"Are these things beautiful?" Freydis asked naively, noting his cheerful expression.

"It's about my parents" he said, not believing he would utter those words again talking of himself. 

Silence swooped into the library, which was the only place in the temple with the lights still on, in the darkness of the night.

"Your parents? But weren't they dead? I remember you told me that you had never met them and that your father had been killed, while your mother had become a kind of machine for giving birth to the Frostsinners children!" the young s.h.i.+eldmaiden replied, recalling the speeches between her and Dag when they were just children.

"I've always believed it too... but Magni told me that a few hours after my birth, my father abandoned me and my mother, starting his life again somewhere else... all this might make sense! But how do I do it now? How do I find out if that's the truth?" Dag said, appealing to the wisdom of his Masters and his companions, who knew him better than anyone.

"He abandoned you... to go where? So, suppose your mother was actually used by the Frostsinners to procreate... in this case, she's on Earth for sure, your home planet, right? But if what Magni says is true and your father ran away somewhere else... he was forced to leave the Earth, otherwise, he would have been killed!" Egill exclaimed, reasoning loudly and looking upwards, focusing on the information received by Dag.

"It means above all that I am not the result of an alien biological combination! I'm not an experiment! But how is it possible then that I have these powers? If I have two human parents, where do my dark powers come from?" Dag continued, refuting Egill's thesis that he had not thought of that possibility.

"According to the stories I have heard from my earthly acquaintances, human beings on Earth have never shown this kind of power, so it is impossible that you inherited them from your parents..." Dargeon interrupted, expressing his opinion.

"Powers come from very powerful energy sources, such as divine ones... if the G.o.ds of all the Pantheons have been driven from Earth, it is impossible that there is anyone who from there can draw on those sources... maybe Magni's vision is just something my mind wanted to see... he made me listen to what I wanted, materializing my most hidden desires... I should stop believing everything I see in my 'visions'!" Dag replied, shaking and scratching his head with one hand.

"Pantheons? What's that?" Freydis asked, intrigued by that unknown word.

"Don't worry, of course, you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sure you're not the only one among us... you must know that before the Dark Day, human beings lived together on Earth, in very large communities, each of which had its own laws and revered its G.o.ds, maintaining mutual respect with other ethnic groups… more or less. The continents were divided into nations and nations into regions, just as it happens on Skjold, but with the only difference that on Earth there were many more... think about it… five continents and about 208 states!" 

"What? And each of these places wors.h.i.+pped different G.o.ds?!" Reidar asked, unable to believe his ears.

"Yeah, a kind of... let's say that there were groups of states that wors.h.i.+pped the same G.o.ds and often spoke the same language or fairly similar languages. You know the runes with which we write?" Dag continued, trying to make his story as interactive as possible.

Egill and Dargeon remained silent, arms crossed, slightly embarra.s.sed not to be aware of that information, while Reidar and Gridd nodded their heads.

"Well, ours is just one of the languages that were spoken thousands of years ago on Earth! There were more than 6000!" After the Sun exploded, the Xis arrived, preventing humans from permanently extinguis.h.i.+ng themselves and completely dismembering this system, with which we had lived since antiquity, h.o.m.ologating to each other and entrusting the newborns with an identification code. Mine, for example, is 813666".

"Then the arrival of the Xis was fortunate! Without them, we would have been hopeless!" Freydis exclaimed, confused by that statement.

"No, it's not like that. In addition to dividing us, exterminating all male human beings and enslaving women, the Xis also imposed their supremacy on the divine kingdoms, forcing the G.o.ds to kneel at their feet! I just know the story of Asgard, but only thanks to the tales of Weland, who after escaping death, deemed us worthy of knowing the truth!" 

Dag's listeners were speechless.

"The Xis themselves divided the ancient religions of the Earth into six Pantheons, creating a planet for each of them and exiled its G.o.ds to it. Ours is called 'Norse Pantheon' and is composed of Asgard and all the other 8 kingdoms connected by the Yggdrasill, the tree of life. Like Odin, Thor, Freya, and all the others, the other Pantheons' G.o.ds have been exiled from their home planet, Earth, with no choice" Dag concluded, trying to enclose so much information in a nutsh.e.l.l, accessible to everyone.

"All this... it's horrible..." Freydis answered, trying to imagine the protagonists of Dag's story, through which she had discovered that there were dozens more, perhaps hundreds of G.o.ds.

"Why didn't anyone told us all this before you, Dag?" Egill asked, after remaining silent throughout the speech.

"Because no one has ever known the whole truth about the G.o.ds! Moreover, the Earthlings do nothing but be afraid of the Xis and their unknown powers and prefer to live their lives pretending not to know what was taken from them!" 

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