The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

It should be understood, before anything else about this story is told, that the World of Gods did not need the mortal world beneath it to survive. The gods who lived there — however they had first arrived, whatever mortal lives they had first climbed up out of — had long since learned to sustain themselves on the same ambient current that ran through the world below, drawn now not from soil and sky but from something vaster, some deeper reservoir their own ascended bodies had learned to reach. They did not require mortal energy. They had simply, at some point so far back that no god currently living could say when it had first been decided, agreed among themselves that mortal energy belonged, by right, to them.

The rule was simple, and it was enforced with the specific patient cruelty of something that has never once been questioned by anyone with the power to enforce a different answer: the current that rose from the mortal world, gathering at the seam between the two worlds the way heat gathers at a ceiling, was not permitted to flow back down. Gods could draw from it freely. Mortals could not draw from the surplus that gods left ungathered, not even the smallest trickle of what the gods themselves had no use for. It pooled, instead, at the threshold, and stayed there, and the gods who lived nearest that pooling grew richer and lazier and stranger for having so much of it constantly within easy reach.

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There was no practical reason for the rule. That was the ugliest truth buried inside it, the one truth every god who ever benefited from the arrangement quietly agreed never to examine too closely. Mortal energy, left to flow back down freely, would have done nothing to diminish the gods' own reservoir — the two systems were not, in any sense a careful mind could verify, actually in competition with each other. The rule existed for exactly one reason, and it was not a reason any god ever said aloud in mixed company: it existed because scarcity, artificially maintained, was the single most efficient machine any society of the powerful has ever built for feeling superior to everyone beneath it. If mortals could draw freely from the pooled surplus, ascension would have come faster, more often, to more of them — a slow, steady trickle of new gods arriving from below, diluting whatever specialness the current gods had built their entire self-image around. Better, by their own quiet and unexamined logic, to keep the gate narrow. Better to let ascension remain the rarest thing a mortal life could achieve, so that every god who had managed it could go on believing, uninterrupted, that they had been chosen rather than merely lucky.

It was, in the truest and least flattering sense available, a lie that served no purpose except to let the people telling it feel large.