Chapter 4: Departure to Origin

In his memories, there was a boulder on the edge of a stream. Rafflesia was sitting cross-legged on it, paying close attention to a pair of beavers building their home at the foot of the boulder.

She saw him. “Craft? Come! ‘Check this out,’ as you people say!”

A month ago, he would’ve done so out of compulsion; she was a higher being. This time, however, he found himself relenting to her on his own.

The way to get to her wasn’t easy. The stream was narrow, up to the waist in depth, but its bed was loose and silty. He’d sink right through it if he jumped right in. He couldn’t just walk along the edge of the stream either, as there might be dead briars which ought to prick him with some exotic neurotoxin, or maybe even a hungry trap plant which Rafflesia had forgotten to feed.

He decided to be gutsy and hop on stones barely sitting above the waterline. Soon, they led him farther away from the safety and certainty of dry land. To get to the much higher boulder Rafflesia was on, he aimed to make his ascent on increasingly larger boulders.

The small boulders were still okay, but when he got to the larger boulders, he made the mistake of looking down. The height between him and the stream invoked a momentary vision of death. A single misstep and he would slip on the wet stone; if he hit his head on the way down, he’d go unconscious, then there’d be no getting his face out of the water. He’d drown just like that.

In that lapse in concentration, he slipped on the last landing. He only had himself to blame. Go figure, was all he thought.

Even as he fell backwards, however, he didn’t panic. Rather, he grunted in mild annoyance. A vine shot towards his leg and caught him, carrying him upside down along the air, unceremoniously depositing him right beside Rafflesia.

He propped himself up and sat straight with dazed eyes. That was, perhaps, the most uncool thing he had ever done in front of her.

“So you can evade shells and bullets, but your weakness is a wet boulder?” Rafflesia said. He looked at her with narrowed eyes, but that only made her break into a chuckle.

He sighed. His body may have escaped unscathed, but his pride had definitely gone under the water.

Rafflesia fanned her hands. “Anyway, can’t you just climb down from the vines like a sane person?”

There were, indeed, vines hanging from the trees, many of them long and thick enough to support a soldier. They were far, though. He took one look at them and grunted. “I’d have to do a tarzan swing to get here, then. I’m not pushing my luck.”

“‘Tarzan’? Whatever.” She pointed at the beaver dam. “Look at that. More interesting.”

I almost died and you just ignore it, huh. Considering how he regularly ‘almost’ dies, well, he shouldn’t be surprised at this treatment.

He looked to where she was pointing. It was a well-developed construct across the meter-wide stream. It was already beginning to choke off the flow, turning a gush into a trickle.

Why’d she show it to him? It’s just a dam. _No, no,_he shook his head. The person beside him wasn’t human. Who knew what hyperdimensional thoughts she was having? That’s right. This beaver dam, too, was just another chesspiece in the cogs of her ever-expanding multiversal thoughts which, no doubt, was coming up with strategies that no mere mortal could ever comprehend.

This dam… It had to be part of a larger picture. Could it be ‘that’? In his mind, there could be no other answer.

“Come to think of it, there’s an android factory downstream, isn’t there?” he replied. “If their water supply dries up, it’s going to set their production back a couple of months” —

When he faced her, she was pouting at him.

“D-did I get it wrong?” he asked.

“Everything is about work for you,” she said. “I just wanted to show you beavers building a dam.”

He didn’t understand her intention. Rafflesia continued to stare at him; he figured she could be shooting very real telepathic messages at him, but if she were, all of them were definitely passing through his monkey brain without any evidence of having even existed.

Or maybe they were having an effect, after all? Craft thought about how Rafflesia had been calmer lately. She no longer concerned herself with the activities of the cartel she was hosting, preferring instead to watch birds, classify insects, and ask for Craft’s presence at any opportunity.

It puzzled him. The prevailing Theory of Demigod Efficiency said beings like her existed only for the single-minded fulfillment of the concept they embodied, but these things she liked to do… They weren’t ‘productive’ pursuits at all.

It really puzzled him. Even as Rafflesia continued to stare at him, he couldn’t come up with an answer to his own conundrum.

That was, except for one possibility he hadn’t seriously considered at first. It was just such an abnormally human reason — boring,ordinary — that it shouldn’t be associated with demigods at all:

Was showing him beavers…supposed to make him happy?

Yes, no, he didn’t know. Ever since meeting her, he had come to know that he was just a man who didn’t know a lot of things. Appreciating things like this was one of them.

“How do you think they met?” Rafflesia asked, pointing at the beavers. He pointed at them, too, raising an eyebrow.

“Them? Beavers? Well, I can’t say I’ve ever thought about the lives of beavers.”

She grinned. “Really? Not even guessing?”

