Haku's mind went blank for a moment. He didn't know what to think. The God of Knowledge… the notorious God of Knowledge who had already contacted him through his priestess while he was a prisoner in the Jurao Kingdom, and who had erected those strange towers that were his temples, was he a friend of Akenothustar? Was a dragon a friend of a god? What did it mean? So... maybe the fact that the God of Knowledge had contacted him meant something? Perhaps the words of that strange priestess were not just bluster?
Rhaegal was also in the thick of confusion. So the God of Knowledge had indeed been allied with the dragons… and therefore it was possible that he still was. The prophecy he had received might indeed have been supplied by an ally, and not be a hoax at all. If that were the case, it would definitely be a good thing; it would be meant to have help within the very circle of the gods. And it would also explain why the God of Knowledge had disappeared: perhaps he had chosen to take the opposite side from the other gods, and therefore had chosen to hide… but if it was so, why hadn't he revealed himself personally? Why had he contacted him through incomprehensible messages, instead of appearing himself and revealing everything? Maybe there was a piece of the story that he still didn't know? Or perhaps the God of Knowledge was unable to act for some reason? In the end he decided to wait for Akenothustar to finish his tale before jumping to any conclusions.
"Henochar and I met for the first time on the battlefield" Akenothustar continued to tell. "He was not like the other gods: he was strong, enough to stand up to me, and he seemed to know my moves perfectly. He and I fought for three days and three nights, never stopping, while our two armies fought below us in a devastating bloodbath, and we both used our powers to the max, until we were both unable to continue fighting. Tired and weary, we chose to proclaim a temporary truce between our two armies; for several weeks our soldiers stood looking at each other badly, but Henochar and I did something more. We both felt intrigued by each other, and I felt something between us, a kind of affinity, so in the end we chose to meet in secret and talk to each other, at first under the guise of simple negotiation, then as the weeks went by out of a simple desire to converse again. Henochar was… different, and he didn't see domination as his only reason for existing, as the other gods did; on the contrary, he felt deep pain towards the newcomers whom the gods with their lies were forcing to kill each other. He revealed to me that even after our defeat the gods would never stop, and that they would continue to fight each other using their faithful as weapons, in a continuous battle without end and without purpose; and their followers, even if their souls were saved in their divine realms, were still destined in turn to continue to plead the cause of their god, becoming their servants and continuing to fight in their name. Henochar didn't want this, and blamed the other gods for being so selfish and uncaring of those who served them. He told me about the world he wished to create: one in which wars and enmities would not exist, and everyone could live in happiness ruled not by the cruel gods who were sadly fighting our war, but by omni-benevolent gods who thought first place to the well-being of their followers. And I in turn told him about my dream, which was practically identical with the difference that the dragons had to be at the head of everything. And that's when we realized that we weren't different at all, and that we actually wanted the same thing"
In Akenothustar's hand appeared the image of a god; a being wrapped in robes that seemed to be made of stars and whose head seemed to be cut in half, and in place of the missing one was a swirling mass of dark matter topped by an eye brighter than a sun. Haku recognized him: he was the god shown in the last fresco, the one who had killed Akenothustar! The great dragon looked at that image with a strange light in his eyes: a strange movement of affection, friendly, almost brotherly. "After coming to this realization, I convinced Henochar that we were fighting a mad war, and that we had to stop. He realized I was right, so together we tried to stop the war. I was the Supreme Commander of the Nine Armies, and both my officers and I were ready to accept an armistice that could put an end, at least for a while, to this hideous carnage; and Henochar was the God of Knowledge, a god who enjoyed extreme prestige among the gods themselves and was respected, for none were as wise as he. Unfortunately, his words fell on deaf ears this time: the other gods were not willing to stop, not now that they were convinced they could defeat us. They made us an offer anyway: they were willing to let us dragons live, on condition that we submit to them and accept them as our masters. No dragon would ever accept such an ultimatum, so of course we refused. Henochar himself, outraged by the behavior of his fellows, abandoned the army of the gods by refusing to fight in protest; he wouldn't go over to our side because he didn't want to be called a traitor, but he would never again fight with the gods. And since he was retired, he could offer his teachings to anyone who wanted; so he took me to his divine realm and there he taught me the secrets of the gods"
