A light shined on Danna. It felt warm and comforting, but also powerful. Her mind felt more clear than it had any time in the past year, but somehow her memories still felt more distant. She pondered that, but her feelings of regret about how she’d handled both Richard and Noah made that too painful even with the strange distance.
The warm light continued to bathe her, but a strange truth occurred to her. I am the light. She wondered how she could be light and how she could know such a thing so concretely. It wasn’t just a truth, but an actual Truth, some core concept of the world. Danna let the light ripple through her as she manifested control over it.
No longer content to be a simple sunbeam, she pushed and the light bent to her will forming her body as she remembered it. Opening her eyes, her surroundings appeared to be a giant cavern that was bigger than a football stadium. What caught her attention though was the humanoid in front of her. The creature had rich scarlet scales that could be seen over its face and peeked out over the very expensive robes that he seemed to be wearing. His head was also completely scaled and his face had a slight snout that protruded from his face. He smirked.
“Welcome to Godhood,” he said, his voice rumbled. It was a deep baritone that sounded like two boulders being scraped against each other. It was a harsh tone and yet somehow not unfriendly.
“Godhood?” Danna asked, finding her voice. Following his smirk, she looked down at herself and realized that she was naked. With a mental nudge, the light that made up her body shifted, forming a forest green evening gown.
“You’re talented. That’s good,” he said. “New Divinities need all the advantages that they can get.”
“Godhood? Divinities? I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.” Danna said, her eyes drifting back to the cavern. Where was she? Why wasn’t she more concerned?
“I'm here to greet you, not guide you. Look inside yourself and you'll see the Boundless Truth within."
Irritated, she swallowed a retort that jumped to her tongue. She hated when people refused to explain things or acted superior as they did, but he actually hadn't been rude. Instead, she took a deep breath and calmed herself. It was easy. Much easier than it had ever been for her. Was it because she was made of light now?
Touching on the light of her being, the Truth she'd felt before deepened. It opened up her mind to the underlying system that ran all of existence. It linked every universe and galaxy and dimension all unified through the both the system and the Truth. That Truth was both specific and nebulous. Grand and minor. It was both everything and nothing and yet still all encompassing.
It was difficult for her to understand it all even in her new divine state. It felt like picking at threads and trying to understand a larger pattern. As a Goddess, she could understand that there was a larger pattern. Mortals wouldn’t even be able to comprehend that. What she did understand was her new role in the world.
Gods and Goddesses were conduits or transformers. Taking mental energy as belief and using it to power the underlying system. This all happened automatically by them simply existing, but the more followers a Divine being had, the more control they had over how their energy was used. That all came with a simple plucking of the thread of Truth. What she didn’t understand was how she came to be. Perhaps that specific truth was out there, but she couldn’t grasp it.
However, she did have someone to ask. “I see,” she said, “that explains quite a bit. Do you happen to know how I came to exist like this? I distinctly remember living a mortal life before.”
“A mortal? Interesting,” the unknown draconic God said. He closed his eyes and she could tell that he was tapping into the Truth as she had, but it seemed that he either had a greater skill or more power because he seemed to find what she could not shortly. “Very interesting. Well, there are generally two ways that a Divine being comes to be. The first is that a mortal ascends. They simply increase in power until they step beyond the Reflection into true Godhood. Power isn’t the only criteria obviously, but it’s important. The second is when enough people believe in a concept, that belief creates a new Divinity.”
“I don’t recall being powerful enough or worshipped enough to have ascended. Actually at the end there, I was kind of a wreck.”
“Yes, well, there is a third way. Basically, a mortal gets deified by other mortals mixing with some sort of concept which has them ascend. It’s very rare as either other mortals know you too well, they don’t know you at all, or they simply don’t associate you with any concept. The only way for that to happen is to have a True Believer.”
“And I have one of these?”
He gestured towards her with a hand that looked remarkably human despite the scales. “You tell me.”
Realizing that she had to have some connection to them since she was their Divinity, she dove back into the Truth. The various threads within it hummed to her now, hinting at the grander pattern, but she returned to the source of her knowledge on what she was and followed a single line that seemed to be her only source of power.
A scene of an otter with too-big feet and a strange network of scars surrounding much of his body lay unconscious on the ground. Daylight drifted across his face as the light shifted away from it much as a passing cloud might do. A battle raged nearby as a dragonfly fought a goblin that appeared to be after the otter. What had happened that caused the otter to become so injured? How had he even known who she was?
Time was wobbly in the Reflection, but as soon as she wondered, she knew. The scene flew backwards following the dragonfly carrying the otter across a large field. Their journey having originated from a forest that was steeped in a type of divine energy. The otter was chased by ghasts and ultimately fought off a fighting drake, but in the middle of that fight, she saw his ascension or rather her own ascension.
That was the point where he’d changed from a simple believer to a True Believer. Her soul had been snatched from wherever it had been and transformed through his belief in her. A belief that came from what he thought were visions, but that she knew were actually memories from a former life before he’d been reincarnated as a monster. There had only been two people in that vision where she’d encouraged the love of her life.
She placed a hand to her mouth and even in her more centered state, relief misted her eyes. “It’s Richard…"