Nod was not a creature given to irony. Had he been, he would have appreciated the fact that, for one who needed no help fighting his battles, there was no dearth of people willing to pledge themselves to him. Indeed, for most mortals, the choice between serving the demigod warrior or getting in his way was often no choice at all. So had it been for his people, the Golgoth, at the dawn of time, and so it was now, deep within the Republic. Once he ascended the Spire and breached the lower level of the prison fortress that sat atop the Pit, it was simplicity itself to intimidate more than a few of the guards into forswearing their oaths and bend their knees to him. They were common infantrymen, after all, not the honored Pit Guard. They held no fanatical loyalty to Eyra or the Etruscan Republic. They only wished to live, and at the moment, their best chance of that was in the service of the Great Beast. 

The fortress prison was in chaos. Loyal guardsmen found themselves locked in sudden and brutal battle against Nod's new soldiers, their ranks bolstered by the freed prisoners. Most of these convicts were but rabble: cutthroats and thieves, bandits and blasphemers. Few fighters among them, but their numbers were vast, and their anger a force to be harnessed. The grand melee swelled throughout the keep, and it would only be a matter of time before the outer gates were thrown asunder, and the Children's escape completed.

Nod stalked through the corridors of the prison, a great tapestry draped across his enormous shoulders like a mantle. It was emblazoned with the colors of Etruscia, and it gave Nod pleasure to reduce the symbol of Eyra's dominion into something with which to wipe his arse. Already the wounds he had sustained in the fight against the Pit Guard were stitching themselves shut, though at a much slower rate than he would have liked. 

He growled. Much of his power was gone from him, spread across the vast multitudes of the little squeaking apes that fell like wheat before him. How could the Seer have allowed such ruin to come to the Children? And for what? To protect these weaklings? These frail and rather tasteless mortals, whose brief lives were the very definition of pointlessness and impermanence?

"[i]MadNeSS.[/i]"

And his brethren. It disgusted him to consider himself akin to them. Even as he clawed his way to the surface, even as he turned the prison fortress upside down, he could still feel them down in the Pit, waiting, talking, planning. His hands shook with rage at their impotence, their uncertainty. Even now, after a thousand years of betrayal and imprisonment, they would rather wring their hands and cow their heads and wait for someone else to make the first move. The [i]cowards[/i]. He would have torn into them, all of them, then and there, but there was nothing to be gained. They would only have joined together against him, and even he could not stand against all of his brethren. He would have been destroyed, and his vengeance on Eyra would be delayed by a lengthy reincarnation. 

Let them remain where they were, chained by nothing but their own dithering lack of conviction. It only gave him the time he needed to claim this prison for himself. Once the last of Eyra's loyalists had been gutted and burned, the castle would make a mighty redoubt from which to marshal his strength, a stronghold that would form the seat of his new empire on earth. 

They took away his power. He would take it back, if he had to personally tear every scrap of its essence from the broken body of every man, woman, and mewling child in existence.