The Death of Gentle Gods

"I was twelve when I learned why gentle gods must die." These gathered souls draw close, and I see in their eyes how strange my story seems to them. My voice is steady, but inside, I feel the old ache stir. "She was beautiful the way only mortals are. When She was near, the world felt smaller somehow, or perhaps I felt larger within it. When She was near, something in my chest would loosen. I did not know it was tight until it wasn't. Often, I would find myself near Her door without having decided to walk there. I would speak to Her and the words would come differently than they did with others. Others came to Her too. With their grief, their fear, their children's fever. She would listen. And something would pass between them. I could see it in the way the other's shoulders eased, the way they would leave lighter than they arrived. But She never left lighter. She would sit after they had gone with Her hands folded in Her lap and Her face very empty. Over the years She grew ... quieter. Subdued. She would sit at Her window and look at nothing I could see. Sometimes when I spoke to Her, She would not answer for several heartbeats, as if my voice had to travel a great distance to reach Her. She began to forget small things, what day it was. Later She forgot larger things. The names of people She had known all Her life. Once I found Her in the road staring at Her hands as if they belonged to someone else. There was a light to Her, even then. More than before, perhaps, but She became difficult to look at directly. There was something about her that hurt to witness. I stopped going to her door. I told myself it was because She needed rest. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps I simply could not bear to watch her fade. I do not know what She was carrying. When I try to remember her all I can recall is the sense of something precious being worn dead." "In our village, we kept the old ways," I continue. I feel their unease, their hope, their fear. "Before we knew better. We did not see how dangerous such a thing could be. Did not understand the cost. It did not occur to us that a god could be born on accident, that a god could be born on a whim. Or against Her will. Only after did we learn. We learned the weight of it, but by then it was too late." I look at their eyes. They want hope, but I have none to give. I have only truth to preach and for it, I must lie. The words taste like blood. "She tried to stop. To end it. I found Her hanging from a barn beam. Her neck broken. Gasping for breath. We cut Her down. We wept. We begged Her not to leave us. We needed Her, we said. We could not bear a world without Her in it. And so we would not let Her go. We prayed. We brought our sick and our dying and we said, only You, only You can help them. We spoke a name over Her body. And she breathed again." "Names are recognition, and recognition must only flow upward to the heavens. This is how we build gods by means of proper rite, through only the Recognition. Not by accident. Not through a mortal girl almost dying." I sob. "She asked us for so little because she was made of littleness. And in this was her undoing." Understanding swells like a tide and I ride it toward the harsh truth. "The Godfall came the moment we would not let Her die." Some caught breath at that. I can see in their wide, fearful eyes that they know it now. They hold their children tightly. They do not want this tale to be theirs. "I looked back at Her body then. Her eyes were open. She was breathing. We had begged the world for this. We had prayed for this. But there was something in Her face that I have spent years trying to forget. She looked at us as if we were very far away. As if She were so very, very far away. I looked at my hands and could not understand why they were mine. My mother stood beside me and when she touched my arm I felt nothing. As if the space between the warmth of her hand and my skin had grown too wide to cross. The air turned heavy. Each breath required a decision. Each movement felt like pushing through water that was not there. I looked back at Her. She was standing now, though I had not seen Her rise. Her body moved but Her face was very still. She looked at us and I do not think She saw us. Or perhaps She saw too clearly. Saw through us to something else. The grey that had settled over everything began to deepen around Her. To pool at Her feet like nothing I have words for." "She fell to Her knees. Rose again without standing. Fell again without falling. Her body was both and neither. The air began to crack. Fine white lines spreading outward from where She knelt and stood and could do neither. Things stopped making sense. Each thing looked at itself and found no reason to continue being what it was. I looked at Her face and understood. We had made Her continue. Our recognition had bent the world around Her until She became something more than mortal." I laugh, almost, and the sound sends an old man in the back almost