Unintended consequences, those two words could just about sum up my entire life in this world. Because I wanted to better the lives of my people I ended up creating tools that attracted the attention of other gods. Because I wanted to avoid war I convinced my mother to talk with her sibling gods instead of preparing for war. Because I wanted to meet the gods’ demands and keep our home island peaceful I destroyed all of my creations. Because all of my creations were gone unrest spread among the people and divided us in civil war. Because of the disunity among us it was easy for invaders from the continent to conquer our island home. Because the invaders conquered us the people were forced to abandon their worship of my mother. Because mom had lost most of her worshipers she was weakened and the sibling gods of her pantheon chose to slay her.
It’s said that the path to hell is paved in good intentions, that saying proved to be more true than I ever could’ve imagined.
Because I saw my world ending around me I became angry, because I was angry I decided to do things that made me into a monster. I used my talents to kill and terrorize. I waged a war of extermination against the gods themselves, and I didn’t care what would have to be sacrificed to accomplish my goals. Magical plagues, monster factories, rift gates into realms unknown, deals with foreign deities, and even massive death rituals. Nothing was beneath me. I was fighting a war against a vastly superior foe so I did everything I could imagine to both hurt and weaken them, no matter the cost that had to be payed.
For a time it looked like I would win my war with the gods of the world, I had made allies that shared my goals and created spells and tools that could scare even immortals. Gods died and the world itself trembled as a direct result of my actions, it felt like I was unstoppable and nothing could keep me from my goal but time.
Then a new god of magic was born who directly usurped my mother’s authorities and aspects. This newborn god was a direct counter to me, and merely by existing he limited my abilities severely. No longer was magic a discipline that I could command at a whim, with a god of magic opposing me I had to struggle to even generate mana and gathering the ambient mana of the world to support me became an impossible task. Still I fought on, and with limited mana to back up my actions my work began to become more subtle. No longer were sweeping plagues, rifts in the world, and endless waves of twisted monstrosities my signature moves. Instead I focused on corruption, curses, and antimagic. I turned my enemies against each other and let their own might be their downfall, enticed and controlled pawns that could serve my cause, and learned the ways to break down and counter magic at a foundational level.
Though my rampage was slowed it was far from over, at least until the gods themselves decided to descend onto the world. That changed things and effectively ended my century long war in only a single year. No longer were avatars and decedents the powerhouses behind my enemies, now it was the actual gods themselves that would step onto battlefields to turn the tides.
There isn’t much a mere mortal can do against a descended god except die. My forces died in droves. Beings I considered to be close friends died for a war I started out of anger and pain. I lost so much in that year, everything I had built was torn down under the sheer undeniable powers of the descended gods.
There is a fundamental difference between mana and divinity, and typically it is impossible for the former to overcome the latter. Yet it wasn’t totally impossible to do so, something I personally proved when the new god of magic and youth tracked me down.
My victory was truly a miracle of luck. If the god wasn’t so very young, if he wasn’t a god whose aspects and authorities were usurped from my mother, if I hadn’t spent so long researching and perfecting antimagic, if he hadn’t been so arrogant and simply finished me off immediately… I won by a fluke of luck and by cheating shamelessly, but the end result was impressive enough that it made up for all that. I killed a god.
Unfortunately my victory cost me, no longer was I viewed as a dangerous nuisance by the other gods. In their eyes I had evolved from a poisonous thorn in there side into an actual credible threat to their existences. They came for me, hunted me across the world. There was no distracting them from their hunt for me anymore, no threat big enough that they would stop hunting me to deal with. The ruling pantheon of the world wanted me dead more than they cared about their worshipers and nations.
I ran and I hid. I acted like the hunted animal I was, and all the while I looked for a way to escape the attention of my enemies. Eventually I stumbled onto a way to survive, but I couldn’t do it on my own. I reached out to my most trusted ally and one of my last living friends and I asked him for a favor that I knew full well would kill him. He accepted.
He disguised himself as me, a disguise so total that it even encompassed the outer layer of his soul. While he ran from my hunters in my place I devoted myself to working, I created a tool that I could seal myself away in until my actions and the gods I fought against were nothing more than an ancient and distant memory in the minds of the immortals. I called it the crystal coffin, and it was one of my greatest masterpieces.
So now I sleep, and as the coffin draws in mana and rewrites my very being with the power it takes in I dream of the past. The past choices and mistakes that have brought me here.
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*
It was a dream of the distant past, before I was brought to this world and given another chance at life.
I was helpless, the accident had done something to my spine that made my entire body numb and unresponsive. The doctors said that in time I could have basic feeling in my upper extremities and torso, but moving would always be a struggle for me. Anything below the waist was a lost cause though, I would never walk again.
The news didn’t really affect me, I was sort of emotionally disconnected from everything. Ever since that nurse came to inform me that my mother had a fatal complication during surgery and had passed away everything has just felt sort of… unimportant. So I wasn’t going to walk again, so what? Mom and dad couldn’t ever walk again either, I was still alive so what did I have to complain about?
