Chapter 5
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The Day Death Didn’t Work
I awoke, for the third time, figuratively blinking away the memories of past lives as a bookkeeper, a baker, and a spit-taker. All of them ended the same, being consumed by the void. I shook my lack of a head to dismiss the phantom memories and turned my metaphorical attention back to the planet I had been creating, the one with a blue sun. Yet again, there were questions:
Q.) How long was I asleep?
A.) Two thousand and twenty four years, based on the calendar of Gaius - the name the people gave to the planet I created as both a memorial and a test.
Q.) Why such a short sleep? The last time felt far longer.
A.) There were enough mortals praying to my gods, and their subsequent lesser gods and demigods, that the Divine Essence I syphoned off filled me up much faster than simply sleeping.
Q.) How many mortals are there on this planet they named Gaius?
A.) 432,709,244 total sentient lifeforms spread across the planet. Most of them are humans and khati as the elves and dwarfs are far slower about these things and it is rare for an elemental to live long enough and gain enough experience to become sentient.
Q.) What happened in regards to this planet whilst I have been sleeping?
A.) This time I didn’t answer myself with words but with images. I saw what could be done when my godlings worked together, the introduction of an ecosystem to the entire planet - something I’d admittedly forgotten to do. I also saw the destruction they could wrought when they fought. The island I had created as a place for them to meet and confer was destroyed and all that remained was The Mountain the people subsequently named The Pillar of Heaven.
Speaking of the peoples of this planet, they were completely separated by race. There were the occasional trade missions between some of the more amorous peoples but given the colossal size of this planet those were few and far between.
The most successful merchants prayed heavily to Vasti in hopes of being blessed by The Goddess of Space and being able to teleport the vast distances between the continents, making tidy profits. Teleportation was otherwise possible by means of powerful magics but anyone with that level of ability wouldn’t need what relatively little wealth it could provide when compared to other endeavours.
Life had flourished on all five of the continents and had barely been scratched by the growth of these cities and kingdoms; most just clung to the coasts and very few ever ventured in land.
A plethora of scenes of political intrigue, backstabbing, alliances, and revenge flooded my mind as I thought about what exactly the five peoples had been up to, so I stopped dwelling on it.
Q.) Can I just have the latest headlines?
A.) Yes:
* Lady Shavari has had six perfectly healthy kittens at the ripe old age of thirty and now the Dro’Zira line is secure.
* Ten die and seventeen more missing after a flood in the continent of Homos (named after the god) takes a whole village by surprise.
* Dem, the god of death, has been captured and for the past day has not been able to perform his duties, making everyone invulnerable.
* The Elf elder, Malcrow, has become the first elf to immigrate away from their home forest and has set up a bakery in the human port city of Tarmouth.
Q.) Wait, what was that?
A.) Elfar Malcrow has, at the age of two thousand and twenty four, become the first Elf ever to choose to reside outside of the Visok archipelago only made possible now that the god of elves has slackened his control over his people and focused more on becoming the forest. Mr Malcrow was, in fact, one of the first people ever created on this planet and, although those created directly by the gods were stronger, faster, healthier, and more likely to have a talent for magic there are only seven that still live in the current year.
Q.) You know that wasn’t what I was questioning, of course you do, you’re me. Why would I be so willfully obstinate?
A.) I–
Q.) That was a rhetorical question. I do this questioning thing because I prefer the idea of asking questions to just knowing everything, having the information streamed into my nonexistent brain… Or do I just prefer it because the human minds whose wills created me would have preferred it… Or would it have been the preference of that one figure who was at the centre of who I was?
A.) …
Q.) This attitude I am developing reminds me of a cat, perhaps I would do better to ask a feline than myself.
And then I thought: why not?
Next to me, in the great vastness of space, far above the planet that had named itself Gaius, there popped into existence a silky black cat. Unlike with the gods, where I separated a piece of myself, this was just a vessel that the part of me I wanted to ask questions could inhabit but our thoughts would still be shared.
I looked into the cat’s green eyes that seemed to know everything, which they did. I saw the cat from every angle simultaneously; both inside and out. I looked out of its eyes at the empty space he saw, since my main body was everything.
