A Wayward God
By Natasha Weber
Copyright 2015 Natasha Weber
I am a child. My eyes rotate around my own person until I see my own teary eyes, and then I close my eyes. When my eyes open, I see a vibrant pink butterfly in my black and white world. I am compelled to chase this butterfly to the ends of the world. I chase it for so long that my feet get tired and I must stop. It always escapes. I can’t let it go though. I chase it every time I dream.
I always wondered what that dream meant. The only thing I really knew was that I dreamt it every night. I had many demons, but something about that dream in particular never let me go. Perhaps the dream was not about demons, but instead a premonition. Someday, I knew the butterfly would have to lead somewhere. Otherwise, why would I dream about it so often?
Whatever the case, I arose from the cloud I had tucked myself into and hopped to my feet. I used my powers to zap some clothes on myself as I didn’t like sleeping with clothes on. The clothes were mostly for the benefit of courtesy among the Gods; and because wearing clothes was a sign of intelligence. We were civilized after all, not animals.
After dressing, I walked across the clouds to begin my job. The clouds, or The Above as it was called by mortals and Gods alike, were where every God lived. The Above stretched as far as the eye could see, and depending on your occupation or importance, you lived on certain colors of clouds.
I followed the purple clouds until they gradually became red. When that happened, I saw the building I needed to enter. It only appeared for me. It was a simple structure, basically just two pillars upon a solid block holding up a roof; the pillars were attached to cement floor, and in the middle of the structure, was a circular indent that held my pool of water. I sat in front of it cross-legged. I closed my other two eyes, but left my yellow one open.
Today, I must judge as Justice. He blinked his yellow eye until a drop of blood fell into the pool of water. In the water was a man named Moritz. He was a cruel man, and the other day he had killed another man’s child. Justice briskly dictated that he must die, and he took out a pen and parchment from the air, wrote down the name and the reason Moritz must die, and snapped it to appear in Death’s room to confirm. Death got to choose the way he died, which I was thankful for, but Justice didn’t care.
After Moritz was a sweet girl who had done nothing wrong, but her father killed her pet because they could no longer afford to keep it. Despicable. For this, Justice dictated that the man come down with a horrible two-week cold from which he would barely recover from. He would see the error of his ways.
After that it was an easy one; a person who hadn’t done anything wrong, and had not been wronged by others. Justice breezed past him without a second thought.
I liked life as Justice. He processed things almost mechanically, without a second thought. I never liked being Joshua. I could never make decisions as him, and I barely ever got work done as him. Joshua would not judge fairly. Joshua was a biased creature, consumed by emotion.
I spent my whole day judging, and then I went to sleep.
Two weeks later, as Vengeance, I repeated the same ritual as with Justice. I closed all of my eyes but my green one, let a drop of blood fall from that eye, and began to judge.
Vengeance judged differently than Justice did.
For instance, concerning the man Moritz and how he had killed another man’s child: where Justice killed Jehts, Vengeance would have killed Moritz’ child; because above all, Vengeance valued an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.
I didn’t like being Vengeance quite as much as I liked being Justice because I considered Justice the better way of judging mortals; but not every God agreed with me, which was why Vengeance was needed. He was also needed because good people needed to die as well as bad people for there to be balance in the world. Not that I could get rid of Vengeance anyway, as he was a part of me as much as any other of my personalities. Whatever the case, I still preferred being Vengeance as opposed to Joshua.
Looking down on mortals and the horrible things they did was hard for Joshua, and sometimes he wanted to judge them all in the worst way possible, even by killing everyone involved in a criminal act. It was that rage that frightened me.
Vengeance was the toughest of my personalities; he was generally unforgiving about his decisions. He much preferred a guilty person than an innocent one, to say the least. It was his no nonsense attitude that made me like being him. I could stand up for myself as him, even though as Justice and Vengeance I could not talk. They were the strong, silent types.
And two weeks later, I was Joshua again. With all three of my eyes open, including the red one on my forehead, I cried three red drops of blood into the pool. The first person to judge was a child who had accidentally killed his brother. They were playing near shallow water, but his brother was getting on his nerves, so he pushed him and his brother cracked his head open on the rocks in the water.
Already, I didn’t know what to do. I found anger creeping up on me along with panic and confusion. Vengeance would kill the other brother; Justice would probably find a way to send him to jail. I on the other hand… I waved my hand over the pool of water.
Next on the list was a girl named Heidi… Heidi was a girl born twenty-five years ago, and I had always watched her from above and admired her. She was one of the few mortals I enjoyed watching.
As usual, when I was Joshua, I found I just couldn’t do much judging, even though it meant I would fall far behind on my list. Instead, I pulled myself to my feet and walked across the red clouds until they gradually became black, and the sky became stormy and windy. I was moving so fast I accidentally ran into my brother, Death.
At first I smiled, as it was the polite thing to do. But, we’d been distant for years, and he didn’t smile back. I made many mistakes in my lifetime, and he helped me to understand that they were wrong. I don't know what happened to us. My brother rarely said anything, but he had gone from speaking to me somewhat often to purposefully distancing himself from me. There was also a subtle change in body posture that I noticed that told me he was different. He looked upon the mortals far more often than I did, even when he didn't need to. I found that strange as he didn't have Justice and Vengeance to protect him from the terrible things in the world like I did.
I knew I had lost him for sure when he told me to sign the death warrant of someone who had done no wrong and who wouldn’t be on my list for judgment for a few weeks. From then on, he seemed to like making mischief more than he liked doing his job. Perhaps he had lost his mind, perhaps he was disgusted by mortals… or perhaps he was simply bored. The cruel mortal woman he was infatuated with wasn’t helping either; she fed his cruel desires and caused only misery to others. Regardless, my life became that much harder without him.
I looked up at my brother, who was a whole foot taller than me, and that was saying something since all Gods were about ten feet tall. I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t spoken to me in so long, and why he had become so cruel lately, but he made me nervous of late.
We Gods rarely changed expressions, and were all very withholding where emotions were concerned. It was for the best, of course, but it made confrontations like this all the more difficult.
I hung my head, not able to meet his eyes. My brother had what I liked to call ‘dead eyes’, which was exactly what it sounded like. They were lifeless, void of emotion, and so creepy you could fall into them if you stared at them long enough.
I stepped around him without a word, hunched over and depressed.
…Joshua, Death’s voice came through clearly in my head, you are pathetic. You have nearly stopped judging as yourself entirely.
You don’t want a repeat of what happened before. But if you don’t even have a use for this personality of yours, you may as well be rid of it…
I felt a little sad that he didn’t even care enough for me now to want me to keep the only personality that could be considered a real person.
“I see…” was all I said. I kept on my way.
A year later, Heidi was still the kind mortal I knew her to be. I watched her often as Joshua. She was an interesting mortal.
But this paticular time, I didn’t like watching her so much. First, I
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