I just blankly stared at the muted green wall with the picture of a boat on a calm sea and thought about how fucked up my life had become because some asshole frat bro thought that he was sober enough to drive despite the icy roads. Things weren’t supposed to be like this, I was a good kid so things like this weren’t supposed to happen to me. I did alright in school, I avoided drugs and alcohol like I was supposed to, I wasn’t in a gang, and I was looking into the colleges that I wanted to attend in my freshmen year. I was a good kid, so why was I here laying in a hospital bed unable to feel my fingers and toes while some idiot dropout gets to go off and get high as a kite without a single worry.
Life wasn’t far, it’s something people say all the time. I now know that this saying is bullshit, life wasn’t just ‘not fair’ life was cruel. Bad things just happened and sometimes there was just nothing anyone could do about it. Life was a cruel and random thing. I got dealt a bad hand this turn while idiot dropout gets a pass. It was that simple. If I believed in god then I would blame him, but since I don’t I can only blame my own shitty luck. Random chance picked me to suffer today, so suffering is what I got.
As my thoughts were beginning to turn dark and I was wondering if I could convince a nurse to overdose me on morphine I heard someone.
“Lux Alexander King, you are alone in this world with a crippled body and a despairing soul. You have no attachments and no hope. I would like to ask something of you…”
I struggled to move my head to the left and through the pain and watering eyes I saw a girl who looked so out of place a part of me wanted to laugh. She looked about my age, or maybe a year or two younger, with short silvery hair and purple eyes. She was also wearing what looked like a toga and those sandals that had straps going all the way up the leg. She was cute bordering on beautiful, but exuded a sort of charming innocence that made it hard to think of her in any sort of sexual way. She was also smiling sadly at me.
“You see, I would very much like a child to call my own but because of who I am and what I embody I am unable to conceive one normally. For a number of reasons the simplest and most realistic way I am able to have a child is through abducting a person from a reality that is separate from my own. Which leads me to you.”
I simply blinked and wondered if I was hallucinating now, it would just be another problem to add to my growing list. People always said that suicide was a horrible and selfish act because of how it hurts those you leave behind, but if you don’t have anyone to miss you is it really that bad? Sure it would still be selfish to take your own life, but what if the alternative is a ruined lifetime of pain, paralysis, and loneliness?
“I can’t read your mind Lux Alexander King, I need you to talk to me.”
Weird that a hallucination can’t tell what I’m thinking if it is just a product of my mind in the first place. Maybe reading all those isekai novels really did warp my mind if my hallucination is talking about sending me to a different reality, guess dad was right about that one.
“Why?”
My voice came out hoarse and it hurt to speak, but I decided to humor my hallucination anyway. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do than talk to myself.
“Why what? Why do I want a child? That’s simply because I would like to experience motherhood and produce progeny. Why you? That’s because I would like my child to love me, and if I simply abducted a person they would resent me instead. You have no attachments to this world and your soul screams out its misery loud enough that I could hear it from the Beyond. You would welcome a new life away from the world that hurt you, and your gratitude to me could easily turn to love. That is why I picked you out of the thousands who at this very moment long to experience a new world from the depths of their souls.”
It seemed reasonable enough to me, though I guess it would have to since this is my own hallucination. I choked out an answer and wondered at why my throat felt so dry despite my having drunk an entire cup of water what felt like only ten minutes ago.
“Ok.”
The girl smiled and clasped her hands together before rocking back and forth.
“Wonderful! Now this might be a little painful, I don’t know for sure because this is my first time attempting something like this, but everything should work out. I’d explain the fine details of the process, but I don’t think you’d understand it as a lot of it is instinctual and what isn’t is such advanced magic theory that it would confuse you even if this reality had magic. I think the simplest way to describe it is that I’m going to recycle you, body and soul.”
The girl seemed so excited that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I hadn’t actually accepted her call to otherworldly adventure, I had just been acknowledging that I heard her. Plus talking hurt and it was something I was trying to keep to a minimum right now.
“Now things will be confusing to you for a while, but don’t worry! I’ll explain things for you and raise you up so that you won’t have any problem adjusting to the world like any other child would. Oh, but I should probably remove your memories of your original parents so that those feelings don’t get in the way. Actually no, I think I’ll just remove the emotions from all your memories of this world. That way you’ll still have all the knowledge you gained from your life here, but it won’t feel like it was really you who lived it. It’ll be like a story you remember reading about but not something you remember experiencing yourself. Oh, and I should…”
As I watched the girl carry on by herself I felt my eyes begin to get heavy. As I closed my eyes I heard the girl speak one last time.
“I guess I should introduce myself now, huh? Hello Lux Alexander King, my name is $%^%*& and from now on I’ll be your mother…”