The white buck raised his hooves and brought them down onto the king’s castle, causing thunder and earthquakes. The castle erupted in a plume of stench, covering the kingdom and the forests with the abdominal smell that accumulated so much over time it was like a deity itself. The god of the forest was stunned and our hero and the healer pinched their noses. This gave the healer time to find his lantern and awaken the fire spirit in it, who in reality was a god of fire he had trapped in the desert.
The god, released, ascended into the heavens as a raging pillar of fire. It possessed no intelligence, as gods are thought to have; its only power was to sustain itself, which it did by setting the forests ablaze and feeding on the god of the forest, who cried, shook in pain, and yet could not defend itself from flame incarnate. The ashes of the forest were caught in an immense dust storm, the lands surrounding the city became desert, and millions of creatures, who lost their homes, family and friends in an instant, prayed helplessly to their god to grant them succor. The buck grew the scales of a salamander, he covered his body in mucus, he became a fish and threw himself into the ocean, but the god of flame fed and fed, for he was a concept and not a reality.
The god of the forest however was not entirely at a loss. The intense heat brought up thunderstorms. The rain cooled the lands and diminished the flames, and the god of fire scampered off as but an ember.
Unfortunately, the rain was on the power of the healer, who invoked his own deity, the source of all of his awesome powers. The mother of light cleaved the heavens, leaving a ray of white light between the parted thunderclouds. The forest god split in twain, and his corpse fell as tatters onto the ground, struggling to become whole once more. The forest creatures, who felt their lineage more deeply than the sons of man, raised their voices to the heavens and cried for the loss of their father and guardian. Without him, their children and their children’s children will forget their origin, and therefore their power, and they all will fade into the dust of time, to be forgotten and trampled by the sons of man.
This was good to the healer’s god, for it originated from man’s genius. It promoted only man’s cause so that all lands would be conquered by his seed and the world would be for his eyes only. The world will be so altered by man’s genius that it will be unrecognizable, and this would be a good world, so this god supposed.
The healer did not care one jot about this. These gods were only a convenience to him. He revealed that, as our hero died and was reborn into this world, he also had been invited to be reborn, along with other adventurers, to defeat the demon lords. But the demon lords could not be defeated, indeed no adventurer could defeat them, and he remained imprisoned in this world alone without any meaning to his life except to fend off its decay.
Our hero could hardly contain this, the deaths, and, most of all, the dissolution of trust between himself and the healer. Thus he beat him. He slapped, punched, kick the healer until bruises colored his face, until blood trickled down his eyes, until his own hands were sore and could do no more beating. He felt no happier at the end of it. The healer did not defend himself, and at beating’s end departed to drain the nearest bottle of liquor.
© 2025 François-Marie Lee