It was 3am when I first met the convenience store Gods.

All golden limbs and stained lips under shitty fluorescent, incense trails of smoke above them; a parking lot parody of preachers. Like this 7 Eleven was about to offer a miracle to the desperate and the damned, sacred ground for the unholy.

"Miss, you look like you could use some help."

Then ye will put out your own eye.

"I don't." Snarky, unhelpful, but fuck, what had the Church ever given me anyway? Sins on sins, visited upon the sons of fathers and fathers of sons and so on and so forth until it's a suffocation, not a purification. What can these young Gods offer me, as they drink wine from each other's laughing mouths?

The big one steps out of the halogen, and isn't that symbolic- Lightbringer entering the dark, palm open as an offering. His hair coils tight to his scalp, a cap of serpentine curls that look ready to defend the master they serve. This is a man wearing a crown made of Leviathans without care. This is a young God of flesh, and flesh, and flesh. This is a young God of mountains, of empty space, of vastness.

"Are you sure, ma'am?"

Rumbles like thunder in his chest, drumming down and through the ground, invading my body like a war cry across aeons. Maybe this 7 Eleven would become a battleground, instead.

"More than sure. Fuck off." Mean, nasty, use that voice that comes from the back of your throat, the one that is hiding a scream. "Move." Wrong one, but hopefully it worked anyway.

The god of quantity blinks, surprise skittering unfettered on his everyoung face. The look back over his shoulder screams unsurity, perplexion; he has not yet learned to hide his underestimation of others. He looks back at the last remains of my self, gaze travelling over the tattered parts of me slowly, noting the paint that peels and the weatherboard that warps in the rain.

Don't look in my eyes, young God of the colossal.

"It's just...my friends over there and I, we hang out here all the time, and we uh...look it's not like we're weird or anything, but we've been watching you, ya know?"

The gods still in their halo of light shift as one. I hate them, suddenly, viciously, righteously. I would smite them down where they stand, hands splayed and eyes hooded.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

My God is a god of wrath and vengeance.

"Don't fucking say that shit to women on their own in the dark. Move, now."

He shifts, moving that mass from foot to foot, like a small child caught in a lie. The army on his head wavers, lifting in a breeze that exists only to them, a pit of wary snakes on alert. I'm staring at them, and it's like looking into the abyss. Heavy brows sit high on his forehead, framing eyes that crinkle at the corner in a way that, in another space, might make an acolyte feel warmth.

Unfortunately, young God of the great, I am no follower, no slavish latherer of affection and tithes, no fighter in the ring for pithy scraps. I am all of the bitterness and tartness, all of the spite and the pettiness, the fire and the brimstone that bled out across those scriptoria floors, illuminated pages torn apart in the middle of the night.

“It’s just, like, you’re always so sad, ya know? I mean, not that you look sad, like, shit, I don’t know- it just feels like you need something.”

You have no idea what I need, you young God of the sweeping plains and distance. You would burn in the fire of piety I was born in, raised in, cherished in; a tornado of ash that would storm your walls and laugh as they fell, a plague of hate and fear and pain that would last a thousand years, and more, your palaces in ruin and your cities razed.

Gomorrah was beautiful, once. Sodom was green.

I am angry, and it is easy to be angrier still at these living gods, these descendants of an Icarus who listened. My eyes roam over the rest of them, over the shoulder of this man with vipers on his head and concern in his mind, from foot to brow and down again, one, two, three, four.

A young God of yellowed pages and dusty shelves, of creaking bones and wasted potential, his scuffed shoes unlaced and tangled- twin to the one next to him, from the soft lines on both of their beings. Then a young God of the spaces between words, the pause from one inhale to the next; a paradox next to his brother, one of the past and one of the future.

Sharp is the third God, of steel and might and thin ribbons of blood; a young God on the edge of the cliff, ready to jump. Exhaustion rolls off of him in waves even from this distance; this is a god who is tired. He leans against a pole, eyes closed, nodding softly to the voice speaking next to him

Speaking is the young God of the rippling stream, of the light dancing at daybreak off the waves, he of the babbling brook and the flash flood, a typhoon inside a pond. He would say he’s part storm chaser, if you asked him.

Part storm chaser, part priest. A desperate handyman in a demolished building, trying to patch walls.

There are five young Gods at the convenience store, standing under a street light. All of them are dangerous, and none of them are. They do not even know they are Gods.

“I need something? Don’t we all, dude. Now can you fucking move?” If you reach out that hand, oh young God of the monstrous, then I shall cut it off.

He surrenders, wounded in a way that reminds me of another wound in another face; the pain that lances through me is swift and hot, an old scab ripped off right at the edge of healing. The skin underneath is not yet pink, not yet shiny, and I am gaped open again, sinew and bone and muscle visible outside the cocoon of my body.

I am stupid. So fucking stupid. I wish I could trap my tongue behind the tower of my teeth.

“Wait. Sorry. I’m, uh, really tired. Thanks, though.”