Warning: death mention, deity themes, existentialism, reader interactive
It's a tough question. Would you kill baby Hitler, if given the chance? Would you take over the world? Would you banish everyone who ever committed you the slightest wrong? If you could bring back the dead, would you? More importantly, if you could do anything, what WOULD you do?
Shae could do anything. She may have been able to before, but she didn't know. She could find out, but she wasn't sure she wanted to.
Shae was a god. She could do anything, but what would she do? Nothing presented a challenge to her, and in retrospect, nothing ever had. Would she stop WW2? Perhaps she could simply erase humanity from this plane of reality completely, or move this miniscule speck in the universe to another dimension, just for the heck of it. Maybe she'd make herself famous and rich, or make it so no one needed food to survive. She could make dreams or rip out the fragile souls she knew lived inside so many things.
She could erase hate, foster love and bliss. She could pit things against each other in epic battles or inspire a revolution, good or bad. Shae did not know what she would do. She knew the meaning of everything now. Because of this, nothing meant anything to her anymore. She could simply float in the void, she supposed, but it may get awfully boring. She decided to send a message across the cosmos, across all planes of reality. She asked for all beings to tell her what they would do if they became a god as she had. She waited for their response with a forever of patience. She would not do anything until she had an answer from everyone and everything. Shae wants to know.
Warning: death, fire, and yelling! “War” was not a typo! If that bothers you then DON’T READ P L E A S E
"Look at me." He looked down at her obediently, his eyes spilling liquid emotion. She reached up and wiped his cheek with her thumb as her watery eyes tried to blink away the pain.
"Don't look away," she murmured. "I've got you."
"And I've got you." His voice broke, but he managed to smile. She wrapped her arms around him and gazed into his eyes.
"Always," she whispered. They embraced, and the room erupted in flames.
—
"Cover me! Agent Heather going in." She double checked her air-tight suit, reassuring herself that she still had twelve minutes of air left before the poisonous exterior began seeping in.
"Agent Heather, this is Praetor Nightshade. As your superior I command you to stay where you are. We've lost too many agents tonight. I'm calling this the one in. Let's make sure the rest of us live to fight another day."
"All due respect Praetor Nightshade but," Heather pried open the door into the center as she spoke, flames leaping out to meet her but brushing harmlessly past the proofed cloth. "I'm not going to fight another day, one way or the other. I'm giving this one my all." She turned off her communications as the praetor and her fellow agents began to shout at her. She smiled grimly at the darkness within and trudged on.
—
"KEEP THEM OUT!" He screamed in the youth's face, who recoiled immediately. The other knights kept their gaze away, glad it was not them who had the guts to ask the question they all wanted the answer for.
Lord Cytisus looked around at them in disbelief. "What did you THINK you were supposed to be doing, running around like headless-"
"SIR!" An apprentice burst in and then shrunk back from the intensity of the glares shot at her.
"WELL?" Cytisus demanded. "What is it, Miss Abrus?"
"An agent has penetrated the inner circle, sir." The poor girl was only a child, but here she was in the middle of a Knott-forsaken battle. Many of the knights pitied her, but their attitude changed drastically with her next words.
"They've let the firewall in." Gasps went up around the room as realization set in. The firewall was a last-ditch defense mechanism that had been created so that it did not reach the interior, but the old building had been hastily adapted for it when enemy forces chased them out of their old base. It was only a matter of time before they would be incinerated. There would be no escape from the shrinking circle of death as it enclosed on them.
"...Lord Cytisus?" The young knight from before spoke up again. "What now?"
The man was quiet for a minute. "There's only one thing we can do."
He turned to the man—more of a boy really, he realized—that only moments before he had wanted to slap. "Your name is Fallopia, yes?"
"Well, yes—yes sir." Fallopia shuffled his feet, feeling the gazes of everyone on his back once again.
"Well Mister Fallopia, I want you to go into the back with Miss Abrus now; she'll lead you to the cases we've been protecting. I want you to destroy them."
Fallopia's eyes felt like they were going to pop out of his head.
"But sir!" Abrus protested. Cytisus silenced her with a single raise of his hand.
"If we are to lose, then our efforts shall not be in vain. It is better for that information to be lost completely than in enemy hands. Do you understand?" The two looked at each other for moment and then left uneventfully.
"Sir?" Another knight clutched her sides fearfully. Cytisus wished he'd bothered to learn all of their names. All he could do was memorize their faces, raw and afraid, in this moment. He had to make sure their sacrifice—and his—was worth something. He needed to prove that their lives had been worth it.
"Sir," she repeated, "are we... giving up?"
The man smiled at the innocence in her question. "My dear," he said, with a gentleness none of the knights knew he possessed, "who ever said we were doing that?"