It was rather odd, so I stopped paying attention to that part of my mind, just as I did most of the rest of it. Now I could have a conversation with myself without feeling quite so crazy. It was akin to talking to a sock puppet rather than speaking to oneself in a completely empty room. One is a perfectly normal thing to do whilst the other is quite mad.
I made noise appear near the cat so I could ask my question:
“Now, what was this about the god of death being captured? By whom? Why? What for?”
The cat hissed and pranced back through empty space, getting away from the voice that had been placed right next to its ear before speaking in the language of cats:
“I don’t feel like answering. I think I should have a nap.” And with that the cat that was me breathed out a cloud of perpetually burning flame, circled around it twice, then curled up, shut his eyes, and began purring.
Mayhaps I had made him too much like a cat. It was no matter, I knew everything he did. I knew who had done this and why and, to be honest with myself, I thought it best for the integrity of the test if the native gods dealt with this problem on their own.
That said, I couldn’t just let things stand as they were. People not dying - it could mess up the cycle of reincarnation. Although I had given up the power of death over the five races I still possessed a greater power over death. I would have to fill in until the gods freed their peer.
✯
Not wasting any time, I formed for myself another body. This one was tall, around seven feet in height, and had no flesh. The white skeleton was topped by a human sized raven’s skull that moved and contorted as if it were still alive. A black mist started oozing out of the marrow of the figure's bones and congealed into a thick cloak that covered him from head to toe.
This body was an exact replica of Dem and even possessed the same powers and abilities he did but to a far greater extent. If he were to let his powers rage out of control it might kill anything within a hundred miles of him. If I lost command of this deadly vessel… well suffice to say that a planet, even one as large as this, is but a grain of sand on the beach when the tide comes in.
I instantly examined everything Dem did in the last two thousand years and felt more than ready to step into his shoes. So, I did. Contorting my perception, I squeezed my consciousness into the replica, took my first step… and wobbled before drifting out into space.
Perhaps I should have tried to walk on land before I tried it out in the emptiness. With a thought, I was laying on the ground rather than flailing around in space. It took an embarrassingly long time thrashing about on one of the grassy hills of the continent of Homos before I was able to stand let alone perambulate. Seeing everything from above was far easier than actually doing. Fractly, I was surprised at how difficult the mere act of walking was.
More than an hour was spent taking tiny shuffling steps before I felt confident enough to get on with the work I had tasked myself with.
“Hmm, how was it that Dem got where he needed to be?” I asked aloud, finding it more difficult to access all my knowledge while contained in this miniscule vessel.
“He just walks, and ends up where he is needed,” a smooth voice replied, echoing my own thoughts exactly. I jumped slightly upon hearing the sound and ended up flailing about to find its source and once more fell onto the ground, the luscious grass breaking my fall. This resulted in a purring laughter from the mysterious voice who I could now see belonged to the part of myself I had contained within a cat.
“You know, you’re just laughing at yourself?” I grumbled, unamused.
“I can’t help it, it's funny,” the cat chuckled as it turned its wickedly smiling whiskered face down at me where I lay, still in the grass.
I sighed and untangled myself from the intangible cloak I had somehow become caught up in, before pushing myself back to my presently bony feet - while ignoring the part of my mind with paws that paced around me, looking me up and down.
“Say, how come your part of me can walk around just fine but this part of me is struggling so much?” I asked my feline self.
“That’s simple,” I replied from fuzzy lips, as my languid body stretched in the warm sunlight, “I’m a cat.” And then I turned away from myself and started walking with feline grace only to turn back my head and cock it questioningly.
“Yes, I’m coming,” I replied from a boney beak, answering the unasked question. I fumbled my way through the thick green blades grumbling about the need for walking but I knew if I wanted to keep things running smoothly on this planet I would need to do my best to get things to work as usual. Besides, perhaps I might learn something. The thought made me laugh, what could there possibly be for a universe that knows absolutely everything to learn?
My steps became more fluid and more regular as I got the hang of walking, though I still couldn’t compare to the cat, and he knew it too. As the grass lands blurred into forests the cat pranced about between the limbs of trees with a predator's agility, darting back and forth across the path as he chased after rodents and squirrels.
