Sleeping Deities

Chapter 1

The first time he met them, it was on a beach.

It was not after his first death, and it was not before his last, either. It was after iterations of failure, of learning, of finally understanding the limits of each reality he was sent to, the rules that plagued each one and the punishment that came with them.

It was after at least a few centuries had passed in his life, forced to survive in different circumstances with nothing but the landscape provided before him. It was after he'd begun to lose count of the number of times he'd died. It was after he'd forgotten to keep track of time.

It was the black fin breaking the surface of the sea that signaled their arrival to him. A song he'd begun to forget piercing the air, a cry from an animal that would soon become a thing of myth to these people who've not seen one before.

It was the sudden ferocity of the hogs in the village by the sea that told him they were close. For even though he had never met them, he had met those like them. And he knew that they could be as cruel as they were kind, and that if anything, he should keep distance between them — he and the village — for the village people are not yet ready to meet their makers.

Not yet.

And so, as he felt the water run over his sandals and the grains of sand rush in the gaps between his toes, he waited.

Waited to be smited.

Waited to be pushed down further into his despair, into his inescapable pit of the infinite.

Waited to be punished further than he already had before.

So the introduction of a language so familiar... That — he found — was not the most unexpected thing.

"D'you think that's him, Techno?"

It was these voices...

"I think so. Or else we have two mortals of the same description, forced to live in an eternity of our making."

They were ones that the man had never heard of before.

They were not the rumble of an earthquake, of a foreboding danger fast approaching. They were not the clashes of waves in a storm as one sits in a dingy boat, being tossed and turned with no end in sight. It did not leave behind the deafening silence that came with agony, and it brought to him anything but a horrible sense of dread.

Cautiously, he tore his eyes away from the flaming horizon and slowly turned his head.

What greeted him were two strangers, who watched him with the same mixture of amusement and curiosity one has when one encounters something so foreign, whose caution and sense of danger kept them from coming closer, as if he were a wild animal yet to be tamed.

But the man knew that despite their looks, despite their fear and awe of him, that they held the power in this interaction, that they were more than they appeared to be.

"And who might you be?" He asked, and his words made them flinch in surprise, as if they did not expect to be talked back to, as if they didn't expect to be seen.

"I— We— Uh— "

The first to give a stammered semblance of a reply was the one who's eyes widened more, who instinctively stepped further back behind the other, whose dark hair and darker eyes reminded the man of the earth, of the ground that he stood upon, the one constant in a life that existed with none.

The sound of his voice could be described as enchanting without magic, intoxicating without the poison that came afterwards. It was a voice that — if the man were still unknowledgeable of such tricks — would have easily persuaded him of anything the other desired.