Divine Chronograph of Flesh 12:36
"To you who are reading this: Did you really think humans could have survived this cruel world without me? I am the goddess of the future and the past, the now and the then, the eternal constant in human life: Zeyna, who will be present at your end and at your beginning."
The year was 1940, right in the middle of the Second World War. Ashes scattered on the barren expanse, and bodies smouldered together in uncanny, tightly packed heaps. Blood clung to the air, cementing the battlefield as a cruel equalizer, one that offered only the choice between dying and dying faster. No sensible human, let alone a god, would willingly jump into the belly of the beast without possessing a peculiar penchant for death.
Yet, here I stood in this paradox.
My life had been one of effortless success since the dawn of my existence. Never once had I been put in a situation beyond me; challenges always seemed to be just below my capabilities. A sense of danger is incredibly useful to a human, but to a god like me, living stripped of my power in a world like this was a uniquely precarious circumstance.
We had Zeyna to thank for this restriction. As the goddess of Time and Lineage, she blamed us for the catastrophic domino of the First World War. Her solution was injecting humanity with Ronich, a divine repellent that acted like an opposing magnet, violently pushing any immortal entity back to the nearest earthly temple.
Zeus, predictable as ever, had a mind weaving a web of loopholes. But Zeyna held her ground with a brutal ultimatum: any god wishing to meddle in mortal affairs had to surrender their secondary dominion, strip themselves of divinity, and walk the earth as a fragile human. And if we caused another catastrophe, she would plunder our remaining power for humanity's prolonged prosperity.
A loud siren echoed, illuminating the battlefield in a cacophony of screams. Visages of red and yellow flew down like a herald of doom. A German Stuka bomber swooped down, dropping a bomb a few hundred metres away.
Shrieks erupted, voices conjoined in a terrifying resignation. Death could be seen on the mud-stained faces of these young British men, desperately trying to save their comrades in futility. Fear! Unbridled. Genuine. Fear in such a visceral sense that I was sure death was imminent, divine in its grace like me.
This foolish embrace must be fought. My feet moved faster than my mind. I retreated, not strategically, but cowardly, the only one who dared to reveal their true face in this grotesque playhouse, the only one who dared run away from their doom, or perhaps it was inevitable. Nothing could change this fact. I would die here, at the expense of not divine schemes or meticulous machinations, but of human cruelty and ingenuity, terrifying in their capacity to create such weapons of mass destruction.
Soliloquies of this nature were for dying men, not gods.
A sudden light blinded me as I felt my death looming, the fates giggling maniacally at my demise, gossiping on my lamentable death. I attempted in futility to cast a ward, a last shield of mist from my mother, but Hecate failed to answer.
Per claves triplices portae matris.
Vinebra velutina spatii infiniti.
Nebulam texe, fatum meum cela.
Mundum luce mea languida excaeca.
Umbras surgere sinite.
Saxa confundere.
A motu mortali me protegite.
It didn't work. Like everything I had, nothing worked. Nothing godly, at least.
The spell died on my lips. My chest tightened. The air remained cold, empty, and indifferent. Hecate was not coming. I was small, and I was fragile. For a terrifying second, I was not an immortal architect of realities. I was just meat, waiting to be torn apart by flying iron. My divine pride shattered, leaving only the raw, weeping instinct of a mortal beast cornered by death.
But were my godly powers really my only source? There were many gods with similar dominions, but I was always the strongest. Why? What set me apart? What can I use? I am intelligent. I configured wars. I shaped realities. What can I do? What...
A sudden spark of clarity hit me like a runaway locomotive.
My mind raced, clawing through millennia of accumulated wisdom for a mortal solution. I had no magic, but I possessed the mind that had designed empires. I looked up at the diving heralds of doom and saw their predictable trajectory.
"Everyone!" I roared, the ancient semblance of a commander bleeding into my fragile human vocal cords. "Fire your guns! Create a wall of lead!"
It wasn't magic; it was ballistic warfare. A single rifle bullet couldn't halt a Stuka, but hundreds could. For a split second, the British soldiers froze. They were a ragged line of mud-caked boys and battle-weary Tommy soldiers, their faces hollowed by exhaustion and stained with the soot of retreat, yet they were gripped by the sheer majesty and authority in my voice before throwing themselves into position.
We moved northwest, retreating toward the southern coast in a desperate, albeit organized, chaos. My mind mapped the battlefield eidetically, calculating distances, wind speeds, and survival rates. A British Brigadier once said to stand up to them, to shoot at them with a Bren gun from the shoulder, to take them like a high pheasant, and to give them plenty of lead, remembering five pounds to any man who brings one down.
Suddenly, a loud shout erupted. A British sergeant grabbed me by the collar, a burly man with black hair in a buzz cut. "Keep your mouth open unless you want your brains blown out of your ears, and lie flat on the ground. All of you!" he screamed. That was the last thing I remembered before it all went black.