A short story, heavily inspired by one of Jorge Luis Borges' stories (which are just pure magic in and by themselves). Written when I should have been doing something else, as usual. I hope you guys don't consider it too horrendous.
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Now that I am beginning to show an age that is often called venerable among humans throughout the multiverse, even more so due to my breathing the fiend-stained air of the Lower Ward for these last couple of years and unmiraculously not contracting any of the rotting diseases that seem to touch every other berk around these parts, I find myself remembering random scraps and strings of stories that I’ve heard in my long life. Stories and memories of things long lost are the mark of one who becomes old, ill or both, as folk say around here. One such story is one my daughter told me a long, long time ago.
The story starts with a young man on some forgotten Prime world that has long since been swallowed by its own sun or somesuch. One day, during a procession of a local church, the young man was awestruck by the miracles worked by the local silver-clad priests. From the simple acts of healing minor injuries to the act of making the rain come and even the restoration of life to those who have lost it, every single thing the priests did, fascinated the young man. When he asked what made these things possible, the priests talked with reverence about their High Lord, the God of all that lives on their beautiful world and everywhere else, who neither waxed nor waned in his power as the moon did, who was as constant as the infinite multitude of stars on the celestial firmament and shone even brighter then the sun itself.
The overtly and horrible poetic language in which the priests strung their words never touched the boy, but the tapestries in which the stories formed, intrigued him mightily. When he reached adulthood, he joined the priesthood not for the power that the clergy wielded in name of their mighty Lord, nor for the sake of helping people with that divine force that the priests strung with prayer and incense, but to know about the Lord Himself that they worshipped. He ploughed through the vast libraries scattered throughout the kingdom in search of stories about his high lord. He found age-old documents describing His creation of all-that-is, His acts in the world, the children he begat there and all other tales and myths surrounding the times he walked among the people as Divine Flesh.
In his meticulous searches of yellow and time-stained parchment, the young man found clues that his Lord could actually be found without shedding flesh and leaving the mortal realm, as his fellow priest often called it. Soon, he had found both portal and key and made his first few steps onto the Outer Planes.
Without too much trouble, though the immense stash of papers in which he recorded his knowledge concerning his Lord and His journeys continued to grow exponentially, the young man made his way to the realm is his lord, where he submitted to the power that He radiated. His pure and absolute devotion to his Lord assured him a place in the realm for many years, and he continued the studies of his Holiness in the presence of the Lord Himself.
Throughout the years, the man walked with his Lord throughout his domain for many times. During these walks, the man, still in an attempt to understand and know his Lord, tried to find a way in which he could describe his Lord totally and perfectly. He understood that he should transcend the vile poetry his fellow priests used. Knowing everything he had ever read or heard about his Lord by heart, he struggled with his language to construct and utter words that would do justice to the almighty splendour of his Lord, but He assured the man that one day, he would succeed.
During one of their walks amongst the unimaginably beautiful gardens of the Lord, the man came to a revelation. In a single sentence, a single word of an incomprehensibly beautiful language, if one could call it that, the man poured out everything he had ever known about his Lord in complete understanding: where He had came from, what He had done, every detail about His infinite existence and every single divine act that He had ever accomplished.
A deadening silence swept through the Lord’s domain and He was stunned. The Man, who had come to him in such ignorance and reverence, never wanting any more then mere understanding of His lord, had achieved the impossible. In an act of unparalleled jealousy, the lord tried to strike down the Man for such heresy, but he found that he was powerless to do so: he could do no such thing, not in light of such an act.
To this day, I cannot remember who was who, whether the Man was the God all along or whether the Man was simply destined to end up as God, as so many before him had done in the same way. All I remember is that man that came to me that day and stole from me everything I knew I was.