sprawling. He clutches at his chest, breathing hard as if dying. As if he had been struck. They cling to these words with everything they have, because it is all they have. "What divinity wills, the world must answer. And our need would not allow it. The same force that had made Her divine pressed against Her will with equal weight. She was divine and commanded cessation. The world commanded Her continuation. Existence, caught between a god's desire and the recognition that had made Her a god, could not reconcile that contradiction." It will happen to them, too. And soon. I wish I could save them. I cannot. They are as helpless as we were. Some of them are certain enough now, knowing enough, that they might grow to hate me for this helplessness. I will take that hate. I will take the blame. I died for this once, and it's too late to change things now. "I do not remember how long this lasted. Time had stopped meaning anything. She was so light when I—" I pause. My throat closes. "She was so fragile. The world was ending around Her, and She could not stop it, and She could not end and I—"I look down at my hands. They are shaking. "I tried to help Her. We all tried. But nothing we did could— The contradiction was too great. She was divine and mortal and neither and both and the world could not—" Nothing is whole. I hope they hear that. My hands. I can still feel the warmth leaving. No. That is not what I mean to say. "It consumed everything. House by house. Person by person. They simply stopped. Stopped moving, stopped breathing, stopped being anything at all. And She remained. Trapped. Unable to end. Unable to be. I watched it spread from Her like—" "I knew what had vanished inside me had vanished within her, a long time ago, too. I knew the very moment that her divinity had split open and torn apart. Without Substance to hold her together, she had fallen. I knew it at once, I knew it when I saw. And I knew I could not save myself from it." A child starts to cry, but I don’t stop. They need to hear this. The door opens. The violent sound cuts through the chapel. Two figures enter. Priests, I can tell by their robes, but the weapons and white and red mark them as something other than what I am. The tall one's eyes find me immediately. The other one's face is wrong somehow, assembled poorly, and he cannot hide his fear. My voice catches. I have lost my place. "I don't remember how I escaped," I say, and the words taste of more blood. People lean closer. The priests do not move from the doorway. "My memories fracture. Break apart like everything else did that day. I was there and then I was not there. I was in the village, and then I was in the hills." The tall priest's gaze does not waver. I feel it like a weight on my chest. "Sometimes, it feels like I never escaped at all." Why do they flinch? Does it sound familiar? Do they hear the cracks opening around their lives? I do not remember how I escaped." My voice cracks. The priests in the doorway have not moved. "The paths of survivors often diverge. Seventeen of us, they say. Seventeen who could tell you the same tale." It is a lie, all of it. I am a lie. These words are a comfort only if they believe them, if I believe them, and I don’t know if We do. The old thoughts in me ache as I speak, knowing how cruel I am to give this false salvation. Knowing it doesn’t matter if they take it, for they will be gone soon. Perhaps the promise of any hope is enough for them. Perhaps I am not so cruel, yet I let them grasp at it, even knowing it will not last. I almost feel them reaching to hold the words I scatter like seed, snatching up the few truths they find among them and mistaking them for salvation. Do they feel it yet? Do they know how broken I am, just like Her? Just like them? Soon they must, and when they do there will be nothing left. I draw a breath, lie and confess. "I have not spoken to the others in many years. The paths..." I pause. "The paths of survivors often diverge." I watch their eyes, wondering if I tell myself this lie more than I tell it to them. Maybe I am the last of them. Maybe someone else is. But I am just like Her. I shift, stepping closer to those who cannot step away, closing the space until they can feel the warmth of my breath over them, the weight of my truth over them. "I don’t remember how I escaped," I cry out, again, and I see them lean in, devouring the only knowledge I have to give. I pause, searching myself for the strength I need to speak as I should. Why don't I remember? Why is remembering so hard? They wait, more unbroken than I am. "I wish I could tell you more." My voice is dust. "But weak gods have limits." Do they follow the rupture in my story and trust it as real? As a caution? I look to them, the waiting and the weight of them, huddled so tightly. They clutch at each other and at the madness of it all. How could they understand? "Our village was among the first. The first of many. It burned. For seven days it burned. We survivors set the fire ourselves