As the cat had said, I just seemed to walk and appear where I needed to be. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with my path, first through grasslands then a short frosted section and now into an elven village and, indeed, if I were mortal I would think nothing of it. But I wasn’t merely mortal, or just a worldly god for that matter. I knew that each of the places that seemed to be right next to each other were, in fact, on different continents.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
I wasn’t teleporting, or using any spatial magics for that matter. I had created this body to imitate Dem exactly and it was using the nature of death to be where it was supposed to be. Death was never late nor early, it was exactly where it needed to be when it needed to be. This level of comprehension over what was such a small aspect of death surprised and impressed me, I had underestimated the gods I had created.
“Looks like an elf shall be the first to be called upon,” the cat remarked after slurping up the tail I had seen between his teeth. I shuddered at the feeling of a mouse travelling down my throat before focusing back on my replica Dem body.
Looking around nervously at the elves going about their lives in the village from the cover of the bushes, I asked my cat self:
“Won’t they see me if I walk in there looking like this?”
The cat scoffed, “Who would want to see death?” I shrugged, stood straight and walked out into the village. Instantly I regretted it when I saw a little elf girl staring at me.
“She’s looking right at me,” I whispered out of the side of my beak.
“Of course she’s not,” the cat chuckled, “She’s looking at me,” he said with pride before walking over to the child and winding between her legs and sure enough she completely ignored me and started petting him.
He let out a meow that I understood to be a self congratulatory, “See.”
I expelled a raven-like caw of exasperation before continuing throughout the village gate unbothered by the guards.
The structure of the villages of the Visok archipelago were much the same. In their centre was a seedling of the great tree which Vicok himself had created in the centre of the capital. The original was an oak, fashioned after the great oak that he had created on that first island and which had been destroyed in the conflict with Helka. The seedlings, however, could be any type of tree and would grow differently based on their surroundings and would grow larger based on the number of elves that lived in the settlement.
Since it was a village I found myself in and it was growing in a birch forest, the central silver birch tree was grown into a space large enough for a village hall. There were other trees which were grown into homes though they were smaller and less grand. The house trees created a ring around the central tree with their entrances facing the centre and thick brambles grown between them to create a fortified location.
The only break in the thorny defences was the gate, whose posts were trees which grew into an arch. There were two guards stationed here though they were lax and people came and left freely. It appeared this was a mostly peaceful and safe village.
My comforting and homely perception of the small collection of trees the elves called a village was swiftly shattered alongside a window on the second story of the village birch hall.
Children who were playing out in the courtyard, this kind of settlement had by design, froze at the sudden sound. I looked over at the source of the disturbance. An adult male elf had been defenestrated and a rather burly looking elf was looking out of the window down upon the figure.
This figure looked far worse for wear than simply being thrown through a second story window could explain. There were a number of burns, cuts and bruises covered by torn and tattered rags. The fallen figure was near death already but when a slender elf came to the window beside the larger one, looked out and saw that the man was still moving, if barely, he screamed something.
The tromp of armoured boots could be heard in response to the lordly looking man’s orders and in short order the door to the village hall was thrown open and three armed and armoured elfs bustled out. The equipment was ill fitting and poorly maintained, the only one who looked somewhat like a proper soldier was the larger man who I knew to be the one to throw the tortured man from the building and the noble elf who wore thickly dyed velvet robes and a sneer that seemed reminiscent of their god.
By this point in time, all the children who had been playing were ushered inside to their tree houses by older folks - the look of fear and resignation, symptoms of people who knew something horrible was about to happen but couldn’t do anything about it. These were the faces of elves stuck under a tyrant's rule. Doors were barred shut and curtains closed as the community turned their back on the man who was soon to die.
While the ruff looking elves surrounded the mostly incapacitated elf their leader approached, staring down at the man with contempt. I walked up next to him and peered down at the dying elf curiously. None present noticed me.
“Was it worth it?” the tyrannical elf asked his downed adversary, “If only you hadn’t tried to escape I might have let that daughter of yours live.”
The injured man's eyes, which had been staring death into his taunter, shifted to uncertainty and he spat out a mouth full of blood before speaking with a mixture of fury and fear:
“You’re lying, your men killed my family. They all burned in that fire.”
