Midnightly Thoughts (a short story)

It was supposed to be a simple operation, one that she’s done thousands of times. Assume the identity of a mortal, become this writer guy’s biggest supporter, seduce him, give him an unforgettable night, only to watch him disappear without a trace in a burst of flames shortly after. There was nothing to go wrong, and yet there he was, peacefully asleep, his body and soul completely intact. It was at that moment that “Artemis” began to think that maybe that “fall of gods” might have been real.

Of course, people noticed it when two enormous figures appeared seemingly out of nowhere only to drop dead with grave wounds on their bodies, and the news of that spread everywhere rapidly, but to even assume that those figures belonged to the very deities that watched over this world for millennia seemed outright blasphemous.

Especially since pretty much every prophecy or piece of study out there came to the exact same conclusion: the world as it exists is held up by the two deities, and just one of the two dying would cause catastrophic consequences. The Wardens knew that, too. Even a lot of the mortals did, though they did get some of the details wrong.

Not to mention that she’s still alive, too. She and all of her colleagues were taught that, as creatures of Darkness, they were inherently bound to their Master, same as every Warden was to theirs; that not only their powers, but their very being was dependent on the will of their respective gods, and could be terminated at any moment.

She might have hated the Wardens for their zealous desire to make the world follow all of their misguided and oppressive rules, but really it was the mortals she despised the most. In spite of their limited lifespans and near total lack of arcane powers, they were granted the kind of freedom both her kind and the Wardens could only dream of. Sure, a lot of them were still worshipping one of the gods and cursing in the other’s “name” (another concept they got hilariously wrong), but they could still think and act however they wanted and, with very few exceptions, only be judged by other mortals. And as much as she considered the idea of someone breaking the very explicit rules of the god they claimed to devote their entire lives to as hilariously hypocritical, she still envied the possibility.

Another thing she always envied was their ability to create. Much like the rest of her people or the Wardens, she was told that only the two gods had the true power of creation, and yet it was “humanity” that grew and advanced at an increasing pace, while they instead always had to catch up to new inventions and discoveries, ways of life, styles of fashion, speech, art, and so on. In her work, she has personally witnessed many of her colleagues fall into suspicion by saying some phrase that no living mortal would even recognize, or failing to recognize a “new” thing that has existed for decades. Of course, the easiest explanation was that the gods were secretly interfering in people’s societies, but then why do their own realms still run almost the same way as when she was a child? Pretty much everyone smart enough suspected that clearly, the mortals must therefore have their own spark for creation, with the only limit being their lifespan and lackluster abilities.

This is why she particularly delighted in going after creative people. Writers, artists, musicians, inventors – she felt extreme envy against those whose abilities were inherently denied to her and her kind, and it was one of the greatest joys in her work to be able to deprive the mortals of someone like that. She often spent several months meticulously preparing for certain operations: collecting all sorts of useful information, coming up with consistent identities to take, forging life stories and plausible belongings that would be accepted by the mortals (even if, in reality, they were mostly stolen from other mortals and, when needed, slightly rearranged).

But now, she started thinking about the writer’s own work. She’s been only around for a few centuries, and her memories of youth were extremely hazy, but she started to recognize that even a lot of his greatest creations also borrowed lots of elements from more ancient stories and texts. His scripts were performed in the greatest theaters and books of his works were read by both nobles and commoners, and yet she could easily imagine something almost exactly like them being read or played back in those more primitive times. Did he also play the same devious trick by stealing parts of long-dead people’s stories and changing them to fit in modern society?

Clearly, not quite. After all, they may be mortal, but that doesn’t mean they have no idea about what the past was like. They have universities and libraries, where people can read and study the classics of ages long gone. Entire fields of study are held in languages people haven’t spoken in dozens of generations. Someone learnèd enough could easily expose the writer as a fraud who hasn’t made anything truly original.

But then, would they care? It seems like a lot of these same people delight in learning about the past and using these lessons to reinvent something long-forgotten. It felt almost insulting to her that her desperate efforts to fake creativity were so similar to how actual mortals functioned. And, yet, she could not deny that it worked. Their understanding of physics, medicine, warfare kept improving. Their art got more and more complex and detailed. Her older colleagues can easily recall times when the mortal societies were even more primitive than that. And her own efforts in infiltration have successfully gotten her into places where her less skilled colleagues failed.

She gradually realizes that all this rising confusion and uncertainty are emotions she didn’t have to struggle with back when she knew that her Master was watching over every one of them. Is “the power of creation” an actual thing that mortals have? Did the gods have it in the first place? And if they’re clearly dead now, does that mean her folks and the Wardens are now just as free?

She looked at the writer, still happily asleep. All this time, sex was purely a means to an end – a convenient murder weapon granted to her by her Master. She never had to consider it in the way the mortals do, as either a means of procreation or an enjoyable activity.

She carefully rose up and walked into a nearby bathroom. If she can’t do this anymore, what else does she lack now? Looking into a mirror, she was able to confirm that she can still change parts of her appearance at will, so at the very least she’s not stuck with this look forever. She also checked if she is still capable of lighting a small ball of fire, although she discovered that keeping it lit for more than a few seconds made her feel an unusual discomfort. At least the years of training for all those skills weren’t a total waste. Still, she thought that it’s better be to careful, as even if these abilities aren’t inherently suspicious – some mortals can do similar things – she doesn’t know what her new limits are or how long they will last. Of course, this only raised a more important question: is her immortality also gone without the Master? She decided not to test that particular hypothesis and returned to the bedroom.

For once, she thought about how her own “job” caused the deaths of so many mortals. Even if, as a being who supposedly owed all of her life to the Master, she had no power to resist, she now feels heavy guilt for all these acts. Sure, a lot of her victims were awful people, or deserved to die for aiding the Light’s brutal system of obedience, but she also recognizes that her former leader wasn’t exactly a paragon of justice and freedom, either. Both deities have spent centuries treating the mortals as disposable pawns in an elaborate game for power and influence, and now that this game is over, she recognizes that, really, everyone in both her kind and the Wardens has a lot to atone for.

There’s a lot of questions yet to be answered. How did the gods die? People are talking about weird wounds on those bodies… Did they kill each other, or was it someone else’s doing? Why did so little change in the world after the fact? She imagines that everyone else, including the Wardens and the mortals, are asking the same questions right now.