God.
What a strong word. A title that makes entire pantheons crumble just by its utterance. A concept that civilizations build and break themselves upon.
But it is hollow. We are gods not by some grand, noble purpose, but by the simple, indifferent accident of our birth. We emerged with power, and so we declared ourselves the apex. I should know. I was there at the beginning.
I am the Origin God of Magic. The wellspring from which all spells, all enchantments, all arcane energies in a thousand-thousand dimensions first flowed. I am unbound by the principles I helped weave into reality. And yet, for all my eternity, I have never understood the one thing that makes reality… real.
Life.
I have watched it from my silent throne in the void. These fleeting, frantic lifeforms. They possess a quality I could never replicate, a chaotic, brilliant spark: emotion. Such a weird, inefficient, and utterly creative force. I watched them love, hate, hope, and despair, and a strange, hollow ache grew within me—the closest thing I had to a feeling. I, the creator, wished to be like my creations.
So, I committed the only sin a god can commit: I desired.
I stole the Heart of Reincarnation from the secret treasury of the high-tier gods. It was a pulsating, crystalline thing, containing the secret laws of mortal transition. My form—an immortal body of pure, shifting cosmic energy, not unlike the Alien X you might imagine—drifted through the silent Ocean of Laws, the very fabric of causality itself.
Why was I there? Because he saw me.
The God of Laws. The one being whose dominion superseded even my own creative power.
I fled. What else could I do? It was the only chance, while the endless, tedious Council of Gods was in session. I, the Primordial, had no recognition there. Worlds teeming with magic don't even know my name. I receive no divine power from their prayers, no strength from their positive thoughts. We are sustained by belief, and I am the forgotten founder.
The God of Laws caught me. His judgment was not wrath, but a cold, precise punishment. A curse of one hundred lives. Ninety-nine as lower lifeforms, each a lesson in futility. The one-hundredth, the last, as a human.
I almost laughed. I have lived eons. How difficult could it be?
The First Life.
…Ugh.
It was difficult. I was a bacterium. I existed and did not exist simultaneously. My consciousness, which once held galaxies, was compressed into a single, frantic point of chemical data. I was adrift in a warm, dark sea, tasting the decay of a universe I could not see. My divine will meant nothing here. The laws were biological, absolute.
A shadow fell over me. An amoeba—a formless, gelatinous leviathan in my microscopic ocean. A current, unimaginably powerful, seized me. There was no battle, no grand spell. I was drawn in, engulfed.
My consciousness did not fade. It was digested.
The last sensation of my first life was not of battle or glory, but of dissolving into constituent parts, my divine awareness scattered into the meaningless chemistry of a simple cell's meal. It lasted for an eternity. It lasted for an hour.
Later, I knew. This was what the humans called "fear." I had to die to understand it.
The Second Life.
My consciousness returned not as a gift, but as a sensory assault.
I was a fly. A thousand fractured images flooded a mind accustomed to unified perfection. The scent of a flower was a chemical weapon; the decay of a leaf a mile away was a siren's call. I was a prisoner to primal drives, my godly intellect screaming against the urge to land on filth.
The humans I once observed were now terrifying, mountain-sized deities. Their passing created hurricane winds; their swats were continent-shattering events. I lived in constant, low-grade terror.
As the sun set, a biological weariness forced me to land on a warm, sun-baked stone. For one second, there was peace.
Then, a blur of pink. A chameleon's tongue.
Impact. A sticky, crushing darkness.
I see now. This is what he meant. "You will change entirely before you even reach the 100th regression."
The Cycle.
And so, it continued. I lived a day, three hours, four days, two minutes, nine seconds, a week, a month, a year, nine years, ten minutes, a hundred years, two thousand years. A worm, an ant, a grasshopper, a skeleton in a forgotten tomb, a moth drawn to a fatal flame, a bug crushed underfoot, a boar gored by a rival, a cat drowned in a sack, a sheep led to slaughter, a tiger felled by a single arrow, a vulture picking at my own previous life's corpse, a goblin killed by an adventurer's first spell, an orc in a meaningless war, a mosquito smeared against skin, a cockroach scuttling from the light, a jellyfish dissolving in the sun, a turtle that outlived human empires only to be flipped onto its back.
I have been fear's greatest test subject. I am its embodiment.
The Ninety-Ninth Life.
This is it. My ninety-ninth life. I am a frog. It is… better. At least I can move. At least I can hunt. I can feel the damp earth and the cool water. All I hope now is that the God of Laws did not lie. I want to see the sun with human eyes. I want to feel rain on human skin.
Well, I am hungry. I will try to catch that mosquito. My tongue darts out… and misses. It is harder than it looks. Survival is a relentless task.
Sssssssssup.
A shadow. A strike. Agony, then constricting pressure.
A snake. It has me. In one, efficient attack, my world is consumed by darkness.
This is the point, I suppose, where a human soul would think, "Yes! I am excited for my new life!"
I still cannot replicate that feeling. All I feel is a weary, cosmic relief.
So, here goes nothing.
Ughh…
The One-Hundredth Life.
"Miss! It's a boy!"
A voice. Muffled, but clear. The first sound that hasn't been a growl, a buzz, or a death rattle.
A sharp slap on my backside, and a reflex I did not know I possessed takes over. I cry out. The sound is shockingly loud in my own new, tiny ears.
"Ooh! It's even crying loudly, isn't it? Way more than normal kids," a woman's voice comments, laced with awe and exhaustion.
Ugh. I… I'm reborn.
My last life. I force my new eyes to focus. Blurry shapes, light and shadow. I have eyes. A good sign. I twitch my hand. Five small, perfect fingers clench and unclench before my face.
Huh. These… they're mine.
A feeling, vast and terrifying, begins to bloom in my chest, something beyond the fear I have mastered. It is fragile, it is warm, it is… new.
Maybe… Just maybe… Am I… a human now?
The emotion, raw and uncontrollable, surges up my throat and I cry out again, even louder, my tiny body shaking with the force of it.
"By the gods, why is he crying like that since his very birth?" a man's voice, deep and concerned, asks.
They don't know. They can't possibly know.
I am the master of crying and running away. I have had ninety-nine lives of practice.
Well, time for my last life. Even if it is short, I will die. But for the first time, I can die without regressing. The finality of it, the sheer, terrifying beauty of a true ending…
That itself, I now understand, is what it means to be human.