Third Person POV
The Black Plague that swept through Europe and claimed millions of lives finally started to fade around 1351. The unnatural smog that had covered the sun for so long, that dark miasma that turned day into perpetual twilight lifted gradually, dissipating like a curse being broken.
With sunlight returned, the healing process truly began.
Across the ravaged continent, survivors emerged from their homes, blinking in the brightness they'd almost forgotten. Fields that had lain abandoned began to be replanted. Trade routes cautiously reopened. Life, stubborn and resilient, reasserted itself.
The explanations for this miraculous recovery varied wildly depending on who you asked.
The Church, desperate to maintain authority after years of powerlessness against the plague, proclaimed it divine mercy.
"God has heard our prayers," bishops declared from their pulpits. "Our penance has been accepted, our sins forgiven."
But among the common people, different stories circulated.
Rumors spoke of a miraculous healer traveling from town to village, appearing wherever the plague struck hardest.
Descriptions were frustratingly vague but consistent. Blonde hair like the morning sun's glow, blue eyes clear as summer sky, young looking but impossibly wise, gentle but impossibly effective.
"He cured my daughter when three other healers said she'd die by morning," one merchant swore. "Just touched her forehead and the fever broke like magic."
"He taught us how to properly boil water and wash our hands," a village elder recounted. "Said disease spreads through filth. We thought him mad, but it worked."
"An angel," some devout whispered with certainty. "Heaven sent us an angel to save us!"
The more apocalyptic-minded went further. "Jesus has returned!" they proclaimed. "The end days are nigh! Repent while you still can!"
Church authorities investigated these rumors, of course. Too many people were claiming miracles outside official Church channels. That was dangerous, it suggested someone worked beyond their control, which undermined their entire power structure.
But they found nothing. No blonde healer. No miraculous physician. Just stories that grew more elaborate with each retelling, details shifting and changing like water.
The man became myth. The myth became legend. And in time, like everything, he was forgotten by most.
But those he saved never forgot.
Years later, some would still search. A mother whose son he'd pulled back from death's door spent a decade traveling, trying to find the man who'd saved her child.
One time she thought she saw him again, sitting atop a cliff, watching the world bellow. But she did find a long black feather that somehow shone brighter than anything. She carried it with her, never showing anyone.
She eventually concluded he must have died himself, though she never stopped lighting candles in his memory.
A priest who'd watched the healer work claimed he'd finally tracked him down in Rome, three years after the plague's end. But before he could approach, before he could speak, the man had sprouted wings.
Not white, feathered wings like traditional angel depictions. Black wings. Impossibly black, like they were made of crystallized void, of compressed night given physical form.
Wings that didn't belong to anything in this world, that hurt to look at directly, as if mortal eyes weren't meant to perceive such things.
And then he'd flown away, vanishing into the sky faster than any bird, leaving the priest staring slack-jawed at the impossible.
The priest tried to tell others. Tried to explain what he'd seen.
But people looked at him strangely, whispered behind his back. The Church itself declared him mad, suffering delusions from surviving the plague.
But they also feared he might have been telling the truth. Perhaps that scary archangel who vistited them once centuries ago now walked among them.
They confined him to a monastery, supposedly for his own good. But in truth, they were afraid he might reveal the existence of supernatural to the common mass. It was already hard to keep it a secret.
Even as the priest wasted away, declared insane and heretical, he kept muttering three words over and over:
"Beautiful. Perfect symmetry. Golden ratio."
The monks who cared for him in his final days reported that he died with a smile on his face, still whispering about impossibilities.
Meanwhile, the Church itself fractured.
Multiple bishops claimed to have received visions during the plague years. Angels visiting them, they said. Divine guidance on how the Church should be led.
And coincidentally, each vision proclaimed that particular bishop should become the next Pope.
Pope Clement VI died in 1352, and immediately the succession crisis began.
Three different cardinals claimed the papacy. Each had significant support. Each refused to back down. The College of Cardinals split into factions, unable to agree, and for the first time in centuries, there were multiple men simultaneously claiming to be God's representative on Earth.
