- What the dawn illuminated was a sight that no god should ever have witnessed.
Men scattered across the ground as though something had half-devoured them, parts of themselves missing, torn away. Women with their throats slit, their naked bodies bearing the unmistakable signs of having been violated. The room smelled of copper and silence. That thick silence that exists only when everything that could breathe has already stopped.
But that was not the worst part.
The worst thing he found was in his own bed.
He approached slowly, as if some part of him already knew what lay beneath the sheets and wanted to delay that moment for as long as possible. He pulled them back with hands that trembled without his command, and there they were: two of his sisters. Bearing the same signs. The same wounds. The same final silence upon their faces.
He ran.
Not like a god. Like something broken that only wanted to escape from itself.
But outside, there was no escape. The bodies continued along the corridor, down the stairs of the great pyramid, staining every step a dark red that the morning sun made gleam as though it were something sacred. As though the entire world had decided that this was normal. That this was right.
They say it was there that he stopped.
That his legs simply could carry him no farther, and he fell to his knees amid the horror he himself had created. And then he wept. Not as men weep, in silence and shame. He wept as only a god can weep: completely, with his chest laid bare, with cries that shook both heaven and earth. His grief was so immense, so genuine, that the sky had no choice but to mourn alongside him. Silver tears fell from above, for he was the god of rain and water, and even the heavens obey sorrow when it is real enough.
That very afternoon, without saying a word to anyone, he removed his jewels. His robes. Everything that made him appear as what he was: a ruler, a god, someone worthy of being followed. He let it all fall to the ground as though it were nothing more than stone. He covered himself with the first thing he could find, old worn cloth, and went to the shore.
He gathered trees. Timber. Everything he could find. And he built a ship with the very hands that had brought all of this to pass, because it was the only thing left for him to do.
That was when the humans arrived.
They did not come in fear. They did not come with hatred, torches, or stones. They came concerned, their eyes filled with a sincere confusion that seemed stranger to the god than anything else he had witnessed that morning.
"Do you not fear me?" he asked, and his voice emerged hoarse, broken, authoritative only out of habit. "Do you not hate me? I have committed something unforgivable, and yet here you are."
The humans exchanged glances. At last, one of them stepped forward.
"We do not understand, my lord. You have committed no atrocity."
The god trembled.
"What are you saying?... Those women, those men, I... I..."
The man smiled. With a natural ease that froze something inside the god that he had thought could no longer be frozen.
"That? We thought it was what you desired. You have given us everything, my lord, and we merely sought a way to give something back. A tribute. I am certain those men and women were more than happy to serve you in such a way."
The silence that followed was different from all the others.
It was not the silence of the dead. It was the silence of someone who had finally understood the true scale of his failure.
He had not guided them. He had taught them nothing. He had lived among them, giving them every material gift a god could offer, yet he had never filled what mattered most: their hearts. He had never taught them that certain things were not tributes—they were crimes. That not even a god stood above such truths. That what had been done to those people was a horror, not an offering.
And they did not know. They smiled without knowing.
That was what destroyed him completely.
He turned away in silence. He pushed the ship toward the ocean without looking back, though he heard everything: the pleas, the cries, the voices calling his name and begging him not to leave them. He kept pushing. He kept walking into the water until his feet no longer touched the bottom, and then he simply sailed away.
In that moment, he made himself a promise. Without words. Without witnesses. Only himself and the weight he carried.
That he would return. That when he did, he would be different—wiser, more worthy of the trust they had placed in him without condition. And that this time, he would guide them properly.
The sun was sinking beneath the horizon when the figure of the god grew small and then vanished, swallowed by the light and the sea.
Behind him, the weeping of his people mingled with the rain he had summoned without meaning to, because the sky was still crying with him.
As he drifted farther away, he did not know that he would never see them again.
End of Chapter.
Next Chapter: The God Who Wept, Part 2.