Dead God Complex (End)

I woke up… somewhere. Until then, I hadn’t seen anything like it. It most certainly wasn’t Everywhere. As I looked around, I could only describe my surroundings as incomprehensible. Unlike the overwhelming flood of information in Everywhere, this place was an oppressive void. My mind was constantly being assailed by intangible and undefined concepts and ideas. Is this…?

“Welcome to the Abyss.”

I suddenly noticed a familiar pigeon standing in front of me, as if it had been there all along. It hadn’t simply appeared; it was as if it was simply unnoticeable until it chose to be noticed. I frowned slightly at the sheer oddness of the Abyss.

“Why didn’t I die, Spirit? Wait – no. Answer this first: why are we here?”

The Abyss wasn’t somewhere that we should be able to exist in so casually. My father, Apollyon, was the Angel of the Abyss, so his characteristics were more suited to it, but we were power-drained fragments of God. We weren’t built to live in nothingness.

“I brought us here. Everywhere is gone, so this is the best I could do.”

“… You implied that when I died, we would disappear.”

“I said that when you died, ‘it’ would be ‘over’.”

I sighed at the Spirit’s pedantry.

“For someone who can only communicate in concepts, you still have a knack for wordsmithing.”

“The onus is on you for assigning mortal language to me.”

That was true. The literal ‘translation’ applied to Spirit’s communication was only a tool I used to help comprehend it. The original concepts it communicated would be more accurate.

“Well… what now?”

“…”

The Spirit didn’t respond immediately, so I glanced at the pigeon curiously.

“You have a choice.”

“Oh?”

“Your first option is that you may return to the Abyss.”

That didn’t sound awful. God originated from the Abyss. The Abyss was the ‘primordial soup’ of human consciousness, so to return to it would be reuniting myself with my father, a creation of God, in a sense. But….

“What’s the other option?”

“Return to Earth.”

“Huh?!”

I can return to Earth? That makes no sense. My body is dead, and we don’t even have the resources….

“You misunderstand something, Elysia.”

“…?”

“You are not just God the Son. You are the Son of Man.”

“I know that….”

“God’s end was never your end.”

“What…?”

This was something running completely contrary to my understanding of how divinity worked.

“It was impossible to save God from the start. God was already dead.”

“What do you mean? I am God too; I would know if I were dead.”

“I mean that God’s death was inevitable. Even if you had gathered faith, it would have been lost within a span of decades. Any true extension on God’s life would come at the cost of humanity’s development, and, as shown by the Second Great Flood, we did not have the ability to damage humanity.”

“… Why would you set up this elaborate scheme to gather faith if things were already done for?”

The pigeon’s eyes almost looked wistful for a moment.

“When God the Son incarnates into. When the Father chose to create a vessel, I pushed things down the path of you surviving.”

“So… all of this was pointless? Couldn’t I have just used up all of the divinity immediately on coming to Earth and then come to this same conclusion.”

“No. It was to give you a true choice.”

I narrowed my eyes as the Spirit continued.

“You were not born into sin. I gave you an existence independent from God. Your choice is to die as God, or to live as a human, remembering all the sin of God.”

I burst out laughing. The choice was flagrantly absurd. My entire life had been for something that the Spirit was planning to have fail from the start. I’d been running around with some kind of God complex – well, perhaps a dead God complex – thinking that I was trying to revive God, when that God was planning on staying dead the whole time.

“Well?”

I took deep breaths to calm myself at the Spirit’s urging.

“Can I ask you something first?”

“You have already asked plenty of questions, but what is this one?”

“Did you and the angels manipulate me into making friends?”

“We only significantly interfered near the end to cause you to drain the Father’s remaining resources. Everything else was just misinforming you on miracles.”

“… Wait, so I really was just an awful prophet?”

“Indeed.”

Huh. But, with that, I could decide.

“I want to go back to Earth.”

===

Mark Bellon was a coward. Just ask his sister, she’d tell you. When he heard from Adam that Elysia, the person he credited with saving his civil service career, had vanished in a small town on the East Coast, out of fear, he did something he would consider dishonourable.

===

I woke up in a grassy field with a pigeon pecking at my head. For a moment, I thought I saw a blue glint from its eyes, but, if that was there, it soon vanished. When I sat up, it flew away. I gave a bitter smile looking at it. I glanced at my E-watch, and I saw three days had passed. That again? The Spirit didn’t have much creativity….

When I looked around, I realised that I was on top of a hill. I looked down the hill and saw a crowd of people with bulky equipment gathered at the entrance to a town. … Reporters? I realised that I was just outside of Drewville.

Well, I guess I should move somewhere else and start a new identity. I don’t want to ruin my use as a martyr for the cause of rebuilding the East.

I dusted myself down.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I was suddenly interrupted by a blonde-haired man glowering at me.

“… Mark? How did you get here?”

“I walked.”

“….”

We stared at each other for a moment, before I eventually had to break off eye contact to hide my smile. Mark sighed, and his expression lightened.

“Seriously, Elysia – what happened? I won’t ask why you went to Drewville, but can you at least explain why you disappeared? You clearly didn’t die after being shoved off Jackson Cliff.”

Oh, he knows already? Hm….

“I didn’t die, obviously. I swam for a while and then eventually made it here. But why did you come down here? How did you know I would be here?”

Mark’s gaze sharpened.

“That Jude woman reported that something had happened, the full story came out within a day. When you were reported missing, Adam used the… questionable… privacy of the wiWatch U to find its location. I came out because I was on assignment close by in my internship.”

“… The watch’s privacy is that bad?”

Mark shrugged lightly, and I looked back to the reporters.

“You seem a bit different from when we last met, Elysia. You’re more expressive.”

“People change.”

I closed my eyes and considered my options for a moment.

“If I’m not seen as dead, then I won’t be able to be used as a symbol for East Coast reconstruction efforts.”

“So?”

I turned back to Mark, who had come closer to me.

“Before any of this had even been reported, Adam told Lillia that something seemed off with you when he met you at the train station. When Lillia went by to your apartment, your friend Sarah said something similar. Everyone is worried about you.”

Well… there goes my plan to run away.

“I guess things will still more or less work out media-wise even if I’m not actually dead.”

Mark grinned and stuck out his hand, which I grabbed onto and stood up with. I flicked Sarah’s glasses down over my eyes and examined the scenery.

Those reporters are going to be a pain to avoid….

But, the sight of law enforcement interviewing townsfolk and blue-patched men was certainly a sight for sore eyes. Throughout my observation, there was another lull in the conversation. Noticing that, I spoke up first.

“Would you believe me if I told you I was a former god?”

Mark chuckled.

“I might believe you if said you were a former angel.”

I frowned.

“I don’t think I’d get along with an angel if there were any left.”

Why? Well, it’s actually quite simple.

God is dead, and I killed him.

Dead God Complex – The End.