bare feet. The shoes she used to wear at the Pantheon were nowhere to be seen. One foot had a small cut from a sharp root. She felt the cold ground through her thin dress and the growing ache of hunger in her stomach.
She spoke again, even quieter.
"So this is what it feels like, huh!"
She did not say the words with anger or self-pity. She simply stated the fact. She had spent centuries watching mortals struggle with cold and hunger and pain. And now, finally, she sat in the middle of it. The difference between watching and feeling was larger than she had expected.
She added another stick to the fire. The flame held. Then she pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. The night sounds of the forest started to grow louder around her. Something small moved in the bushes to her left. She turned her head and listened. Whatever it was, it stayed hidden.
She knew she could not stay here long. The fire would not last the whole night without more wood, and she had only just a basic idea of what hunted these deeper parts of the forest after dark. She knew she could not travel far in the dark without risking a broken ankle or worse.
After a long time thinking, she finally looked at the small flame again.
"So, survival is not going to be as easy as I had thought, ehh!?" she said to the fire. But no answer came.
There was no drama. No grand scheme was here for her to escape from this place. She knew that, however difficult it was, she had to survive this forest on her own. No one is going to come and help her. She knows better than that this is reality, and help just doesn’t come out of nowhere. So, if she wanted to survive, she had to fend for herself and had to do it fast.
Because the more dark this forest is going to be, the more danger is going to find her, especially when she is alone and unarmed in this deep territory.
