Mutation (Seeking Monthly Votes, Subscriptions, and Double Monthly Votes)

Divinity was an exceedingly rigorous power. It was not something one could use casually the moment one obtained it. Every fragment of divinity carried a powerful personal will. For example, seizing divinity was an extremely complicated matter—it was not over simply because the previous owner of the divinity had been killed. The person who acquired it could not control the divinity at all. They had to struggle against the personal will within it until they completely conquered it. Only then would the divinity truly have a new owner.

Otherwise, the will within the divinity could strike back at any time. When that happened, the slain original owner might even be able to resurrect through those hidden remnants of will!

Back then, the God of Tyranny and Strife, the Dark Tyrant—Bane—had resurrected from his divine offspring using precisely this method. In fact, many gods knew this trick. For instance, the Goddess of Magic had resurrected from the mortal female mage Midnight through the consciousness within her divinity. However, that goddess had some decency. She had not completely destroyed Midnight's will, but instead merged with that mortal mage. Thus, the current Goddess of the Weave could also be called Midnight.

There had been successes, but there had also been failures—and quite a few of them. The God of Murder, Bhaal, was one such failure. After foreseeing his own demise, he began spreading his seed throughout the Material Plane, leaving behind over a thousand descendants among every race. Dragons, humans, elves, dwarves, gnolls, lizardfolk, orcs, giants, centaurs, and more—so long as it was a race in Faerûn capable of bearing children, he had slept with it.

No one knew where he got such an appetite. Intelligent creatures were one thing, but he had even laid hands on races classified as monsters, like ogres,