because nothing else would end it. Smoke rose black into the sky even once there was nothing left to burn, even once all that was left was ash upon ash upon ash. We watched from the hills and we knew. The fire ended what could not end itself. A week it burned, and the smell of it stayed with us even then, even after. We knew what it meant. We knew what She had touched would not cease. Could not find its ending. It would remain, purposeless and grey, unless we gave it one." The tears in their eyes tell me they expect more. I know what more they need. They are desperate. Desperate for comfort. Desperate for hope. I have none for them. "Now there are only places where no one names their children at birth. No one visits the dead at burial mounds." I look at their frightened faces. Their clutching hands. "We aren't the only survivors. Not anymore. There have been too many since. And there will be more. She is just one among the masses of them now, one small god, against Her will. A god whose mortal gentleness could not bear the weight of divinity." There is desperation in them now, real, tangible. I feel its weight upon me. It is theirs, but it is mine also. Did I make it theirs by making it mine? "And every year I know that the smoke from another burning village, another place that lost its names is the fall to another gentle failure." So many lost. So many gods, and all of them born gentle, the way she was. But they lean into the words as much as they can. How intently they drink from the sound of it. How is it they still have that kind of faith? How do they bear such trust or such emptiness? There are too many of them for me to see clearly. Do they believe so much the way we did? At the moment she split? Too much of that left to chance? I watch them. I watch how they flinch and clutch at each other when I tell Her name again. Is there purpose in that kind of faith? The longer I speak, the less I wonder if there’s meaning in what I say or who I say it to. But I’ll tell it anyway. "But She haunts me most. Because of how small she was. How gentle. A village girl who asked for wildflowers." It spreads, it spreads, and I cannot stop it. I can only speak while the end writes itself on their lives like I wrote it on my own. The details shift. How can they not see? Is it hope or dread or is there no difference? I feel them close and closing even tighter. I must tell them. Even if it’s madness to do so, even if I don’t understand it myself. "I’ll tell you a secret. Something I’ve never spoken aloud. Not to the other priests. Not in confession. Not even in my prayers." I see the doubt crossing one another's faces, the way they hold it close between them. The way the rift opens in their minds and I wonder if it is too late to stop it. I want to tell them everything, though the truth is no good to them. No good to anyone. Perhaps especially not to me. They will not listen, not after hearing how brittle the words become. How fragile. How cruel. They will think it lies, more of them. But this is not a lie. They’ll hear it that way, however clearly I speak, however loud I shout it. Perhaps I am the only one that can hear. "I still dream of Her," I say, and this time the tremor in my voice is real. They shiver and draw closer still, pulling at each other with empty eyes. I wonder if they feel it already, the ache that never leaves me, the secret pressing in and in and in until it consumes every hidden space. "This is my confession, and I give it to you." The truth spreads like a crack through glass, and their terror is palpable now. I know that I am cruel. They know only cruelty to be strength, and strength is what they crave. "I wake every night and cannot remember why I should rise. I stand at my window and forget. Sometimes I speak and the words have no weight to them, no reason to be spoken. I feel it in me, what was in Her. The same absence. The same gray creeping at the edge of everything that I am." I watch their hope falter beneath the weight of this bleakest offering. This they understand. This sorrow, this pinch of a truth. I wait for their breath to slow. "I pray I’m wrong. I pray I can remember the meaning to it all." Somewhere in what remains of me, I remember too much. What got away. What I was, before. "But it’s the truth that wakes me screaming. I loved her. I loved Her in a way I have never loved anything else. She was the only place where the tightness in my chest would ease. The only person I could speak to without the words catching in my throat. When I was near Her the world made sense in a way it has never made sense since. That love is still there. It is still in me. Do you understand? But now it’s..." Is it no longer love? What is it now? Is it emptiness that has crept inside of me and smothered what was whole? Is it something else entirely? How can I name it when it feels so much larger than I am, when it confuses my tongue and twists my heart? This is not the love of a small boy reaching out his tiny arms toward his mother, but it is still