No one ever really understood what the Gods were.

Perhaps not even the Gods themselves.

 

Were they manifestations of man’s need to believe in something greater than themselves? Or were they the emobodiments of the great and primordial forces of existence?

The only truth that mortals could be certain of when it came to their deities, was that they dwelled above them and that they were immensly powerful.

 

When the first God fell, the walls between those above and those below were forever broken.

The fires that consumed the skies above Homs on that fateful day would be the harbinger of change for the world below. A change that would be as irreversible and permanent as the first flashes of life. With a roar unheard of since the universe tore open, a body fell from the sky. As wide and as deep as a mountain range, it fell upon that poor, ravaged city of Hom, destroying all that lived there.

The Gods’ name was Pazuzu, felled by the cruel hand of his own father, Hanpu.

 

He would be the first of many.

 

A few days later, the citizens of London woke to find Old Father Thames floating lifeless in his namesake. In Ethiopia, Afar salt miners came across a rapidly spreading lake in the middle of the Danakil Desert. Face down in its centre, they found the quickly dissolving body of the God, Beher, a sword of unknown origin or design stuck in his back. The skies opened above Australia, raining the entire continent in the technicolour passing of the Rainbow Serpent and in a back alley in the city of Poznan, the remaining light of life fled from the murdered body of the Sun God, Dazhbog.

 

None bore witness.

 

It was only when the entwined bodies of the divine mother Goddess, Parvati and the war Goddess, Hariasa crashed through the Black Forest of Fiburg, tearing into each other with a long forgotten barbarity did the pieces begin to fit. As they screamed at each other in alien tongues, the world splintering beneath their rage, mortals begin to realise what was happening.

 

The Gods were at war and Earth was their battlefield…