Chapter Text
It was common knowledge among the people of Fodlan that when the Goddess had first descended upon their land some four thousand years ago her heart had wept when she had witnessed the cursed existence of mankind. Their lives consisted of suffering, trapped in a land which was dry and barren, the ever present scorching heat of the sun relentless. They had been little more than beasts, bound to their bodies and without a soul. They didn’t even possess magic and barely lived to the age of adulthood before perishing without a trace.
But the Goddess had seen the potential deep inside them, their goodness, their ability to grow and how they had possessed just a flicker of the divine in them. And so they had been worthy of her blessing, of her guidance and of her gift of a soul to them.
Sothis always thought that the story sounded very nice –especially when it came to the parts about herself- but really, she had just felt very bad for humanity when she had accidentally stumbled upon them and had tried her best to do her job well.
They also gave themselves much less credit than they deserved.
Even before her arrival they could hardly be called beasts, they had already evolved far beyond that stage and there were already budding cities, with humanity trying their hardest to tame the land and make use of what they were stuck to deal with. They had culture, language and even developed writing.
Even without her there had already been civilization.
But indeed, the lands were not working in their favor. Sand wasn’t very edible to mankind, or useful for anything for that matter. She didn’t quite understand why humanity had decided to evolve themselves into self-awareness in a huge and unforgiving desert, especially considering that halfway across the globe there were much more suitable biomes for their particular biological needs to help them thrive.
But no, they just had to emerge in a desert of all places.
Curse the universe and its damnable ineffability.
The part about her weeping when she first saw mankind was somewhat true. She had truly wept when she realized their average lifespan was under twenty-five years old while the slow and ineffective way they learned things meant each individual barely had the time to make sense of their world before they croaked. How would they ever develop into anything meaningful with such short lives?
She always ended up having to work with the weirdest life forms.
Sothis was but one of many beings of her kind, each with their own large chunk of the universe falling under their jurisdiction, and Fodlan just happened to fall under hers.
And yes, technically the universe was infinite, but the habit of the universe to continuously keep expanding meant that the further their kind ventured from the center the less…Something those places contained and the more… Nothing it consisted of. So Sothis and her kind generally left the parts with more Nothing than Something well alone.
It made them very uncomfortable to be there, if they were honest with themselves.
The universe as a whole was very whimsical despite supposedly being forced to abide to the laws of physics.
And so if the universe wouldn’t listen to the laws of physics and stop randomly creating life on backwater planets the universe would just have to listen to the laws of her.
This meant that technically she too was but a law of physics in the universe, but that thought always unnerved her.
Instead she preferred to see herself as a voyager, burdened with the responsibility to take it upon herself to give randomly emerging fledgling species possessing at least one of several kinds of higher forms of intelligence, one of them being self-awareness, a helping hand, ensuring they’d actually have a chance to get anywhere meaningful. That was a more noble and dramatic way of wording her actual job description.
There were billions of planets in her chunk of the universe and while the majority of them were devoid of life it wasn’t too uncommon for her to find planets with life. Among those many had very insignificant forms of life, single cellular things and such. She didn’t bother with guiding them but she would always leave a beacon in the center of such planets which would send her a ping should they at some point in time evolve to a level of intelligence that would require her attention.
The beacons would also send her a ping if the life on such a planet would go extinct.
The pings she received were nearly always a confirmation of the latter.
After all, the whims of the universe were harsh and unforgiving.
Still this particular life form had made it impressively far despite their unfortunate circumstances, but they were going to be a handful to handle, she could tell.
The first thing on her list of changes was to extend their natural lifespan. Genetically speaking they already should be able to live well into their eighties but they had so little knowledge of how to feed themselves efficiently (or have access to such a variety of nutrition) while also constantly burdened with suffering under the strain of their environment, which would either rapidly wear down their bodies or just instantly kill them, that they had a hard time getting even a single individual to make it halfway into eighty years old.
She wished they had been something similar to yet another sentient species of sandworms instead. They were already surrounded by a lot of sand, so that would have made things a lot easier for her. She was also very fond of sandworms in general, they tended to enjoy burying themselves deep into the sand, remain dormant for years -if not centuries- while they contemplated the meaning of life until they reached enlightenment and transcendence. That meant they often required very little attuning from Sothis.
But no such luck.
