The moment she entered the divine kingdom and saw this deity, Angel recalled the statue of the Earth Mother that Klein had discovered in the Fourth Epoch Ruins beneath Backlund—the lady holding a baby, whose concrete image had stood in a separate room alongside those of the other five deities, excluding the God of Steam.
Of course, since the beginning of the Fifth Epoch, the gods had fully replaced depictions of their divine bodies with abstract holy emblems. This prevented concrete images from taking root in their believers' minds and exposing them to the negative effects of faith anchors while they received worship. Such images, which resembled humanity's notions of beautiful beings, were no longer circulated.
Instead, temples of the True Creator still have murals vilifying the six deities... I wonder how everyone will get along once the Ancient Sun God returns... Hmm, Storm and Wisdom should already have fallen by then... Angel's thoughts rapidly wandered.
The voluptuous lady before her walked slowly forward, gradually shrinking from a giant-like figure dozens of meters tall to roughly Angel's own height of 1.7 meters. Dark green vines wound around her, accompanied by herbs and flowers of various colors, and several clusters of golden wheat hung from her brown hair. She matched the image in the Earth Mother Holy Book perfectly, but a faint crimson glow enveloped her, like the Crimson Moon in the sky.
Angel understood that this change had appeared after the Earth Mother reclaimed the authority of the Moon, but the glow still gave her an ominous feeling.
Lilith approached her. Without any visible movement on her part, the vines winding across the ground grew on their own, forming two individual seats. Still holding the baby, Lilith sat in an exceedingly ordinary high-backed chair, while a wicker chair resembling an