***Ọrunmila***

***Councellor***

A long time ago, I had found out that I wasn’t much of a deity. Most things I touched ended up in shambles. Then, when I once helped out a troubled friend, I realized that I had another calling in my existence. I accepted my new vocation with all my heart and became a psychologist for immortal beings.

All kinds of creatures visited me now on a daily basis, making sure that my name was known throughout the multiverse. Immortals, mythics, demons, even gods darkened my doorstep.

So I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when an angel entered my office.

“Please, try to make yourself comfortable. We have all the time in the multiverse,” I advised my newest patient and jotted down some notes. “I’ve found that these consultations go down far easier when the patient isn’t stressed.”

The woman, a platinum-haired angelic being from the looks of it, surveyed my plain office with an expression of doubt, but she sat down and leaned back in the extra fluffy couch that I had tailor-made for my customers. “Ọrunmila, you have been recommended to me…” she replied with a voice as clear as glass.

She stopped, thinking, then continued, “To solve some… issues of the mind. Though, I don’t see how someone like you could help me with my troubles when a mind mage could solve the problem easily enough.”

“Maybe, and maybe not,” I replied, and noted down ‘trust issues’ on my pad. “You wouldn’t be here if a mind mage could help you, or if you hadn’t at least qualms about employing one. The help which I offer is more of a process than an immediate solution. May I know your name and who referred you to me?”

“Carne. He told me that you helped a lot in getting his ‘harem-issues’ under control. As for myself, I have had too many names throughout way too many reincarnations,” the being in front of me replied. “And I’ve stopped caring about them, to be honest. You might simply choose one?”

Carne? I mused about the name, remembering him to be one of the leaders of the more powerful pantheons that ruled the multiverse. If that was the case, then this woman in front of me was likely not the average angel.

I smiled and underscored my note from earlier. “Just as all of us have many names, the beings that enter my office are myriad and manifold in shape and form. Please believe me that when I say that your purpose doesn’t matter to me. Such is simply the nature of the multiverse and those with the ability to transcend between dimensions.”

The woman frowned at me. “So who I am doesn’t matter.”

“The truer you are to yourself, the easier it is for me to help you,” I replied.

She hesitated but seemed to come to a decision. A moment later, her body was engulfed in arcane flames, revealing what she likely thought of as her true form.

One half of her body was still her previous angelic self. A beauty without equal that possessed a white feathered wing protruding from her right hip. But whereas her right would have drawn the eyes of any being of light, her left half was nothing less than demonic. Not ugly, but it had the sensuous features of a deadly predator.

Manicured fingernails to the right, polished claws on the left hand.

What looked like a golden-white tiara on one side, was a flaming crown of horns on the other.

A beautiful and gentle blue eye on the right – the slit, glowing pupil of a monster to the left.

She was a being of opposites, but beautiful and alluring in her own, unique way. I wouldn’t have said that her contrasts clashed, but that they merged to form an intimidating wholesome creature that demanded respect through appearance alone.

The woman on my couch nodded towards me. “I find this form pleasing.”

I acknowledging her desired form with an approving expression of my own. “You still haven’t mentioned your name.”

She hesitated.

“How about going with the name your parents gave you?” I offered. “If you had something like parents?”

The woman’s eyes grew distant as she was taken over by a memory and I allowed her the time to think, but she caught herself after a few moments. “Seria. That’s my name.”

“Any titles?” I asked, noting down the name of my newest customer.

The woman smiled. “Some call me the Goddess of Life and Death, but you can call me Seria.”

I took the note and returned my attention to my patient. She wasn’t the first god on my couch. In fact, I specialized in customers who hadn’t much else than eternity itself to fear. Far too many creatures achieved immortality without the right mindset to deal with the troubles that came with it. “Would you like to describe to me why you are unhappy with yourself?”

Seria raised a questioning eyebrow. “Unhappy? I wouldn’t say that there is something I am unhappy with.”

“Then the reason for your visit,” I clarified. “Those who come to me rarely have physical problems which they cannot deal with unless the problem lies within their own nature.”

The goddess pursed a set of beautiful lips. “I guess that’s fair.” She swung one leg above the other and settled her wings on top of them, spreading them out like a skirt. “I feel like I am unimportant. Like I don’t matter in the grand and glorious scheme of things. I know, given my origins and my deeds, that’s an outrageous claim, but I can’t help myself.”

I nod. “Can you point out why? Excuse the need to clarify, but claiming power over the domains of Life and Death seems pretty important to me. A god who presents two such powerful concepts can hardly be unimportant.”

She tilted her head. “I guess that would probably be the case, from a mortal’s perspective. Maybe my problem is that I am hardly associating with any mortals nowadays. My husband is a god. My parents are also gods. The people in my vicinity are hardly bothered by things such as life and death.”

“That means you are part of a larger pantheon,” I concluded.

If I wanted to help her, I needed to understand her circumstances. But often enough my customers were very reluctant to share such information. “One of the societies that have intentionally secluded themselves from mortal affairs?” I guessed that was one possible way to come to think of yourself as insignificant. If the people in her surroundings were vastly more powerful than herself…

“I guess you could say that,” she hedged around the subject. “We aren’t that insular. When our help is needed, we step in. It happened a few times in recent memory. Though, most of those in power prefer it if we stay out of the picture. Just as we hate it when our involvement becomes necessary.”

“Like?” I looked at her and corrected the placement of my glasses on my nose. “What would your people deem significant enough to step in? The end of a world?”

The woman laughed and waved her hands to stop me. “Oh, no-no. Mom and Dad would never lift a finger to help out a single world. What they are concerned with is nothing more or less than the continued existence of the multiverse.”