This would later be known as the Western Schism, a crisis that would last decades and fundamentally reduce the Church's power across Europe.
When there were three Popes all claiming divine authority, people began to question whether any of them actually had it.
The cracks in Christendom's unity widened. National churches gained independence.
Monarchs stopped automatically deferring to Rome. The absolute spiritual authority the Church had wielded for centuries began to crumble.
And as the Church weakened, secular power grew.
England and France, exhausted by plague but not destroyed, turned on each other with renewed vigor. Old grievances, territorial disputes, succession crises—all the kindling that had been accumulating for years suddenly ignited.
What would later be known as the Hundred Years' War began in earnest, reshaping the political landscape of Europe for generations.
But the blonde healer who'd started so many of these changes involuntarily, was already gone, moved on to his next phase of learning.
Kokabiel POV
It's been years since I came down to the human world. Twenty Five years, three months, and seventeen days to be precise, though I'd stopped counting so obsessively after the first year.
Time flowed differently here than in Heaven. It was more chaotic, less structured, marked by seasons and harvests rather than eternal consistency.
I had learned so much in these years. Good and bad. Beautiful and ugly. The full spectrum of human experience laid bare before me.
The beautiful things still surprised me sometimes. A mother's joy when I saved her child, the way her entire face transformed, tears streaming down her cheeks as she clutched her recovering daughter and whispered prayers of gratitude.
That expression stayed with me for days afterward, replaying in my mind during quiet moments.
An elderly couple holding hands as they recovered together, fifty years of marriage evident in every gentle touch. The way they looked at each other without words, communicating through small gestures and knowing glances.
I'd sat with them during their recovery, watching them care for each other, and felt something warm settle in my chest. Not quite understanding, but approaching it.
Communities coming together to help each other survive. Neighbors sharing their last loaf of bread. Strangers taking in orphaned children. The wealthy opening their stores to feed the hungry.
Humanity at its finest, when crisis stripped away the petty differences and revealed the core goodness underneath.
The uglyness was harder to witness, even with my dulled emotions.
Lords who hoarded food while peasants starved, claiming they needed to "preserve resources for the recovery."
I'd confronted one particularly egregious noble, appearing in his feast hall while his people starved outside.
The fear in his eyes when I'd simply asked him to justify his choices had been... satisfying? He'd opened his granaries the next day. And the ignorant people hailed him as a kind ruler, cheering for him.
That also taught me the gratitude can be bought. Even if it doesn't last long.
Then there were Physicians who charged desperate families their last coins for useless treatments: bloodletting, prayer beads, herbal nonsense that did nothing.
I'd exposed several as frauds, though carefully, without revealing my nature. Let them be run out of town by angry mobs rather than smiting them myself.
I was already interfering way too much. It made me feel petty. Like humans keeping animals in Zoo in the name of preservation. Those animals might be preserved, but they lacked freedom or happiness.
People who blamed Jews and foreigners for the plague, leading to pogroms and massacres. Those I had to intervene in more directly, though discreetly. Mysterious "accidents" befalling ringleaders. Supernatural fear convincing mobs to disperse.
I didn't enjoy the deception, but I wasn't about to let innocent people die over ignorant superstition.
The casual cruelty born of fear was perhaps the hardest thing to witness.
Good people doing terrible things because they were terrified. Mothers abandoning sick children to save their healthy ones. Husbands fleeing wives who showed symptoms. Friends betraying friends to avoid association with the infected.
But all of it was educational.
I'd decided early on to live as human as possible. No casual use of divine power to make life easier. No omniscience to predict every outcome. No floating above human concerns in transcendent detachment.
It was weird at first. Profoundly uncomfortable. Why experience hunger when I could simply not? Why sleep when I didn't need to? Why walk when I could fly? Why limit myself at all when I possessed power beyond mortal comprehension?
But then it became... I hesitated to use the word, but it fit.
Fun.
Actually fun.