love in what little ways it can be. A different kind, maybe. A desperate reaching into empty air, trying to find something that cruelty hasn’t taken. Do you see it? This love that should have been smothered, this love that should have curled back into itself and become something smaller. But it didn’t. But it hasn’t. So what is it now? I pause, letting them finish the thought for me, instead. Wrong, they should say. Let them feel it, I think, let them see where love and gentleness will take them if they follow. "You come here carrying your sorrows. Dead children in your arms. You come here, hoping my words will make sense of it. You come hoping I can tell you things you mustn’t say aloud. Hoping I have answers that won’t leave you any worse. You come expecting comfort from truths that have no warmth." Are you so blind to see? Do you believe a liar or believe a truth you can’t bear? What can I give them but the hurt I know so well? I have nothing else to give. No revelation sweeter than loss. No promises that sorrow won't find you in the end, only a warning that it will. That it can. That it already has, and you blind yourselves to it. It’s my own panic I taste as I open my mouth and preach the words I wish I could believe. It’s my own story I hear in your own. These truths have eaten me alive, just as they eat at you, and I call them a gift, but only because I have nothing else. "Yet all I can offer," I say, "is for you to understand why we must be cruel to keep the gods. Why we must give them weight enough to resist the pull of feral nature." Oh, the shiver of their faces, the pale tremor of their lips. They hang upon his words like children. "We failed Her with our hope." How far will it take them? How much will it eat? "We gave Her only what cost Her. We gave her too little and took too much when she needed foundations of stone." "She needed more than that. She must have what stays with her past our lives. It cannot be soft or gentle, careless or unweighted. We did not give enough. We gave her weakness instead of strength. We gave her pretty things that eased our hearts, feathery things that fly with the wind. We gave her what cost us nothing. Nothing that could last. Nothing that would hold through time and want and all the pull of Its own nature. She could not stay what She was because She could not stay.” “We must do better. We must give until it hurts, then give past the hurt. Offer enough to weight them to this world. Make the gifts too heavy to lift, too deep to leave, too strong for mortality to gnaw through." "Some call it cruelty," I tell them. "Some weep to see small gods so burdened. But I have seen what kindness costs. It takes everything. Shreds what you love into ribbons and leaves you empty. I carry my people’s graves in my heart. It is the soft gifts, the ones that come without effort, that betray the most. But the hardest gifts, those will hold.” I see the flinch in their bodies as I preach, the wince as they realize how much I mean it. How much I believe it. How much it has taken from me. It is more than kindness that makes me so cruel. More than my own history that lets me spread the suffering. I have nothing but the truth to offer them, and the truth scorches as it reveals. I feel them clutch at each other. It is the same. The same as it was in the village. The same as it was with her. The same as it will be for them. I cannot give them hope. I cannot ease their loss. To do so would be to leave them vulnerable. To leave them prey to the echo of myself. What I give them is not comfort, and I have none to spare. What I give them is a warning. A lesson, though they may not see it yet. They stare at me with hollow eyes. I don’t think they understood a word. ### The strangeness has crept into me again, as relentless as my own voice. I watch the pilgrims shamble away, and feel the unraveling of my own memory that each of them leaves in their wake. I remember none of their faces, none of the fear in them, none of my own fear when I hit the floor. Did I really hit the floor? I look at the altar, recalling nothing of those missing days. Recalling only Mara's face as she died, as I killed her, the taste of something that wasn’t blood. Was it more than my own collapse that laid me flat like that? More than my own madness? I touch my lips, though I don’t know why, and something sticks to my fingers. Red. I think it’s blood. Was it my blood? No. