Chapter 4: Chapter 1.3

The feeling of dread within me vanished alongside with him, leaving only the usual darkness and the stone to my feet behind. At first I felt insanely lucky to have him gone as he was possibly the scariest existence I could even imagine. His missing face certainly played a huge role in that.

But still, I felt bored after a minute of being alone in this weird space. Without anything to do, the only option I had was to stumble through the darkness without any goal in mind. I desperately wished I would have picked ‘Reincarnate me as soon as possible’ as a wish, but that possibility was gone. Theoretically, he could even let me wander around this godforsaken place for years without any issues. I was dead after all and I highly doubted someone would search for me. I was there for a reason after all and I didn’t believe one second there was a mistake in me being there. As such, I would certainly go insane one day if he chose to let me rot in this place.

“Greatly done.” I kicked a small stone I felt with my foot as far away as possible. I was angry. Angry at myself for being a fool, angry at the gods for giving me him as my patron god and furious about everything.

At least I could play around with the stones to my feet for a little while and possibly even create something fascinating with it. A castle for example. Without anything else to do and convinced my idea was great, I immediately started searching for a few usable stone and began my work.

“Behold! My grandiose piece of art, the stone tower!” An hour or more later, I had successfully stacked three rather flat stones on top of each other. Sadly, there were hidden by the pitch black veil covering everything which made it very hard to see. But still, it wasn’t even difficult to build this tower as the stones I found were quite useful and not heavy at all. Sadly, I lost where I stacked the stones as I was searching for the fourth stone while crawling on the ground. Still, I was quite satisfied with my work. One hour of hard labour resulted in a tower someone, preferably an evil god would trip over. And even though it wasn’t a castle which I seriously doubted I could build after all this work, it was a beginning.

“This is so boring …” A boring beginning to be precise. “Hey, evil god, why don’t you make this place a little more engaging? Like adding a rollercoaster for example? I´m sure nobody would like to visit this place otherwise.” I kicked another stone I felt a few seconds earlier out of boredom. I underestimated the weight of it by quite a bit though and hissed loudly as I hopped away from it while holding my aching foot.

“You think that someone likes to visit this prison, even if it was as engaging as an amusement park? A rollercoaster wouldn’t help at all … a waterslide is a great idea though.” The same voice I heard earlier spoke once again, seemingly out of nowhere. It freaked me out quite a bit that he kept watching over me, but I managed to calm myself down within seconds.

“Then why I am here?” Was I a prisoner as well? Damned to live in this dark place for centuries to come because of some misunderstanding? Because I seriously doubted stealing the pudding last week did result in my situation. Could I leave? Or did the god lie to me in the beginning?

“You are a lost soul, wandering on the river Styx unguided by a helping hand and being washed ashore here. I just had to save such a pitiful creature that couldn’t reach its real patron god. And as such, I plan on extending my hand towards you, hoping you will take it one day.” Was he planning on becoming a poet or why did he speak like this? I smirked as I thought about how the god of the underworld would present poems to his audience but quickly shook my head. This was never going to happen.

 “Then tell me, my oh so helpful god, why am I still here? Without any light to guide my steps, I had to stumble through the darkness for three hours already?” Truth to be told, I was still annoyed by the selection of activities in this place. There was stone kicking, stumbling through the darkness, stone throwing, falling down over a stone, hitting one stone at another … yeah, it was incredibly boring, even more so than staring at the sensor screen for multiple hours straight.

“I still don’t know what the most fitting body for you would be. Do you want to be a boy?” Where did this come from? I would rather die than being expected to do the heavy work. Furiously, I shook my head and tried to shake off the future where I was bound to lift crates and crates of machine parts. I´d rather did kitchen work on the spaceship than any of these activities.

“Hell no. You have a weird taste, you know that?” If he needed my confirmation to change anything about my reincarnation it was better to state right away what I didn’t want. I highly doubted it though, alongside the fact that he had to fulfil my wishes.

“What do you prefer, a knife or a gun?” I thought my new home would be quite medieval, so where did this gun part come from? Was he able to give me a gun in the new world? Well, that would certainly be interesting. I could win every fight without doing much … at least until I ran out of bullets.

“A gun.” Thus, the gun was clearly the better pick, but I seem to have missed the point of his question as he laughed madly immediately afterwards.

