Chapter Two — The Seven Gods
The seed shifted.
Sun noticed it the same way one notices a sound in a quiet room. There was a change in the pulse beneath his ribs—not the normal flow he had grown used to over four years, but something more like *attention*.
He had been trying to understand the seed since the day he arrived in this body. It had absorbed his divinity, taken specific memories, and changed his existence from the inside before settling into him as if it had always been there. It usually responded to almost nothing. He had tried to study it through every method available to a four-year-old.
Those methods were limited. Now, for a reason he could not identify, it was reacting.
He remembered what had happened the previous night. Among mortals, affection was expressed through a deeply questionable ritual known as a "kiss"—the act of pressing one's lips against another person.
The first time his mother tried it, he had reacted immediately. When he saw her face suddenly approaching his, lips first, he naturally assumed it was an attack. A strange attack, certainly, but an attack nonetheless. So, he defended himself. Violently.
He would have seriously wounded her, too, if she had not shouted in panic that it was just a kiss and not an assassination attempt. He was forced to reconsider the situation. After careful analysis, he had come to a deeply unsettling conclusion.
He was still thinking about it when the door opened.
The man who walked in was dark-skinned with blue eyes and a face that would have been considered beautiful if not for the scar that ran from beneath his left eye to the corner of his mouth. A tattoo marked his right arm—old ink, the kind that had been there long enough to become part of the person rather than decoration.
He moved like a retired climber who had stopped fighting recently enough that his body had not yet forgotten how.
Sun observed him. Then he observed him again. Something was off.
He could not name it. The man's posture was relaxed. His expression was warm. His materials were organized. Everything about him looked correct: a retired climber doing private tutoring. Nothing unusual. Nothing worth noting.
But the seed reacted again beneath his ribs—the same way it had reacted a moment before the door opened. Sun kept this at the back of his mind and kept his expression neutral.
His mother appeared from the kitchen with a soft smile. "You must be the teacher. I'm Mary. Nice to meet you."
"Kael," the man said, shaking her hand. "Nice to meet you, too."
Then he looked at Sun. He looked at him the way people look at things that are smaller than expected. "This must be little Sun."
Kael stretched out his hand for a handshake. Sun's expression did not change.
Internally, a three-thousand-year-old divine consciousness registered the word *little* with the specific displeasure of something that had once caused fifty gods to hesitate mid-strike. An assessment was made. A response was calculated.
He smiled politely. "Nice to meet you," Sun said. "I am Sun."
Not *little* Sun. Sun.
He noticed Kael's outstretched hand and stared at it carefully. "Is something wrong with it?"
Kael blinked. "What?"
"Your hand," Sun said, pointing. "You are holding it out like it has stopped working."
"It has not stopped working," Kael said. "It is a handshake."
Sun frowned. "A what?"
"A handshake. You grab my hand."
"Why?"
"It is a greeting."
Sun looked deeply troubled. "So when humans meet peacefully, you capture each other's hands?"
"No, you just shake it."
"Shake it?"
"Yes."
Sun stared at the hand again. "And if I refuse?"
"That would be rude."
Sun sighed and carefully grabbed Kael's hand. Kael shook it once. Sun immediately pulled back and inspected his arm.
"You also vibrate the limb."
"That is the shaking part."
"Your species greets others by temporarily kidnapping their hands and rattling them," Sun said seriously. "You could simply nod like a civilized species."
Kael rubbed his temples. "When you say it like that, it sounds strange."
"It is strange," Sun agreed.
Kael thought this kid was something else entirely. He pushed the thought aside and acted professionally. "Your parents mentioned you were bright. Teaching Tower fundamentals to a four-year-old is... well. We will see."
Sun nodded politely. Mortals often said "we will see" in situations where they had already decided the outcome but wanted to appear open-minded.
His mother laughed softly. "He is very smart. He asks a lot of questions. Sometimes strange ones." She paused. "He is mostly alright."
Sun filed *mostly alright* alongside *little* and continued smiling.
The lesson began at the table. Kael produced materials—a book, several illustrated charts, and the organized energy of someone who had taught this many times before. Sun approved of people who checked their work. He also observed Kael's hands. Steady. Practiced. The steadiness of someone who had learned to keep their hands still regardless of what they were thinking.
"We will start with the foundation," Kael said. "The seven High Gods. Everything in the Tower—every path, every system, every law—traces back to them. Understanding them is understanding how the world works."
He opened the first chart.
"The God of Light. The first and oldest. Before his arrival, the world was formless. Filled with nothing. The moment he came to be, light existed, and with it the ability to see, to sense, to understand what was around you. He is called the God of Life, the God of Hope. He is the most worshipped being in the Tower."
Sun looked at the illustrated figure on the chart. The artist had drawn him well.
