The Dying Soldier Speaks with the Penitent Goddess of War

This story was inspired by the “celestial bureacracy” trope common to East Asian and East Asian-inspired stories. It was also the shortest of the three voting options for October- the other two are quite a bit longer. (Though I won't say which the longest is!)

The Lieutenant was dying slowly, and none of his magic could stop it.

He could punch through stone, bend metal with his bare hands. His sword could hack apart armor, could conceptually slice enemy messages out of the air. He could revert his personal timeline by six seconds every minute, could reincarnate within a moment of his death once per month, could pay Fate herself with his virtuous deeds to guide him away from death.

And yet he was dying of a simple gut wound, while wondering why he had been the sole survivor, what made him worthy of living, even if only for a short, painful time.

When they had gone to war against the gods, they had expected a brutal war, one that would leave the land broken and bloodstained.

They’d easily won all the early battles against the faithful loyalists, had crushed several armies of weaker angels, all while preparing themselves battle great monsters, chained demons, natural disasters, and unnatural plagues. They’d expected bloodline curses, memnovores, even inverted hells.

What they’d gotten instead had been a relentless rain of fast-moving metal projectiles.

For all the Lieutenant’s mighty powers— though he was, frankly, rather middle-of-the-road for an officer of the Polity-Blessed-Under-Heaven— he just… couldn’t keep up, couldn’t protect himself and his men. Selective time-reversals didn’t matter against indiscriminate, relentless assault. He’d used up all two-dozen of his remaining reincarnations within an hour. All of his carefully hoarded good fortune had slipped into Fate’s grasp, and it hadn’t been nearly enough to protect his men.

Little metal pellets just kept raining at high speeds from the divine positions. The Hurricane General’s lightning and flying cavalry failed halfway up to the floating cloud castles of the gods. The Clock King’s ten thousand splitting and rejoining timelines all ended in failure as he tried to break the great dragon engines filled with angelic foot soldiers. The Queen of Quiet Moments, the greatest mortal prophet to ever live, who had single-handedly slaughtered multiple armies with her scissors before, could force no future but her own death.

So after the great generals and unstoppable champions had all fallen, after the Lieutenant was one of the last remaining soldiers alive, he had crawled past the corpses of his men, dragged himself up a short hill, and leaned himself against a thick-trunked willow to die, looking over the gods roaming the battlefield.

He expected the Goddess of War to slay him when she ascended his little hill, but she just looked sadly at him for a few moments, then lowered herself to sit against the tree trunk as well.

“Why?” the soldier finally asked.

“You were the ones to attack us,” the Goddess of War said. “You tell me.”

“You were oppressing humanity,” the Lieutenant protested.

“A bit, yes,” the Goddess of War said. “We told ourselves it was for a good cause, but it was certainly oppression.”

“It was pointless oppression,” the Lieutenant spat. “You were parasites on humanity, demanding endless expensive rituals, many of which accomplished literally nothing. We could have fed so many hungry people, stopped plagues, explored the unfinished corners of the world, even lowered taxes if not for those cursed rituals.”

“The rituals were the wrong color of candy,” the Goddess of War said tiredly.

“They were what?” the Lieutenant half-shouted. He immediately regretted it, as pain shot through his torso.

The goddess sighed. “I was human once, on another world, did you know that?”

The Lieutenant gave her a confused look and shook his head.

“It was one of the low worlds— with a population of billions, yet there wasn’t enough magic for any one sentient to do anything with it. And yet we still managed to find a way to kill off our own species, to slaughter ourselves in a mere four cataclysmic hours.”

The Lieutenant had no idea how that kind of destruction could be achieved without magic, but he doubted he’d live long enough to hear the whole story if he interrupted too much.

“A passing demi-urge took pity on the few thousand dying survivors in the ruins. He rescued those of us who had nothing to do with the destruction, abandoned those survivors who were culpable, and raised the rest of us to godhood, to refound our particular strain of humanity on other worlds,” the Goddess of War said. “Needless to say, the survivors immediately collapsed into squabbling groups.”

The Lieutenant nodded— the story was on familiar ground now, he’d heard travelers from other worlds and dimensions tell similar stories often enough.

“The fifty-nine of us in my faction chose to terraform a world in one of the nastiest, most brutal systems we could find, one that suffered frequent mundane solar flares, drifts of ethically mutagenic radiation, and from the sun waking up every few centuries and attempting to vampirically devour every soul for light-years. Not precisely a dream-home for humanity, but then, we weren’t exactly powerful enough of a pantheon to seize better.”

“Fifty-nine?” the Lieutenant asked, giving into the temptation to ask questions. “I thought there were only fifty-four gods?”

The War Goddess shrugged. “Few gods left at different points, one got killed by a sentient black hole he picked a fight with, another died of some cosmic plague she picked up visiting an alien hell. Anyhow, we eventually turned that hellish system into a near-paradise.”

“And then made it an oppressive nightmare with all your rigid rules,” the Lieutenant said.

“The rules are what keeps you alive,” the War Goddess said. “The rules and rituals are what shielded our creation from the ethical mutagens and solar radiation, and kept the vampire sun pacified and sleeping.”

“But as you pointed out, many of the rituals do nothing,” the Lieutenant pointed out.

The War Goddess nodded. “And as I said, they’re the wrong-colored candy.”

She raised a hand, well aware of his visible irritation without even looking at him.