He threw his arms up. “I don’t know, some kind of beaver society? A speed dating network?”

Rafflesia snorted, then covered her mouth, suppressing her guffaw and converting it into convulsions.

Craft’s eyes shot wide open. He’d never thought he’d make a demigoddess laugh.

“I didn’t expect that,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’ve been watching these beavers for the past two weeks,” she continued.

There she goes again with the weird projects, Craft couldn’t help but think. All things considered, he’d rather see her doing something adorable like that rather than conquering humanity with eco-friendly drugs and poisons.

“I watched them find each other at random. They smelled each other and decided to stay together for the rest of their lives. Isn’t it amazing?”

Craft chuckled. “That’s terrible criteria for a relationship.”

Rafflesia looked at him with play-angry eyes. “Why? They seem happy enough.” She looked away, watching one of the beavers drift off aimlessly downstream. The other one jumped in from the top of the dam and paddled to chase its partner.

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Craft watched them, too. “That way’s the factory.” He frowned. “You know, they’ll eventually figure out the dam’s blocking the stream, then they’ll hit this place with a drone. If I were these guys, I’d move out of here ASAP.”

People were gifted with rationality to predict disasters and avoid them. A human who didn’t use that gift was going to put themselves in a world of hurt — was what he believed.

“They seem happier than you, at least,” Rafflesia quipped.

He stayed quiet, casting his gaze downwards. He watched the water flow downstream and leave him behind. It was quiet now, but there was a storm coming.

“Don’t trust the CAZ,” he told her. “And don’t trust me. They’ll have me kill you one day, you know?”

Rafflesia didn’t reply for a while. “It interests me that they can do this without reason,” she eventually said, watching the better of the beaver pair wade through the waters to drag the other back to their home. “They don’t have to consider the things around them. They don’t fiddle with lifestyle, position, math, and money. They are single-minded in their nurture of the other, and for that, they will do anything. Futile as it may appear to us, irrational as it may be, nothing else matters if their role in the world is so small, anyway.”

She looked at him. “Kill me if you have to. The future doesn’t matter. If you want to enjoy our time together, do not complicate it. Your company is already okay for me. All that remains is if mine is okay for you.”

***

Craft lingered outside the cottage in Enthusia’s domain. Her generosity was alien to him, but despite that, it was easier for him now to accept that it was just the way she was. Yet, the more humanity he saw in her, the more he was afraid that he, himself, might have less humanity than a god.

She was kind, and he was not — this, he believed. Having been shown her kindness, his instincts told him to return it, but he didn’t think he could. To meet Enthusia’s kindness with his own, he first had to match her kindness at all.

He looked at the shed, then the view of the hill behind him, and finally, the gazebo where a pillar of soft light descended. That pillar led to her world, no doubt. Maybe he could gain such kindness there.

He faced the cottage again. One moment it was there, and the next, it blipped out of existence — gone like mist. He was surprised he didn’t feel much about it; he’d lived there long enough that he thought he might feel something, at least. He supposed it wasn’t so much the cottage that he liked than the people he’d been lucky to stay with this whole time.

Enthusia was beside him, just an arm’s length away. It was surreal to him how he could feel grateful and apprehensive at the same time.

“It’s surreal how you can just do that,” he said. He was carrying a rucksack filled with the same tools he’d been using these past few centuries. It didn’t feel like centuries, though.

“I am a goddess,” Enthusia said. She was in the same dress as yesterday, except for the new shawl.

This person, too, he wouldn’t see after today; he couldn’t look away from her. Looking at her was the only salve for the uneasiness starting to chain him to this place, as he was beginning to realize just how high the hurdle to his task was: How did becoming kind even work? Wasn’t that equivalent to becoming a different person altogether? It was the sort of project that would have taken the efforts of a team of high-spec Ph.D’s and the affordance of a military budget to accomplish, yet here he was, self-tasked with doing it alone.

She noticed his gaze and smiled, waving hello.

He snapped out of his thoughts. “Looks good on you,” he said, just for the sake of saying something.

She eyed him for a second longer than normal. Perhaps coming up with an idea, she pointed to the storage shed. It hadn’t disappeared with the cottage. “Do you want that?”

He looked at the shed, then at her. “What, the whole thing?”

“Well” — she smirked — “yes.”

They stared at each other for a while.

“And everything in it,” she continued.

Craft couldn’t say anything to that. His blank stare alternated between her and the shed. “Oh, you can do that.” … He’d almost forgotten she could.

Enthusia chuckled. “I did make a retirement house the size of a planet.”

