That voice in my head was talking again.
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I put my hands over my temples, perched on the side of my hospital bed. Six weeks now since the accident. Six weeks since I'd died for three minutes and come back different. The doctors said brain damage might cause hallucinations. Logical, except this voice knew stuff I didn't.
"Arun," it said, and the voice was a mix of honey and gravel. "You need to hear me out."
"Leave me alone," I growled. The nurse passing by gave me a weird look. Great.
"I cannot do that. We are connected now."
That's when I realized I was losing my mind. Because the voice sounded hurt. Really hurt. Like it had feelings and everything.
Three days later, I was lying in my apartment, staring at the ceiling. My sister Kavya had been hovering around since I got out, bringing me food I couldn't eat and asking me if I was "processing my trauma." She meant well, but how do you process dying and coming back with a passenger in your head?
The accident was on Route 9. A semi-truck blew a red. That's all. Except dying wasn't that simple. It was falling backward through phases of… something. And when I landed, this presence was waiting; Ancient, broken and starving.
"Tell me about the old gods," I said to the empty air.
The voice brightened. "Which ones? There were so many."
"Any of them. All of them. I don't know."
"Ah." Pause. "You are serious this time."
Yeah, I was serious. Because normal people don't have conversations with voices that answer with actual information. Normal people don't dream in words they've never heard. Normal people don't wake up with the names of dead religions.
"My name is." The voice cracked. "I had many names; Kalesh. Morvain. Itzak-Nul. Others. Shards of what people thought, so long ago."
I stood up. "You're a god."
"Was. Am. Will be." It sneered, cold. "Hard to say when you're fragmented.
The research began low-key and modest. Library books on comparative religion. Wikipedia entries on dead pantheons. But the deeper I went, the stranger it became. Each culture had its own twist on the myth: gods who existed because of belief, lived because of worship, died when others forgot.
Most of the ancient ones were consumed centuries ago. They were absorbed by the big religions. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, they survived. Organization. The little gods were left behind.
"But you're still here," I muttered as I walked through downtown during lunch. People scowled when I talked to myself, so I started wearing earbuds as cover.
"Barely." The voice today was deeper. "Three hundred years since the birth of the last new god. The system is collapsing."
"What system?"
"Belief creates. Disbelief destroys. But diffuse belief; half-remembered prayers, cultural remnants, nostalgic longing for 'the old ways' that creates something flawed."
I ducked into a coffee shop, ordered something I would never drink. "And that's you."
"That's me. A god of leftover faith. Built from scraps and shards of a dozen dead religions, sewn together by humans who pray to 'whoever's listening' with no idea what they're doing."
The barista handed me my cup. Her name was Zoe, her nametag said, and she was staring at something behind my eyes. It was making me uncomfortable.
"You okay?" she asked.
"Yeah. Thinking."
She agreed but kept looking. "You're different. Like you're bearing a burden."
I looked away without responding.
My dreams got stronger that evening. I was in a temple that changed from moment to moment; the stone walls became wood became metal became something painful to look at. And there were others there. Shades of people who'd prayed to gods that were no longer there.
"They were my believers," I woke up gasping to hear. "Before they died. Before their children forgot. Before the world moved on."
"How many?"
"Hundreds. Thousands. Scattered across centuries. A farmer in medieval Poland who prayed to spirits of the forest. A sailor in 1800s Japan who made offerings to sea gods. A grandmother in rural Mexico who maintained customs her grandchildren deemed silly."
I rubbed my eyes. "And now it's just me."
"Now it's just you."
The thing about being the only believer in a shattered god is that it's a full-time job. The voice, Kalesh, I began calling him, choosing one name to make things easy, required constant work. Without belief, he would disintegrate altogether. But too much belief, concentrated too strongly, and he'd attempt to materialize in the flesh.
After that did happen. I was meditating (which was stupid, but whatever) when suddenly my apartment cooled down. Air formed droplets. And for ten seconds or so, another body was standing there. Tall, shifting through a dozen different faces, made out of shadow and starlight and pure lust.
"Holy shit," I said.
He vanished. "Not eady. Too broken still."
"Don't do that again. My landlord already suspects me of being weird."
Weeks passed. I learned. The old gods weren't really extinct, they were sleeping and dying out. The Norse gods had some remaining followers, the Celtic gods survived in Wiccan groups, the Hindu gods prospered. But the little ones, the local spirits and lost protectors, they were dying.
