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There are only so many ways in which you can say ‘old man’. None of them entirely inoffensive. Alezor had an extremely eventful century and a half behind him. He had stood up for truth and justice and things like that. He had battled whatever forces had appeared evil to him in their time. He was an inspiration to good beings in his world and beyond (or so he liked to believe).

Of course, all of this would not have been possible if a freak coincidence had not turned on his latent psychic powers and given him almost god-like invulnerability. It happened when he was young and in school. Once, when he was idling away on the grass, a bully singled him out from among the half a dozen other too-sissy-for-sports kids at the end of the playfield and started twisting his arm. As the pain seared through his being, he seemed to feel a kind of angry abandon that was not his. Without realising it, he was channeling his tormentor’s feelings and feeding off them. As the anger shot through him, he grabbed at something and swung it into the bully’s ribs. It hurt. First the bully and then young Alezor himself, because he still felt what the other one did. But while the brute simply slumped to the ground, Alezor was caught in that moment of agony. He froze.

At almost the same time, far above the playfield and beyond the clouds that drifted over it, in airless space, two cosmic beings of an immortal nature fought to settle scores. One, as is usual, was losing. He needed that little extra edge, a slight nudge from without to outdo his opponent and save face. There were psychics on innumerable worlds, connected to each other and to him too, watching the stellar showdown.

Back in the playfield, young Alezor snapped out of his state and let out something that might be called a psychic scream of sorts. It swept the skies and blew past the clouds into the airless where the cosmic combatants were at each other’s throats. Our man, the loser, saw the wave and knew his time was come. With skills that only cosmic beings of an immortal nature possess and that lowly mortals will never know of, he channeled the wave of psychic energy to his own advantage and blew his opponent into another dimension or something.

As his galaxy-wide audience cheered him, he soared down seeking the source of the wave. Young Alezor was discovered. Many of the psychics in the cosmic beings’ network gasped. Never before had they known such potential in any being in all the worlds they were gods of. Such might and such energy and such foul pent up anger. The one in debt of Alezor freed his mind by connecting him to himself and every other psychic in the known universe. Alezor knew all others in the network at once. He felt the winds from a million worlds brush his face and he felt capable. He kicked the bully lying at his feet in the stomach.

Alezor had, as has been noted before, centuries behind him. That time and many others have passed now. But the old god who keeps losing his staff and would have forgotten his robes on some desolate peak long ago had it not been for the devoted spirits that owe allegiance to him, feels a shiver run up his spine every now and then. The most trying of times is still to come, his heart tells him. But he is an old man.

Posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 2:08 pm and filed under Myth, stories, fantasy.

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