THE FALL
The village was beautiful that day, a faintly shimmering hollow of autumn gold nestled among blue-grey mountains. I had been walking it since dawn, and I wished the sun would stop flitting in and out long enough to let me see my lands under light one last time. Once, a wave of my hand and a glance of my eye could lift storms around and send them back, and now I could not summon the strength to deal with a kerchief’s worth of clouds.
This is how a God dies.
I had always been their God, and they had always been my People. I made the wheat turn gold and stopped the barley withering on its stalk, brought in the summer sun and staved off early snows. I gave life and I took it away. Mine was the first face they saw when they emerged bloody and crying out of the womb, and it was the last one to fetch them home, whether in beds surrounded by weeping children or alone on the forest floor after a hunt gone wrong.
I do not know the alchemy by which human hate and human fear, human love and human desire melt down into a God, but I know this – its catalyst is belief. And belief is a thing as scarce as gold, and far more difficult to hoard.
Fool I was not to have seen the upstart make his way in through the whispers of travellers and the subtle magic of words written down. I will say this for the new god, the interloper – he and his priests understood the eternal kernel of desire that lay at the heart of all humans far better than I did. My blessings were too immediate, too quotidian. How could a few seasons’ worth of fruit and heat compare to bliss everlasting beyond the sky?
Once, they heard the clinking of my horns on the highest branches of tall trees, the brush of my wings on water. Now they shut their ears and lock themselves up in smoke stained shrines, sing strange hymns in a foreign tongue. They offer up candles and incense to him and the bowls of blood and wine lie empty and forgotten in my fields.
Do not think that I gave up without a fight. I noticed at last the dwindling offerings, the flickering and weakening of my powers, like a flame before it goes out. The solution was simple, but simple does not mean easy. I had to spark belief in my People again.
In the spring, I used bribes. I turned snow into grass overnight. I made the cattle fat and the flowers bright. I did not come for the old and the dying, and every mother birthed a healthy babe that season. I answered each prayer, every wish. And they smothered the temple in milk and honey and prayed at the feet of the new god.
In the summer, I used miracles. Gold spilled out of berries bigger than eggs. Each night, every night, the forests and fields were illuminated by a full, lustrous moon. Birds spoke in the voices of men and exhorted them to praise the true God. And they went down on their knees and cried the name of the outsider.
Then it was autumn, my People had forgotten me, and I decided to die.
And so, I circled one last time the huts, the fields and finally, the forest. I did not know what happened to Gods when they died. Did they rot into bone and dust like humans do? Or worse, were they simply scattered into the wind and forgotten forever? So many times had I fetched, but never followed.
I was already starting to crumble when I saw the stag. Dead, taken down by wolves. It seemed a sad mirror of my own fate. Once majestic, now a mass of sinew and scraps of flesh in a pool of old blood. And yet in death there was still life. Maggots seethed, ants scavenged the corpse and the earth slowly digested the animal, getting ready to turn it into soil and coal and a thousand other living things.
In death, there was still life.
The world seemed to tilt, change and then set itself right again. The new god, I had heard, transforms his body into bread. Like the stag, like the stranger, I would transform as well. I had pleaded in the language of desire, I had called in the language of awe. Now I would throw my head back and scream in the language of fear.
For six days and six nights the village burned, an eternal, infernal daylight. Beasts turned their hooves and claws on each other, and on their masters. Ghosts sprang up like mushrooms after rain. I killed every first born, made the rivers congeal with blood and darkened the fields with clouds of locusts.
To destroy is so much easier than to create, and pain so much easier to believe in than joy. Each scream, each tear, each cry of fear was as a drop of oil on a naked flame. It made the ichor course through my veins, stronger and faster than it ever had.
If I could not replace the new one with love, I would take my seat beside him and rule with fear. And because hope is twin to horror, I let some of them survive, those who had once been my People, so that they could flee, and live to sow the tales of my torments in other lands.
Once my name had been a secret thing, it sounded like wings beating against the sky, the crunch of dry leaves, the splash of water on rock. Now it is legion.
Day Bringer. Demon. Devil.
Tempter. Slanderer. Satan.
Mine is the kingdom of terror, for ever and ever, world without end.