“See the world with your own eyes.”

I saw the world young again, as rain touched down across endless fields of luxuriant, soft grass. The earth was bedded down in blankets of green, the sky a deep and satisfying blue as the sun dims beyond great barriers of drifting cloud like mountains in the sky. The rain was constant, light and warmed through by the summer air. It fell like silver threads suspended between heaven and earth, the strings of an instrument that played in the tongue of raindrops, pattering into the leaves of great forests, running happily through rivers and streams paved in smoothed stones; splattering gargles pour from the rooftops of houses set along the countryside, clinging to hills and nestled in low valleys among the sprawl of farmlands, squares where the earth has been tilled to ripe dark soil or filled with golden grain.

And the rivers!

And the fields of the flowers!

The cities that sat as tangled knots of rooftops where roads meet, and scrape the skies with the smoke of their chimneys. Birds in flight through landscapes of white cloud turned golden at their edges by a sunset on the far seas. Ships dragging their wakes through the waves.

This was the world as it should be.

This was the world as I remembered it, although that world was dead before I was truly born.

And I saw the Goddess.

She was all but invisible. I could imagine the people below rarely if ever noticed her presence. She was made of air, cloud, and sunlight, subtly warped into the shape of a woman who stood above the earth. So huge that the people below would only see the beautiful parts, and miss the greater whole.

Where her feet touch down, flowers grow. As she walked, the flow of her hair became a clearing in the clouds where sunlight broke through and scattered the raindrops into a thousand colors.

I moved alongside her, looking down at the world from her shoulder.

I already liked her a lot more than the other god I met, who mostly seemed like a sad, dumb animal hoping to find something smaller and weaker to kick about.

“I am the lady of Open Skies and Sunlit Days.” She said in a voice like birdsong. All of it. All the birdsong that has ever existed and then a little bit more that won’t ever exist, and is heartbreakingly beautiful because of it.

“I noticed.” I said, as respectfully as possible. She hardly needs to introduce herself to me.

“I am also the goddess of Grasshoppers and Hares.” She added.

“Well that I didn’t know.” I admitted. “And I’m- I suppose you should name me?”

“You will be named by the living.”

“Which means you’re not one of them, I guess. Condolences?” Did the dead want to be mourned?

She laughed. A thunderbolt fell from the blue in the distance. “I may yet live again, but in your time, I have been forgotten. Many things have. Those that died lie restless and those that live cannot even dream of a better world. I have brought you here to remember us.”

“It’s sad to think of all this going to hell. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of stopping the whole apocalypse from ever happening?” If she could send me this vision through time, perhaps time itself could be bent. We could end this before it began.

But she only shook her head.

“A beast from the depths of the Abyssal Void will come and run rampant across this world. Across many worlds, but it is here we will stop it. The Beast will be called the Black Wolf. It will come to devour the cosmos and birth a new one, as it created our own from the ashes of the last.”

“But we will refuse to die quietly.”

She gestured towards a statue that stood over an entire city, a towering giant of marble carved from a marble cliffside. The artistry was wonderful. He looked as if he was clawing his way out from the earth, ripping free to reach a single hand out across the sea, clutching at the sky.

She looked at his face and a terrible sadness filled the air.

I couldn’t say I shared her melancholy. This statue - it was the god who’d tried to kill me. “Arak.” She named him.

“We - the gods of a hundred worlds - shattered the Beast into fragments, but found killing it impossible. Arak was our leader then. God of Triumph. The strongest and most fearless, most honored among us all.”

“Well, if you don’t mind me saying, seeing as everyone’s dead now and it hardly matters anyway.” Oh me and my big fat mouth. “Maybe you honored the wrong things?”

“Perhaps. But he was a good man once, and magnificent even among gods. He volunteered to contain what we could not kill and take the Beast’s destructive nature into himself. The bindings we set could never be broken.”

The wolf in his chest, gnawing at his bones. Forever. “Ah. Then he went insane? From having an ancient evil lodged into him like a bad appendix?” Seemed rather predictable.

“Several hundred years passed. The land began to heal, and the gods rebuilt much of what was lost. Then, after centuries of torture the beast finally broke him, and yes, he went insane. The world shook with his wrath and we’d given so much of our own power to the bindings we could no longer stop him.”

“So how do I defeat him?” That seemed like the relevant question. I had a sneaking suspicion I wouldn’t get an easy answer. Or an answer, at all.

“I do not know. The truth is, I have already failed. It was my plan to seal the Beast within Arak. My plan that led to this. It is better you find your own way, and not rely on one who has already lost their battle.”

“Oh, that’s a terrible attitude. Come on now. Look. People don’t fail once and never try again. Making one mistake - a really bad one, mind you, kind of a world-ending mistake, but - doesn’t mean you can just lie down and give up. Actually, honestly, please don’t smite me for this, but it’s kind of self-centered to say you failed and won’t try again? Think of all the people you could help instead of feeling sorry.”

She didn’t say anything. So I kept talking. I was, after all, a talker.

“I failed rather badly today. Mm, I’m not going to say I got a world killed twice, exactly, but- I failed to save someone who needed my help. And it wasn’t because I’m some terrible useless excuse for a nobody. No! It was because I didn’t realize how much a small bit of kindness would mean to him. Think about that! What a wonderful mistake! I mean, awful, because he’s dead now, but- the kind of person you’d have to be to never make that kind of mistake, it’s not worth being. You can’t just harden yourself up and do nothing all day and say you’re perfect because you never try anything you could fail at. Ridiculous! I’m only hours old, and that's already obvious."

I was lecturing a goddess, I realized. I stopped.

And waited for the lightning to descend.

It did, but only because she laughed again.

“You are not what I imagined.”

“Oh? What were you imagining?”

“The beast came to destroy all of the known worlds - but it also bore the power to create new ones in their place. Death and life both. When we broke it apart we sealed only the power to destroy...”

She pauses, for a moment, and after a moment more I get it. “Oh. So that ugly wolf is… part of me?” How repulsive.

“It was once. And Arak will do anything to reunite with you. To make the thing in his chest whole so it can rip its way free and end his misery. That is what it promised to him after centuries of pain and despair.”

“What you’re telling me is I kill a god and my own worse half or, mm, not just this world, which has kind of already had its day, but all the worlds die?” Oh boy. It was almost like she kept missing the part where I was hours old. An innocent naif alone in a cruel world. Completely unprepared for this.

“Yes. And I believe you will succeed.”

“I’d love to know why. Are you the Goddess of Longshot Gambles as well, maybe?”

“I chose to believe. I watched the world rot for years, without a single chance to grow anew. I could have allowed it to continue. But in the end, although it gives the Beast a chance to break free, I chose to release you from where you were hidden. Because the world won’t heal without you.”

“Mm.” You know, a second ago, I’d been the one giving high-minded lectures on morality and hope, on trying and failing. I did not at all like the taste of my own speechifying.

We stared out at the world for a while. A world I know will end.

“Thank you for the hippo. He’s a very good boy.”

“You’re welcome.”

The dream came apart like a morning fog being dispelled by bright sunlight.