“How evil. A gun can only be used to kill people while a knife has multiple purposes. Is this what you want? Murder humans?” He didn’t intend to gift me anything at all, but rather wanted to ridicule me. I should have known better and just kept my mouth shut. But after his words, I needed to justify my choice.

“Well, you can use a gun for multiple other things. For once, you can absolutely use it so shoot someone, or you can use it to …” I thought hard about different usages of guns, but nothing good came to my mind. “… to scare someone off! Ha, what do you do now?” He grumbled, not expecting me to come up with anything different. To conclude, the evil god wasn’t perfect either.

“Alright, you may or may not have convinced me. But to see if you are truly evil, I just need to ask one question. What do you think of pineapple on a pizza?” That question baffled me quite a bit. We had food that should have tasted just like pizza but it was rare to come by and as I never saw a pineapple in my whole life except on a screen I kind of struggled to answer. Thus, I could only pick one of the answers.

“Hmm… uh… they are great together?” He laughed loudly, sending shivers down my spine. I may have picked the wrong option there, even though I didn’t know why.

“Truly evil. Let me think about it a bit more. I´ll be back in a few days.” Evil? How is pineapple on pizza evil? I didn’t understand the world anymore, but I also wondered why this evil god didn’t even try to ridicule me more than that. In fact, I wondered so much about it that I nearly missed what he said.

“Days? Days? How am I going to survive here for days?” No food, no water, no comfortable bed, everything was missing in this barren place I would need to survive. Let alone the useful utensils like the smart mirror I had on the spaceship, there was nothing in this place except my used clothing.

“You are dead, remember?” Yeah, I did remember how I steered the spaceship into the abyss, but he didn’t have to rub salt onto my open wound. It weighed heavily on my shoulders that everyone was dead because of me even though I managed to hide most of my anxiety because of the rather unusual situation. Luckily, he was already gone as I cursed him quietly for bringing that up.

Once again, I was left to my own demise like a lost soul in purgatory, just that there was no fire and no screaming humans around me. I was a bit unsure if this place would be any better if it burned, but the darkness slowly got on my nerves. Not being able to see was quite the obstacle in my exploration of this area. I could only crawl on all fours or slowly but surely place one foot in front of the other and thus didn’t make much progress during my next hours in this place.

Luckily or not, I was really dead. That reality sank in quite quickly as I missed any feeling of thirst, hunger and could hold my breath for as long as I wished. There was simply no need for me to breathe at all, just like a corpse wouldn’t need to do so. Slowly, my state of mind changed as the adrenaline left my body. My act of being a brave, tough person in front of the god crumbled quite quickly.

Surely, I was insanely good at acting on the spot, but my mind wasn’t firm enough to deal with the situation for too long. Feeling insanely exhausted, I sat down on a rather large stone and noticed how tears were welling up in my eyes. I swiftly wiped them away with my tattered t-shirt, but the god apparently noticed even that.

“Are you okay?” He was watching me the whole time like a creepy stalker. And sadly, there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop him. I mean, what was a teenager supposed to do against a god? And as such, I could only convert my tears into anger about the unfairness of everything.

“If I am okay? I am in purgatory or whatever this place is and the goddam roman church isn´t even selling indulgence letters here! You won´t let me go either, so how am I ever supposed to leave this place? Heck, if I would have reacted just a bit faster, I could still be alive.” I nearly shouted at him, wherever he was. If I could have disabled the warp drive soon enough, we may not find ourselves in this crappy situation, but rather be dead for good. Or maybe, just maybe we would have escaped another way. I knew our chances were pretty slim, but at least we had a chance this way.

“Do you want to know what you are good at? You are insanely good at working under pressure, even if it seems to crush you. And that’s something to be proud of. Not a single one of your crewmates on the ship found the courage to act in that hopeless situation, but you did.” Well, he was right with that, even though I disliked agreeing with him. The others were frozen in fear while my mind felt strangely clear, so there was at least something I was good at however useful that may be. It still irked me that an evil god was consoling me. It just didn’t feel right at all.

“Stop that. You aren’t supposed to help me.” I was still sobbing a bit, but it lessened considerably. Once again, my mind felt clear as I thought about his motivations. He even admitted to being an evil god, so I failed to grasp his motives right away. Die he need my trust for something? Or was there something else?

