“We need to talk, Arkadin.”
Arkay sighed as he fell into his black bean bag chair. The other three deities had thrones. He had a sack full of polystyrene beads. However, Epani wasn’t using her ornate gold and red throne, she was standing on the table between them all, hands on her hips, clearly looking at Arkay.
“What have I done wrong now?” Arkay asked.
Kairos, who was sitting to Arkay’s left on a pile of luxurious cushions, on top of a silver and sapphire pedestal, tutted. “You know what you’ve been doing wrong.”
“I don’t, actually”.
“Do not play games with us!” Epani hissed. “You know EXACTLY what you have been doing wrong! Where were you yesterday?”
“I…”
“You were in Palaestra, planet Portalia, a neutral world!” Epani didn’t give Arkay a chance to answer her own question. “What were you doing?”
“I… I took one single mortal to the mall, as a thank you for helping me in the past.”
“You have met with them multiple times!” Epani snarled. “We know where you go. We can track you. Why did you visit them?”
“Uh… they’re a busy mortal. I wanted to make a proper arrangement to go out to treat them, to thank them for helping me. But I was kinda unaware of their job and time zones and stuff so it took multiple attempts to properly arrange something.”
“What did I tell you about talking to mortals?”
“To… not talk to them…” Arkay took a deep breath, then sighed some more. “I… I guess I’ll… I’ll stop seeing them…”
Satisfied with Arkay’s answers, Epani got off the table and sat down in her throne. “Wonderful. I was worried I would have to get violent with you AND your little mortal friend. Glad you have accepted your place once more.”
Arkay opened his mouth to comment, but decided against it. Instead, he gave up, sighed again then changed the subject. “Is there… anything else I need to know about?”
Epani summoned some sheets of paper, then flicked through them. “No, no, don’t think so. You got rid of that annoying silver Voidborn who constantly pops by, you’ve tidied things up nicely, everything else you’ve been doing has been perfectly fine.”
“Oh. Alright…” Arkay slumped in his seat and fell silent. Epani was about to turn to Kairos to discuss something else, but a pink flash on the other side of the table interrupted them.
Snarling, Sini threw a collection of vials, syringes and sheets of paper across the table, then furiously sat down, crossing her arms in frustration.
“I fucking swear, one fucking quack with a massive advertising budget and one badly done study has made my life a fucking misery! Why do people believe one guy who had his fucking medical license stripped over the work of countless experts and… OH! Hello Arky! How was your little meeting yesterday?”
“What is wrong, sister?” Epani politely asked. “Wait… you know about Arkadin speaking with mortals?”
Sini eyed Epani. “Is Arkay not allowed to have friends?”
“No.”
“But Kairos is allowed to stalk and harass a Ksithan who dumped him?”
“I am not stalking Phovoula!” Kairos immediately protested. “I want to make amends! And I can’t make amends without talking to her!”
Sini closed her eyes, then threw herself across the table and slapped Kairos across the face, before growling and sitting back down.
“Leave that poor damn Ksithan alone, stop being a stalker and stop being a hypocrite.”
“Sini, that was somewhat uncalled for…” Epani tutted.
“Uncalled for? Are you fucking kidding me?” Sini glanced at Arkay. She noticed he was sitting in a very submissive way, head down, not making eye contact. Sini didn’t need her weak time powers to work out what had happened just before she’d arrived. “You just told Arkay off for talking to a single damn mortal in a friends-only manner and told him to cease contact with ALL mortals! But Kairos can do things that would get a mortal arrested or fined and that’s FINE by you? On top of that, you fucking EXPERIMENTED on Phovos, and you’re making that permanent teenager’s life a misery by letting Kairos bother her? You’re both fucking hypocrites!” Sini turned to Arkay. “Sooooo how was the mall? How was the date?”
“It was, uh, nice. I enjoyed it…” Arkay stuttered.
“You gonna go again?”
“I… I kinda just… said to Epani that…”
Epani growled ever so slightly. Sini immediately turned back to her.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“He NEEDS to be kept isolated! Arkadin is the personification of decay! Gods of Decay are dangerous, they need to be kept on a leash, to stop them from succumbing to the Perpetual Hunger! Spending time around mortals, having mortal needs and desires, drags him closer to that hunger and makes him a risk to all of us!”
Sini continued to stare at Epani. “You do realize that literally any deity can succumb to that, right? Kinisis’s corpse fucking succumbed to it. But you’re missing the entire fucking point of what the Perpetual Hunger is, it’s a desire to destructively fill a hole within you. Which we fix by constructively filling that hole. You do so by creating moons and dancing in asteroid belts, for example. If a plant is hungry, you water it and give it sunlight. If an animal is hungry, you feed it. You DON’T fix hunger by STARVING them!”
“How is this related to-”
“You are starving Arkay.”
“I-”
“Shut it!” Sini hissed at Arkay before he attempted to say anything. She knew what Arkay was thinking, he wanted the argument to end and for everyone to forget about him, but Sini wasn’t going to allow it. “Epani, Kairos, put yourselves in Arkay’s place for a moment. Imagine yourselves starving. As someone who was, albeit briefly, an avatar of decay myself, it’s really fucking easy to avoid. If you are hungry, eat. Just try to stick to a balanced diet.”
“We are deities though!” Epani countered. “We do not NEED food.”
Sini closed her eyes and sighed again. “Alright, let me put this another way. In a way you understand. Because you two don’t understand mortality, or, really, morality…” Sini pointed at Arkay. “Arkay is your slave. Slaves get angry and fidgety and hungry when you force them to work all the time and don’t give them basic needs. When that happens, they lash out and someone gets hurt. So, to stop them lashing out, you give them breaks and you give them basic needs. Right now, you are NOT giving Arkay breaks and basic needs and that makes him consider lashing out. How do we fix this? By giving Arkay breaks and basic needs! In Arkay’s case, we let him spend time with the odd mortal, we let him have breaks and occasionally have fun too. In exchange for that, Arkay doesn’t get angry, fidgety and hungry, and all is good!”
“Yes, but Arkadin is still the god of death. He needs to-”
“Well why don’t you just fucking put me into a coma or something then, if you don’t want me to have any freedoms?” Arkay suddenly exclaimed as he stood up and leaned on the table. “I get it! You brought me back from the dead to be your damn slave to help you with your perfect little universe, but right now, you are making me wish I had stayed dead! I didn’t even ask to be resurrected! I was happy to stay there, in the eternal darkness, forever…” Arkay fell silent, then rubbed his eyes. “This conversation is stupid. It doesn’t matter. I… I need to be alone.”
With that, Arkay lumbered off, then disappeared in a puff of black smoke. Once the smoke had faded, the other deities all glanced at each other.
“Maybe Arkay would be better as a comatose god?” Kairos suggested. “It would solve most of our problems.”
“We need Arkay to be active and conscious, to keep the universe secure!” Epani tutted. “Sini, sister, why do you care for Arkadin so much?”
Sini slapped Epani across the face. “His name is Arkay, not Arkadin! And, as far as I’m aware, he’s the ONLY child of Kinisis who isn’t an utterly awful person.” Snarling, the Allbirther marched off, going down the same path Arkay had. “You had better get your shit together, you two, because otherwise you’ll have two death gods on your hands.”