Just looking at it from the outside-in, there wasn’t any reason for him to refuse. “Well… Alright, I guess,” he said, but only halfheartedly. It wasn’t that it was difficult for him to wrap his head around the concept, but the fact was it was being given to him, like a trillionaire had walked up to him and said, “Hey, by the way, here’s the key to a car worth 10x your lifetime savings. I’m not using it anymore, don’t worry.”

Enthusia tilted her head. “You ‘guess’?”

There wasn’t a single trace of malice in how she said it nor how she looked at him. I’m being peer-pressured by a goddess. He chuckled to himself and scratched his head at this luxurious dilemma. “Alright, alright. I guess it’s going in my pocket.”

The shed blipped out of existence in the next moment…and nothing else happened. He’d expected some mysterious magical feeling to indicate a storage shed had been crumpled into a sub-dimensional ball and attached to his soul with a…paperclip…or something.

He patted himself down. No physical mutations, either. “Is that it?” he asked.

Enthusia jerked back slightly, looking at him like he’s the strange one here. “Do you want it to feel heavy?”

He shook his head and leaned away. “Don’t make me out to be the weirdo here.”

She laughed, and they started towards the gazebo. He didn’t really want to, though.

The uphill trek was slow, and Craft liked to drag his feet. It was a subconscious thing — up until he’d become aware of it, then it became something he did on purpose. Maybe I can stay a little longer, he thought. If he were to ask Enthusia, she’d probably relent … but here wasn’t the place where he’d take his first steps forward. Here was the place where he would stay the same, and staying the same was the one thing he didn’t want to do.

Even so, taking even a single a step became a slog. He kept his head down, counting the number of steps he’d taken, measuring the distance between each step so he wouldn’t look like he was dragging his feet. One step at a time, he chanted in his mind, even tiny steps are still steps forward. … But why did such tiny steps have to be filled with so much dread?

“Don’t be like that,” Enthusia called to him. He looked up at her. Did she notice? He got himself together and showed her a small smile. “Thanks again,” he said, “and sorry for making you cry.”

“I’m always willing to cry,” she replied. “If it’s with someone else, even better.”

He smirked and looked down at the ground again, watching the grass travel under him. “You’re really a weird one for a goddess,” he added.

She chuckled. “You too. Most people ask for some kind of cheat before getting beamed down, you know? Are you sure you don’t want to be reborn as the third son of a noble family?”

Craft chuckled. “No.”

“No? You don’t even want ultra-rare magic?”

He shook his head. It’s not what he really wanted. She quieted down.

“It’s making me sad that you’re sad,” she said after a while, and that got him to look at her. Her eyes avoided his, but soon, she gathered the courage to look at him again. “Really, what’s wrong?”

He looked away and shook his head. “I’m scared, is all.”

She stopped walking. He stopped as soon as he realized she did. “At least tell me,” she said.

He turned his body squarely to face her, but just that amount of courage wasn’t enough to make the words come out. I’m leaving again, his thoughts repeated, and I’m still not able to say what I want to say.

They both stayed frozen, seconds stretching into minutes. In front of him, Enthusia showed no particular expression, patiently waiting for him to come up with some explanation for feelings for which he didn’t have enough clarity to describe.

Her patience was just like Rafflesia’s, and that memory made him smile, even if only a little. Unlike with Rafflesia, however, there was no ending for this waiting contest. Any amount of time could pass and he and Enthusia would still be staring at each other. There’s just no winning against someone who saw a couple of centuries as a break for tea and hot chocolate.

“There’s no one-upping you, huh,” he said with a chuckle.

She smiled hesitantly. “You are afraid,” she said in a soft voice.

Craft’s chuckle settled into a bittersweet smile. It was one thing for him to say he was afraid, but it felt different to have someone else say it for him. An otherwise personal emotion was being observed by someone else, and, strangely, it made it easier for him to accept his own feelings. “That, I am.”

She stepped towards him; she was at speaking distance one moment and right beside him the next. Just that much surprised him already, but when she took his hand, palm-in-palm, that surprised him even more. Her grip was feather-light, and he felt he could shake her off whenever he wanted. He couldn’t find the will to do it, though, and he wasn’t even sure if he disliked it.

She took a step towards the gazebo, but stopped and looked back, gently tugging him onward. Her suggestion clashed with his body’s instinct to freeze, but even so, he found that his feet had taken him forwards without his say-so. It was just by inches, but they were inches forward.

He thought she’d forcibly pull him along after that, but she just waited. What’s she waiting for? he thought. In a few moments, he realized the answer in how his fear started to subside. It was still there, but because of how patient and unhurried Enthusia was — how her touch did not invade but suggest — the once impossible walls between suggestion, decision, and action thinned. They turned into water, and water was something he was used to wading through.

He took another step, and another — but he stopped. Perhaps now, he could confess his fear.