Frowning slightly, I turned around and stared at the darkness that let the usual darkness in this place shine in comparison. Once again, the feeling of dread crept into me but it didn’t stop me from staring at him.

“I am trying to improve your mood. Nothing else.” He said it so calmly, so friendly that I nearly believed him. But my whole being screamed at me to never think of this self-proclaimed evil god as friendly. It just didn’t fit the context of this place.

“If you truly want me to feel better, then send me away from here. There is nothing else you can do.” He vanished in front of me, but that interestingly enough didn’t stop me from tracing his movements. His location was incredibly easy to make out. I just had to turn around and look at whatever felt scary.

“I cannot do that. But we can escape this place together.” I laughed hard. I just lost my life to godlike beings who were tearing apart a whole universe and couldn’t be hurt with the greatest weapons of humanity and he expected me to work together with him, another being I expected to be exactly the same? For how dumb did he take me? My friends may have more luck with their patron gods, and I wasn’t willing to ruin their new shot at life for selfish reasons. They were my family after all.

“Is that what you want? Do you need my help in escaping this prison? I would rather die than let anything ruin my friend’s new life. And you certainly have the potential to do exactly that.” I concluded and balled my hands into fists, just so that I would feel a little bit stronger.

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He reappeared in front of my face or rather sped around me at incredible speed, stopping just a few centimetres in front of me. I nearly stumbled backwards, but I did hold my ground in the end and stared back while squinting my eyes. He grinned, showing strangely white teeth in comparison to his otherwise pitch-black being. Interestingly enough I could see everything. There were no lights around here and I couldn’t even see my own hands, but I could see this god and his teeth very clearly as if he was a light source.

“You are wrong. You cannot help me in escaping this place as you are now anyway. I tried to be nice to you, I really tried, but it does not seem to be working at all. Humans these days, they don’t even fear their own creators anymore.” I stumbled backwards, shivering as a feeling of terror radiated from him even more than before. This god knew how to make others fear him quite well, I had to give him that. “But I don’t mind it. I´m patient. After all, I already waited thousands of years for you.”

The terror, the fear, it all vanished into nothingness. If he had this amount of control over my emotions, what else could he do? I surely didn’t want to find out. He continued to speak, but this time with a more casual tone. “I will let you leave, no, I will even give you a parting gift if you promise me to free me with the best of your abilities. You have no other way of leaving this place, so do take your time in deciding.” He vanished into thin air again, leaving me behind with stones, smaller stones and slightly larger stones, not to forget the crushing boredom that came slightly afterwards.

I knew that there was absolutely no way I would be able to live here for too long, with only my sounds accompanying me while I stumbled through the darkness. While I was certain that I would be faster if I crawled on the ground, I didn’t want to tear my clothing even further.

“Why do I have clothing in the first place? I mean, I am dead, so does that mean that my clothing is dead as well? Poor, poor jeans and t-shirt.” Sometimes, it was better to not think too hard about certain things, which included this topic as well.  And so, I walked onwards, occasionally hitting my shoes against a larger rock and despairing about my situation. Somehow, I got the feeling that I couldn’t just break a promise I would give him easily and thus couldn’t accept his proposal.

I took another step, hoping to have a stable footing which I succeeded in, but still froze at the sound I heard as I stepped on something. It was definitely not a stone that made this strange noise. I closed my eyes, but I realized that this didn’t even change anything. Either I stepped on something like wood, which would certainly be strange in a place without light, or I just broke something that would certainly fit into the ambience of this place.

“Sorry.” I took another step and heard the cracking sound again. “Sorry.” I cried as I walked onwards, but never thought about going back. These bones I stepped on were either faked or from beings that died long ago. I chose the former, hoping that there was no reason any living being would visit this place. The field of bones seemed endless and I said sorry with each step I took, even when I hoped that they were fake. Finally, after quite some time walking did the bones lessen and stones littered the landscape again. I finally calmed down enough to breath normally again, a chance that I used to summon my beloved god again.

“Hey, Mr. evil god, why are there bones?” He didn’t wait long to give me a reply.

“Bones? Which bones?” I stopped walking. Was he lying or did I just really cry because I stepped on something that wasn’t bones? Still, I felt relieved by his question, hoping that I stepped on something different.

“What did I step on this whole time?” He reappeared in front of me again, giving me the shock of my life. At least he didn’t manipulate my emotions again.

