![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
k_a_webb“Some of the angels would disagree with you,” Uriel said, remembering the times he’d been told he was making a mistake because he worked closely with the spirit guides or had, inexplicably, become friends with Hades. “Even though they aren’t certain why we’re here some do believe that we were created by the Christian God and by fraternising with creatures who believed themselves to be deities was a sure way to bring the wrath of God upon myself.”
Hecate laughed. “The Christian God is a human creation, Uriel. They wanted a single deity they could pray to, so they gathered together everything they knew about the other gods, and some of the goddesses, and ended up with a very grumpy god who likes to smite people. I prefer calling him Yahweh, if I’m going to call him anything, although I do sometimes use the name that some children have mistakenly given him.”
“What do they call him?”
“Harold.” Hecate laughed again. “A child can easily confuse ‘Hallowed be thy name’ with ‘Harold be thy name’, and for them it makes a lot more sense.”
“Does he exist in the same way we do?”
“There are plenty of people who believe in the angels and actually pray to them, often to get them to ask Yahweh to help on their behalf, in the same way they pray to the Christian saints and occasionally even Jesus. Unfortunately they’ve been so convinced that they need to go through someone else in order to get the attention of God, whether that be a priest, an angel, or a saint, that there aren’t enough people who actually talk with Yahweh to make him more than a voice.” Hecate sat down next to Uriel. “In some ways he doesn’t need a body, although I think he’d like to have one.”
“Another problem Yahweh has,” Hades said, “is that he’s purely an Earth god. There are no other worlds where he’s worshipped and he hasn’t been able to connect with anyone from another world.”
“It’s pretty much the opposite problem the the one Lucifer has.” Hecate shook her head. “Poor Lucifer wants to connect with someone from the Earth so badly, but it’s hard for him because they see him as something he isn’t.”
“There are times when it’s hard for all of us, Uriel,” Hades continued. “On some worlds a deity will connect with someone and then they’ll gather others, usually by word of mouth, who may or may not also connect with us. That one person may be the only spokesperson for the deity, which can affect the messages that get passed onto the group, or there may be many who end up arguing about what the true message the god or goddess is.” He sighed. “A lot of the time we find it’s like a game of Chinese Whispers, if you know what that is, so when someone connects with us and finds that what they’re learning from us doesn’t correlate with what they’ve read it can affect their choices.”
“I don’t know what Chinese Whispers is,” Uriel replied, as he thought about everything else that Hades had said.
“On Earth it’s a children’s game,” Hecate explained, “where one will come up with a phrase that is passed along a line and the last child will tell the others what they’ve heard. Normally it’s very different to what the phrase originally was, because the message gets changed by one or other of the children. It may be that the original phrase was ‘the fox jumped over the dog, so the dog chased it’ when it ended up as ‘the sock jumped over the frog, so the frog raced it’. The first phrase made sense while the second one didn’t.”
“It can happen with almost anything. Surely you’re been talking with someone and heard something different to what they’ve said.” Hades smiled. “There are times when it can be amusing.”
“I get that quite a lot with the mirror, especially if I’m watching someone while I’m doing something else. Sometimes what I hear is so different to what they’ve actually said…” Uriel shook his head. “Thankfully I can always go back and rewatch it, but if you’re trying to tell someone something in a dream then that’s obviously not possible.”
“I’ve heard interesting things about your mirrors,” Hecate said. “I’d love to see one of them.”
“They’re probably much the same as your vision pool. I can see the past, the present, and the future of spirits who are currently incarnated on Earth and those in the afterlife, as well as the other angels and the deities. As I have no connection to any of the other worlds I can’t see any of them, but I would have thought that I could if I did.” Uriel shrugged. “It’s not something I can imagine having to do.”
“We could help you connect with other worlds if it was something you really wanted to do.”
Uriel looked at Hades, who just shrugged, and then at Hecate. “I don’t know.” Uriel sighed. “I think I’d like to, but I have a feeling the other angels really wouldn’t approve. At least not until I have a chance to share what I’ve learnt with them.”
“As I’m not Yahweh there’s a chance they may not want to accept anything I’ve said, but if the mirrors do work the way you’ve said they do it might be a way to show them what I’ve seen. If you get a chance, Uriel, go back as far into your past as you can, and then you’ll see what I mean.”
“That something I’ve always been a little scared of doing.” Uriel bit his lip. “I remember waking up one day, in the room I still think of as mine, and I’m grateful that I wasn’t alone, because I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know what my name was.”