Either way, she went to work and quickly came up with a first draft, which she eventually narrowed down into what she thought was a solid and well thought out plan.
She’d have to make a personal appearance to mankind and introduce her changes gradually.
Just instantly imposing great changes on a species or their surroundings tended to throw them a little off balance, sometimes enough to cause them to go extinct, despite her changes having specifically been designed to make their survival easier.
But most species simply needed a lot of time to slowly adapt to any kind of change.
They already had Gods which they prayed to, so introducing herself was easy enough. (Sothis always thought it was incredibly uncanny how sentient species tended to come up with the concept of Godhood by themselves, without someone ever telling them of their existence. She often checked several times out of sheer worry if there actually were other species of divine beings besides herself who were actively influencing a particular planet but her checks always came up empty.)
Previous experiences had taught her that casually waltzing in on a civilization and kindly explaining to them that their Gods were actually not real and merely tales they had come up with to make sense of the world around them, but that she right here was actually the very real deal tended not to work and instead she would likely be seen as a demon or false usurper.
Mass mind wiping always made her feel very guilty, so she now tried to do things more delicately, test the waters and such.
It was far more effective to shape herself after the Gods they had already come up with and simply speak to a civilization through their many oracles, divination methods, trances or whatever form of communication they had designed. It was a little troublesome for her that humanity had already grown big enough that they had fractured into multiple different cultures, naturally each with their own Gods, and did not appreciate it if one culture insisted their Gods were more real than another.
So she’d have to work on steadily unifying their many religions. Check.
Monotheism was a far more efficient mouthpiece for her than polytheism anyway.
Alright so she had settled on gradually increasing their natural lifespan with each new generation, stabilizing at an average of about two hundred while simultaneously covertly teaching them how to actually make it that far in accordance with their respective cultures and Gods.
They really needed to unlock their potential for magic as well, though. They already had souls, ones solid enough to make it into the next universe with ease too. But somehow they were completely shut off from accessing any of the mental and metaphysical abilities that usually came with souls and instead solely lived on using their souls as a consciousness to operate and animate their physical bodies.
Very uncomfortable.
Unlocking their magic proved to be very tricky for Sothis. Introducing magic gradually over generations was very unpractical and hard to actually set up correctly. She also couldn’t just make it appear in certain individuals and have it slowly become widespread over the centuries. Creating any form of inequality in terms of power or intelligence in any species nearly always had disastrous effects as among those who had ‘more’ there would always be some individuals who would decide they should just rule over the rest then. Or they’d insist only they were blessed by the Gods. Or worse, insist that they were Gods themselves. The arrogance.
She also couldn’t do something like make a nice place where her budding species could simply travel to and pick up their awesome new magic, something like a divine spring.
Access to that would certainly be monopolized by a lucky select few, thus creating the same problem with inequality all over again but this time deliberate and manmade.
Sothis struggled to come up with a solution with nearly a full five seconds, a new low for her, and came up with no satisfying outcome.
So she gave up and broke one of her own rules and imbue sudden change. Instantaneous magic it would be.
She’d deal with the outfall of the ensuing chaos and hubris as it came.
Which she ended up doing.
With painstakingly slow results, for over seven very long centuries, cursing herself nearly every single day.
At least she had found it in herself to make a half-assed attempt to actually announce the upcoming change mankind was about to undergo. For months she spoke through the voices of every single of their Gods, (those who weren’t outright evil or excessively violent) announcing in various cryptic ways there was to be an important and sacred blessing bestowed on all of mankind, as both a reward and proof of their immortal souls having reached out to the divine.
It was to happen on the winter solstice. Any species with culture tended to really like rituals, especially if they had traceable and recognizable patterns, and humanity especially had a thing for the changing of the seasons and tracking the position of the stars. The winter solstice was already an important day of jubilation for them, as the shortest day would be over and soon they’d be able to start farming again, so she just knew they’d be reassured their fate was in good hands if their Gods would tell them such a thing.
(Except for the few smaller cultures scattered about she hadn’t considered, who had at some point concluded the winter solstice was a Bad Thing instead and so the messages from their Gods that something big was to happen on that night was a very bad omen for them. She had wasted a lot of time and energy spinning her tale into a more positive light to those, suggesting something like that it meant the darkest day was going to be conquered by the Gods.)
