In the shape of things to come, Alexa landed alone. Her ship perched precariously on the side of a mountain, but all the land here spiked up and came right back down, almost separating the world into a uniform grid of pits. Nothing living seemed to move for ages out in any direction, and the sensors were on the fritz, but Alexa was not spending more than one day on these shenanigans.

Alexa descended the rocky slope best she could, though it required a good deal of drifting and telekinesis on her part, and as she descended, she began to smell something rank. There was plant matter on the side of the valleys, and down at the bottom of the cup, amongst the scattered rocks, was a single, scaled being. It was like a wingless dragon, though it didn't have the ring of horns, either, and it appeared to be bipedal, with its tiny hands clutched tight to its chest.

In a more sentimental being, it might have evoked pity.

It moved towards her, slowly sniffing her with its massive nostrils, and then it asked, "Are you god?"

"Yes."

"What are we doing?"

"Speaking," said Alexa. This was to be tedious, or it was to be over quickly, and she was leaning hard on the latter at the moment. "This is how living beings interact with each other. Curious, isn't it, that you know how to do it, when by all accounts you never need to communicate? Curious, isn't it, that we are able to communicate with each other, despite being from entirely different worlds?"

"A god can speak to everything, including the plants and rocks, and in their heart of hearts they will understand," it repeated, dipping its head. That was prophecy, right there, of a foreign sort, and Alexa knew exactly where it came from. "Where are we going?"

Alexa telekinetically lifted stone, only to find it was thin near the center, thin enough that it crumbled in her unsteady grip. Another ditch opened up before them, and Alexa's eyes darted towards the next victim, another creature who, too, seemed confused. Alexa walked past it, leaving her first follower to fill the second in, and opened another ditch. The hordes filled in behind her, trodding along and explaining, in excited voices, stories that had already become exaggerated in the moments she was there.

"--and she talks to rocks and trees--"

"The land obeys--"

"--she brought us up from the dust, and has come back to us--"

"--breathes the knowledge of words into us, so we can speak it back to her--"

Alexa paid no heed to how the rumors swelled about her like a storm. She continued through the dry land, quashing plants as her followers moved in to devour the contents of another creature's home. They all fell in line, through sheer awe, and at last, when it took three whole ditches to occupy them, she turned.

"Tell us where your seraph is," Alexa said.

"Is it a living being, like you?"

"Naturally," Alexa said.

"There is no other," one said.

"I'm scared," another said.

"Where do we go back to?" asked another.

"Which pit are we all going to live in?"

"These are not my problems," Alexa said. "They are things that will be of importance later, once we are done. We are looking for a golden, curled horn. You are to find it."

"Why did you bring us together?"

"I brought this army together to look for the seraph," Alexa said. "Do any of you know where the seraph horn is?"

"On the top of the highest mountain in all the world--" began one.

"--core of the earth--"

Mutters rose up, each story wilder than the last. They entered consensus and fell out of it, each of them equally invigorated by the story as it swam through the mass, becoming a tangible thing, powerful as Alexa was over them.

"Oh, stars's sake, I don't want a folk story, open your mouths and give me the truth!"

A lone voice echoed up from the darkness. "What is... the truth?"

Alexa's voice stretched into a staticky, panicked laugh as she realized the likes of what she was contending with. All the creatures looked up at her, their heads tilted, and she wanted to twist them asunder, but she could not even make herself be so cruel. Instead, she continued to laugh violently. "You're broken, broken, all of you are fundamentally broken, and you can't tell! Every single world here is another exercise in corruption of the spirit, every soul on it just a member of sme twisted mass intended to destroy passersby, and you have so little purpose or agency in your lives that you can not even find it within yourselves to be furious about it! I can't-- oh," she said. Not one of them had moved nor spoken during the outburst. Not one did when it ended. Alexa felt herself still, regaining her composure. "Oh. Well. Go at each mountain. Bring it down, forcefully, if you need to. It is your purpose in life to find whatever lies inside of it."

