“Tell us the one about how the Aylin Islands were saved again!” a soldier cried, holding a mug of ale in his hands. “We liked that one.”

  Mr. Axwel sat there in a wooden chair, a smile planted on his lips. “Very well,” he said. “I’ve told this story to you guys three times already this night, but a fourth won’t hurt.”

  The crowd of soldiers around him, about twenty or thirty, were clearly all drunk out of their minds. Even though everybody there right now knew the story, he was still going to tell the same version he’s told every time. “This story takes place a thousand years ago, before the rule of the king has come. The Aylin Islands are a place far away from here, made up of seven islands in total. The trees there are unique, they have pink leaves on them instead of green, and when fall comes, the whole nation beautifies. Every creature, plant, and person there work in harmony with one another to make the place a pleasant one to live.

  “Then the age of gods have come. They no longer could sit and wait around watching the world they created turn on without them, forgetting them. When the hearts of men start to look for new reasons for being, they forget the old. As civilization advances and learns new things, it forgets other things that were once important to them.

  “Of course, gods being gods, were not content with the people forgetting their existence. They sent down a champion. A man with every single Blessing inside him, one with enough power to wipe out everybody on the island.”

  A single hand raised in the audience. Mr. Axwel sighed and pointed to the soldier. “You know we’re not in school. You can speak whenever you want,’ he said.

  “Thank you, Mr…”

  “Just call me Axwel.”

  “… Axwel. Can you remind us what Blessings are again?”

  Mr. Axwel couldn’t help but crack a smile. This was the fourth time he was telling this story to this group of people for the night, and yet, they still ask the same question every time, without fail. When he set out to be a storyteller, he did not realize the main source of interested people would be drunks inside bars. It didn’t matter to him, however. He loved telling stories.

  “Blessings are what you call things that gods put inside people. It gives them ability beyond what normal people can do. Here, the most common Blessing you will see is people can draw in power from various gemstones, and with different gemstones, they will gain different abilities. Otherwise known as Gemming.”

  He is met with the familiar sound of the crowd voicing their awe.

  “Back to the story,” Mr. Axwel continued. “It wasn’t the god that watched over the Aylin Islands that was angry. It was the god from a different land, the god often referred to as the God of Anger. He was angry that the people of his land stopped worshipping him, so he sought to punish another island. He sent down the champion with all the Blessings inside him, a legendary warrior with many myths sung about him throughout history, to show his might. If the god’s own people were to stop worshiping him, then he will destroy another nation to demonstrate his power.

  “The champion was ruthless. When he arrived, the Aylins had no idea what was coming to them. He visited various towns on the outskirts of the seven islands, and mercilessly pillaged through them, killing the men, women, and children.”

  “What was the champion’s name?” someone from the crowd called out.

  “He went by many names throughout the legends. His name has become lost to the winds of time,” Axwel answered. “He used the power of gemstones to burn down the villages he visited, and the Blessing that the people controlled couldn’t help when faced with this madman.

  “This drew the attention of the god presiding over Aylin Islands. She refused to let her people be slain by a foreign god. Gods, in the past, have always have this agreement to stay out of each other’s territories. But the God of Anger was always the one to ignore this. He intruded, and that displeased the god of Nature.

  “Back then, the Blessing that the Aylins had was they could grow and cultivate plants. That wasn’t very helpful in times of war, however. The God of Nature retracted this Blessing and created another. One where they could infuse magical essence from themselves into flowers. The flowers then cultivated themselves and based on the flower, did a variety of different things.

  “Similar to Gemming?” someone from the crowd asked.

  “Think of it as Gemming, but opposite,” Axwel said. “With these newfound powers, they had something that the champion did not have. This gave them a way to fight back. But things didn’t go exactly as planned. Instead of fighting the citizens of the island, he went straight to the god’s holy place, a tree in the middle of the lake, surrounded by all seven islands.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “Because he was the champion from the God of Anger, his powers surpassed that of other gods. Especially a god who’s main ability revolved around life instead of destruction.

  “He killed the god. Used all his powers at his disposal and destroyed the god of the Aylin Islands. The people could feel when the presence of their god faded from the world, and so things were plunged into chaos.”

  “But you told us that gods don’t really die,” someone from the crowd piped up.

  Mr. Axwel frowned. “Yes, I did tell you that. In the same story. Later on.”

  The soldier murmured a half-hearted apology before shutting up and allowing Mr. Axwel to continue on.

  “Anyways, the goddess that presides over the Alyin Islands dies, and when gods die, they go to their eternal prison in their homeland, while their power rejuvenates. In her case, she went to the Tree at the Center, the biggest tree in all the islands, that’s located at… well, the center. The tree has roots sprouting out from it that reach all the islands at once, and people claim that is how the islands have so much power.

  “And with the goddess in the prison, the champion has free reign over the people. The God of Anger placed all his trust in the champion to carry out his will, and carry his will was exactly what he did. He sought to force the people to worship the god from another land that they did not know.

  “This forced worship continued for the next century. The champion ruled over the people of the Aylin Islands like no tomorrow, and he enjoyed his time there very much. But all good things had to come to an end. With the deaths of most people alive during the era he came to power, a shift of power occurred. People forgot the horrors of the champion, and they rose up. The champion once tried to burn the Tree at the Center, and this angered the citizens. A sacred national treasure such as that had to be preserved, so the citizens struck.

  “The Aylians had forgotten how the champion came to power and didn’t want to take it anymore. They knew their ruler was all powerful, but yet, their will to be free was stronger. Similar to the king here, in a way, except no one has really rose against him yet.

  “They used their Blessing to their advantage and was able to take down those most loyal to the champion.”

  “That’s the end?” one of the soldiers asked.

  “Yes,” Axwel said. “A nice ending if you asked me. Someone once told me that my stories don’t have very good endings so I changed this one for you guys. It originally didn’t end like that.”

  “How did it originally end?”

  “The goddess became reincarnated from the tree’s prison many times, was enslaved again and again to her eternal slumber, and the citizens enslaved for the next three hundred years until a nexus event called the champion away from the Aylin Islands back to his home nation. In that time, the people reinvented their system and put another government system in place, with people worshiping both the God of Anger and the Goddess of Nature. Content with this result, the champion returned to his homeland permanently and was never seen or heard from again.”

  “That was still a happy ending,” one of the soldiers spoke up. “The people eventually earned their freedom, did they not?”

  “Yes, in a sense,” Axwel said. “But it took four hundred years. Four hundred years of suffering, forbidden from worshiping their own god, forced to worship another. The message I wanted to pass here today is that no one can control your minds. Only you can do that, and if someone tries to, that’s when you fight back. Don’t let another person control what you think or how you think. If they do that, then you fight back, no matter what. A message is told from the story when the champion tried to burn down the Tree at the Center. That message is if you see a fire in an impossible place, then it’s the torch for a call to action.”

  The tavern sat in silence for the next couple of moments, digesting what Mr. Axwel had told them. Axwel yawned. “Well, would you look at the hour. It’s getting late now. I’m afraid I have to retire for the night. If I see you guys again, I’ll come with a different story, eh?”

  He got up off his stool and promptly exited the bar, hiding his smile from the tavern’s patrons. Ah, how he loved telling stories.