Myriad Heavens: Rise of the Rune God

Chapter 220: Chapter 220: The Gathering

Wukong sat on the edge of a cliff on a planet he had made himself.

It looked like Earth. Same atmosphere, same gravity, same weight to the air when you breathed it in. He had built it from memory — the curve of the horizon, the color the sky turned at a certain hour, the way wind moved across open ground. He hadn’t consulted anything. He had just built it the way he remembered it, which meant some details were perfect and others were slightly off in ways he couldn’t identify and didn’t try to.

He was eating a peach, watching the sky, completely relaxed.

The first arrivals came within minutes of the call ending.

They came fast. Beings that treated hundreds of millions of galaxies as a short commute dropped out of the sky, stepped through dimensional tears, rose from what passed for an ocean on this constructed world, descended from the upper atmosphere. They arrived the way beings at their level always arrived — without ceremony, without announcement, with the casual efficiency of those who had long since stopped finding travel remarkable.

Each one landed, took in the surroundings, and went still.

The stars were wrong. That was the first thing. The cosmic coordinates didn’t match anything stored in their memory — the constellations were completely different, the galactic positioning foreign, the background radiation of the space around them carrying a signature that didn’t belong to their universe. The planet beneath their feet felt like Earth in every physical sense but the sky above it was not the sky that should have been there, and the rest of the solar system — the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, all of it — was simply absent.

”This isn’t Earth,” said the first arrival, a minor deity who had made the crossing in under ten seconds and now stood looking at the horizon with her head tilted.

”Where are the other planetary bodies?” The second arrival, landing beside her, scanning in every direction.

A third stepped through a tear in space and stopped. ”Wukong.” Flat. Requiring an explanation.

Wukong took a bite of his peach. ”Sit down. Wait for the others. I’ll explain everything.”

”You’ll explain now —”

”Sit. Down.”

The third arrival sat down, mostly out of surprise that he’d said it that way.

They kept coming.

Zeus arrived first from the Greek pantheon, his presence filling the air around him the way it always did — loud, authoritative, the particular weight of someone who had been the most powerful thing in a room for so long it had become structural to his identity. He landed, surveyed the unfamiliar sky, and turned to Wukong with an expression that had never once in the history of its deployment been successfully ignored.

Wukong pointed at a flat rock nearby. ”Sit.”

Zeus stared at him for a long moment. Then, with the dignity of someone choosing not to make an issue of something, he moved to the rock.

Athena arrived a few minutes later, quiet where Zeus was loud. She didn’t ask questions immediately. She stood to one side and started reading the dimensional coordinates with the focused attention of someone who intended to have most of the picture worked out before anyone told her anything.

Poseidon surfaced from the constructed ocean, water running off him, and stood on the shore looking at the horizon with a frown that was more professional than distressed. The ocean wasn’t right. He could feel it — built correctly in structure but without the deep history that real oceans accumulated over billions of years. He made a small adjustment to the tidal pattern without asking anyone and then walked up toward the gathering.

Ares dropped from the sky and landed hard, already scanning. His hand found the grip of his weapon before he’d fully registered that there was nothing immediately threatening present. He let go of it and looked around. ”Where are the enemies?”

”There aren’t any yet,” someone said.

Ares’s expression indicated this was not the answer he had been hoping for.

Medusa stepped through a dimensional fold and her presence registered before she fully appeared — a pressure in the air that made several nearby beings instinctively pay attention to their peripheral vision. She completed her arrival calmly and found a space toward the edge of the gathering.

Hermes arrived at speed and was already moving through the crowd before he’d fully landed, saying hello to people, which was very Hermes. Apollo and Artemis came through together. Hephaestus arrived last among the Greeks, looking slightly distracted, already examining the composition of the constructed ground with the focus of someone who had opinions about how things were built.

Thor came down from the upper atmosphere like a deliberate impact — Mjolnir first, landing hard enough to shake the constructed ground in a twenty-meter radius. He stood up, shook rock dust off himself, looked around at the gathering already assembled, looked at the wrong stars, looked at Wukong.

”Where are we?” he asked.

