by entropy-reducing reagent
Jane Doe believes in the gods.She just never expected the gods to give a damn about her. Her father died building a temple altar. Found with stale black bread in his pocket—saved from his own rations to bring home.The priests called it theft. For one silver coin, they said, his soul could still enter the sanctuary.Jane didn’t have the coin. Her mother had lung rot. The silver bought medicine instead.By winter, her mother was dead too. That was life. She didn’t rage at the gods. She spat at the priests, then went back to the fields. Then the knights came.They took her harvest, her seed grain, her only goat—all for a crusade against the Demon Realm.Jane cursed them under her breath and handed over the key to the cellar. What else could she do? On the night the crusade left, the world split open.A golden light. A crushing force. Then black rain falling from a black sky.A frozen pillar of colored slime dripped from heaven to earth like molten glass. She woke in the Demon Realm and saw bodies of huge cockroaches on the ground.
