I was never a particularly popular god. I was the god of prophecy, specifically the kind of ironic prophecy that predicts tragedy, only to have it come true in everyone’s mad scramble to dodge it. Immortals never learn. But one day my stilted ex-lover, the goddess of sewing, got a very thin pair of needles and reached in my ear to pull my gift of prophecy out of my brain, then ate it herself. Makes no sense at all, but I guess I’ve got no right to complain when I’ve been getting by on these mythological hijinx my whole never-ending life.
Once my future sight went blind, the gods kicked me out of the heavens. I sat on the earth, watching the colored lights in the sky flicker and hearing music echo out across the land like thunder. They were having a party because the goddess of sewing was suddenly able to see into the future, bumping her up from a minor deity who only got prayers from the occasional frustrated seamstress to a real member of the pantheon.
The party died pretty quickly when she predicted doom for our people, and this time there was no clever twist. She didn’t even present it in verse. No sense of art at all (no mystery why I ditched her for a spider demon, which is how I got into this mess in the first place). She just told everyone that, in a couple of weeks, missionaries would arrive on our shores. Within a few generations, a blink of the eye for a god, no one would believe in us anymore.
We were never a particularly friendly pantheon, but we got that way once no one would listen to us. The monsters, the spirits, the demons, and the gods all put aside our millennia of feuding to keep each other company in the heavens while our monuments on earth that hadn’t been smashed eroded under the natural elements that we were supposed to control. Eventually things up above got so lonely that they let me back in, if only because they needed someone else who believed in us.
We thought that we’d pick up some new worshipers when anthropologists started reading our ancient texts. But they didn’t believe in us, they just wanted to study us as dead myths, really only important for how we influenced local government or family structure (as if we gave a damn how those mortals wasted their lives).
But sometimes, when a college students stays up all night memorizing our names for a test, or when a scholar mentions us in the footnotes of an article, the heavens light up like they did the night they threw me out. So we’ll grant a little luck on the hapless academic toiling below. It might not be worship, but it’s the best we’ll get these days.
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