“What are you doing?”
Arkadin sat up straight. This was the second time in the last few hours that someone had tried to stop him from dying. But this time, it wasn’t a bunch of delusional mortals. A familiar time dragon was standing above him, holding a silver sword that had once been sticking out of Arkadin’s chest.
“Saving you.”
“Why?”
“Because… well, lots of reasons.”
“I thought you hated me.”
Kairos took a sharp breath. He had a lot on his mind. A lot of things he wasn’t sure he could say or not.
“That Phovos, she’s very smart. Very old too. What she said… it struck a chord with me.”
“You’re going to have to be a bit more clear…” Arkadin grunted. “I wasn’t privy to whatever conversation you had with her, since I was busy lying in this grave, dying.”
“Oh. Yeah. Forgot about that.”
“What did she say?”
“That you and I are basically the same thing.”
Arkadin laid back down, tutting. “You’ve only just fucking worked that out? Seriously, sometimes I feel like I’d be better off dead. You all deserve a more understanding death god anyway.”
“There’s no such thing as a more understanding death god. You either get a completely passive, permanently unconscious death god you can’t reason with, an aggressive Wolf God… or we have you.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You’re already the best death god we could have.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not.”
Kairos sighed, then laid down next to Arkadin.
“I hate the fact that we’re treated like siblings. We’re not actually genetically related in any way what so ever. We’re all completely separate individuals. Individuals with our own lives and duties. We are not the same yet the same is expected of us. Servitude to an insane being who… who doesn’t really understand that we’re allowed to have flaws. If we didn’t have flaws, we wouldn’t have sentient or sapient life. And she has flaws as well, but she doesn’t understand that either.”
Arkadin tutted. “You’re just rambling.”
“Maybe.”
The Thantophor stretched out his arms and looked around. Everything seemed… incredibly still.
“Did you freeze time?”
“No! If I froze time, it would cause a false vacuum effect, causing the universe to collapse on itself!”
“So you slowed time down.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not supposed to do that…” Arkadin grunted again.
“So? We’re not supposed to do a lot of things. But we do them anyway. Plus, Kinisis was inadvertently speeding up time by creating four death gods rather than one. Because she set rules that there were to only ever be four main deities and she broke that rule.”
“But…”
“But what?” Kairos asked. “Did you not want to be saved?”
“I feel like I don’t deserve to be saved.”
“That’s dumb. Everyone deserves a chance to be saved.”
“I’ve had to be… re-corrected…”
Kairos shrugged. “This time doesn’t count. Because you’re a decent death god. You don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s true.”
“You-”
“I know I tried to hurt you in the past. That was me being dumb though. Same with Kenon. Epani has always liked you. Kinisis loves you, but Kinisis has a fucked up idea of what is good and what is bad and she just acts purely on impulse. She only ever sees the present, and when she saw that Kenon and Yisini weren’t happy, she believed you were to blame because they said so.
“But that’s not the point. I saved you because I care. I think you’re a good person. You don’t think you are-”
“Everyone says that!” Arkadin interrupted. “I am literally the reason why everything dies!”
“So am I. We’re all part of the reason why everything dies. We’re all part of the cycle. None of us are bad because we are uncontrollable forces of existence. If it wasn’t us, then it’d be something else. And something else would probably be a lot worse than we are now!”
Arkadin hesitated. “Jeez. A worse death god than me. That’d be awful.”
“You’re seriously not as bad as you think you are. You can be a right cunt sometimes though. You’re overly competitive so you hide it by pretending to not be competitive. You desperately want to get laid but you pretend you’re not interested. And when you’re in a bad mood, you can bring us all down unless you sod off somewhere private. But you know what? When you’re not being a cunt, you’re kind, caring and always willing to help. And you have a great sense of humour. You’re alright.”
The Thantophor smiled, just a little. “I’m alright?”
“Yeah.”
“I like that.”
“You should!” Kairos smiled a little as well. “You’re not as bad as you think you are.”
“I guess. But we’ve still got the problem of Kinisis and Yisini.”
The Whenvern sat up, shaking dirt off himself. “Well, we’ll deal with that later.”
Arkadin clambered to his feet. “What do you mean, later? Kinisis is doing goodness knows wha-”
Kairos raised his hand to calm Arkadin down, then stood up too. “She can’t do anything if you’re still alive. By my calculations, we’ve got about an hour and a half to do whatever we want. Wanna go out for a drink?”
The Thantophor hesitated, then nodded. “I’d like that.”