Not knowing what would happen next. Everything becoming a surprise rather than a calculated probability. The genuine uncertainty of mortal existence, it was relaxing in a way I hadn't anticipated. Liberating, even.
Walking through a marketplace and not knowing who I'd meet or what I'd experience. Accepting a farmer's invitation to dinner and being genuinely surprised by the conversation. Helping a blacksmith with his forge and learning about metalworking not through instant knowledge but through patient instruction.
These small moments of discovery felt precious somehow. Meaningful in a way my vast cosmic awareness never had.
I began to understand what made humans happy, sad, angry, and everything in between. Not just intellectually, but starting to feel the echoes of those emotions myself.
Hunger was relatively straightforward, the body's signal that it needed fuel, the discomfort growing until addressed, the satisfaction of eating. I still couldn't feel it personally in the way humans did, but I'd learned to recognize it, even anticipate it.
The way my vessel would signal the need for food, the slight lightheadedness if I ignored it too long, the pleasant fullness after a good meal.
Tiredness, sleepiness, the way energy levels fluctuated through the day, also increasingly familiar. I'd learned that the body operated on cycles, that pushing past exhaustion diminished capability, that rest served functions beyond just physical recovery.
Dreams were strange though. Fleeting, nonsensical, yet humans claimed to find meaning in them. I couldn't dream. And if I dreamed, I would perhaps meet the sleeping fella whose dreams are their reality.
Physical pain remained complex. I could experience it in this vessel if I allowed myself to, but it still felt distant, like observing something happening to someone else.
But I'd learned to appreciate its function as a warning system. The sharp sting of touching something hot taught the body not to do that again. The ache of overworked muscles signaled the need for rest.
But the deeper emotions were where real progress occurred.
Joy when a loved one returned safely, I'd witnessed this recently.
A soldier returning from a border skirmish, his wife and children running to embrace him. The pure delight on their faces, the tears and laughter mixed together.
I'd felt something in my chest watching them. Warm. Light. Almost like happiness but not quite. An echo of joy, perhaps. The beginning of understanding what that felt like.
Relief when danger passed, I was starting to grasp this one. The tension draining from the body, the loosening of muscles held tight, the sudden exhaustion that followed sustained fear.
I'd experienced a shadow of it myself when a child I'd been treating took a sudden turn for the better after I'd thought I might lose her.
Grief over losing someone close, I witnessed this constantly during the plague years, and it remained the most opaque emotion to me.
The hollow-eyed devastation, the way people broke down crying at random moments, the long slow recovery that sometimes never fully completed.
For me, all humans were mortals set to die soon. It was certain, inevitable, written into their very nature.
They lived maybe sixty or seventy years if they were incredibly lucky. Most died younger.
From my perspective, with millennias of existence behind me, they were already dying the moment they were born.
So why cry when the inevitable happened? Why grieve over something you absolutely knew was coming? Not like their sadness would bring their loved ones back.
But I was starting to see hints of the answer.
It wasn't about inevitability. It was about the gap between what was and what would now never be. The future conversations that would never happen. The shared experiences that ended too soon. The absence where presence used to be.
When the elderly man who used to call me his only friend passed away, I felt something. Not crushing grief, but a distinct sense of loss.
He wouldn't make jokes during our philosophy sessions anymore. His particular brand of gruff affection was gone from the world. That absence mattered, even if logically his death had been approaching anyway.
Progress. Uncomfortable, confusing progress, but progress nonetheless.
Angels didn't die unless killed or corrupted into Falling. So mourning an angel's death made some sense. It was preventable, a deviation from the natural order.
But humans? They were temporary by design.
Yet somehow their temporariness made their existence more precious, not less. Like flowers that bloomed for only a day, beautiful precisely because they wouldn't last.
I was beginning to understand that. Not fully, not deeply, but the concept was taking shape in my mind.
Then there was the wealth obsession, which still largely baffled me.
Gold. Jewels. Silver. Just shiny metals and pretty rocks, ultimately. They couldn't eat it. Couldn't use it to fight disease. It provided no warmth in winter, no comfort in suffering beyond what it could purchase.
