[Four years ago, at the Cardinal World — Central Institutional Private Hospital of Tempest, 7:15 AM]
The day God watched a man die, the hospital room was quiet except for the machines.
He sat beside the bed and watched Gard Mjollmile breathe slowly and shallowly, each breath demanding a little more effort than the last.
The monitors beeped a steady sound while doctors prepared past the glass window outside the room, checking charts, talking quietly, doing the things doctors and nurses did when they already knew the outcome and were just waiting for it to become official.
God knew the outcome, too.
Today was the day. He'd known it when he arrived that morning without having to think about it. He'd told no one he was coming, he just came.
Gard opened his eyes when he heard the chair move.
He looked older than anyone had any right to look. Thousands of years had a way of doing that, even to people whose lifespans had been extended far beyond normal. His face was deeply lined, his hair long and white, his hands on the blanket.
But his eyes were clear.
"My Lord… Rimuru…" he said. His voice was a little rough but it was steady.
"What's up, old man?" God leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, smiling gently. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I'm dying," Gard replied.
"Yeah." God looked at him. "I know."
They sat with that for a moment.
"I have to ask you one more time," God said.
Gard smiled before he'd even finished the sentence. "Yes."
"Dude, I haven't asked yet."
"You were going to ask if I really want this." Gard's smile didn't move. "Yes. I really want this."
God looked at him for a second. Then leaned back in the chair. "Okay, fine."
"You're not going to try to talk me out of it?"
"Would it work?"
Gard laughed. It turned into a cough halfway through and he waved off God's instinctive lean forward. "No," he said, when it passed. "It wouldn't."
He looked at the ceiling for a while.
"…When you first offered to extend my life," he said, "I was so happy. I thought — more time. More time to serve. More time to watch what you were building become what it became." He paused. "And it was… it was everything I hoped it would be. Thousands of years of it."
"But?" God asked.
"No but," Gard replied. "It was everything. And now it's enough." He looked at God. "I've done everything I set out to do. The ministry will outlast anyone. All my wishes have come true. I have no regrets, Lord Rimuru. Not one."
God was quiet.
He means it. Every word.
"You know," God said after a while, "I felt the same way when Alice died. Or Gale, too."
Gard nodded slowly. "They were ready too."
"They always are. My human friends. You all reach this point eventually where you're just — ready. And you're all so calm about it that I end up being the one who feels strange."
"That's because you're going to be here long, long after," Gard said. "Of course it feels strange from where you're standing."
God didn't answer that.
They talked for a while after that. Old stories, mostly. Stupid things from the early years of Tempest, back when everything was chaos and nobody knew what they were doing and somehow things kept working out anyway.
Gard remembered details God had half-forgotten. They argued about the correct sequence of events of something that had happened roughly eight hundred years ago. Gard insisted he was right. He probably was.
At some point, the stories slowed down and the silences got longer and Gard's eyes started closing between sentences.
Then they didn't open again.
...…
God watched a man die.
He saw the man's chest rise one last.
He heard him breathe one last.
And there was neither sorrow nor remorse.
There was only the mourning of an old friend.
And a monitor that changed its beeping.
God sat there for a while. Then he stood up, walked over and opened the door, and looked at the nearest doctor.
"10:04," he said. "That was the time of his death… in case you need to write it down."
The medical team moved in quietly then. God stepped out of the room and stood in the hallway while they worked.
"Goodbye, old friend," he said, to the room more than to anyone in it. He looked through the glass at the person in the bed. "It's a shame we couldn't watch one last sunset together. Really. A shame."
He meant it.
He just couldn't feel it the way he once would have.
The feeling of it came from somewhere far, far away now. He understood grief. He just couldn't quite reach it anymore.
He'd noticed this about himself for a long time. The gradual recession of it as the years went by and the world growing quieter around him, not because anything had changed about the world but because something had changed about him.
He was too far out now.
Much too far.
He could watch the world just fine and participate in it just fine and neither of those things were the same as being in it. Like, living in it.
He walked out of the hospital into the morning air.
This was God's destiny and God's curse.
He'd accepted that a long time ago.
◢◣◢◣◢◣
A certain revelation came a few weeks later.
Like many, many times, God wanted to experience the world again.
Not directly, though. He'd tried that and it wasn't something he could really manage with his status. The capacity for that kind of experience had changed in him at a fundamental level and there was no going back. But indirectly? Through something of his own making? That was a different question.
He didn't want a clone. Clones were just him with extra steps, still connected to his soul corridor, still fundamentally the same problem in a different vessel. His subordinates would panic and their interference would span different worlds. It would create complications he had no interest in managing.
What he wanted was something new. Something derived from him but genuinely separate.
Its own soul, its own path, its own life to live entirely without him in it except as the origin of it.
God called it an Archetype.
He went to Ramiris about the lab. She had questions, but he answered the ones he felt like answering and deflected the rest, which she complained about loudly, and then helped him anyway because she always did.
The work took time.
Getting the biology right, the soul design, the balance of it.
God wanted the thing to be strong. Strong enough to survive and grow into something remarkable. But he'd learned enough about himself to know that absolute power was its own kind of prison, and he had no interest in building another one.
So he built limits intentionally. For one, the Archetype's regeneration would be there, but it would not be almighty — true death was possible, which meant caution was necessary. Magic was off the table entirely, which had been the harder decision and also, he suspected, the more important one.
The ability to do anything made nothing feel like anything.
He wanted his creation to know what it was to be unable to do things, to have to find another way, and to actually lose sometimes in one way or another.
Eternal youth, though, that God gave freely. Let it have time. Let it accumulate enough of the world that the accumulation meant something.
The body grew in the lab over months, suspended in the cultivation medium. God visited more than was really necessary. He told himself it was quality control.
One evening, he stood in front of the tube and pressed his hand against the glass.
The thing inside was not moving. It had its eyes closed. Deep blue hair floating around, pale skin, and a face that directly mirrored God's own, but at its core, a genuinely new person.
"You'll turn out differently from me," God whispered.
He hoped so. He'd designed it that way, put every intention he had into it. The base personality would carry semblances of his own — he couldn't fully avoid that, and didn't entirely want to — but there were little tweaks, and the life would be its own.
Whatever this being became would be the product of its own experiences in a world God had never touched.
That was the point.
That was the whole point.
He named him Lymur. Derived from his own name as well. A small secret joke that he thought nobody would ever point out.
God looked at the person in the tube for a long time.
The last time he'd felt something this clearly was — he tried to remember. It had been a while.
Go have a good life, he conveyed his thoughts to his creation with full passion.
Fall in love.
Make friends.
Fail at things.
Get back up.
Eat good food.
Watch sunsets.
All the things I can't really do anymore.
He was smiling.
He didn't notice, at least not until a moment later. And when he did, he stayed very still, like he was afraid moving would disturb it.
It had been a while since that happened too.
"Alright, Lymur," he said quietly, hand still against the glass. "Let's see what you do with it."