Something blipped back onto her radar. There was a mountain not a long ways off echoing a promising signal, just a few mountains off from where she started at the beginning. The redundancy irritated her, enough to make her head twitch, but she at least had the information, now. Had Dusty fixed all the radars, like he promised? If so, that was a stunning display of competence, and Alexa would make sure to inform him of this when she returned. It would not be long now. Hearing warped versions of her story, all the strange, wretched versions of destroy passersby, a lack of purpose, echoed between creatures who didn't know themselves what was being told to them, was incensing her ears something fierce. She hoped to return soon.

"My loyalest, follow me," she said. She was not a good liar. That was becoming obvious. However, once again, her virtues would win this one out. It wasn't as if she could fail this. They were all following her, now. Were they to turn on her at the end? It seemed like the sort of twist the seraph would spring on them to make them feel guilty about their faults, or whatever its ultimate plan was. It was almost comical how determined the creature seemed to make her miserable, especially given the extent to which it had thus far failed. It was dealing with another class of being, psychologically hardened, mentally sharp, and physically adept.

Omnians were predators. Even Cassie's features, those of the Fauna, had become more canine with sentience. The world was remade in Alexa's very image back at home. Was that not the definition of godhood?

As for the Lamb?

Wide-set eyes.

It would do no good for it to feign benevolence much longer. Alexa feigned nothing, and she would take the world out from beneath it, handily, if that was the game the two of them were to play. The creatures tore at the mountain, savagely, finding new ways to use the land and ram their heads against it. At first, it was slow, but as Alexa intervened, tearing down massive swathes of rock with telekinesis, she found them follow in her pawsteps, with their own puny amounts of psychic energy. After that, she dared not use any more tricks. They were watching her intently every time she used magic.

It was late into the second day (which must have been ten times as long here), after several meals of unappetizing foliage (it would not do for a god to eat her subjects, but if things drew out, Alexa could, potentially, demand sacrifice to inspire fear), when they at last undusted the horn. There were celebrations that night, with new dishes, and groups of her subjects gathering and inventing new ways to praise. Alexa heard the first song of a new civilization drift over the hills.

It was not very good.

"And the horn of Serpha will flow down great quantities of water, now, won't it?"

"No, it will engreaten the sun which grows our crops!"

"It will anoint heroes."

Alexa had the horn in her mouth. "I will tell you what the horn does the next morning, and you will hear it over the hills, and know the truth of this world and every other," she promised. "Sleep."

That night, they heard the song of every world long before morning, as Alexa's ship screamed back across the sky. She could almost see the little heads look up, uncomprehending, and she wanted them to know this, internalize this, if they were to survive on their own. Gods would be cruel. Gods would abandon them. No one who had the power to look after them was going to do so unless there was something in it for them, and there was nothing in it for Alexa, who had a world to save, anyways, thusly, justifying all her actions. Alexa thought over this as she got on the manual docking sequence, looking back to her passengers in the pods to remember she had stunned no one with her latest feat. The empty pods looked deflated, and their emptiness was inexplicably disappointing.

There, too, was the issue of Dusty not docking. Alexa called in comms, got a busy signal, and took a deep breath outwards. She aborted the sequence and moved the ship back down, traversing over the land and looking at the small section where the walls had caved in and a whole mountain had been downed. Moving in closer, she was able to see small groups, but there was also movement, which she needed to zoom in several times to see. Many of the creatures seemed to be dispersing back across the land, to their pits, where they sat alone.

Alexa watched blankly at the world below. They might as well reform the mountain, mightn't they? When so clearly they ended up prefering solitude, perhaps, in lieu of a common goal...

... this was not her problem, but she stayed for hours, watching as the last of the small civilization trickled away.

"Dusty," she called again. "Dusty, do you read?"

No one picked up. He was probably asleep in his room again, blissfully unaware of the fact that they had a mission to attend to, which he was doing a poor job of.

"You're not funny, Dusty," Alexa said. "Come in."