He had expected, in whatever small and unexamined way a farmer's son expects anything about a world he has only ever heard described in myth, something like wisdom. Something like the settled, hard-won grace of beings who had lived long enough and drawn deep enough to have earned, through all that accumulated time, some genuine understanding of what to do with the power they held.
What he found instead was a court.
It took him longer than it should have — longer than it embarrasses this account to admit — to understand what he was actually looking at, because the surface of it was, in its own way, genuinely beautiful. Palaces built from crystallized current, glowing faintly from within with the accumulated weight of centuries of hoarded surplus. Gardens that grew and unmade themselves on a whim, because the gods who tended them had grown bored of any single, permanent shape. Feasts that lasted, by mortal reckoning, for years, attended by beings who had stopped counting how many mortal lifetimes had passed since any of them had last needed to worry about anything at all.
Underneath the beauty, once he'd been there long enough to see past the first dazzling impression of it, was rot.
He watched gods amuse themselves with mortal suffering they could observe, at will, through the thin membrane that separated the two worlds — not intervening, rarely even discussing what they watched, simply watching, the way a person watches weather, entertained by catastrophes that cost the watchers nothing at all. He watched younger gods, freshly ascended, absorbed quickly and thoroughly into a culture that treated cruelty as sophistication and boredom as the only genuine crisis anyone at that level of power still had to fear. He watched, more than once, a newly arrived soul — someone who had crossed the same threshold he had, for reasons every bit as modest and human as his own had been — slowly reshaped, over what would have been mortal decades, into something colder, crueler, less recognizable as the person who had first arrived hopeful and disoriented and entirely unprepared for what waited on the other side of the tear.
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He asked, early on, in the careful, unguarded way of someone still assuming good faith from everyone around him, why the current from below was never permitted to flow back. He was told, by more than one god, in more than one register of amused condescension, some version of the same answer: because that is simply how it has always been. He asked what would happen if the rule were lifted. He was told, by a god considerably older and considerably more comfortable than he was, that more mortals would ascend, and that more ascended mortals meant more competition for the resources and the standing every current god had already secured for themselves, and that this — not cruelty, not fairness, not anything resembling a principle — was the actual, unspoken engine underneath the entire arrangement.
He did not act immediately. This detail, too, tends to be lost in the telling, because it complicates the story into something less satisfying than the version that survives as myth. He spent what would have been, by mortal counting, several more years simply watching, hoping, against every piece of evidence steadily accumulating in front of him, that what he was seeing was an exception rather than the rule — that somewhere in that vast, glittering, self-satisfied world, there was a court, a faction, a single god of sufficient conscience, that might be persuaded to change the arrangement from within rather than have it broken from without.
He never found one.
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