NOVGO.NET I.5 — A God Who Did Not Trust Himself
He slept, after that, for what the myths generally agree was a very long time — long enough that the World of Gods, empty of its former court, began, on its own slow terms, to accumulate new arrivals. Mortals who crossed the ascension threshold in the years and decades and centuries after the war, finding a world stripped of its old rulers and unsure, at first, what to make of the silence.
He woke, eventually, and was faced with a decision that the myths, in their surviving fragments, treat as though it should have been obvious, and was, in fact, the hardest thing he ever did.
He could have simply stayed. He had, by any measure the World of Gods had ever used to measure such things, more than earned the right to rule what remained of it — a new eternal authority, replacing the corrupt one he'd ended, shaping the rule of that world according to whatever principles he'd fought to defend. Some small number of the newly arrived gods, understanding at least the outline of what he'd done, genuinely wanted him to. It would have been, by every practical measure, the simplest resolution available.
He did not trust it.
Not because he doubted his own intentions, in that first raw clarity immediately following the war — he trusted, in that specific moment, entirely and without reservation, that everything he wanted for that world was exactly what he'd fought to give it. What he did not trust, and what kept him from simply claiming the throne that circumstance had left empty for him, was time. He had watched, across his years in that glittering, rotted court, gods who had once, presumably, arrived exactly as hopeful and unformed as he had, slowly reshaped by decades and centuries of unchecked comfort into something none of them, at the start, would have recognized or approved of in themselves. He understood, with a clarity that felt less like wisdom and more like fear, that the specific danger of eternal, unchallenged power was not that it corrupted instantly, in some single dramatic moment a person could notice and resist. It corrupted slowly, in increments too small for the person experiencing them to ever feel the exact instant the shape of their own soul began to change.
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What if I become the thing I killed, he asked himself, in whatever internal language a being that large uses to interrogate itself, and found that he had no honest answer that reassured him. He trusted himself, in that single unrepeatable hour after the war's ending, completely. He did not trust the version of himself that ten thousand years of unchallenged comfort might eventually produce, because he had just spent a very long season of his life watching exactly that transformation happen to beings who had, at the start of their own long comfortable eternities, almost certainly trusted themselves exactly as completely as he trusted himself now.
He decided, in the end, on something that satisfied no one entirely, least of all himself, and that has puzzled every mortal scholar who later tried to make sense of it: he would not rule. He would not stay. He would set the world in order as best he could, leave it to govern itself under whatever new arrangement its remaining and newly arrived gods managed to build, and withdraw from it entirely — sleeping, somewhere beyond the reach of either world, for a span of time so long that the myths, straining to render it in mortal units, generally settle on the same approximate figure: thirty thousand years.
At the end of each span, he would wake. He would look, briefly and without announcing himself, at what the World of Gods had become in his absence. If he found it drifting back toward the same rot he'd ended — the same casual cruelty, the same hoarding, the same slow, comfortable forgetting of everything mortal suffering was supposed to mean to beings who had once, themselves, been mortal — he would do again what he had already done once. If he found it holding, however imperfectly, to something better, he would return to sleep, and leave it thirty thousand years more to prove whether the holding could last.