There was once a world where the gods were real. All the stories that overlapped and intertwined with each other were real. The world changed whenever the story was retold and rewritten, each time becoming less real as the fragments of the historical truth were lost. Eventually the gods themselves began to be half-truths, half-things. It is often said that the only thing that can kill a deity is a lack of belief, but that is untrue. Belief was the thing that warped many of them beyond existence into mythology, but belief harnessed in action was what broke them. At a certain point near the end, when the king of the gods was alone and tired, it noticed that even it was finally beginning to change beyond its own recognition. It decided to intervene.
Angus, the head record keeper, had never believed in the gods. His culture’s social structure was dependent on the collecting, categorizing, and understanding of knowledge. Knowledge and belief are often things at odds. The city of Enc and all the adults within it had raised Angus devoid of belief. Angus knew of the gods’ existence, as a record keeper he knew a great many things for which the average Encian only ever wished to understand. Things about history. Things about mythology. Things about the existence of gods and the social engineering effort to remove them starting with the neunietzschens. The Encians, as those in power had been overtaken by this radical group long ago, were not atheists but instead contratheists. Like any who climbed the ranks as far and as quickly as he had, Angus was no true believer. While the political ideas were radical, the politicians and party members of the ruling class were only ever realists and narcissists.
While his title was record keeper, Angus’s directives were not to maintain the records in their current forms. The Encians understood the power of rewriting the history and mythologies of long dead cultures. Most had been warped beyond the point of salvageability long before Angus reached his position. The global monotheistic cults spawning from the Abrahamic tradition had been easier to undo in spite of its outsized influence. There was only one deity to be undone, along with many minor pseudo-iconoclasts across the differing sects. But because of the many fractures within the three main bodies of the cult, the deity of Abram was not a difficult one to diminish and eventually erase entirely. The fools had rewritten their scrolls and books and databases too many times for the web of cracks in the eternal firmament not to spread all the way to the edges. The youngest of the three was the last standing, surviving for a strong millenium owing to their refusal to edit the most sacred text. But even it fell once the supplementary texts received enough editing over time, only requiring a light push in the right direction from the earliest neunietzschens. Angus and his team took up the mantle with pride, remaking and remaking the remaining gods in newer and less coherent ways until they were forced to withdraw from existence entirely to wherever gods go after the end.
Angus even knew that the god king would come for him. He had been receiving prophetic visions since his youth, which were medicated away. He suffered a dreamless sleep and waking fits near the end. He isolated himself socially in order to minimize the harm done when the god king eventually incarnated and murdered him. Only his team would know of his loss. This would have been considered an impossibility by most at the time, but Angus knew better. He knew that it watched and it waited and it would eventually strike him down. Angus lobbied firmly against the ministers when they linked his heart to the black hole powering the record system. The ministers believed that even a god king would act in its own self-interest. But he knew that the god king would not stop because of the destruction of something as small as a universe. If pushed too far it would destroy everything in order to survive.
The god king was first and foremost a deity of light. The earliest believers looked to the heavens and found something beyond themselves, unconsciously willing it into existence back at the beginning of time. Their belief had changed the past, and it would shape the future in ways they would never have expected. The sun god/sky god/light god/moon god/fire god became the central figure in most polytheistic pantheons at one point or another. As the pantheons collapsed into themselves and the stories overlapped with each other the deifabric of the god king was woven into the singular being which it eventually became. Angus and his team dabbled with attempting to rewrite the god king as a being of darkness, but it never took hold. The narrative was simply not as compelling with death at its center. They kept looking, knowing that the last domino would eventually fall and needing it to face exactly the right direction when the time came.
A record keeper named Gerpha found an answer that might have saved Angus were it not for the interference of the top ministers. She surmised that the only thing the god king had been holding onto as the eons passed must have been a sense of identity– a will or intention of some sort, even just the will to survive. A will to survive was often weak in younger deities, as the less wise of them always assumed immortality to be a thing given by the universe instead of a thing taken for oneself. The longer a god hung on, the stronger its need to survive must have become. The god king had been warped more often and longer than any other deity, yet it survived. The only thing left within it must have been a sense of self. Angus leapt at the idea when she presented it to the team. They had tried changing the god king’s identity numerous times, but erasing it entirely might be a way out from his fate. The team worked in shifts of four for weeks to alter the texts and artifacts of the god king, scraping away any and all names, signifiers, symbols, language, and history attached to it. The thing presumably had a gender and a name before the rewrite. It must have been more than an empty husk of a placeholder to have been shunted into the position of ultimate divine authority. But there is no possible way of knowing. After the rewrite any evidence of such things was lost. Even moving backwards through time could not reveal who or what the god king had once been. As the rewrite occurred the god king was finally warped beyond repair. It unwove down to its final phantasmal thread, and as the thread started to unspool upon itself, the god king fled– not to that place where gods go when the end comes for them– but to Enc. It was time for the end of all things to come to pass. It walked through the city like any normal person, and as Enc was a city of reason, found it quite easy to navigate towards the team’s laboratory. The lack of security did not surprise it, as the god king had been watching the inside of Angus’s lab for a long time by then. The god king found Angus at one of his terminals, examining the cosmic radiation in a distant quadrant of the mystic plane where the Encians knew gods frequented before their deaths, though not why they did so. Angus was expecting, even hoping, for a sign of death. His heart fluttered, causing the black hole psychically linked to it to quiver with life. Angus didn’t see the god king until it was too late. The god king put its hands around Angus’s throat, and watched as the life fled from his eyes like shooting stars across an empty sky. The black hole imploded and exploded at once, and the universe began to shrink– faster and faster in on itself. In a moment it was the size of a marble and in a blink it was gone.
A new universe started not a moment later, as they are wont to do. But it was curiously lacking in divine influence. There was once a world where the gods were real, but it ended with a big bang.