“Book. Teach me to kill a god.”

Gods and demi-gods. 

Deities birthed in inter-dimensional spaces, attached by roots thin as chords. The question of divinity was the question of adamance. Cultural recognition of ideals and their defeat, the tug and shove of faith versus shifting expectations. Always another interpretation, another method of calling forth. 

Something to liven up the place. 

Midgard, dimension of humanity in its vast array, the cultures and religions and technologies they made from the earliest stone and bone tools to the newest quantum computers and the eventual unveiling of the still-in construction James Webb telescope. Humanity drifted across their Realm in a stupor, coaxed out of their wanderings in the cosmos by creatures too fantastic. Hazy images of the unreal. 

“Teach me how to kill a god.”

‘Is there a specific deity?’

Carefully recorded in the Book's pages were a litany of events, where humans worshipped the animals they hunted to sustain themselves, rivers they wanted to traverse without drowning, winds they hoped were pacified before they became too harsh upon their skin and stone abodes, or the caves in which they huddled with the left over marrow of their kills scooped into their fingers. Gifts left at the foot of a mountain known for its avalanches, or the path of a river or at the bone pile of a consumed beast became a communication of placation, in the earliest days. Artwork-worship in caves, preserved or lost dependent on too many variables to calculate in a scant few lines. 

The first conversation with any of the myriad other Realms was an apologetic plea. 

More than any other circumstance, this created the imbalance between the Middling Plane and the Realms surrounding it. All touched upon the planet known as Earth, although some more lightly than others, but the humans took the first steps in interconnection. The more gifts humans created, the more stories they wove of how the winds whispered, or whether a belly swelled after a woman walked in fertile fields, the more Realms attached. Roots engorging on nutrients and the sunlight shine of being desired. 

Blossomed like flowers fertilized by proximity, until the Creatrix's Cosmos was filled with cross-pollination. 

“Book, I am your Keeper. How do I kill gods?”

‘Stana, Keeper of the Book of Knowledge. First you asked how to kill a god, and now gods plural. What do you want? I am unused to being asked direct questions from a new Keeper.’

Hearing the voices of humanity, the hymns and songs and promises and prayers was the confirmation of a reality formerly unawares to the Realms in their initial cloisters. None know if the Creatrix meant for this, or whether it was the first minor rebellion. The origin point of Imperfection which reigns through the Middling Plane like its cancerous saviour. 

As the humans continued to make trails and hunting grounds, create cities of mud and stone, Folk from the Realms interacted with these fledgeling, imaginative creatures. Easy enough to view oneself as divine, when the humans worshipped and placed upon them the modicum of control they ought to have kept for themselves. 

But, humans wanted belief, to view the Cosmos as a place of either cosmic chaos (see: Optimistic Nihilism), an in-between or divinely appointed light. Others craved the dead, staring at the Memento Mori and the decrepit, to feel their pain through the lens of other more cthonic sources. 

“Teach me how to kill a god.”

‘Which one?’

“What does it matter?”

‘Gods aren’t interchangeable. What tickles for one might destroy another. Would you like to read…’

“Tell me what I want to know you damn Book!” Stana thumped her fist against the table top, a creak and the shriek of the table against tile her reward. 

‘Nails and wood.’ The ereader flickered with its backlight, the Biblical New Testament passage of Matthew 27 appeared on the flat matte screen.

“What is this!?” Stana throttled the ereader in chapped hands, slamming it against the café table top over and over until the growing shriek burbling from her throat died off to a frustrated grumble. The screen flickered. Once she settled it onto the tabletop proper, the image solidified again at Matthew 27:45 - 56. 

"An account of the death of -" Stana pitched the ereader off the table, and it slid across the floor until it bumped into another set of shoes. Slumped over, a teen in a hoodie didn’t notice the ereader against their runners, nor did they understand the significance of the moment they were but a passing thought within, barely worth the name Stana pulled from their soul. Hunching down in her arm chair, Stana bit at her thumbnail, and stared at the café menu.

“Make me another!” She waved her hand at the barista. Half dead eyes stared at the floor as their hands and arms underwent the muscle memory of making a full fat latte with two pumps vanilla, one pump cinnamon syrup in a new mug. Body leaden, feet hard on the floor, the barista frothed milk and pulled the double shot, mouth a thin pressed line.

“Pick it up, bring it here.”

The teen quaked, until fingers wove around the ereader and they rose to their feet, chair screeching across the tiled floor. Lumbering automata, what else were the idiots around her? So few intelligentsia and wise women left in the world. No, Middling Plane, as the Book whispered in its first lesson.

The ereader spun across the table, and with a wave of Stana’s hand, the teen trudged to the counter to pick up her coffee. Middling Planes, Realms interlocked in multi-dimensional schisms separated by truces and natural orders, only one neutral conjoined point in the vault of stars. 

In the tumult of coexistent spaces.

But it wasn’t natural order. It wasn’t chance laws or multiversial luck of draws. The Book of Knowledge whispered to Stana in the drafty basement of Salomon Calder’s Vancouver Special, with its peeling wallpaper from the fifties still plastered atop drywall and gyproc. The chance to access all of the world’s knowledge, to see beyond veils, the opportunity for the Book to stretch its proverbial legs. After all, twenty years with few calls was a long time for a Book to be bored. 

Lesson one a flick of the screen, while she sat stiff in the Denny’s off HWY 1 with a cup of coffee and wifi signal, cold eggs shifted around a plate already lost of its hashbrowns and sausage, was a series of definitions.

Middling Plane: Midgard. The Human Realm. Hotly contested, and never conquered, the Middling Plane is where we are. 

You are here.

The coil of black dashes and lines on the blank grey screen, a dot above the Denny’s, then the township, the country and planet. Then, no longer a planet but a series of Realms interposed upon each other, all separate but as crowded as a house party known by multiple schools, popularized by the parentals off on a weekend retreat with a fully stocked liquor cabinet. There was so little she recognized staring at the map of the Realms. The blood-boiling rush of a scream was held down with another gulp of freshly topped up liquid brimstone from the server’s scalding pot.

An attribution: Of the Creatrix’s Design.

Stana started clicking rabbit hole links to articles within the Book, bypassing warning screens or the list of articles the Book of Knowledge wished to show first, to give an easy entry to all things for its new Keeper. And halfway through the thirteenth explanation of divinity, as this new way called ‘the internet’ and ‘wifi connections’ opened to its search for new knowledge, the Book of Knowledge began to understand.

The Middling Plane was a far different affair now than the last time the Book went out with its Keeper Salomon for a jaunt.

People were different, or the culture surrounding them shifted with a frothing cornucopia of new waves and radio dials spun into playlists, podcasts, nuclear naysayers, climate horrific, lifelong academicians who focused raising efficiency that extra half percent. Social scores, where the popularity of presence was hidden in with new waves of social media followers, posts, influencers, likes. Democracy in the thralls of algorithms created by biassed beings, who never gave up their unconscious and conscious desires to shift the entire dimension. 

This was no longer a world the Book recognized, and this new Keeper was not alone. Another body slid into the other side of the table, wild amber eyes hiding the crystalline truth of the entity’s nature.

“Mighty precious Book you got there, mind if I sit with you a while?”

If only Salomon knew how to accept a tweet from @BookofKnowledgePersonified, if only the Book knew which feed to push for the Judge to see, the embers in Cormac's eyes would not have taken to smouldering within the bosom of a lost and militant mind.