Chapter Text
Rage.
Blood so hot it boiled.
A frenzied, beating heart.
Godhood within his grasp–
A pesky detect thoughts to be swatted away with ease–
Flash. BANG.
And everything fell apart.
A slip of the mind, and Ankarna rended him in twain.
There was nothing. For a long time, there was nothing.
Then, there was something, and he wished there were nothing.
Immense pressure, submerged in the deep. A twisted amalgamation of water genasi and goliath hell. He was crushed by an impossible weight, too deep to see, too much water in his lungs to breathe. He waited to suffocate, hoped that he would, but the strain in his lungs wasn’t lethal, because he was already dead.
And then he wasn’t.
A breath.
A body that had been split by a goddess’ blade fused back together. A soul drowning in hell brought back to the material plane. He was fresh in a body that should not have been able to be repaired. He felt misaligned, and it took him a moment to figure out why. More than residing in a body that wasn’t entirely the one he left, humming from being reconstituted and stitched back together with magic, there was an absence of divine power.
He was a fallen paladin. An oathbreaker.
The place he used to reach for the power to divine smite, the place he used to reach to channel divinity, was an empty, echoing chasm.
Ankarna had killed her champion.
He’d been so clever, so careful with the devil’s honey, and then–
Memories trickled back in as his body and mind were mended–
There had been a soft nudge of detect thoughts, a juvenile second-level spell he could make the save for in his sleep–
Flash. BANG.
An explosion in his face. Ringing ears. Debris in his eyes. He lost concentration for just a moment, and Adaine Abernant probed deeper.
But no. Not her. She wasn’t the one.
Flash. BANG.
The explosion.
Detect thoughts was child’s play.
It was the explosion.
Flash. BANG.
A shock of white hair. Red, rage-filled eyes fading to black and gold.
“Hey. Don’t be blinded by rage.”
Flash. BANG.
A flashbang. A paltry, low-level piece of fucking artificing–
“Porter?”
Jace knelt in front of him. He looked pathetically hopeful, but Porter could see only Gorgug Thistlespring, the kid who came into barbarian class on his first day of school and sang, the half-orc who was raised by weak, tinkering gnomes, the barbarian who chose to waste his time and potential by setting aside his rage to dabble in artificing–
The kid who threw a flashbang at Porter and got him struck down by a goddess.
“Your eyes are red,” said Jace.
He’d gone into a rage without meaning to. He felt the heat of his blood pumping. He let it fill him. Pure rage. Pure hatred. Gorgug’s face, splattered with blood. He allowed himself to remember Gorgug’s ribs crushing in his fist–
“This is you, right?” said Jace. “Tell me it worked.”
Porter took a deep breath. He was in Jace’s house in Clearbrook, prone in the center of a magic circle.
“Porter?”
“It’s me,” said Porter, and Jace let out a relieved huff. “Are you going to make me ask?”
“Drop the rage,” said Jace, “then we’ll talk.”
He didn’t want to drop the rage. He wanted to let it fester. He wanted to give in.
“I’m not saying anything until you look less ready to murder me in cold blood.”
A jolt of annoyance.
“Porter.”
Porter dropped his rage and felt his heartbeat slow. His skin cooled. His mind cleared, no longer clouded exclusively by fantasies of Gorgug’s violent, brutal death, and he began to put the pieces together.
A magic circle.
He sat up. “You cast true resurrection,” he said, unwillingly impressed at his friend’s usage of such a difficult ninth-level spell.
“Yes, and I’m out 25,000 gold because of it.”
“So, I owe you."
“You owe me a lot,” said Jace, holding up his arm, a shriveled, barely healed mess all the way down to his fingertips. “Didn’t manage to teleport away in time.”
Jace didn’t know any healing spells. That it had healed this much through lesser medicine checks suggested a passage of time.
“How long?” Porter asked.
“Six months.”
Instead of ascending to godhood, Porter had been in hell for six months. “And the Bad Kids?”
“You mean the Photosynthekids?”
“That can’t have caught on,” said Porter, disgusted.
Jace shrugged. “They’re seniors, they party, they go to school,” he said. “Except Faeth. I heard she dropped out, but she still shows up to classes in disguise.”
Porter felt an irritating burst of fondness and shoved it down.
“We’re supposed to be dead, so we should leave Elmville,” said Jace. “Staying is asking for trouble from Aguefort.”
“Right after a quick visit.”
Jace must have heard the menace in his tone, because he immediately contested. “I don’t want another run in with the Bad Kids when the last one nearly killed me and did kill you."
“A goddess killed me.”
“They took down every single one of your raging Rat Grinders,” said Jace. “They aced the Last Stand Exam. They’ve earned our caution.”
“I don’t give a fuck about the rest of them,” said Porter. “I just want Thistlespring.”
Jace considered. “You just want one of them?” He gave a put-upon sigh. “That’s manageable.”
In the chasm that used to house his divine power, Porter felt the embers of something new begin to glow. The power of an oathbreaker paladin, twisted and warped. He allowed himself to slip back into his rage and let it build.
Gorgug Thistlespring had no idea what true rage really was. It would be Porter’s final lesson as a teacher to show him.