The farewell of the Gods

Ases looked the hero of the sea, Atalan, in the eye. Without a word, he was challenging him to go on with his threat, and to actually plunge the spear into his throat.

“Go ahead. It's not like I have much left to lose, do I?” challenged Ases, letting the tip of the spear touch his skin.

Atalan was furious, wishing nothing more than to cut the throat of the unrepentant coward that is Ases, hero of death. After all, when the entire pantheon was about to attack the homeland of the beasts, why was he the only blessed hero who renounced the task?

The other heroes stood to the side, all of them wishing to do the same thing to varying degrees, but at the same time, they understood how meaningless the act truly was.

“I should do it, after all, your revered Goddess would let everyone on this planet die, except for you, wouldn’t she?”

Atalan pushed the spear even more, drawing blood, but not daring to do the final step and actually plunging it in. Ases just continued looking at him in silence. After a tense moment, the hero of the sea finally retired his spear.

“I used to respect you as a fellow warrior, so in honor of that, I’ll concede you this leniency. But at the very least you got to answer this to me. If your Goddess hadn’t deemed otherwise, would you have accompanied us?”

“As a thanks for your trust I fear I’ll have to be honest this time. Is hard for me to say it with full certainty, but at the very least, I believe that it would not have changed anything.”

“I knew it.”

Atalan swung his spear, trying to cut him in half, but this time Ases stopped him, grabbing it below the tip with his bare hands.

“You flaunt that kind of power but at the end you never dared to risk your life with us, even once. If you refuse to do anything with it, how can you call yourself worthy of it?”

Ases did not respond, simply pushing the spear away.

Atalan didn’t push the matter forward, after all, he knew that beating the hero of death was an impossible task. Blessed with an immortal body that could face any warrior, he was at the same time their best shot, and the only person who refused to collaborate with their efforts.

Without deigning him with any further words, all the heroes waked away to the border of the cliff, where the avatars of their gods awaited them. The entire pantheon had banded together, with three notable exceptions. The God of the sea, whose avatar was now under the control of the beasts. The Goddess of death, the impartial arbiter who refused to take a side in the conflict, and The Goddess of wisdom, who waited for the fight to stop before having her final conversation with Ases.

“I thought that asking Mors to make you stay would make the others more understanding, but it didn’t change anything in the end.”

“No, nothing would change the fact that I’m the only one who decided to stay.” Responded him, refusing to look the goddess in the eyes.

“But you are aware that if you wanted to, you could join our efforts, even when Mors does not agree with it. She would not be so callous as to take your powers away if you chose to participate.”

“I don’t think you know her as well as I do, and beyond that, I did not lie to Atalan. Even if the choice fell onto me, I would not accompany you in this expedition.”

Finally, he turned around and looked at her. She was radiant, a clear embodiment of divinity. The eyes he feared would look at him hatefully, instead showed only compassion and understanding.

“But what I don’t understand is why you agreed with all of this to begin with. You know this expedition is doomed from the start, right?”

He asked the question that had been gnawing at his insides from the start. After the God of the sea fell, they knew that all the other Gods were also in danger, which pushed them to take extreme measures against the beasts. Even so, the truth was that even before that happened they had been fighting them with all their might, and time and time again it proved to be insufficient. The pantheon simply did not have the power to beat their mysterious magic or their unending numbers.

She blinked at him, as if the question caught her off guard. Then, she looked like she had to make an effort not to laugh, as if she found the question itself absurd.

“I am the avatar of the Goddess of Wisdom, and as such, I will follow through with her wishes to the end. For me, this was never a question, this was a certainty. Fate does not exist, it is only an illusion perceived by those who can’t see the forces that move our reality. But at the same time, fate is almost set in stone if you truly understand how all those forces fit with each other. What I mean is that this was the only possible course of action for us, no matter what the odds of success were to begin with.”

“I truly don’t get it. You can say that, but just like you say I can choose to stay or to go, you can choose the same thing, can’t you?”

“Certainly, I could stand my ground here and just deny myself, but every fiber of my being would resent the notion of doing nothing right now. Is not a matter of options, it is a matter of who we are.”

“So who you are is a suicidal Goddess, that’s what you are trying to say?”

“It’s also not a matter of life or death. Don’t you understand?”

The Goddess indicated him to follow her, going to the border of the risk in a different place from where all the other Gods were.

“If I can recall, your homeland was around there, on the base of that mountain whose peaks now are bathed by the waves. Your family, and hundreds of others, lived in that village for decades if not centuries. If you had not killed the boar, you probably would have never become a hero and would have never left your hometown. How would your life have been?”

Ases reminisced back to those times in his youth, now two decades ago. When he was trying to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“I probably would have become a shepherd. That’s what I was doing before I encountered the boar, to begin with.”

“So you would have stayed, which means that if your life had gone on like that, you would be dead by now.”

“True, but I still don’t understand what you are getting at.”

“Time and time again you have said that you wish you had never killed the boar, and that you regret ever becoming immortal. Would you have preferred to be a shepherd, even if that meant you would be dead by now?”

That was a hard question, and once again, he tried not to look at the Goddess. He had been asking himself that same question ever since the catastrophe began. Seeing this, she continued:

“As I see it, both your life as a shepherd and your life as a hero have the same meaning, both are a reflection of who you are inside. You used to wish for your life as a shepherd, but now you deny it because you realized it only spelled death in the end, but don’t you realize that your life now also has the same endpoint? Someday you’ll lose the blessing of death, and the result would not have changed.”

“It would have changed, because I’m alive here right now, and maybe a Goddess would not get it, but that means everything to me right now.”

“Of course, but you’ll still die. The endpoint has still not changed, no matter how much the world around you did. If the end is the same, then what truly matters is what comes before it, is what you find true value in before you get there.”

“And how do you find value? By dying in vain?”

“By fighting to the end, of course. If death is still the endpoint, then what matters is being true to ourselves in every step before then. Atalan called you a coward, but as I see it, your most valuable thing is simply not the same as ours. You tried to hide it, but you have a wife, and even a kid, don’t you?”

Ases looked at her in horror, after all, he had gone to great measures to hide that fact from both the Gods and his fellow heroes.

“Don’t look at me like that, did you really think you can hide something from the embodiment of wisdom? What a silly man you are. ”

The Goddess left him behind, starting to walk towards the others, who were now ready to go. But before she did, she turned around to give him some last words.

“Don’t fret about it. We don’t have anything left more important than this fight. I won’t foretell you the result, but I’ll ask you to stay true to yourself after you finally find your meaning. And you better make it quick, after all, time is the only thing you don’t have now. If you want the most time you can, you should take your family to Yatro, and I wish you luck once you arrive. Goodbye, Ases”

The gods reunited and Atalan used his blessed spear to open the seas. He had become a mortal again, but he still conserved traces of his old glory. Following him, they all started traversing the desolate remains of the old world. The goddess waved him goodbye and followed them, leaving him alone on the cliffs.

Ases remained on the cliff after their departure, wondering if he did the right thing by abandoning the fight. But when the sun went down, he finally decided to do the most he could out of the situation. He put back the boar mask, rose up, and walked away. He now had a destination, and no time left to lose.