The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

There remained, before he could finally rest, one piece of the old order he had to decide the fate of: the rule against the current flowing back down to the mortal world below.

He understood, better than almost anyone who might have argued the point with him, exactly how unjust that rule had always been — how it had served nothing but the comfort and the vanity of a court he had, by his own hand, already ended. He considered, in the quiet aftermath of the war, simply breaking it. Opening the gate fully. Letting the pooled surplus that had accumulated at the threshold for longer than any record could measure finally flow back down to the mortal world it had been stolen from in the first place.

He did not.

It was not, he told himself, and told the handful of newly arrived gods who asked him directly, a decision born of agreement with the old rule's logic. He believed, as firmly as he had ever believed anything, that the rule had never served any purpose except cruelty dressed as necessity. What stopped him was simpler and, in its own way, more troubling: he did not know a better rule to put in its place, and he understood, with the same hard-won clarity that had kept him from simply claiming the throne, that acting without knowing was its own kind of arrogance, no less dangerous for being well-intentioned.

He reasoned it through as carefully as grief and exhaustion allowed him to reason anything, in those first raw days after the war. If the gate opened fully — if mortals could suddenly draw as freely from the pooled current as gods themselves did — ascension would stop being the rare, difficult, hard-won threshold it had always been, and become instead something closer to an arms race. More mortals would cross into godhood, yes, and faster, and in greater numbers than that fragile, damaged world had ever needed to absorb at once. But power, however it arrives and however justly it is distributed, does not automatically arrive paired with wisdom about how to use it. He had watched gods who ascended slowly, over long and difficult years, still curdle into cruelty once they'd settled into their new strength. He could not imagine that mortals ascending in sudden floods, en masse, with none of the discipline his own drought-stricken childhood had forced upon him, would fare any better — and he could imagine, all too easily, exactly what a mortal world suddenly populated by thousands of newly minted, untested gods, all jostling for the same scarce respect and standing the old court had once hoarded for itself, would eventually become. Not liberation. War. A war fought not by one god against a corrupt handful, but by thousands against thousands, with no single reckoning capable of ending it the way his own violence had, however imperfectly, ended the one before it.

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So he left the gate as narrow as he had found it — not because he believed it was right, but because he could think of no way to widen it that did not risk trading one form of suffering for a worse one, and he had already, in ending one corrupt order, taken on more responsibility for the shape of that world's future than any single being should reasonably carry alone. It was, he understood even as he made the choice, an imperfect answer. He simply had no better one to offer in its place, and preferred an old, unjust scarcity he at least understood the shape of, to a new chaos he could not yet predict the cost of.

The scars of the eight bandit-gods that Eremos would one day end, in a tavern yard on the mortal side of that same ancient rule, were, in their own small and distant way, proof that the imperfect answer had never actually solved the deeper problem. Ascension remained rare enough that those who achieved it still, generation after generation, sometimes curdled into exactly the same casual cruelty the God of Destruction had once burned an entire court to the ground for practicing. He had ended one corrupt order. He had never claimed, even to himself, that he had ended corruption itself.