“Bones. Ahh, you mean these bones. Let me think about it.” He tilted his head while I cursed him silently, realizing that I indeed stepped on bones. “No, I don’t remember how they got here. Maybe they were here even before me.”

“Are there other bones?” I did not want to repeat this experience ever again. Thinking that it was something different certainly helped, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do that once I knew that this stuff was bones.

“Oh, certainly there are. The gods throw all kinds of living beings down here that they want to see dead.” Even the god of Hope? Or, I don’t know, the god of love? Or was it just other evil gods that used this place as a prison? Honestly, I didn’t care that much about it, so I chose to ask something different instead.

“Why can I leave with your help and they cannot?” I took a step back, finally putting some distance between us. He followed suit, shortening the distance even more.

“Because your arrival here wasn’t intended by the gods. Even I was baffled when I saw you.” I took another step backwards, hoping that I wouldn’t trip. The non-existing distance between us made me incredibly nervous.

“You weren’t the one that brought me here?” Everything made even less sense. I thought that he was the reason for my dire situation, but if I were to believe his words, he was completely innocent in that regard.

“No, someone else must have screwed you over.” I stopped walking backwards and nibbled on a fingernail. Someone else? But who? Who had the power to do such a thing and why would he or she do that? “Have you decided?”

“I want you to answer me a few questions truthfully. What makes you think that a mere promise will lead me to free you? Couldn’t I just forget about it?” It honestly didn’t matter if he would say the truth or not as I would decide on the worst possible outcome I could imagine anyway, which was that he would have a way to force me.

“Aren´t you already a bit obsessed with keeping your word? I mean, you threw a tantrum last week because someone promised you his pudding.” Pudding was precious on the spaceship so his accusation hurt me quite a bit. Still, it wasn’t to an extent where I felt obligated to follow every promise I made, even when I usually tried to keep my word. But that wasn’t even the worst part. How did he know? Reading my mind was out of the question as I obviously didn’t think about pudding in purgatory.

“How … what´s my favourite colour? How long do I sleep? What is my favourite task on the spaceship? What´s my dad’s name?”

“Red, as long as you can, repairing the hull from the outside and Marc, although he was called sergeant more often.” He knew things I thought consciously about, things that were true, but I didn’t think consciously about, and even knew facts that I shouldn’t know. My dad died before I was born and my mum obviously didn’t talk too much about him with her young child. He may have lied, but then he would know what I didn’t know.

“How …” I was shocked, incredibly so. He was a god, but didn’t he take that a bit too far?

“You are mine. From the moment you woke up, I knew every single fact about you. And I also know that I just need your promise and you will free me one day.” Could he read the future as well? No, that should be impossible. But what made him so sure? I wasn’t that obsessed with promises to justify his claims, so it must have been something else entirely. I laughed and played the tough girl again, even when it was useless. At least, it washed away the feeling of helplessness to a degree.

“If I am yours, why don’t you manipulate me and make me your loyal servant?” He stepped one more step closer. My forehead nearly touched his jaw and I trembled as he placed his hands on my shoulders.

“Unlike most of the other gods, I believe in free will. And remember, I am not forcing you to accept my proposal. You could stay here forever with me if you so desire.” I would rather avoid that if possible. After all, I hated this place since I woke up here.

“If you believe in free will, how do you want to force me to keep my promise?” That was what I really wanted to know.

“I do believe that you will keep your promise on your own, even when you intend to never follow through with it right now. After all, I fulfilled your wishes in the best possible way and even when you somehow manage to fight against your very own nature, you will have to choose between dying or freeing me one day, at least that’s what I believe.” His words didn’t really make much sense to me, but I understood that I would probably save him one day if I agreed to his deal.

“How many will die when I free you? Will you kill my friends?”

“Haa … you are asking boring questions. I will not answer any more than I already did.” We both knew that my questions were in no way boring, but rather troublesome for him to answer. “What do you say? Do you agree or not?”

He was here a thousand years and was impatient now? I honestly couldn’t decide. Getting away from here was incredibly tempting but putting my friends in danger was also something that I couldn’t allow.

“I think I´m building another tower right now.” I crouched down, escaping the pitch-black hands that were still on my shoulder and started searching for more stones in the darkness. The god must have been fuming, but not a single word escaped his lips if he even had any. Now it was his time to wait for my answer.

Something I quite liked.

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