If I Were A Creator

The city of Atrahasis has never been more prosperous.

Tilled lands and gardens of green surround the city for a mile, with adobe houses erected in concentrated areas. More adobe houses were present, surrounding the fields. These houses are barracks for the city's defenders and their family.

A mile beyond the end of the fields, a 20 foot tall wall of clay and sand surrounds it all, acting as the outermost protection of this ancient city.

Athanasius' home has been transformed into a grand temple of sandstone, great obelisks and intricate carvings on the walls decorated the shrine. Idols of Athanasius flanked the entrance, hundreds of prayer pots set before these idols with incense burning within them. Many believers crowded the shrine, praying and singing praises to the nazar.

Athanasius had left 3 summers past, his leave causing great grief and the lamentations of this city's inhabitants for the guardian has departed to the heavenly land. His prophet revealed the war of gods that he must attend, a war that decides the fate of the world. He, along with the patron gods of other cities unite to stop the fallen gods who plan on swallowing the world and extinguishing mankind.

On a secret meeting, Akka was told by her master that the city must become stronger in order to prepare for the coming war. If the Bahith are victorious, it is up to her to stop them before man would be destroyed by them. As a failsafe, the nazar taught her the foundations of magic and many books that could help her reach nazar-killing powers.

Hopefully, she could raise the city of Atrahasis into a great city of mages who could ward or even kill the bahith faction's invasions. Her eyes widened at the mention of god killing abilities and she asked him, with worry, "Are you sure of this, wouldn't man grow to arrogant with this power?"

Akka couldn't fathom what her master was thinking, this power could spell as much disaster as the bahith faction's invasion. What if evil men had that power, wouldn't it destroy the world?

Akka was sure that there are more evil than good in this world, for if more good existed, this city would surely be better. The priests would not cheat, instead rely for funding from the generous donations of the happy populace. Women would be free, allowed to serve as anything they willed, not trapped as a home slave.

Though the general had been nice to her since their marriage a month ago, she could not help but fear. Fear that this facade of kindness is what made women accept this fate out of hope that the kind, loving husband would one day return. Or am I overthinking this and the only reason is for them to gain food and a roof atop their head.

Athanasius had always said that I was ahead of my time, but I couldn't understand what he meant by that. It seemed so natural that this is what I thought, after all, my parents treated me that way till I was ten, when my parents disappeared after I went through an alleyway.

Anyways, I followed his instructions and learned divine magic. He taught me for a month before leaving, in which I organized a grand ceremony in his honor. In my speech, I told them about the war of gods and our role in it, which is to aid.

I revealed to them the power of magic by splitting the clouds with a large gust of wind. They marveled at the sight and many shouted, "The power of Gods!", "The Nazar have bestowed us power!", "Hail Lord Athanasius, the eternal lord of Atrahasis!"

If the nazar were dead set at their elimination, even this magic will not save them, only delay the inevitable.

So, I taught them magic while studying them on my own. I learned from a book about the power of magic that identifies six elements, fire, water, wind, earth, light and darkness, all elements that make up this world. I decided to give no special treatment, for I learned them all.

First, I learned fire. Fire was quite a lesson since I had to use some rage or anger to better control it. Athanasius said that to conjure fire, you must imagine a cloud of fiery rage that burns the air around it like the searing wrath of a furious man.

My first attempt ended in an explosion, a loud burst of air that blackened the wall and caused Athanasius to sneeze. Hey, at least something came up and it was only a day's effort. The future mages had it harder, it took them a week before summoning anything.

It took me a month and a whole room of charred walls and ash in order to finally summon a lasting flame. I succeeded after I understood more of Athanasius' words before his leave. When he spoke about a cloud of fiery rage, I imagined it as an erupting force, not as a lasting wisp.

I forgot that it stayed hot and bright, not only explosive and deadly. It should stay, burning things gradually instead of bursting and destroying everything on sight. It should be warm and bright, hot when things come close enough and destructive to all it touches.

With this, I conjured a simple red flame, one that hovers on my hand and brightens the dark practice room. At my success, I tried moving it around, focusing my will on moving the whole flame around. At this, the flame burns brighter and larger, with every stroke of movement, the flame doubles in size and heat till it scorched the roof and I stopped it.

The use of mana did not exhaust me but the room was boiling because of that big flame and I resolved to find why. I developed a training method for the future mages and for me. Future fire mages will learn to light ten candles spaced a few inches between in order and by generating the least amount of flames in doing so.

Also, the caster may not move in order to improve one's perception of space. Akka diligently trained her flame magic with this method and achieved breakthrough in three months. Now, she could consciously control a head sized fireball and throw fireballs accurately from 50m away.