She had also been subtly hinting that this imminent divine blessing was part of something bigger than the many smaller Gods the people prayed to, to ensure she’d be able to eventually unify their many religions into one with one all overseeing God. Her.
Time passed and then the winter solstice was upon them. At exactly the middle of the night (as far as this was possible as humanity had scattered far and wide enough that the middle of the night didn’t happen for all of them at exactly the same moment) every single human on the planet was imbued with her gift of magic, or rather she simply unlocked the potential they always had deep inside them.
It manifested on them in the form of a mark - a small pattern- engraved in their skin which would faintly glow in a color that represented the general type of their magic. There were thousands of unique and differently shaped marks, each having their own distinct and complex aspects the human bearing it would be more adept in, along with a general universal basic magic each mark possessed.
She had made sure humanity didn’t instantly have complete access to the full potential of their newfound abilities. She’d rather not watch them accidentally or impulsively blast one another into oblivion in a fit of emotion. No, they’d have to train, practice and work diligently to develop their powers.
Make an effort you stubborn little creatures.
Sothis had hoped she had put enough pillars in place chaos wouldn’t ensue.
Chaos had instantly ensued.
The stubborn little creatures possessed far more unwavering amounts of free-will than she had taken into account. And so Sothis, now faced with the consequences of her own actions, tried to take responsibility, meaning that for the next seven hundred years she babysat her chaotic little magic wielders, attempting to steer the direction of their development into one of balance, peace and autonomy so she could eventually leave them to their own devices and decide their own future.
Finally she felt she had succeeded. Mankind was prospering, there was peace… mostly, they had gotten more efficient at utilizing their magic and apply the knowledge she had been subtly feeding them over the centuries in actually useful ways, developing more advanced tools and making great efforts to understand every aspect of their planet, including themselves.
They were also mostly monotheistic now, although she had taken care to leave most of their different rituals, believes, forms of prayer and religious days of festivity in-tact, all of those now just applied to various aspects of one all-knowing God.
Goddess, to be exact. She considered she had at least earned the right to subtly slip her actual name and gender into their religion after her many years of hard work. Gender was a rather humanlike concept, as a God –Goddess- like Sothis had very little use for physical procreation, but if a deity wanted to get as deeply involved with a species as she did they had to somewhat shape and adapt themselves and their identity in accordance with the species in order to better understand them so they’d actually make sense when communicating with the species.
The only small shadow on her handiwork was that humanity had still found a way to use their magical marks –Crests, as they now called them- as a crutch to establish hierarchy among themselves, having grown to value certain types of Crests over others and using the fact that Crest were along through bloodlines to ensure certain families now held power over many others.
It wasn’t too bad, all things considered. It wasn’t as bad as slavery or forced servitude based on one’s Crest, and neither were some people considered innately superior or more intelligent than others. Mankind was also putting increasingly more value in the research of ethics, basic rights and respect for all life, so she was sure they’d work out the little dents in their civilization by themselves eventually.
So at long last Sothis was satisfied and considered her job well done.
Only one last task remained. One she hated as it was incredibly exhausting and taxing for her to do so but it was custom and her responsibility to do so.
She had to run a thorough check on the future outcome of any species who had reached a stage where they could continue to thrive without her constant guidance. Even if she left the planet her divine presence wouldn’t just vanish from the planet along with her, it would simply be… automated. A program that acted as a constant representation of her will and power.
She also couldn’t simply look infinitely far into the future with complete accuracy either. She wished she could, it would have made her job so much easier, with much less experimenting and guesswork.
No, her power worked more along the lines of a complex formula, she’d enter the variables of the current state of the planet and run a diagnostic analysis of the millions of possible outcomes –most of them usually very similar to each other- if she were to leave them in their current stage of development. This didn’t have infinite accurate reach either, the further into the future she looked the less accurate the results were, but a few thousand years usually were accurate enough. She’d come back after that to see how things were, and occasionally check on them in the meantime as well.
Sothis, with some trepidation, began running her very taxing diagnostic program on Fodlan, math was the language of the universe after all, and waited for the results to come in.
Once they came in a single word consumed her entire being.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Fuck, why was she so shit at her job?
Oh, Fodlan would continue to prosper without her, but absolutely not in a favorable way.
She had considered humans to be somewhat slow in their advancement but apparently she had been very wrong about that.
