Eye of a God
There is something somber and beautiful about the idea of seeing a life fade in front of you. The thought of light leaving the eyes of a person and how their body turns to a husk right at the cusp of their soul exiting their body. The realization which must flash before their eyes as they take their last breath and the inevitability of their affliction sets in, that acceptance must be a most beautiful thing. No one can save them. Nothing anyone does, they do, can reverse the course of the fate in that instance. Poignant and somber, surreal — the whole deal of dealing with Death.
But we weep. We cry and beat our chests and wail in agony as someone close to us is clinging to the last of their moments in the mortal realm. Separation, after all, is the biggest root of all the fears of our existence. How can the biggest separation not terrify us into crying? The death of a loved one. The uncertainty of a future without them. The inevitability of losing them in this form, the one which you knew them the best in, to the ethers of after life. To the domain of Death they went. You just don’t know.
Wrapped in a dark cloak, wielding the unwieldly scythe — the skeletal figure and silhouette of the Grim Reaper is the most popular form of Death in the Western World. There is also the Grim, a large black Church dog which guards graveyard and helps the deceased find a safe passage to the after life. Death comes in various forms — riding atop a bull, appearing in a cloud of ash, piercing the Earth with its bony hands — it rides many modes and dons many faces. Death is ubiquitous. All the cultures and all the times have portrayed Death in many manners, all kinds of manners, given it all sorts of forms, stated it responsible for all sorts of calamities and feared it to all degrees.
But there has been an oddity which stands true among all the cultures that have existed and will — the reverence for an entity, a concept which they do not understand and in most instances hold an immense fear of. There is something divine about things you do not understand. A person wise beyond their means is divine. A person powerful beyond the physical realm is divine. A person whose influence goes piercing the wall of flesh directly to the soul is divine. And Death, which is most definitely not a person, is divine beyond measure.
But most things are subjective. And the concepts of our creation are subjective as well. Their assignment, their position, their power — its all relative to the person who assigns them meaning. Thus a person can state that anything is divine, really. Anything beyond their comprehension can be divine. And so can be the person, or concept, who wields the Will to end their existence. A person with a hand on the trigger can be divine. That person is divine, because it is Death. And Death comes in all forms — for you it took the form of the person pulling the trigger.
Divine is godly. To be divine is to be God. Thus a God was born the day you were ended. An equal exchange in the eye of the Universe, since within you was the potential of a God. You could’ve been Death.
You pulled the trigger.
A callback from the first time you thought of the great power which lies within and the lure of its sweet stench. The hands soaked in red. The cloth carrying blots of iron. The splash of black on your pristine conscience. You noted the cracks on your lips as you smiled the blood soaked grin? The crazed and hungry look in your eyes? It is good. Better than what you were. You realize the power you have. You admire your hands with a new found appreciation. They are the tools which you never knew would make you into a God.
It is still the callback. With the power there is a responsibility. Not a terrible one. It is nothing compared to your divine affliction. It is more human, a last remnant of your fragile shell. A gift to you, a cost, which came with your power.
You recall the eyes. At all waking moments the eyes of the Donor, the one who bestowed on you the wonderful gift of divinity, peer at you through the thin veil of your mind. The power of your good affliction is such that the boundary between the real and the imagined is nonexistent for the most part. The eyes that peer at you are real and they are haunted. Within them they carry the reflection of all the emotions you felt as you pulled the trigger which started your decent into the Godhood.
The eyes strike a sense of unease in you. Looking into them is like drinking from a pool of fear and frustration and the more you drink, the thirstier you become. You cannot look away from the peering eyes, even if you want to, even when your being is screaming at you to do so. It gets to the point where you tear your eyes out. But the peering orbs don’t leave. They persist since they exists in your mind and your mind is not blind, not yet at least. The eyes follow you in every corner, through every door, behind every brick — the eyes are a permanent fixture for you. Such has become their nature that you cannot sleep away from them. They follow you everywhere.
You are now lying panting in a pool of your emotions and feelings and fears and…misgivings, misunderstandings. This pool is your end. You’ve been drowning in it endlessly for eons now but you feel that the end is near. That the torment is to end soon. The eyes still peer at you. But something has changed. Fundamentally. You no longer fears the eyes. They have wept out the sea of torment from within them. Now they appear to be two pools of compassion brimming with tears for your plight. The pain they’ve inflicted upon you is terrible.
You’ve long since come to the realization that the power you considered to be your decent to the Godhood was but a curse come to life, afflicted onto you by the soul which considered you a God for a moment. Just for a moment. And the realization of your circumstances came to them as the last of their breath was leaving, parting. You were a victim of Death, more so than them. You were never the God, never supposed to bet the God.
The God was them.
Their parting with the world was a Gift to them by the Death. It was a Gift, but a terribly cursed one. They had within their hands the power to shape anyone into a God. And they chose you. They were the Death, for a moment. And they had all the power. And they made you into their victim.
They rejected the Gift of Death and perverted in into the abomination that were you. The Gift of solace and harmony was shredded in their last moments and remade into the patchwork of your remaining existence. And they stayed with you, the person. They stayed with you through your torment, hating you for taking the Gift of Death from them, as rejecting the Gift made Death reject them.
But things changed. Your downward spiral brought clarity to your God. Their anger and betrayal turned to compassion and sorrow. Their hatred and angst gave way to love and kindness for you. They came to love you as a parent would their child. And in a twisted way, you were their child. They stayed with you through the last of your moments. They comforted your withering being with their loving gaze. They cooled your burning heart with their tears. They stayed by you long after you heaved your last breath.
Death came to you, bearing a Gift. You accepted it. And Death accepted you.
But your God stayed behind, for they had nowhere to go. Nowhere to be. But to stay by the body of their dead child and comfort its burning form for an eternity. For they cannot bear the separation. They rejected Death.