Yet humans obsessed over it, fought wars for it, murdered each other for it, measured their entire worth by how much they possessed.
And they couldn't even take it with them when they died! The richest man and the poorest beggar ended up the same way, rotting in the ground, all possessions left behind.
What was the point?
Of course, wealth provided tangible benefits. Comfort, security, opportunities. A wealthy family could afford better food, warmer clothing, safer housing, education for their children. I understood the practical applications perfectly well.
But to make it the central focus of existence? To sacrifice relationships, health, morals for the acquisition of shiny metals? To value a person's worth based on their possessions rather than their character?
That remained foolish and disappointing to me.
Though I was learning nuance. Some pursued wealth not for greed but for security, the trauma of poverty driving them to ensure they'd never be vulnerable again.
Some hoarded because generosity had been punished in their past. Some valued gold because their society valued gold, and humans were deeply social creatures who needed their communities' approval.
Understanding the why didn't make it less frustrating, but it made me less judgmental. Slightly.
I didn't wish to interfere much with human society .
To me, watching their civilizations rise and fall felt like observing a complex simulation play out.
I could change it all if I wanted, reshape societies, redistribute wealth, force cooperation and peace. My power made such interventions trivially easy.
But that would defeat the entire purpose of being here.
I'd come to learn, to understand, to reconnect with emotions through genuine experience. Controlling everything would just be Heaven again, just me imposing order because I could.
So I watched. Participated when appropriate. Experienced life from a mortal perspective, with all its limitations and uncertainties.
I could know everything that would happen if I activated my Omniscience . See every choice and consequence, map every timeline, predict every outcome with perfect accuracy. Know the end of every story before it began.
But I didn't. Most of the time, I kept that sense muted, dulled to barely above human awareness. The uncertainty was more engaging, more educational. Surprises taught me things that perfect knowledge never could.
A child asking an unexpected question that made me reconsider an assumption. A elderly woman sharing wisdom I hadn't anticipated. A young man making a choice that defied the logical probability.
These moments of unpredictability held value precisely because I didn't see them coming.
I had very little to look forward to after becoming an Outer God. My existence stretched into incomprehensible eternity. I'd already transcended normal reality, touched the fundamental underpinnings of existence itself.
What was there to anticipate? What could possibly surprise or engage something like me?
But watching humans; their brief, chaotic, passionate lives that held interest. Their struggles and triumphs, their absurd persistence in the face of inevitable death, their capacity to care deeply about things that ultimately didn't matter on a cosmic scale- it was refreshing.
A farmer spending hours arranging flowers on his wife's grave, even though she was dead and couldn't see them. The gesture was illogical, pointless by any objective measure. Yet it mattered to him. It meant something.
That meaning, that subjective value humans placed on things beyond survival and logic, I was starting to appreciate it. Not fully understand, not yet. But appreciate.
Maybe watching over them, learning from them, could give my existence something resembling purpose again. Something to care about beyond abstract duty or cosmic balance.
I remembered it used to be my duty as an angel. Protecting humanity, guiding them, serving as Heaven's shield against threats they couldn't comprehend.
Perhaps I could reclaim that, in my own broken way. Not as an angel anymore, but as... something else. Something that had been angel, had transcended into horror, and was now trying to find its way back to caring about the small and fragile and temporary.
The World Will's essence continued integrating slowly. Each week brought small improvements. moments where emotions felt slightly more real, slightly less like simulation. Gabriel would have been proud, I thought. She'd always believed I could recover fully.
I hoped she was right.
****
From top 3 to current rank, it seems I've done a bad job. Since that's the case, I guess we should end it here early.
Thanks for reading I guess. I'm just tired of seeing the same shit repeating. Even trolls who trashed the story can farm votes with fake id, even some folks from here supporting that garbage. That's your choice.
So I don't feel like writing when shitty books and stolen works can get better response. Let the trolls win. Let's fill the site with trash stories.