Short Little Stories

“Breathe. Just breathe.”

Stanley’s voice was calm, and that wasn’t a surprise – but the confidence within it, and the personality behind it, was.

Rowen glanced at him. Her face was flushed, her eyes blinking rapidly, though whether from tears or worry it was hard to say. She stood in the center of the ruins now – but she still couldn’t fill the god slumbering beneath them.

If she had, would it have calmed her, or only caused more agitation? Another difficult question – but not one that needed to be answered. It didn’t matter to the situation – all that mattered was that Rowen do her part.

“You are sure about this?” she asked, glancing at the faded symbols that adorned the crumbling walls. She knew what Stanley had told her – that she alone could rouse the power that could send them back to the world they came from. She knew that the god’s name was lost to time, but that it had been both kin and rival to Inti, a sun god worshipped by a people known as the Inca.

And she knew that the only thing that could rouse it was worship.

She frowned. Stanley could tell that it wasn’t like her to be so nervous – but that predicting her behavior ever since her goddess had died was a futile task. Her most intimate connection, her most profound faith, had been torn away into nothingness.

And now he had asked her to cast her heart and soul out into emptiness once again, putting her faith in an unknown deity from a foreign world. It was to her credit that she stood her, know, ready to go through with his plan.

“I am sure. All it will take is a simple call, a simple act of faith – but it must be genuine. You must believe, or he shall not rouse.”

Her frown turned into a bitter smile. “How can I have faith? I’ve already seen that gods can fail – why should the gods of your world be any different?”

“Your gods took on an impossible task, and it proved too much for them. But this god… all it needs is worship. All we need of it is simple passage, a task surely well within its capabilities. Knowing what you know of the divine, is it not easy enough to believe that it can at least do that?”

Rowen hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, she was lost, for she felt the faintest glimmer of belief flicker to life within her heart.

And that was all it took.