Eternity ((Kamukoma Short Story))

Part Two [Abyss]

Komaeda's feet felt heavy, or rather his entire body felt heavy. With the ice in the air, it was too difficult to fight the freezing winds to take flight.
The other gods were kind enough to tell him the location of the hollowed underground but getting there was all on him.
He couldn't be mad at that though, not after all of this was his own fault.

The thick darkness was interrupted for only a moment for a whisp to twinkle as it passed by before it sunk into the ground.
Whisps were harmless spirits that simply existed to exist, it wasn't as though he hadn't seen them before, but knowing it was the spirit of the dead still hurt and frightened him a bit.
But if one was vanishing below the ground here... This was it, right?
But where was it? As he looked around, Komaeda didn't see any such entrance, he couldn't just vanish into the ground too, as divine as he actually was, which was probably only a step above parlor magician.

He recalled Akane's words, directing him to use his powers upon some sort of sacred stone.
But the land around him was flat, not a rock in sight. Unless...

The God scraped his foot across the ground once, twice, and then changed location, kicking at the dirt around where the whisp vanished before he finally hit something, nearly making him fall back in surprise.

Without a second thought, he fell to his hands and knees to dig, exposing what looked to be a flat slab of rock, marked with mysterious symbols.
In the dark, they were too difficult to make out but luckily, the number of whisps that were starting to fill the area at... Alarming rates were enough to light the stone for him to read out.

It looked to be the door to the hollowed underground alright. Komaeda could feel his powered weak without the sun, but he had just enough juice left to press his hand against the stone as directed, and let his divine powers flow to the door.
The rock rumbled, urging him to pull away, and lowered into the dirt to expose a cave, just big enough to crawl through.
Well, it wasn't as though the hollowed underground had guests on the regular, the door was only for gods that absolutely needed to come by anyway, and nobody ever really did until now.

"Looks like I'll be crawling," He muttered aloud and squeezed into the dirt cave.
It was barely big enough for a full-grown man, the walls of the cave scraping against his body and the air was suffocating and dry.
If he wasn't a god that didn't require air, Komaeda would probably be feeling really claustrophobic.
After what felt like forever, the cave opened up to a dark room, lit only by torches.
He could hear the sound of running water but saw no such thing.
Yet, he also felt like he was being watched, but by who? And from where?
Could it have been the souls?

"Hello?" He called out, voice echoing across the walls.
"Warm..." A voice suddenly answered when without warning, something ice-cold grabbed his ankle and Komaeda looked down to a transparent figure, gripping his leg tightly.
No eyes or mouth to be seen as it looked up to him, and yet he could feel a sense of hope from it.
Still creepy though, he tried to pull away only for another to grab his arm,
"Sun God," It whispered, "Sun..."

Another pull, but the spirits were surprisingly strong. Well, when you're not confined to a weak mortal body, you don't have many limits to strength it seemed.
"Begone," Someone new entered the room, giving a wave to the spirits, who begrudgingly released him. "Annoying mortal pests," He scoffed before looking upon Komaeda. "You must be one of the incompetent sun gods. Your heart glows like the sun." He chuckled, as though mockingly.
Rather than answer, Komaeda quickly found himself blurting out,
"Those people had no faces-!"

"Obviously," The Death God huffed, "Only death gods can look upon the faced of the damned. That's is sort of our thing. Seeing as you opened the door and went through the effort to crawl in here, I'm willing to bet that you didn't just happen upon the hollowed underground on accident?"
"No," He forced what was probably the most pained and awkward smile of his life. "Actually, I was sent here by the... The other gods."
For a long moment, the death god remained silent, taking in Komaeda's looks carefully before meeting his eyes.
"The sun is gone and rather than doing something about it, a sun god enters the hollowed underground. I cannot fathom why you would need to come here of all places, but I assure you we don't have the sun."
Of course, now comes the moment to admit everything and request a much more experienced god to do the exact opposite of their job.