Though she made a significant breakthrough, she did not rejoice, she will need to be much stronger if she wanted to repel the evil nazar. So, she trained harder in the art of fire with even more training methods, designed to help her rival Ishim's power. Stronger processing, faster thoughts, mental coherence and greater will, these are the aims of her training.

But alas, her will outweighs her talent and even a year of effort cannot mend that. Her fire abilities would be considered at the apex for humans at that time, even for the servant of gods who decided to dabble in some magic. Her strongest ability is to summon waves of fire that can travel for 50m before disappearing.

The flames would scorch the ground they passed on and char all of its enemies to disfigured corpses. If she appeared in earth's ancient times, it would be awkward if she was not worshipped as a fire goddess or a fire angel. Especially with her meteor attack, where she summons a shrine sized fireball from the parted sky.

Despite this power, she knew that it wasn't enough and without breakthrough, she shifted her sights to learning water magic. Her progress in water magic was more or less the same, but learning and training was much easier. Water in its own is something that flows in one direction and possesses great resistance to an opposing force.

With this in mind, visualizing water was easy, but commanding it was not. If you visualize water moving upwards, there will be resistance in the actual motion due to gravity and the action is delayed until more water pushes upwards. Mana distorts by summoning energy and mass but it cannot negate forces unless one visualizes a countering force.

Since physics do not exist in this era, let alone the simple concept of gravity, water magic will be severely limited in the motion department. Knowledge is power, this is the one rule of magic.

In the first week, Akka had learned to throw jets of water, not much to seriously injure but enough to push a group of charging men. She imagined the weight of the water crashing on her targets and used the unknown force to strengthen its effect. Water was quite easy to imagine, just form, direction and weight, unlike fire's heat, light and form.

She simply needed to envision a flow, a heavy flow slithering in one direction. Bending water was the hard part, but its creation was relatively simple and leads to its simplicity compared to other elements. Because of it, many disciples chose the path of water due to its apparent simplicity.

Creating directional waves and bolts were not a challenge, many could learn to summon these within a month's training. Akka stopped her water training after three months because her water magic rivaled the effects of her fire magic already. Making large waves are not too much trouble, especially if she was already near a source of it.

Wind magic was quite abstract, as wind itself was tangible but invisible. It was hard to visualize an intangible force and because of that, directional wind was hard to produce and Akka took a few years before she could do anything else than super jumps and slow falling. So, she only learned to properly control wind at the age of 28.

By then, her marriage had reached 6 years and it was still smooth sailing. From the outside, she looked completely carefree and happy, but she still kept her guard and prepared herself for any terrible situations. She prepared herself for her husband's older days when he would lose his coherence and control, where he could no longer withstand the temptations of harlots.

After mastering wind, she ventured into earth magic, which was similarly difficult as wind magic. Earth magic required her to define a piece of earth to summon and control. Adding by the lack of anything close to physics in this era, she could only send tremors and earth spikes.

Bending earth had its difficulty amplified due to the high memory requirement. If one forgets which section to control, it could cause the construct to become defect or collapse. It requires perfect or at least near perfect visualization for an earth construct or spell to be effective enough.

Guard captains mainly learned earth magic, incorporating it to their routine as a crowd control ability for making their targets collapse or attracting attention. Some of them quickly understood how to draw mana, but they had much issues in controlling the direction of their quakes. For the first several months, the quakes caused the captains to lose balance and fall, leading Akka to tell them to be more careful and alert over hundreds of times.

But alas, men overestimated themselves and Akka had to use some wind magic to lighten the fall to reduce her chores of wiping blood from the temple training grounds. One captain, reckless he was, summoned a strong quake and caused him to trip down a short flight of stairs head first. A statue was about to fall on him but Akka managed to stop the statue from falling with a strong gust of wind and a quick thinking student came and saved him from falling.

The captain found himself forever indebted to a young prodigy, his name was Saqan if I'm not wrong. Saqan had an affinity to earth magic and despite my three year experience in Earth magic, Saqan could rival me in both knowledge and action in a mere few months. They've even given him the title of Earth Prophet because of this.

Saqan was the reason why the walls could be so large and sturdy, giving the city an extra three kilometers of space. His extensive knowledge and earth magic, added by his water magic wielding brother led to the creation of massive fertile plains to grow food and incense. Now, we grew into the largest incense source for the world and a self sufficient city that could handle an additional ten thousand into our walls.

His earth magic also aided in the city's building and he planned many long term projects to further enlarge the city. Of course, as his mentor, I aided him in this endeavor and in a year, we will see our works bear fruit.

Now, I am 32 years old, married to a 40 year old general and I am unofficially the ruler of Atrahasis, both as the High Priestess of Our Thunderous Lord and as the General's wife who teaches the divine arts and brought a golden age to this city.