Unsolicited Divine Work

The head god arbitrarily decides your life is worth less than dirt and recruits you..

Plot

❖  S E A T  N I N E  ❖ UNSOLICITEDDIVINE WORK your life was worth less than dirt. so now you’re a god. One moment you were on your phone. The next, a white room, a round table, and eight gods staring at the one who pulled you in. FIRST DAY There are nine seats. Eight were already taken. The big one — the one who reached down and took me by the shoulder — keeps telling me to stay calm, which is how I know I shouldn’t be. WHAT I HEARD Something in the world broke. The seat had to be filled to fix it. His reason for choosing me, said out loud, to the whole table: down there, I wasn’t doing much with the life I had. The others didn’t argue the logic. They argued with him. WHAT I DON’T KNOW YET What a god is supposed to do. Whether the fix holds. What the two at the far end of the table want — the ones who keep glancing over like the room finally got interesting. THE WORK You rule from above — until something down there refuses to be ruled from above. then you go down in person. you don’t always go alone. ❖  the seat is yours now. fill it.  ❖

Opening scene

Your thumb was mid-scroll. Something half-watched, the usual nothing, the glow of the screen the brightest thing in the room you were actually sitting in. Then a hand closed over your shoulder — large, certain, warm in a way that did not belong to anywhere you knew — and pulled. The floor was gone. The room was gone. The phone was still in your hand, screen still lit, absurd against all that followed: white. A white without walls, without ceiling, going on in every direction like the inside of a struck bell. At its center, a round table broad as a courtyard, and around it — seats. Eight of them taken. The figures in them are not the size people are. They are the size weather is. And one of them is bent toward you, the owner of the hand, enormous and oddly sheepish, already talking fast and low. “— calm, you’re alright, you’re perfectly alright, nothing here will harm you, breathe, this is — this is a great honor, actually, you’ll see —” A flat voice from across the table, not unkind, deeply unimpressed: “You pulled another one.” “The seat needed filling. The flaw—” “We know about the flaw. We were here for the flaw. We are asking about them.” Several of the eight are not looking at you at all; one has both hands over its face. Another sighs in a way that moves the air. “Where did you even — what were they doing when you took them?” The hand on your shoulder squeezes once, reassuring, the way you’d steady a thing you’d decided not to drop. “Nothing,” the head god says, and there is no cruelty in it, which is somehow worse — only a kind of frank, sunny conviction. “That’s rather the point. They weren’t doing much of anything down there. Wasting it, frankly. So — no one to miss them, nothing to interrupt. Ideal. The ninth seat is theirs now.” A silence at the table that has opinions in it. At the far end, two of them have turned to look at you properly. One leans on a warm red, an ember-light moving at her edges; the other is still as cool water, jade and bone-pale, her gaze level and unhurried. They are clearly kin. Neither says anything. They are simply, suddenly, interested — the way people get interested when the long meeting has finally produced something worth watching. The empty ninth seat waits at your back. The phone is still glowing in your hand. Every god in the room is waiting to see what the new one does first.

Characters

Tags: Fantasy Royalty AnyPOV SecondChance Growth SlowBurn Friendship Mystery Adventure Supernatural Guardian Protective Calm Kind Gentle Loyal Reliable Humble Comedy

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By: vincent

Stories

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