“In our original world, there was a troupe of touring musicians in high demand who gained a reputation for making steep, even ridiculous demands on their hosts— most notably for demanding they sort a certain color of candy out of a common candy mix. In truth, however, that demand was a clever trick— it was in the middle of the safety measures they demanded. If a host failed to meet it, the musicians knew they had likely skimped on fire safety or the like.”

Understanding and resentment washed over the Lieutenant. “So the rituals are warning bells.”

The War Goddess nodded. “They’re specifically built for us to be easy to detect, unlike many of the more subtle rituals that protect the world.”

“And now that we’ve stopped it, we’re going to get devoured by a vampire sun,” the Lieutenant said. “You couldn’t have just… warned us of the risks?”

“No, and yes,” the War Goddess said.

She fell silent, and resentment was replaced by suspicion.

“This isn’t your first world,” the Lieutenant said.

The War Goddess sighed. “No. Our first world, we tried. We communicated openly with its inhabitants, told them everything up front. And within a dozen generations a secret cult formed to the sun and woke it up, and it promptly devoured every soul in the system. Once we realized it would be tens of millennia until that sun fell back to sleep, we abandoned it and moved on.”

“So this is your second try?”

“This is our third,” the War Goddess said. “On our second attempt, we tried draconian control over human society, which… yeah, that resulted in an even worse rebellion than this one. This is our third attempt, our third failure, and the fourth sun that humanity’s lived under. At least, that we know of. Maybe some of the other human gods are attempting the same, though I suspect most ascended from the material plane long ago.”

“So what killed the next world?”

The War Goddess slumped back. “Our second attempt was adjacent to a weak point in the universe, and without the buoyancy rituals, it sank and was submerged into an infinite sea of blood pouring out of a living multiverse, and ripped apart by the apocalyptic antibodies in its scarlet waves.”

“And our world?”

The War Goddess snorted. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Will I really like any apocalypse?”

“Fair point,” the goddess said. “Space sharks.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The rituals for your world kept it hidden from the space sharks that swim the nearby nebulae.”

“Space sharks.”

“I told you you wouldn’t like it.”

The Lieutenant nodded regretfully, then winced at another jab of pain from his stomach.

“Want me to heal you, or at least suppress your pain?” the War Goddess said.

“Will it extend my life that much?”

“Not particularly, no.”

The Lieutenant thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Sure, spending my last minutes alive without pain sounds nice.”

“Huh,” the goddess said.

“Huh?”

“Oh, it’s just that most warriors in similar situations to yours seek to embrace the pain, to bear it as some sort of penance for surviving when their comrades didn’t.”

“My grief is pain enough for penance,” the Lieutenant said.

The War Goddess turned and looked right at him for the first time. Then she slowly nodded, snapped her fingers, and the Lieutenant’s body was whole once more.

Then she slowly turned back to the corpse-strewn battlefield, and they sat in silence for a time.

“So what next?” the Lieutenant finally asked. “Are you going to try to create a home for humanity that doesn’t require rituals?”

“What is humanity without ritual?” the Goddess asked. “No, wrong question. Can humanity exist without ritual? Can people go a single year without starting new rituals? I doubt it. But that’s not your question, is it?”

The Lieutenant thought for a moment, trying to phrase his question better. “Are you going to try to create a world that humanity isn’t responsible for preserving?”

The War Goddess turned and looked at him for a second time, and he felt immediately foolish.

“Humanity’s always responsible for its own preservation, isn’t it?” he said.

“Growing into responsibility is the dividing line between childhood and adulthood,” the War Goddess agreed.

“And we’ve failed to make it past adolescence even once.”

The War Goddess looked away. “When a parent loses three children, do you blame it on the children, or the parent?”

“There’s no hope of finding a less dangerous world, at least?”

“We’re weaker now than ever, the worlds are only getting worse from here. Even one success would be enough to radically turn our fortunes around, but…”

“So what are you going to try next?” the Lieutenant said.

“I haven’t the slightest clue,” the War Goddess admitted. “Got any suggestions?”

The Lieutenant thought for a few minutes, the Goddess waiting patiently beside him.

“Try openness again,” the Lieutenant said. “I think you may have been right, you just needed more practice. I can’t imagine there’s many gods of any species out in the universe that get it right their first try. Tell them about your past attempts, your failures. Tell them about us, about the people of humanity’s past homes. Just, you know… maybe don’t pick a system with a cosmic horror idiots can awaken.”

“That last isn’t so easily done, but… not a bad suggestion,” the War Goddess said.

She slowly climbed to her feet, brushing dirt off her armor with her hands, even though she could have done so with a simple effort of will.

“We can’t bring many humans along with us, but you’re welcome to join, if you’d like,” the War Goddess offered.

The Lieutenant didn’t even have to consider, just shook his head. “No, take someone who didn’t help kill the world. An artist, maybe, or a historian. Someone to help preserve our memory.”

The War Goddess nodded, and then began to float up into the heavens.

And then stopped, and turned back to face him in mid-air.

“My grief is pain enough for penance too,” she said. “But it will never be enough for absolution.”

And then she was gone.

The Lieutenant sat there for hours, keeping vigil over the corpses of his compatriots, who had fallen in a useless rebellion that had doomed their own world.

As the sun sank and the night approached, he couldn’t help but stare at several great blank patches that had appeared in the sky, where unbelievably vast objects occluded the stars. Entities as black as the void, save for their countless triangular white teeth, each bigger than a mountain, glimmering with reflected sunlight.

“Space sharks,” the Lieutenant said, as one of them bit a moon in half. “Fucking space sharks.”