milliways_bar | (no subject)

When he opens his eyes, it'll be to a Japanese teenager (cloth-wrapped sword beside him) watching him with (very) idle curiosity.

"Hey there," says Belar, waving a hand. "How's it hanging, dude?"

The top half of his sign winks out in a flash of blue light.

"Mmm... pretty good," Yoh replies. "You were really answering prayers."

It's not... quite a question, although the question is implied in the slight tilt of his head.

"Yup," says Belar. "Mostly the prayers of my people back on Gara. Some of them on Earth, too, I've got people both places."

"You're a god in two worlds? Wow! That's cool." Yoh grins. "I didn't know you could do that. Well, I didn't even know about other worlds until recently, anyway," he admits, scratching the back of his head a little. "I'm Yoh. Asakura Yoh."

"I'm only a holdover god on Gara," Belar corrects. "We delivered the world into my brother Eriond's hands a while ago, but as long as people on Gara still pray to us by name instead of him, we're supposed to look after their interests. Probably within the next couple hundred years Eriond's worship'll have taken over completely. Maybe a thousand or two, tops."

"...Huh. Well, okay, I guess," Yoh replies. "So now you're a god on Earth? What part?"

"Mongolia. The Dorbed people of western Mongolia adopted me as their god of prosperity after a six year stint of thinking I was an anthropologist," Belar says. "I try to live up to the reputation."

"Congratulations!" he says, grinning again. "I think it must be almost as bad for a god to be without people as it is for a people to be without any gods or spirits to guide them," he continues.

Belar nods. "My brother Mara lost all of his people for a while, and it drove him right over the edge," he says soberly. "He wasn't really himself again for thousands of years, not until we found a survivor of his people whose ancestors had been carried out of his jurisdiction and into another god's lands. It's a tough thing to have happen to you."

The look on Yoh's face is nothing short of horrified.

"He lost... all of them? What happened? Couldn't anybody stop it?"

"At that point in time, we couldn't manifest physically in the world," Belar says. "There are seven of us on my world, plus our father, and six of us brothers had to withdraw because number seven would've destroyed the world to get at us- or at least cracked it open, which he'd already done once. The people of Nedra, my second oldest brother, got it into their heads that if they conquered Maragor they'd claim the richest territory on the planet and get all the gold the people of Maragor ignored, and, well, they went for genocide instead of simple provincial conquest."

He grimaces, then adds, "There were survivors. They got sold into slavery outside of Maragor. Mara promptly filled the entire country with ghosts and drove anyone insane who tried to set foot in there in search of riches. It kept invading armies of any country whatsoever from passing through the region for several thousand years. He's working on putting things right now, though."

Yoh is very quiet for a long moment. Then,

"Didn't you have any good shamans in your world?"