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember much. Just like the stories I spin, the helplessness runs deep. The oldest scar. The oldest madness. Was it me who fell apart? I think it was, but when I reach for the memory, I only find the cold of it there. Just the same. Was it someone else? Someone closer? I remember so little. Her face. Her name. I remember the shape of Her, the tang of blood not my own, the certainty that I’ve lied, but no recollection of what else it could have been. I remember how many there were when it was done -- there were more of us, I remember that. It comes and goes -- was it more or less? Less now. Seventeen, eighteen, twenty? Is that how many it was? I try to recall the truth of it, but I don't remember anything except my own madness when I fall to it. Is that how it happened, then? Does it even matter? No. Yes. Always. More than me alone? We never knew the meaning of things when we were many, and now I know even less. There was a gathering, and then the flood. There were faces, names, and all of them beyond grasp. Beyond hope. I remember Mara, that much is clear. Her face when death came and split us both. When we were no longer we. When it pulled me out of myself and myself out of the Old Man. My mouth full of emptiness and rage and another god. I think I remember. I think it was madness. Do I have to remember? Yes. Am I just a raving old man after all? Perhaps they’re all already dead, and I'm a liar all over again. Was I still lying to her at the end? Maybe I’m only ever this: the Old Man that does not remember, the Heretic-Priest with his secrets, the Feral God with the ravening urge to destroy. What can I tell myself this time? How can I spin it into belief? Maybe I’ll pretend I never really knew. Did I mean for them to die? Mara, the others? It will happen again. It will happen again, and it will always happen again, and my telling won't change a damn thing. It spreads from me. It spreads like me, and it is me. I lost sight of what I am, what I thought I was. I am more than she was. Less than she is. If I could save her ... no, I couldn't. I couldn't. I can only let them die as she did. Let them be memories too distant to remember, too lost to grasp. Let them vanish the way I can’t. I’m afraid. Yes, I think I’m afraid. Of them, of me, of what comes between, what comes for me. How did I escape? Did I escape? I said I would never leave. I never left. Yet I left them. Mara and those dead kids and their- gods and what was I thinking? Was it a dream? This vanishing and this lie? She swore it. Yes, she swore it at me. And I promised, didn’t I? But I lied, I think. I always lie, and now it happens again. My teeth in that dead flesh. She tasted the way only gods taste. Gods that need to die. But why? Why did she need to die? She promised I’d remember. This ache in my stomach? I still feel it. She promised, but my flesh is empty. My mind is not. Maybe it never was. I have the hunger still. They don’t know that I am her. And that terrifies me. It must terrify them, too. Did she know? Did she know It'd happen this way? Did I? Am I still feeding myself this same lie? I know I am less than I was, yet more than she could ever be. It is no wonder that I broke again. It is no wonder at all. So many of them. This is who I am. Maybe it always was. I remember so little of myself. I am too much this. Too much of me, and too much what she left behind. I must get ready. Need to prepare myself for the next godfall. I feel it like a tumor, growing and expanding and whispering how I cannot flee what is always inside of me. There are survivors. There are so many of them, and I will outlast them all. In the end there will be none of them. I lied to her, and I lie to myself, and I lie to them. If only I could believe it the way they do. She’s a god, she can make things the way she wants them, but here I am. I struggle with the story that never changes, even as it changes with every telling. What have I told them? What will I tell myself? Did I lie? Of course I did. Everything. The empty pews are accusation, and they speak back to me in my own harsh breath, my own thoughtless cruelty. In the way my words fracture and hang suspended, forever this side of memory. This side of hope. Of course I lied. What else can I do? Nothing. Nothing else. It’s all I have to offer them; It's all I have to offer myself. Her taste. I need to get it out. I need to remember more than blood and the pain that burns inside of me. More than the hunger that’s grown like a rot. I need to not think, not collapse under the weight of knowing and not knowing and not knowing what she made of me. And what I make of myself. The altar. That's where I was when the gaps in my story opened. I touch the red again. The bile. I am her, or me, or more than either. What can it mean? What can I make it mean? When I raise my eyes, the chapel is bare. My breath is thin. I need to move. I need to pretend, even if it has no meaning and I don't know why. But I must pretend. I feel more and less than I should. Did she want me like this? Did she plan for it? My hands tremble with the enormity. They tremble as they place and move and arrange with a thousand years of knowledge I don't have. My hands tremble like Mara and the others. I pause. The tremble grows. The bleeding grows. My heart is colder than I remembered it being. But it is still a heart, isn't it? Even after it all? Even after this? I loved her. Or maybe I never did. I cannot taste this in my mouth. She made sure of that. I think I hear my mother calling. I love her. Or maybe I only did. I have no