”On a planet,” Wukong said.

Thor processed this. ”Ah,” he said, and found somewhere to stand.

Odin didn’t arrive so much as simply become present. One moment he wasn’t there and the next he was, standing slightly apart from everyone else, one eye reading the gathered beings and the other eye reading everything else. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. The weight of his attention was its own form of communication.

Loki materialized from somewhere nobody had been watching. He had the particular ease of someone who had specifically chosen an unobserved angle of entry and was aware that everyone knew this. He was already smiling. He looked at the assembled gathering, looked at the wrong sky, looked at Wukong eating his peach on the cliff edge, and his smile became slightly wider, which was not reassuring.

Freya arrived with quiet authority. Tyr came through a dimensional gate, looked at the size of the gathering, and nodded once as though confirming something he had expected. Heimdall appeared and immediately positioned himself where he had a clear line of sight to Loki, which he maintained without making it a production.

Ra descended from the upper atmosphere trailing solar energy, his presence warming the air around the landing point by several degrees. The light shifted slightly where he walked. He looked at the unfamiliar stars and something in his expression went carefully neutral.

Anubis stepped through a dimensional gate with the unhurried ease of someone who had never once in their existence been in a rush. He looked at the gathering, looked at Wukong, and moved to a position slightly apart from the main crowd, which was where Anubis always stood.

Thoth arrived and began observing immediately, saying nothing. He had already produced something to write on from somewhere and was noting things down before he had fully oriented himself to the location.

Horus, Isis, Set, and Osiris came through together in a loose group. Set looked around with the restless energy he always carried. Isis’s attention went straight to the dimensional structure of the space around them. Osiris and Horus exchanged a look and moved toward a clear area to wait.

The Jade Emperor arrived with full formality, attendants dismissed before the journey, presence carrying the weight of an institution rather than just a being. He surveyed the gathering, identified each person present with a sweep of his gaze, and found an appropriate position.

Guanyin descended quietly. The space around her landing point went still — not from force, just from the quality her presence carried. Several conversations in the nearby area paused without the speakers quite knowing why, then resumed after she had passed.

Nezha came in fast and loud, skidding to a stop near the edge of the cliff, looked over it, looked at Wukong, grinned. ”What did you do?”

”I’ll explain later.”

”You always say that.”

”And I always explain later.”

Nezha made a sound of mild complaint and went to find someone to talk to.

Ancient cultivators who had withdrawn from Earth millions of years ago filtered in over the first hour — men and women who looked unremarkable at first glance, dressed simply, moving without performance. Most of them were recognizable to the older beings present and invisible to the less observant ones. The kind of people whose cultivation depth became apparent only when they chose to let it, which they generally didn’t.

Jesus arrived without announcement. No entrance, no displaced air, no dimensional signature preceding him. He was simply there — standing on the cliff edge a short distance from Wukong, present the way a fact is present. Several beings who hadn’t been in the same space in centuries went quiet when they noticed him. Not from deference exactly, more the particular stillness that comes from encountering something that commands genuine attention.

He looked at Wukong. Wukong looked at him.

They nodded at each other. No words. They had known each other a long time.

The dragon sovereigns came last. They arrived in compressed humanoid form, their true scale folded down out of courtesy for the space, but the compression didn’t fully hide what they were — the air around them carried a different quality, older, heavier, something that predated most of the beings present. They found a space slightly apart from the main gathering, exchanged brief looks with each other, and waited.

Other beings came too, from traditions that resisted clean categorization. Ancient things that had existed before humanity developed the language to describe them and had simply continued existing afterward. They came, found space, and waited.

Stragglers continued arriving through the first few hours. Each new arrival did the same thing — landed, registered the wrong stars, looked for the missing solar system, turned to Wukong with some variation of the same question.

Wukong waved them off each time. ”Wait for the others.”

With nothing else to do, the gathering began talking to itself.

The day that followed was something that had never happened before and would likely never happen again — every significant being that Earth had ever produced, gathered in one place, with nothing to do but wait and talk to each other.

Centuries of separation compressed into a single afternoon.