In her results nearly all of the possible outcomes showed minor variations of a future where in less than three thousand years humanity would have developed weapons which could easily obliterate their own damn planet in a single instant while also already being far past the first stages of developing technology for efficient space exploration.
Or rather, if she looked at how mankind had established their culture at that point in time it would be less consisting of ‘exploration’ and much more among the lines of ‘colonization’
Or just plain ‘conquering’ once they’d start reaching other planets with life.
Yeah, the fellow members of her kind would most certainly not appreciate this. Fodlan might be located in a remote, isolated and backwater place in the universe but it seemed mankind was hell-bent on making sure their kind wouldn’t remain stuck there forever.
She had to do something, she couldn’t leave them like this but she also couldn’t stick around forever.
After some consideration on her part she remembered how she discovered that a common virtue of humanity was that if they were given enough time, space and resources to contemplate their own actions and the effects they had on others they usually made much more levelheaded and ethical decisions. They could be impulsive by nature and were often led by emotions, but if given the time to reflect they weren’t all that hopeless.
So she had to slow their development down somehow. Give them the time to adjust to each new advancement in their civilization and understand the possible impacts they could have.
Alright, she quickly had to conclude that the automated version of her divinity she had planned to leave behind was not working as intended and humans had found numerous ways to bend her blessings to their will and make very creative and efficient use out of them, a little too creative and efficient.
So she opted to leave a part of her with a consciousness behind instead. They would be… her Children. Yes, humanity would like that. Humans liked children.
Sothis took great care in shaping them. She imbued them with an imprint of her will, their purpose to govern mankind in her stead, but also didn’t want to resort to creating a bunch of her personal minions with no mind of their own. To refrain from making that mistake she had made them as human as possible, just more powerful, with an infinite lifespan and slightly more intelligent in several specific ways. They had a somewhat more advanced understanding of how Crests and magic worked, were slightly more flexible whenever they had to quickly adapt to a new situation and were more efficient in accessing and relying on their memories, which eventually would cover of over thousands of years’ worth of living, a human would have started to forget most of it and that just wouldn’t do for the Children of the Goddess.
She had created them all equally and with the same basis but decided to let them fill in most of their individuality. Their appearance and personality, down to details like their preferred foods and colors, were up to them to decide.
Sothis also thought it would be cruel to completely abandon her Children and leave them to their own devices so she gave them some forms to communicate with her even when she would be somewhere halfway across the universe. And she cared about them so she decided she’d do an annual remote mental visit to them –and only them- to simply talk with them and see how they were doing.
She had introduced her Children to mankind as Saints and while they were meant to govern Fodlan she didn’t actually want them to rule over humanity. Instead they’d become the bridge between the Goddess and humanity, advisors, guides who would rely on the faith to strictly supervise the development of mankind.
It was a bit more… oppressive system than Sothis liked to admit, she vastly preferred leaving life forms to be free to decide for themselves what was right or wrong, but humankind possessed such a stubborn kind of free-will they’d either free-willed themselves straight into extinction or would one day free-willed other species into extinction –which was admittedly mostly the fault of Sothis for bestowing them with all those biological and technological advancements and underestimating their creativity.
She held no illusions she’d get anything more than a barely passing grade once she showed her fellow beings the detailed report of her work.
Ah, well.
With some frustration she ran her programming of future predictability diagnostics again. The first time had already made her tired, this time she’d be totally wasted afterwards so she hoped with desperation she had been successful.
Once she analyzed the results she sighed in relief.
It wasn’t perfect but at least it was functional, and infinitely better than the previous results.
Roughly three thousand years from now Fodlan would be mostly stable, even prospering in several aspects. They still hadn’t advanced to the stage of mastering electricity for technological purposes but what they lacked in scientific ways to improve their lives they had substituted with creative use of their Crest magic. They had gotten very knowledgeable and efficient in cultivating the land, ensuring a steady and varied supply of food, which was accompanied with a solid understanding of the nutrition their bodies needed to actually live to the lifespan Sothis had intended for them. There was peace, aside from minor scuffles, and no signs of people subjugating others into inhuman servitude in a consistent manner.
She was surprised to discover nearly all of humanity had remained concentrated on a single continent with one nearby island. There were some small settlements on the other continents but they were all but forgotten by the main continent, and those settlements had mostly forgotten about the main continent –along with its religion- as well.