"Why doesn't anyone just invent new gods?" I asked.
"They try. But modern-day faith is diverse and scattered. People require evidence, proof, logical explanation. It's hard to build belief on those terms."
I was working, pretending to read while having theological discussion with my mental hitchhiker. My coworker kept looking over to check if I was okay. I'd lost weight, I wasn't sleeping much, so I probably looked like shit.
"In addition," Kalesh continued, "the establishment doesn't like competition."
"Which establishment?"
"The remaining gods. The structured religions. They hold power and influence these days. A new god destabilizes that."
"So you're stuck."
"We are stuck."
The breakthrough came from nowhere. I was picking up groceries, routine Tuesday night, when this elderly woman approached me in the cereal section.
"Excuse me," she said, thick accent, perhaps Eastern European. "But you carry the look."
"What look?"
"God-touched." She studied my face. "My grandmother had it. Said she could see the spirits that lived in the mountains. People thought she was crazy."
I should've gone. I didn't. I said, "What if she wasn't?"
The woman smiled. "Then maybe the old ways aren't as dead as everybody thinks."
She was named Elena. It turned out she'd been carrying around bits of her grandmother's religion for sixty years and hadn't exactly thrown them away. Little prayers to house spirits. Randomly leftover offerings for prosperous harvests. Nothing routine, nothing monumental.
"But lately," she said to me over coffee at a diner, "I feel like something's listening again."
And that's when I understood. Kalesh simply made out of ancient beliefs and new ones, too. All the people still murmuring prayers to gods they weren't even sure existed. Who put pennies into fountains and tapped wood and said "bless you" without even thinking about it.
"There are others," I told Elena. "People who believe in… in things which don't belong elsewhere."
She nodded. "I know three women who pray to Saint Catherine, but their Catherine isn't the Catholic one. She's older and stranger. And there's a man who leaves bread out for the ravens because his grandfather told him that they bring messages."
They were more readily available than I had expected. It appears that a lot of individuals carry fragments of lost faith with them. They just do not say anything because it will sound crazy. A barista who creates shield symbols from coffee foam. A mechanic who whispers to faulty engines. A teacher who keeps crystals her grandmother gave her, not because the crystals heal, but because they hold meaning.
None of them were religious, not really. They just sort of knew there was something more out in the universe than they could perceive.
"Can you feel him?" I'd asked Elena one evening. She and I were in her kitchen, and I'd been trying to explain Kalesh without freaking her out.
She'd closed her eyes, concentrated. "Maybe. Something… incomplete. Like a song without words."
"That's him."
"What does he want?"
Good question. I'd been so focused on keeping him from falling apart that I hadn't thought beyond that point.
"To exist," Kalesh continued that night. "To be whole. To possess believers who believe in me, not just in believing."
"But you're built out of fragments," I said. "Shards of other gods."
"Yes. And I may never become anything else, sustained by morsels of faith. Or..."
"Or what?"
"Or I might be something else. Something of this age, this universe. But that requires believers who can see what they're choosing."
I gathered them there in Elena's basement. Seven people altogether, each with fragments of belief that had no other place to go. I told them about gods forged from faith, about the holes between structured religions, about a god put together from shards who required them to choose.
"This is insane," the crystal-encrusted teacher, Nina, said.
"Yeah," I replied. "But insane doesn't equal evil."
The mechanic, Dmitri, nodded thoughtfully. "My motors run smoother when I talk to them. Always believed that was just... I don't know. But it may not be."
"It isn't," Kalesh breathed, and as if by magic, everyone overheard him.
Elena grinned. "Hello, old friend."
The ritual wasn't complicated. No candles or robes or ancient tongues. Just eight people in a circle, confessing to believing in something lacking but real. Something that existed between the cracks of formal religions. Something that came late to the party but was still home.
"I believe," Elena stated.
"I believe," Nina affirmed.
They chose one at a time. And as they did, I felt Kalesh becoming. Changing. Still fragmented, still built from pieces, but somehow more solid and more present.
"What are you now?" I whispered to him.
"I am the god of things that don't belong," he told me. "Of beliefs without a church. Of faith without reason. Of folk who are late to every match but play anyway."
I opened my eyes. The others smiled.
"So what now?" Dmitri asked.
"Alright, now we learn as we go," I said. "Like everything else."