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the oldest of gods(and the worlds older still)

Summary:

The Worlds, of course, are even older than her, and in a time when the oldest gods are at a loss, perhaps it is time to turn to their elders. It is the gods who serve the Worlds, after all, and the youngest gods have yet to learn their place. But they will learn it in time; they will learn it in time, she thinks, and that is a promise.

Work Text:

The gods are in shambles. Have been for a while, really, although a thousand years isn’t long to the oldest of gods. The Goddess of Death is in favor of change, of the new world that the mortals have wrought, though not all agree with her. Still, even she sometimes misses the simplicity of the old times, when everything was orderly and new gods were few and far between. It used to be that humans advanced slowly, inconsistently, and rarely gathered enough power of thought to bring a new god into being. Even when they did, those gods were generally confined to one server, for how could the idea of them spread beyond the world where it was born? 

Things are different now. The idea of Admins was one long debated within the pantheon, requiring millenia to put into place. It was supposed to be a way to lessen their own burdens, to give mortals just enough power to interact with and maintain their worlds. Perhaps the most skilled of them could hop over to other servers to see the sights, but would ultimately return home.

In hindsight, they did not think things through nearly well enough. For all that the gods see all, they are foolish, and the oldest of them were never human. Even Kristen failed to recognize the inherent kindness in mortals, the desire to share their freedom and to make a better world.

It took only one generation of admins to create the Portals, and the very foundation of the universe shook. 

Things were so simple before, she laments, though she can’t bring herself to regret it. This new world is utterly fascinating, with all the ways that mortals have found to cheat death, to come closer and closer to becoming gods themselves. Ah, but therein lies the problem; there are so many new gods.

Where once one could find maybe a million players on one server, now several billion are all interconnected. Universal comms, set up by the same admins who created the Portals, make it easy for ideas to spread like waves across the universe. And there are new concepts for gods to represent all the time, as mortals advance far faster than ever before, communication and near-immortality making innovation far easier. There are new Major gods, representing things like the Portals and Admins and even the largest worlds. Then there are the scores of minor gods, another one ascending every other day (or so it feels), who rise and fall far too quickly for her tastes. 

There is no organization in this new pantheon, and that is what worries her. These minor gods are left to their own devices, uneducated in their duties, and there are not enough of the Old Gods to even count them all, much less slot them into some kind of system.

And the Gods of Gods, the Watchers, do nothing as always. Perhaps this was what they wanted, in the end. But the Watchers were once human, and Death will remain when all of humanity is gone, but the Watchers will not. So perhaps it is up to her, and the oldest of gods, to rectify this.

The Worlds, of course, are even older than her, and in a time when the oldest gods are at a loss, perhaps it is time to turn to their elders. It is the gods who serve the Worlds, after all, and the youngest gods have yet to learn their place. But they will learn it in time; they will learn it in time, she thinks, and that is a promise.