“All but one.” The elf responded with poorly disguised glee. “Your daughter, six years old, with brown hair, was found at the site of the burned out farm three days later having survived trapped in the roots.” The man's words were so confident, so certain that the tortured man knew them to be true and horror covered his face.
“No..” he said, in a whisper of a voice, the colour having drained from his ruddy cheeks, “Annabelle?” he questioned, closing his eyes and holding back all but a single tear.
“I had intended to bring her here and kill her in front of you as punishment for your defiance but alas, it doesn't look like you’ll last that long,” he said with genuine lament. The evil lord snapped his fingers before leaning in close to the incapacitated man who looked impossibly lost as he grew weaker and weaker.
“I know, I shall do the opposite. I’ll preserve your body and tell that little girl I am taking her to see her father, only for her to come into town just as your head is struck from your shoulders. That shall be the start of the worst life imaginable and it is all. Your. Fault,” he finished, inches from the other elf man's face with a wide grin plastered across his own.
The plan was so terrible that even one of his own fighters shivered from the description and looked away from the dying elf.
This vile and unnecessary remark caused a change to overcome the injured elf. Where before he seemed depressed and listless now he was full of righteous anger. He struggled to move his arm, his leg, or anything to strike this elf.
The lord was at first stunned by the surge of life but when he saw his prey was unable to move he let out a laugh.
That was all the distraction the dying elf needed. With the last of his strength, he lurched his head up, trying to bite off the head of this defiler. Although that seemed possible to his pain addled and adrenaline filled mind he still only had the mouth of an elf which was nowhere near large enough for such an act. Not that there was no effect. The elf’s sharp teeth bit through the lord’s nose and as he pulled away it was ripped clean off.
“Kill Him!” he screeched to his guards. The sudden violence came as a surprise to the two untrained thugs but the more professional of the three didn’t hesitate.
Although his face remained stony throughout I knew in his heart he hated the man he was forced to serve and now that he had the chance to end the suffering of one of his lord’s victims he saw it as a mercy.
The fine elven blade pierced straight through the dying man's heart. Fury dripped out of the man drop by drop as his blood watered the soil. To the man, time seemed to slow as the life left him until it finally froze and he closed his tear filled eyes.
If I were to do exactly as Dem would have, I’d have stood on the sidelines in this monochrome and still world, where everything is precisely as it was when someone died, until he noticed me. Then there would usually be a moment of shock and panic upon seeing such an unnerving creature as Dem. He would proceed to stand still, say nothing and reach out a hand until they calmed down and took it - or grew tired of running in circles in the timeless bubble that surrounded someone at the moment of death - and then he would escort them to where they needed to be.
I could do that, but I had a better idea. For a couple thousand years, until his capture, Dem had been doing a good job of fulfilling his Purpose - perhaps too good. There were myriad myths about deaths on Gaius, a hundred different ideas about what the god of death was like and even his image was highly disputed. This came about as Dem never appeared to anyone near death and no one ever managed to escape him so there were no first hand accounts of the god - save from very few situations but that person would always die soon after.
He was so good at his job that this planet had never seen undeath - people had tried to raise the dead but Dem was always there stopping the attempt so it was considered an impossible feat. A world without necromancy, to me, seemed incomplete - it lacked balance.
Because of this, I chose to interrupt this elf’s silent sobs.
“I have a proposition for you,” I said in the eerily quiet, yet perfectly audible, voice that belonged to Dem. The words, spoken in the silence of death, were deafening. For a moment nothing happened, then he opened his sorry eyes.
I saw fear in the pale grey depths, swiftly drowned in a sea of sorrow. Defeated, he turned his weary eyes on me and asked in a voice hoarse from crying:
“What?”
I was about to reply but he cut me off, “Just be gone, or take me to Uffern or whatever it is you are here to do just do it then leave me to my misery,” he sobbed.
I decided not to beat around the bush, he was in no state for conversation.
“I offer justice,” I explained. This caught his attention. The elf jumped to his feet, not even noticing that he leapt right out of his physical form and stood as a grey and hollow spirit that held a finger out towards me accusingly.
“You lie. What are you, a demon? Some foul creature here to steal my soul?”
“Would it matter if I were?” I asked.
A silence followed, in which I saw whatever argument he had formed collapsed under the weight of that simple question.
