Archive of Our Own ^beta

You are satisfied. You have everything you have ever wanted.

Mostly.

That is true, for the most part. You achieved your goal. You are unending, you are powerful. You only wish sometimes that it didn’t come at such a cost. Love.

Love is different for a god. Gods cannot love the way humans can. You know this better than most. As the years have passed, you have found yourself distant. Colder.

You have seen humans die. You preside over the rift between life and death. You have seen humans dragged kicking and screaming into the void, clinging to life by their fingernails. When you were human, you understood why. Human love is all about survival. They require love to survive. Their lives are so short, and yet they pack so much meaning and love into such a short time. You admire that about them.

Gods do not die, not unless they are forcibly torn and removed from the world. They have much, much more time. Godly love is slower, unhurried. Human love is desperate.

This drove a wedge between you and him. You felt as if he loved you less, and that bred resentment.

You were wrong about him. Your lover, your predecessor. Every time you think of him, you feel an emptiness, a hole. Like a lost tooth, you keep worrying it, poking it with your tongue. Something is missing. Something is missing.

People talk, you know. They say you murdered him, that you killed him and took his place. That isn’t true. He was old, and fading, and you helped him move along. That’s what he wanted. That’s what he begged for, all those years ago, when you met him. You gave him what he wanted.

Still, something is missing.

There is a gap in your memory. When you think of him, there is an ache, tugging at your attention. Something is not right.

They have many names for you. Raven Queen. Matron of Death. Duskmaven. You’ve accepted them, adding them to your mantle, each another feather in your cloak, but the added weight is heavy on your shoulders. With each name, your unease grows. Something is not right.

Those are not your names. Your name is…your name is.

You do not know.

You do not know his name either.

You search through your long, long memory. Surely, there must be something somewhere. Some record, some proof that either of you existed besides just your memory. He was real. You know that. He was. So are you.

So are you.

The other gods have never truly accepted you as one of their own. Your predecessor was close to many of them, and they have never forgiven you for taking his place. No matter how many times you explain that no, you didn’t murder him, he asked you to do this, they don’t believe you. Why don’t they believe you?

You are telling the truth. You remember it clearly. Your first contact with him. You were overjoyed, ecstatic that your ritual had worked. You asked him how one would go about ascending to godhood. He told you that you would have to kill one of the gods, betray the Pantheon, break and reshape reality with your bare hands, and then and only then could you take their place. If you did it correctly, no one would even remember your predecessor, not even you. Their name, their memory, their essence would be wiped from the universe. They would simply cease to exist.

You did not perform the ritual correctly.

You do not know why. It started out well, but partway through, he started to struggle. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe you did something wrong. It does not matter now. What does matter is that it worked, you took his place, but something went wrong. His memory was not wiped from the world, only his name, and he took your name with him. You have been incomplete since. He left you with a permanent sense of wrongness, and the world has been slightly off ever since. It has been so long, and everything has been wrong since. You notice, and they notice.

It is very, very difficult to kill a god. It is against their nature, you see. Their souls have fought so hard to achieve godhood that they cling to it. They do not want to let go.

(That may be true, but this was different. You know that.)

There are consequences when a god dies. The place where their body resides, because they do have a corpse, once they are gone, it becomes cursed. Faded. His resting place is far away, deep in the Shattered Teeth, where no one should find him. You pray that they don’t. He does not want to be found.

(He did not want to be killed, either.)

Stop it. You are telling the truth. It is simply very difficult to kill a god, and very easy to muck up the ascension ritual. That is all. Gods cling to their life the same way that humans do.

(If he were truly ready to die, he would have gone peacefully. At that point, all the fight has gone out of them.)

Gods cling to their life the same way that humans do. That is true. That, you know.

(You have only ever seen one god die, and he was murdered. No one who is murdered ever goes peacefully.)

You tried everything to ease his pain. You did not want him to suffer. It is not your fault that the ritual went awry.

Why are you lying, ______? He did not ask for this. You did this, not because he asked for it, but because you wanted to. He was a black hole, and you were a black hole, and you both knew that it would end badly when you met.

You always have been too ambitious for your own good.