Feeling a God Cry

In the excerpt below the enslaved servant of the Goddess Elyria, the warrior-scholar Baj Expatrianis asks the Goddess why she would not accept a mortal female as an acolyte nor take one as a forced servant.

As soon as the question had escaped his lips, the bright blue green eyes of the Goddess began to glow and he could not look away. He was being drawn deep into them, his very life essence sucked into the Goddesses eyes by a great whirlpool made of her emotions. Anger, hatred, pain, and regret were the water and waves which fed it, and at its center stood a gaping black maw, and he knew that it was sorrow and sadness of which it was composed. It was a grief so deep that all the other emotions had become trapped in orbit about it, forever swirling around the massive center of gravity this grief had created. And he was falling, falling ever more rapidly toward this terrible sorrow, and he felt that surely he would die so overwhelmed was he by the Goddess's emotions. Only moments before he was about to fall into that pitch black darkness he snapped back to himself and found himself looking at the Goddess, her face a blank slate, her eyes returned to their normal brilliant blue green, but tears were streaming down his face like a baby, and he felt such great and terrible sadness, more than he could bear. He stood and ran away as far and as fast as he could, found a cool spot underneath a large oak tree and cried. He cried for two days straight, even while he slept, barely managing to eat and drink and nothing else. He still had the occasional nightmare about that time, even two years later. Every time he did he would awaken with tears running down his face and he would cry until he felt he could cry no more. Mortals were not meant to feel the emotions of Gods. They were just too much for a man to bear. He did not envy the Gods because of this, in fact he felt sadness for them, at least he felt what sadness a mere mortal could feel.

I found the idea of a God or Goddess experiencing an emotion like sadness fascinating to consider. Layering on top of that was the question of what it would be like for a mortal that had the misfortune of experiencing just a portion of that emotion. Though they are very powerful, much more so than any mortal, the Gods and Goddesses in the Expatrianis Histories stories, the series from which this excerpt was drawn, are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. They act/interact with mortals in a manner much like how the Greek Gods were said to interact with ancient man. They have no great love for us and treat us much like pawns on a chessboard. They do not hate us either. We are simply beings at a level so far below them that it is a wonder they even notice us at all, let alone care to intervene in our lives whenever the mood strikes them or for reasons we will never understand. The Goddess and Baj have a unique relationship to say the least and she shares things with Baj she would not share with any mortal. Because she is basically clueless in many aspects of how mortals think and feel, sometimes her sharing inadvertently results in great pain for Baj. The above excerpt is one good example of what I mean by that.

With this passage I hoped to emphasize the power and strength and otherness of a God's emotions. The idea was that they would be so overwhelming that to experience them fully could result in a mortals death. The best metaphor or analogy I could come up with was the very cliche and overused whirlpool. In this case the whirlpool of her emotions has a black hole at the center, and that black hole is the grief of the Goddess. The gravity of that grief has caused all of her other emotions to get stuck in orbit around it and they are slowly being pulled down into it. This is exactly how grief has felt to me in my own life. The source of the Goddesses grief is never described in detail. All we know is that it is so great it has caused her to forever swear off mortal female acolytes and servants. In the stories she is highly antagonistic to the other Goddesses but less so to the "male" Gods. I wanted the reader to fill in the blanks for themselves and imagine their own story explaining what happened. Whatever it was, it was very, very impactful and resulted in the Goddess essentially forsaking female companionship of any sort for the remainder of eternity. The Gods are immortal remember although as I explain in the stories some do die.

As I reread the passage just now for this critique I was struck by how raw and emotional it was. It brought back painful memories of a time in my life when I was racked by grief shortly after the unexpected death of my wife of only two short years. Though we were only married for 2 years, she was my best friend and lover for almost 16 years prior to that. You never really get past that sort of loss. Never. Even today, just now as I write these words, the emotions are as raw as those of the Goddess and it feels as if to experience them will eventually kill me. Maybe our emotions are not all that different from the Gods after all.