He looked familiar. Then Sun recognized him.
The moment it registered, something dark moved inside him. Kind? Benevolent? Sun almost laughed. He had spent thousands of years under that being. Treated like a tool. Like a dog.
In the end, all he had received was betrayal.
Anger rose fast, like something held underwater finally breaking the surface. Then the seed shifted. It did not remove the anger; it was more like a hand placed firmly on his shoulder. Calm. Steady. A quiet reminder that now was not the time.
Sun exhaled slowly through his nose. The anger settled—still there, just no longer visible.
"Is something wrong?" Kael asked.
"Stomach ache," Sun said.
Kael did not look entirely convinced. He wrote something in his notebook. Sun noted the notebook carefully; the column for "unusual behavior" was likely under serious strain.
"The God of Desire," Kael continued. "Before his arrival, living beings existed but had no direction. No ambition. No want. He gave them desire—the drive to reach for something beyond the present moment."
"What is wrong with having no desire?" Sun asked.
Kael looked at him carefully. "Well, without desire, you would not want anything. You would not try to improve."
"But would that be bad?"
"It would mean no progress," Kael said.
"Is progress always good?"
Kael paused. This was clearly not where the lesson was supposed to go. "Generally," he said.
"What if you grew in the wrong direction?" Sun asked.
"The Tower provides guidance for that."
"But what if the guidance was also wrong?"
Kael opened his notebook. Sun watched. Teachers, he noticed, frequently wrote things down when confronted with questions they preferred not to answer.
"The God of Imagination," Kael said, returning to the chart. "He gave living beings the ability to picture what did not yet exist. Thought. Intelligence."
Sun thought about a being of pure thought who had built an entire world trying to get home and kept missing the door. He did not say this.
"The God of Progress gave us strength, the capacity to act," Kael said. "The God of Manifestation gave us knowledge. Together they built the foundation of advancement."
"What about the God of Shadows?" Sun asked.
"We will get to him in order."
Sun accepted this patiently. Mortals often needed information to arrive in a specific order even when the order itself did not matter.
"The God of Corruption," Kael said. His voice changed slightly. Just enough that Sun noticed. "He is a rogue god. He introduced corruption. He is the reason power can consume its user. The reason the world is imperfect."
Sun studied the chart. "He made the world imperfect?"
"Yes."
"And before him, the world was perfect?"
"Correct."
Sun tilted his head. "What was wrong with a perfect world?"
Kael blinked. "Nothing was wrong with it. That is what 'perfect' means."
"If everything was perfectly ordered," Sun said carefully, "and everyone followed the correct paths toward the correct destinations, would anyone be able to choose a different direction?"
"The gods provide guidance."
"That is not what I asked."
Silence settled over the table. Kael wrote in the notebook again. For a moment, something appeared on his face: recognition. As if this argument was not entirely new to him.
"The God of Shadows," Kael continued, "is the strangest of the seven. He gave living beings self-awareness. He also created death."
"Why?" Sun asked.
"To give mortals identity. Without an ending, there is no meaning to a life."
"No," Sun said. "I understand the function. I am asking why he chose death specifically. It directly opposes the God of Light's domain over life. Was that intentional?"
Kael stared at him. "I do not think," he said slowly, "that a four-year-old is supposed to ask that question."
"What age is it supposed to be asked at?" Sun asked.
"I will research that," Kael said.
"I will add it to the list," Sun replied.
"The list?"
"Of things you are getting back to me on."
Kael looked at him for a long moment, then wrote an entry that took much longer than the others.
The lesson ended an hour later. Sun's mother appeared with tea and the careful expression of someone who had been listening from the kitchen.
"How did it go?" she asked.
Kael gathered his materials. "He is... very thorough."
"He asks strange questions," she admitted.
"Yes."
"Is that a problem?"
Kael glanced at Sun. Sun sat exactly where he had been the entire lesson. Hands folded. Posture straight. "No," Kael said finally. "It is not a problem."
As Kael left, Sun caught a brief glimpse of the final notebook entry: *Who taught this child to think like this?*
At the door, Sun's mother spoke quietly with a neighbor. Sun listened.
"Still no word about the Lena girl," the neighbor said. "That is three children now. Three in one month."
"They are saying Nullspawn activity," his mother replied.
The moment the word *Nullspawn* was said, the expressions changed. Fear took hold.
"Do not say things like that where the children can hear," his mother whispered.
The door closed. Sun sat at the table, hands folded. Three children missing. Nullspawn were territorial and preferred adults with larger life forces. Children did not fit their pattern.
This did not look like their work.
Something was beginning. He was not certain what yet, but in his experience, the things worth paying attention to rarely announced themselves at the start. They accumulated quietly.
Until they could not be ignored.