Was there really much use in wondering over the particularities of his being?

Divinity was an aspect that was inherent to his person, inseparable from who he truly was and what he represented.

Gods were incomparable to humans; they would never understand what immortality was like. Humanity was all consuming; it was the certainty of inevitable, slow and torturous death that kept humans in wilful ignorance and selfish, histrionic narcissism.

Perhaps that was what kept Jiyong so distant from people. Selfish self-love wasn't a concept with which he was familiar. His knowledge of himself, his ability to think of himself with love, was a knowing, tested one. Truthful where humanity would be biased.

But sometimes, all Jiyong wanted was someone to love him. Someone that wasn't himself. A god couldn't be one without another's fealty and adoration and worship. He couldn't be divine, would be nothing unless he had just one person who would be the one to look towards him with nothing but reverence in their every look, every breath.

It wasn't too much to ask for; wasn't too much at all.

Love should be free, after all. An emotion that was solely human--because a god's love wasn't true love; it was something that went beyond such a simple term--because it required cognition and recognition and the physiology to cope with those feelings so intense that no animal should be able to experience--and perhaps that was what distinguished humans as people.

Only a person, after all, would be able to feel emotions.

Was he a person?

He loved as much as any other person, any other human. He had things he liked, and he had things that he disliked. Everyone did. Such opinions were natural, and they all fell upon a cyclic spectrum where at one end you had love and the other end was love because cycles didn't have a beginning nor an end.

So where would hate lie?

And then he remembered that everyone he knew wasn’t meant for him.

He was alone in his lonely pedestal, high above the others, low beneath the others.

He was caught between two worlds: he was too- too strong to be of the weak, to be human; yet too human to truly be of the strong, a part of the heavenly pantheon that watched upon their human subjects with dispassion and pure, utter apathy.

He could never reach the height the other gods were at, yet he would never be able to bend himself enough to become one with the other humans. Too much pride, he supposed, to willingly bow his head enough to become a pariah.

It was a lonely existence.

He often contemplated disappearing: no one would care for him, no one would mind. They wouldn’t spare him a single thought. He was a mere god, after all, useless and discardable; nameless in a world of names.

There was an idiom he recalled; one that asked what a god was when in the presence of an atheist.

They were nothing.

No power could come from unbelief.

He was nothing, least of all to her. His sweet, beautiful Yoona.

And so this is where his divinity failed; he became only just a man. How strange it was that a god such as he would crumble like the dynasties did, so long ago and yet barely a blink of his eye.

The destruction of men, it seemed, would always begin in the love of a woman. Perhaps it would be beautiful; Jiyong would settle for nothing less than this imperfection.

There was, after all, beauty in the breakdown.

And his breakdown would begin and end with her.

FIN