“I’ve seen that moment for different angels. There simply is nothing before that and I can’t work out why Gabriel woke up so long before the rest of you.” Hecate shrugged. “There’s a chance he woke up because he had a lesson he needed to learn, but it’s affected him so badly that I can’t help thinking it was just down to bad luck.”
“Wasn’t he the first of the angels to be mentioned in the Bible?” Hades asked. “That might have had something to do with his early awakening.”
“The Bible isn’t something I know much about,” Uriel admitted, feeling a blush heat his cheeks. “I read a couple of books of the new Testament and then put it down, because I didn’t have any connection to it, even though I wanted to. From what I’ve heard none of the other angels have much of a connection to it either and Gabriel never even picked it up. As far as he’s concerned if there is a God out there who created us all he’s a sadist.”
“I can understand why,” Hecate said, smiling. “Gabriel didn’t know what he was and as he didn’t have anyone else there to talk with he found himself exploring the afterlife alone, which is why he believed he was a spirit. If he’d woken up with the rest of you things might have been different for him, but none of you had a simple time when you were trying to work out who you were and why you existed.” She reached out and patted Uriel’s arm gently. “You’re all still learning, because there hasn’t been anyone to guide you, in the way there wasn’t anyone to guide me when I first became a deity.”
“Maybe you could help Gabe.”
“I’d love to, if he’d come to me, but I doubt he will.”
“When he gets back I’ll talk to him.” Uriel looked at Hecate, wondering if he had the courage to ask her about her life and decided that she’d been so nice to him that he didn’t need to be scared. “What was it like for you?”
“Nowhere near as difficult as it was for Gabriel. I was born mortal and there were deities I worshipped, like everyone else, but I made the choice to dedicate my life to one specific deity. She apparently saw within me what was needed to be a deity and guide other people, so she asked me if, when I left my mortal life, I wanted to become something more than I was.” Hecate ran her tongue over her bottom lip. “Like almost all the mortals who have become immortal I had no idea what I was accepting, but I accepted it any way, believing it was the right thing for me to do. If she thought I would make a good deity then I would try, for her. When I finally took my place amongst the deities I was thrown in at the deep end, in part because they weren’t sure what to do to teach me how to become a deity.”
“The deities’ world was a very different place then,” Hades said. “Each different group had their territory, but now we do our best to work together, especially as it’s quite normal for the deities from different Earth pantheons to work together on other worlds. It also helps with training, because we take the time to train all the deities before they take on any duties, whether their born immortal or made immortal, as we learnt from the mistakes that were made before. Hecate’s been helping my daughter, Callidora, and she’s made sure that Callie’s worked with deities from different pantheons.”
“It helps that both Sephy and Hades are open to working with deities from different pantheons themselves. Callie’s always been around a mix of deities, both gods and goddesses, so she’s had a bit of a headstart.”
“The more you talk about the deities’ world the more I want to visit.” Uriel sighed. “Do you think the deities’ would accept me?”
“Most of them would.” Hades reached out and squeezed Uriel’s shoulders. “There are some who might view you as an interloper, but their deities that haven’t let go of their past.”
“Like Zeus.” Uriel felt Hecate’s hair brush his shoulder as she shook her head. “Until he became the ‘King’ of the Greek pantheon he was just a weather god and he won’t accept that’s what he still is. Nothing changed because of what the Greeks believed, but he clings onto the belief that he’d better than the rest of us for that reason.”
“Very few of the deities are like Zeus, Uriel. If you visit the house I share with Sephy then I’ll invite over some the deities I think would love to meet you.” Hades smiled. “Callie and Archie would love to meet you too.”
“Archimedes is your son?”
Hades nodded. “He’s our eldest. Then Phelix is in the middle and Callie is the baby. We’re hoping to have another child at some point, but we’re both so busy at the moment that it wouldn’t be fair on them.”
“You never seem to talk much about Phelix.”
“I spend more time with Archie and Callie at the moment. Phelix is off exploring a world as part of his training and we haven’t had any contact because he asked us to give him time to learn about himself alone. We were happy to do it, as every deity learns a little differently, and I think that having the time to himself should really help him decide what path he wants to take.”
“Hades did the same thing,” Hecate said. “During his training he left the deities world and went to spend time alone, so he understands the choice better than Sephy does.”
“Sephy still misses Phelix and I know she wants to get in contact with him, but we promised him.”
“And Sephy always keeps her promises.” Hecate laughed. “Hades knows that for a fact because she promised him, when she was still a deity in training, that she’d marry him.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.