The Scared God [ManXManXMan]

Chapter Two: Живой - Zhivoy

[Warning: Suicidal thoughts/past suicide/mentions of suicide. Implied death/thoughts of death. I wouldn't call this chapter super dark, but there is a dark theme to it.]

~Chapter Two: Живой – Zhivoy~

There is no sudden moment of awareness that comes when returning to life. My eyes do not suddenly see everything with startling clarity. My muscle control is not suddenly perfect. My body does not suddenly regain complete function of its organs. My heartbeat is erratic, my skin feels numb, and my eyes cannot filter light properly, making everything painfully bright even though I know it is not.

When I cough up something that tastes metallic onto a ground I cannot yet see, I am not concerned. When the numbness is replaced by a tingling pain, I am not surprised. And when I cannot roll over onto my back so my face is not pressing into the dirt – at least, I think it is dirt; my skin is not sensitive enough yet to tell – I just give up.

Nothing good comes from being alive.

Eventually, the more immediate side effects of returning to life wear off, though, leaving me with more mental pain than physical pain. I do not want to be alive. I stopped wanting to be alive after my twenty-third death and my desire to just stay dead grew stronger with each return to Iriy that was not of my own free will. It is not like I want to be revived every time I die; it is just the curse of being an underworld god – I cannot stay dead.

But, unfortunately, choosing to die – which is now called suicide – never works.

It was around the twenty-ninth time I died that I had had enough and just killed myself with magic to see if I could maybe stop the horrible cycle of death and rebirth. Unfortunately, that was also the shortest amount of time – two weeks – I ever spent in Iriy, so I never tried it again. I would rather die sporadically than every other week.

I would return to Iriy as I am, but it is dangerous for me and the realm if I spend too much time there when I am alive.

Time moves very differently in Iriy than it does anywhere else. If it were a living realm instead of an underworld, this would not matter, but since it is not, Iriy is not safe with the living in it. In Iriy, there is no set time for how many Iriy days makes a mortal realm day. The time is controlled by the realm's magic, which is ever-changing. A month in Iriy could be a week in the moral realm, or it could be a decade. However, if a living being – underworld god or not – is in Iriy, time moves at the same speed as whatever realm that being hails from. This can damage the realm since the magic that normally controls the time would start lashing out.

I wonder how much time has passed since my death in this realm...actually, I am not sure I want to know.

One would think that, after all of my previous deaths, I would be used to dying and eventually waking back up in the mortal realm. And while I am used to the dying part – or, rather, I am resigned to it; it is hard to be 'used to' death – it is the returning to life part that is the worst. Never knowing who died and who is still alive...

Knowing that the one who has killed me more times than anyone else is just waiting for me to screw up to do it again.

Angrily dismissing that thought, I focus on my surroundings, which I am only now starting to see. Slowly sitting up – which is all that I am able to do at the moment – standing up seems impossible with my current muscle control – I eye the field before me with growing wariness. It is not the open ground that makes me wary, though; it is the location.

I have woken up in fields before. In fact, meadows and other large, open areas tend to be my revival points the most. There is a lot of untainted magic in uninhabited areas like this since they used to be popular places for magic rituals hundreds of years ago. Though most of it has worn off, all that strong ritual magic leaves an imprint on the land that my magic seeks out to help aid in my transition from dead – or as dead as an underworld god can be – to alive.