In the centre of one of the many roads that crisscross and litter the lands of Godville and look remarkably similar to the point of allowing reasonable suspicion, you happen across something that, despite everything said previously in this sentence, is even more commonplace and inescapable throughout all Godville:
What seems to be a hero’s diary page.
Well, to be specific, a /heroine’s/ diary page—although in the end, the difference is minimal:
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There’s not much to say about Semita before her god found her. It is assumed she lived a fairly ordinary life with fairly ordinary aspirations. She’d recently gotten booted out of the nearby generic town for disorderly behaviour when she came across a group of traveling priests.
Raedan was at that moment a rather minor god, and just so happened to be wandering with his followers and checking out the landscape changes in the last thousand years—you know, which empires had fallen, what mountains had crumbled, and whether or not that nice little town with the great juice bar ever heeded that prophet’s warning about the active volcano and moved shop.
As of late, all his followers were male priests, overall not very good at fighting, and constantly praising Raedan and his will, but never actually doing much else besides that, so she was the start of a nice gender balance and a chance to use his godly abilities to do something besides smite the next squirrel that came along for the priests’ dinner.
So he commanded one of the priests to try and convert Semita, and that priest hit her over the head with a book of prophecies, and, while this was not what Raedan had in mind, it seemed to do the trick. Or maybe it was the free medical care and BBQ squirrel they gave her that convinced her to give it a chance.
Well, roll with the punches, as they say—or let your heroine roll with them while you rain down cleansing blue fireballs from a distance.
--~-°-~-~-~
And that seems to be it—maybe it features a specific god, but what you now realise is a chronicle is nearly a carbon copy of any other one you might find in Godville—the meeting of the God and heroine, praise to the heroine’s Lord, random nonsense that’s probably supposed to be seen as humorous—in fact, this one is a little bland, as far as chronicles go, you might think.
Yet something holds your attention to the single page in front of you—something is off about it; there’s nothing to point out quite what it is.
Perhaps if anyone saw you there, standing in the middle of one of those many roads staring intently at one of countless heroes’ gibberish-like scribblings, you might feel embarrassment, or realise that you might look strange, but right now there is a mystery to solve in front of you, with no one around that seems keen to interrupt.
You stand there for a time—maybe, as there seems to be no puzzle for you to solve besides the feeling it generates, you’re hoping one just suddenly clicks—when, miraculously, a solution does make itself clear.
Between the lines of perfunctory scripture, other words begin to appear.
Not just words—whole sentences, and, as it continues it becomes clear that the sentences are not hidden between the words—rather, it seems the page itself is made up completely of sentences and words—that the page did not hide letters, but was made up of another story—maybe even more than one.
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Apparently Semita’s deity is the God of Things That Are Not Always There, or That Do Not Always Exist. Whatever that means. Semita can’t ever remember not existing herself, but who is she to question a god?