answers. They don't leave when I shout at them, any more than I do. I think I taste blood, but it doesn’t taste the way it should. That red at my mouth and the strangeness in my skull. I never should have made it. This I know. And it’s the only thing I know for sure. I never should have. Never. I listen for the old comfort, and when I hear it there, the whole mess of the world creeps into me again. Mara’s voice. My own hunger. The first madness. But all that comes back is what I didn’t do. What I could never do. Save them. Save her. The taste. The breaking. I was the last. It gnaws and gnaws and still nothing to hold. Still the certainty I lied. When? How did I lie? What did I lie? Maybe I didn’t think it mattered. But that’s not true. It never was. There was blood. There was not blood. It was more than that, but what more could it be? My head spins, and this time I can’t stop it from spinning. That’s not new at all, this whole memory of my own mad self, my whole confused Old Man. It’s the same as it ever was, though I thought it different this time. Thought I could believe myself and them. Maybe I did believe it, and maybe I’m more of a coward than even I thought. Yes. That’s it! The ache of this empty head, and the fear of it more than anything else. Maybe even more than my own cruelty. Yes. I wake to the old uncertainty, and how far did I fall? How much? All the way. The way I always fall. How much did I make the story up this time? Was it like I wanted to think? Did I know, really know, as much as I wanted to? As much as I told myself? Did I know even less? They had tears in their eyes. Yes, they did. What did I say that made them so profane? What did I tell them? Do I remember? Did I ever? No. I didn’t remember then, and I don’t remember now. Maybe it is the first madness. Yes. I am sure of it. I’m so damn sure of it, even if I can’t be sure of anything else. And how many times have I done this and lost? Forgotten myself so badly that it splits me open and spills me out and becomes me all over again? How. Many. Times? Enough to be a coward every single time. I think that’s what I am. I think that’s what it is. What I was too weak to hold, the helplessness I still taste. Mara's face. The Feral's face. The Priest's face. The Old Man that does not remember. I have that now. I don’t have much else, but I have that now, the horror of all the absence. Of that lack of knowing who I am. It’s always the same, always this. There’s something that’s always wrong, but what it is -- that’s as far away as it ever was. That’s as much as I can’t recall. Yes. The same. I wake from my own lies, and it haunts me that I cannot remember why I spin it the way I do. That I cannot know. I thought I knew, and maybe that’s why I broke so damn bad. Why it got me that time and the time before and the time before that, and the thinness and the whole lot of forgetting that I wake to. It breaks me, yes, and it bleeds me. The cold of it, the blood, the everything I thought I could believe. What is it then, this memory that splits me the way that old feeding did? What did I do to ever deserve this? Everything. I did everything I always do, and it shattered like glass in my hands. And I always do. I taste it. I hear it. The sound of every single break, and nothing is left. I was there. I think I was. No. Yes. The lies I made them hear, but were they all lies? Yes. No. I never know. Was it too early to tell? Too late? Did they understand how much was real? I remember the panic in their eyes, I remember my own damn panic. And that’s it. That’s all. I remember only the terrible loss. I remember that and nothing more. I remember that and nothing but that. The terrible absence and the lie of what I call my life. The rest is gone, and I don’t think it will come back this time. I can’t recall if I wanted it, if I planned it this way. If I didn’t? Maybe I didn’t. A Heretic-Priest who can’t remember. An old hunger. An old certainty that this is the last, the very last. It will happen. It will happen, and it always does. Yes. The same. It breaks me again and again, and here I am, here I am again, as red as the shame in my blood. Yes. Yes. This way, every time, and maybe the last, the last of the me who thinks he knew. The Priest, the Old Man, the other me. That’s all that I have now, and the cruelty of that haunts me more than them. The nothingness I carry is the truest thing about me. The birthright. The calling. The others, they are so much less than me if only I could remember. But now I’m gone. I’m going. And there’s no more words and no more sound, just the quiet of the truth that I have known forever and ever. The moment stretches, and I am stretched with it, and there is no end to it or me. There is no remembrance. There is no forgetting, no fading, only the release of death. I am nothing, and the others are nothing, and the gods are nothing, and we are all the same. I am the stillness of a long-closed room, the airless dark no light has ever seen. I am that room. I am that dark. And-