She frowned a bit at the complex form of sexism present in mankind’s civilizations, she could see how the biological differences between men and women would lead to some different social expectations placed on the two sexes but honestly most of it wasn’t upheld out of necessity but instead out of greed and power. She chided herself when she caught herself thinking that if sexism had to be prevalent she would have at least preferred if it would been done so in the opposite direction, you know, since they all prayed to a Goddess and all. But she really ought to be above such selfish wishes.
She noted their society as a whole was surprisingly strict on themselves though, and this phenomenon was present in all of the different cultures. Most of this originated from the various believes stemming from the importance religion held in their cultures and Sothis thought her Children might have taken their task to govern humanity a bit too serious and literally.
When she homed in on what her Children had actually been up to across the centuries –they all carried her essence so they weren’t hard to track down- she had a good laugh. Most of them had stuck around for maybe about fifteen hundred years tops before they had decided it was enough and had promptly disappeared somewhere of into space, or just outright left the entire universe. Yes, she could have expected that from beings who were part divinity and part human. Free-will was such a fickle thing.
To her surprise, and secret amusement, there had been one of her Children in particular who had made a spectacular mess of things. Her son had at some point decided she had been an unjust Goddess and had instigated a rebellion against her, raining down chaos and destruction upon the lands. Seeing as she wasn’t present initially her other Children had ended up heeding their call and waging war against him. Sothis witnessed her future self coming back to Fodlan at some point to just banish him from this realm altogether, leaving his influence on Fodlan diminished to nearly nothing.
She made a mental reminder in her head to ensure she wouldn’t accidentally forget to come back at that point in the future.
After her temporary return and his defeat humanity had started referring to him as Fallen and had begun seeing several things they had the potential to do themselves as sins, and people who did so repeatedly would be condemned as heretics, those who had Fallen as well, with the consequence that their souls would be punished in the afterlife. The fear of having their souls punished caused them to keep themselves –and others- in check with detication, although many of the things they would grow to see as sins were not things Sothis would consider a sin in the slightest. Still, she’d rather not force her will too much on the people.
Around the endpoint of her gaze into the possible futures she saw that five of her Children remained on Fodlan, all of them an important religious figure and a well-known divine being who each ran a different monastery dedicated to provide education at their own monastery, while also ensuring the world remained in balance. Despite them being deeply respected and revered individuals by humanity Sothis laughed when she saw how the relationship among themselves consisted of a lot of well-intentioned bickering. They weren’t just her Children, they were also true brothers and sisters.
Somewhere just before the point in time where she could see the possible future outcomes with reliable accuracy got too distorted to be useful she felt an odd tug in her mind, as if some sort of signal was reaching out to her on her own private frequency. Curious as to what that could possibly be she took a closer look and was surprised and worried to discover that a group of people had begun understanding the nature of what she was more than she had anticipated and they had conducted an experiment which had imbued a human with a fraction of her essence, which had manifested in the form of what would have been her Crest if she had let it be present in humans, along with the Crest that consisted of the genetic magical essence one of her remaining Children on Fodlan carried.
Their experiment had failed though, for the most part, and had severely impaired the process of their research on Sothis as well.
Still she considered it worrisome, but when she looked further ahead of what would happen with the experiment –a human girl- she found her worries soothed. One of her Children –her daughter who, despite having made her home in a very lively monastery, lived an isolated live and was more lonely than she admitted to herself- would get herself involved with the experiment. Or, to word it better, her daughter would grow to be very emotionally attached to the girl that had been experimented on, a young woman by the time her daughter would first meet her.
The young woman carried a lot of potential, along with a fierce personality and unwavering determination, meaning that aided with the power of two Crests inside her which consisted of a magical frequency on the level of divine beings, she could very well one day will herself into becoming a being equal to what Sothis’s Children were, maybe even more. Perhaps she’d end up becoming an actual God in human form.
If that would be a good or a bad thing for Fodlan’s future Sothis decided was something she’d let herself be surprised by and would come back to see the outcome when the time came.
For now Sothis felt she could safely leave this planet, her report was long overdue already.
Also she’d really like a good nap, she deserved one.
But not before handing over the report of her work and enduring the disappointment of her fellow divine beings with shame.
She really did wish she had stumbled upon another race of philosophical sandworms instead.