I bit my lip. “May I ask who your parents and your people are?”

The woman sighed and visibly deflated. “I guess we would have to talk about that at some point anyway. My parents are none other than Chaos and Order themselves.”

“Oh,” I looked at the woman in front of me, really looked at her for the first time. “You are that Seria. From the Chimerans. Your parents are… kind of infamous among the transcended communities.”

Seria rolled her eyes. “Yes. They have a tendency to take over wherever they go. It wasn’t easy to be one of their children. And now that we are talking about it, therein probably lies my issue.”

I tilted my head. “With a father like that-”

The goddess vehemently shook her head. “Oh, no! Dad isn’t the problem at all. He is all about freedom and doing whatever he pleases. It’s Mom who is the problem. Things always have to be in the right place with her. There is no middle ground. I swear, if she didn’t have Dad to nag on, the multiverse would be a neatly ordered pile of stale boringness.”

“So they complement each other,” I suggested. “There is no Order without Chaos. No Chaos without Order. No one without the other.”

She nodded. “They somehow blot out all of my accomplishments. Despite the fact that it’s only thanks to me that we can have this conversation at all. And let’s just be honest, being in the presence of two primordial gods, the creators of the multiverse no less, it is simply suffocating. And as their daughter, I am even worse off. I always question my every action. Not to mention that I am the one who gets to clean up their messes when they have one of their lover’s quarrels! Last time, my brother brought home a girl he blew up the moon at our winter resort.”

The woman looked wistfully at the ceiling. “I really liked that moon. Do you know how long it took me to find a new one that looked similar enough to the old one?”

“You couldn’t put it back together?” I asked.

“There was nothing left to put back together!” Seria replied icily.

“I see.” I nodded to myself and looked down at my notes. I had been writing while Seria was talking. “One parent who is very lenient, if unpredictably volatile, and another who is very strict. Aside from his tendencies towards others, is there anything bad you could say about your father?”

Seria’s face scrunched up in distaste, her voice filled with trepidation. “It’s that damned thing that he created to watch out for me!”

“Thing?” I frowned, noting that the woman had gotten truly emotional for the first time.

“The cat!” she exclaimed. “It’s the cursed cat!”

“Cat?” I replied questioningly, not understanding.

“The cat! It’s his creation, and the worst of it is that nobody ever notices it! That’s why it is so ingenious. He somehow slipped it past mother’s attention when they created this multiverse!” Seria wrung her hands as if she was strangling something.

This multiverse? As in, there had been others? I wondered, and then I shook my head, deciding that delving too deeply into the secrets of a primordial deity wasn’t healthy for me. Especially when it was about the secrets of those two.

“Riiight,” I drooled the word to gain some time, asking myself whether I should activate some of my security measures. Violent patients didn’t happen to me often. I didn’t cater to that kind of clientele, but it did happen.

Seria leaned forward. “Haven’t you wondered about it? The entire multiverse, wherever you go. Every world and society has its legends and myths about cats. Even those people who don’t believe in gods! Cat’s have nine lives. A black cat crossing your path spells misfortune! They think it is just a pet, but it’s his creation. He is watching through its eyes!”

I nodded slowly, thinking about my own slandering feline that had taken to sleeping on the oven at my home while edging my foot closer to the spell array that would activate the barrier around me. “Aren’t a cat’s abilities in general responsible for such myths? Their traits allow for less...”

Seria laughed somewhat crazily. “That’s what nobody gets. There is no plural or such a thing as a race of felines.” She growled menacingly. “It’s all the same being! No matter what shape or form it takes. It’s the Cursed Cat!”

I blinked. “But-”

She stopped me. “You are going to say that there is no such thing as omniscience in the multiverse, and that is certainly true. But if there is something that comes close, then it’s the cat! It’s Chaos’s cursed creation!”

I swallowed. “You seem pretty upset about that.”

“Of course I am!” she exclaimed. “Dad may not be like Mom. He would never tell you not to do something, but he is always watching. And when you do something he dislikes…”

The woman shuddered and flicked her finger. “Poof?”

“Poof?” I swallowed. For some reason, my throat had become dry.

“Poof!” she affirmed.

“I think that I have enough on that front,” I interjected quickly before she could work herself up even more. “And I may have a small idea of what the problem might be.”

“You do?” Seria seemed taken aback.

“When was the last time that you went down your own path?” I questioned. “I mean, doing something that doesn’t get your family involved.”

The angel-demon frowned and tilted her head from one side to the other. Then her eyes wandered upwards as she searched her memories. “I actually can’t remember. Before I reincarnated the last time, a few thousand millennia ago?” Her face scrunched up. “I actually have trouble remembering what I did before then.”

“I tell you what,” I smiled. “What you need is a vacation. But for it to work, it has to be without anyone you know. Tell your parents to stay at home and strike out for some plane of existence where you can play on your own. It’s important that you get to do your own thing for once in a while.”

Seria still looked dubious of my suggestion. “Like where? Someone is bound to recognize me sooner or later if I get involved with a world’s deities. I guess I could go to the Infernal Planes, but they hate my family there. I think they even threw out my father, saying that he should never come back. Not that it bothers him or that he gives two shits about what those Planar Lords tell him. They are delusional if they think they could stop him.”

“No, not the Infernum! Please?” I winced. The Infernum wasn’t a place where one could relax. What did it say about Seria that she actually considered going there just to get away? In fact, I knew of not a single god or deity who would voluntarily visit those dimensions.

I set down my pen. “You know what, I will suggest a place for you. Some backwater plane at the edges of the multiverse that nobody ever heard of. There may be some mythics living there, but that’s nothing someone of your calibre can’t deal with!”