The Younger Gods - #AtoZChallenge

"People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind."

- William Butler Yeats 

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The Younger Gods

The Dreamers #4

Fantasy

by David Eddings

The four elder gods Dahlaine, Zelana, Aracia, and Veltan have ruled over Dhrall for eons. Every 25,000 years, the siblings pass on their duties to a quartet of young gods so that they can rest. But as the next changing of the gods approaches, the elder gods are faced with a potential catastrophe: an enemy has arisen from the vast wasteland in the center of Dhrall and is bent on conquering the entire realm and using all its inhabitants as nourishment for its minions. The Vlagh, as it is called, is a wellspring of evil, continually birthing nightmarish insectoid monstrosities to make up her army. But as the final battle looms closer, one of the elder gods begins losing her sanity. As the gods desperately search for ways to stop the Vlagh -- and rein in their unstable sibling -- heroes turn up in the unlikeliest places. 

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Excerpt:

It was well past midnight, and Zelana was standing alone on the balcony of what big brother Dahlaine called his ' War Chamber. ' It seemed to Zelana that those fancy names had always been one of Dahlaine ' s failings. For some reason he seemed to feel a need to give almost everything some kind of stupendous title. If he ' d spend as much time solving a problem as he usually spent coming up with a name for it, things might go a bit smoother for him.

Right now, however, Zelana was trying to swallow some very peculiar events. It seemed that they had a mysterious helper who could pull miracles out of her hat ' or sleeve ' without any kind of warning at all.

Down in baby brother Veltan ' s Domain, Longbow had been plagued with a series of very peculiar dreams which were being rammed into his mind by an entity he always called ' our unknown friend, ' despite the fact that he ' d told Zelana and the others that he recognized the voice ' but he couldn ' t quite attach a name to the speaker. Zelana knew that Longbow ' s mind was too sharp to start getting fuzzy about something that important, so it was quite obvious that ' unknown friend ' had been tampering with him in ways Zelana could not even begin to comprehend.

There was one thing that was abundantly clear, however. Not only could ' unknown friend ' erase memories, she could also break ' or just ignore ' some very important rules. Zelana and her family were not permitted to kill things. ' Unknown friend, ' however, had manipulated the members of the Trogite Church with her ' sea of gold ' and lured them into a confrontation with the Creatures of the Wasteland. Then, when the two enemy forces were locked in what would almost certainly have turned out to be a war of mutual extinction, ' unknown friend ' had obliterated them all with an enormous wall of water that she ' d pulled up from about six miles down below the face of the earth.

It seemed that their friend had powers that Zelana could not even imagine, although she was almost positive that their friend was using the Dreamers to assist her.

The more Zelana thought about it, the more certain she became that Eleria ' s flood and Yaltar ' s twin volcanos had also originated in the mind and imagination of ' unknown friend. ' 

The involvement of the Dreamers had been confirmed when the children ' s shared vision had mentioned ' a fire unlike any fire we have ever seen, ' which had produced the blue inferno that had obliterated what had almost certainly been an entire hatch of the Vlagh.