He shrank back, his eyes wild and his state manic. I could see into his mind. It truly didn’t matter to him if I were the devil himself. He hated the revelation, he had always thought himself a good and honest elf, yet, he would sell his soul for the slimmest chance that Annabell might be spared.
“No,” he finally answered meekly through shivering grey lips.
“Are you prepared to defy death to do what must be done?” I asked with ceremonial gravitas.
“I am,” he replied with some steel returning to him.
“Are you willing to give up all that makes you an elf?”
“I am,” he affirmed even more strongly.
“Will you consign yourself to an eternal and torturous existence, cursed to walk the planes for all time and never die? To be the antithesis of death, the bringer of unlife, and scourge to all that lives and dies in the natural cycle?”
This time there was a moment’s hesitation but the thought of his little girl, playing in the orchids. The image of him lifting her to pick her first apple. How happy she had been in the cold winter nights sitting on her mother’s lap by the fire, watching the flames dance. The look of terror on her face when the ball of fire smashed through the window. All of it flashed through his mind in a second and hardened his resolve.
“I am!” he replied with no doubt.
I took a step forward and layed a bony hand on each of his shoulders and lined my eye holes up with his own. Now that his heart was set he didn’t even flinch.
I spoke in a grand voice that moved the frozen earth with its presence - a voice that contained all that was, and all that ever will be, in its infinite frequencies.
“I name you Ori’Vairion, God of Undeath,” and with my words the world of black and white shattered. The soul of the elf shot back into its ruined body as time resumed.
To the officer who had killed my newest god, no time at all had passed. One moment he was plunging his sword into the heart of yet another of his master’s victims, watching as the life fled from his eyes, the next he was being forced back by the body that was still being stuck through with his weapon. There was a moment of uncomprehending horror on both sides, then, they screamed.
The hardened man’s cry was that of cold, unadulterated fear - his deep voice forced out of him, taking his breath with it, and the professional killer’s composure broke. He was the first and so far only to react, as the corpse slowly rose and pushed the blade out of its chest and shrugged off the attacks the officer was attempting. Punches, dagger strikes, and sword swings had their intended effect but still Ori’Vairion pushed himself to his feet.
The newly minted god was in just as much pain as before his death and that would never change but he could move. Compared to the breathy and panicked shout of the fighter, Ori’Vairion’s screech spoke of pain, loss, regret, and revenge. It stilled everyone for a moment as they were frozen in fear.
The other two fighters had been tending to their leader’s injury but upon hearing a cry that came from beyond death they were stunned and a stain began to form on their trousers. As for the lord of this village, he - surprisingly - didn’t hesitate and fled into the village hall, slamming the door and abandoning his men outside.
Thinking a calm and sunny day wasn’t fit for this occasion, I decided to add a little drama. I summoned thick and heavy storm clouds and scattered them with purple lightning to match the purple glow behind the God of Undeath’s eyes.
Once Ori’Vairion overcame the initial pain and shock of unlife, the goal that had driven him to accept this form reasserted itself and he began a limping march towards the giant birch this village used as its hall; ignoring the hyperventilating attacker as he pushed past.
“Masadir!” Ori’Vairion shouted. Pointing at the tree, he instinctively used one of his powers as all the hundreds of dead insects in the area returned to the mortal world and began eating their way through the door so quickly it appeared to be melting.
The God of Undeath shouldered his way through the remains of the door and pushed further into the living building, screaming in anger the entire time. Seeing this, the three armed men turned and fled, leaving through the open gate.
Smiling at a job well done, I spun on my heel and began walking away, whistling a merry tune accompanied by the sounds of pleas for mercy.
As I was leaving, the cat pranced through one of the tree house walls like a ghost and rubbed himself between my ankles before walking alongside me.
“Weren't you supposed to make sure he was dead?” the cat asked without inflection.
“This was better,” I responded happily.
“Was it?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Well, no, but now there is balance.”
“And there will be a lot more people praying,” the cat commented, knowing my thoughts.
“That too,” I responded unashamedly, “tell me, where were you?” I asked, knowing the answer,
“The children were scared,” he replied simply.”
“Softy,” I accused.
“Balance,” he reminded.
And, walking as companions, me and my cat-self continued on to the next person who was going to die.