An amused grin appeared on Akenothustar's face. "Henochar had decided to punish the arrogant and selfish gods with an enemy they could no longer consider small. He taught me everything I needed to know about them. I discovered that in fact the gods weren't omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and so on as they wanted their followers to believe, and they had not always existed, much less they were the creators of the world, but were natives of this world and were born after the great catastrophe.The evil light that had descended on this world had changed something, mixing matter alien to this world with the matter present here, and the fruits of this union had infiltrated the most recondite depths of the mana veins, so much so that we dragons had never noticed it and the same was true for the newcomers; only some enterprising individuals who had dared to go down there had found them, and had absorbed these fruits and obtained enormous power from them.These fruits, known as 'divinity', made the gods what they are today: beings capable of modifying reality in ways that are almost incomprehensible to us. Thanks to this power they had been able to break through space and take refuge elsewhere, in a different plane of existence, and their thirst for power had continuously grown leading them to desire to conquer this world and make it theirs. Henochar provided me with everything I needed: he showed me where to find some of this 'divinity', taught me how to use it, and explained how to open a door through it to the divine realms of the other gods. Armed with this knowledge, I led the Nine Armies to conquer the divine realms, which were now defenseless. Henochar meanwhile identified for me the most powerful and dangerous gods and the location of their divine realm, so that I could storm and destroy it. Finally we dragons were able to fight back, and the usurpers were killed one by one; those who had slaughtered many of us while remaining safe in their divine realms now found themselves powerless against our onslaught. And so, the war completely changed direction, and what for millennia had seemed like one-sided genocide by the gods became a full-scale conflict in which each side wasn't safe from the other"
The scene on Akenothustar's hand changed again: now there were no more scenes of total defeat by the dragons, but real battles inside unknown places that Haku couldn't understand, which presumably were the divine realms themselves, and the gods were no longer smug and satisfied but clearly terrified, fighting not as if it were a game but as if their very lives depended on that battle. "For the next several hundred years, the war between dragons and gods grew even more bloody and bloody, but for the first time we had a chance to win. Henochar and I hoped that after the more warring gods were dead, the others would agreed to come to terms. Unfortunately, this was not the case: our new power terribly frightened the gods, who now knew they were no longer invincible, and therefore could not allow the dragons to stay alive. If they had, we dragons could have multiply enough over the next millennia, until we were enough to eliminate the gods once and for all.They weren't willing to do that, and they still intended to rule this world, so they unleashed everything they had on us regardless of the losses. What's more, after all that time, many gods had attained considerable power, capable of standing up to the mightiest among us; even the weakest gods could now hold their own against a two-domain dragon. And to top it off, we dragons were greatly diminished by those two thousand years of strife. Even though we could now fight back, the balance of strength still tilted in favor of the gods. No matter what strategies Henochar and I devised, the gods kept having the advantage, and we dragons kept dwindling and thus losing… Henochar, in an attempt to change the mind of the gods towards peace, returned to their ranks and began to enter into negotiations, and to prove his loyalty he clashed with me a second time and for the second time our battle ended in a draw. Thanks to this the God of Knowledge, who already enjoyed great prestige, became even more important since he was considered the only one who could stand up to me, and finally other gods began to listen to him and began to doubt. They began to see the futility of conquest and domination, of eternal warfare in an attempt to win over more believers, and they began to believe that they too could be different. If we dragons, after millions of years of arrogant rule, had changed, why couldn't the gods, too? And so they too joined the cause of the God of Knowledge and began to cry out for peace. But unfortunately, all this was in vain. This minority of gods was too weak and few in number to oppose the majority of the gods who instead wanted to continue the war and sabotaged any attempt at reconciliation. And all the while, more and more blood was being shed and our ranks were getting smaller and smaller. We were ready to fight to the last dragon... but one day, my friend visited me. Henochar came to me and revealed to me that he had discovered the greatest power in the universe, the one that could finally give him access to infinite knowledge: that of being able to break the barrier of time"
Haku opened his mouth. Break the time barrier? So was it really possible to know the past and the future? So this was how Akenothisstar had learned his name, and that of all his siblings, and had known precisely where to locate them? "I know this information will come as a great shock to you, but yes, it is possible to see through time. You see, this world and this entire universe are nothing but actors acting on a stage, and this stage is the combination of space and time; a 'spacetime', basically. But space isn't always the same and time doesn't always work the same way: in short, they are relative. Through the use of certain powers, it is possible to break this stage and create trapdoors that lead to other places and other times. Until that day, we dragons believed that only the most violent cosmic events could generate the conditions necessary to carry out such a feat; but Henochar, using his divinity, was able to obtain a similar result. If the gods were already able to break the barrier of space and move to a different plane of existence, why couldn't they also do the same with that of time? And it was just so then that the God of Knowledge became able to see the past and know the future. He taught me how to do it, and then together we looked at what should have happened"