What if you had Gods, and they were human. What if you were created by magic, body and soul, to perform labour for the beings who blessed you with life and food and shelter and purpose. What if one day, there was a problem so severe that your Gods abandoned your island.
What if they left you behind. They could make more of you at their destination, after all. What if you had to figure out how keep your people alive without them. What if you had children in a godless world and taught them who they were and what their history was. What if the Gods were gone for generations, and you all held on, doing your best to serve absent masters at the last purpose left for you, waiting for the day when they would return and bring your true purpose back again.
What if they left you a ruined land, and no instructions, and many of you starved to death. What if you realised how much pain and suffering and danger your people had gone through, were going through, for indifferent creators who thought that you owed them everything and had the right to nothing, not even yourselves. What if you banded together with others in your righteous anger and declared that your Gods would never set foot in your land and drag you or your descendants into slavery again.
What if they left, and you had to figure yourselves out, build a society without them. What if you found that you could, and that you and your people were capable of sense and reason and dealing fairly with each other, and that likely your Gods were too. What if you decided that any who would treat you fairly and equally was welcome, and that lifelong master or lifelong enemy would be determined by the actions of any you met, your kind or theirs.
What if you were in one of three factions that shared an island for generations, with constant friction and occasional war at your borders over a singular issue related to a people long gone and irrelevant to the future. What if this opinion as ingrained so deeply into all three of your cultures that permanent peace and reintegration seemed impossible. What if this was your future, all for a race of Gods who would never come back.
What if one of them came back.
What if a young God stepped onto your lands, a trainee, the power of creation new and raw in their hands, and were surprised to find you kind there. What if they were surprised to find that your island even existed. What if they told you that your island wasn't in their records, that their arrival, a possibility that you had fought wars over for generations, had been accidental. That the people that you had fought and died and built your philosophies over did not know who you were.
What if your Gods returned, and they had forgotten about you.
