The day God died, rain poured down in heavy, wind-driven sheets, and nobody paid any mind to the child running through the streets of the city.
Her skin was scoured clean by the weather, but the bloody stains on her nightgown remained, more stubborn than the storm.
The child, for her part, didn’t notice the crisis that drove every adult to panicked flight in a state of wild, abject terror.
It barely aroused her curiosity that the city had more hills than she remembered, or that it was full of more flashing lights and angry sounds.
She also didn’t notice that she was fleeing toward the part of town everyone else was fleeing from. Her mind was racing as hard as her legs were running, as hard as the storm that savaged the city. Her only thoughts were of flight. She ran in the direction that seemed right.
Well-armed men had established themselves around the point of the impact—though it wasn’t really an impact at all, no fall from above bringing God’s dying body here—but in the dark and the driving rain, nobody could have been expected to see the small figure slip between them.
The ripples were still fading from the moment God breached the surface, denser waves of rain splashing her in the face in a peculiar rhythm as though in sympathetic imitation of God’s slowing heartbeat.
Of course, nobody knew to call It God yet. When she arrived at the great, hollowed leviathan, not even the girl knew. She only recognized the enormous creature as her kindred in suffering, and she touched It without even a trace of fear in her heart.
She crawled inside Its gaping wound to take shelter from the rain, and it is with love and gratitude in her heart that she offered God Its first prayer, a sweet little wish for an end to God’s suffering.
With that small kindness, God’s heart ceased.
By morning, bones were all that was left of God, a huge skeleton that could almost have been human if it had not been so completely inhuman in shape.
God’s divine realm was so much smaller then, such that even from outside, you could see the girl sleeping in Its ribcage.
Some tried to “save” her. They did not yet know that stepping on blessed earth would bring madness and enlightenment in equal measure.
Only the girl could internalize God’s wisdom and remain sane. Wherever her original home was, God’s final resting place became her new one.
She survived on Its blessings, Its marrow, Its teachings, and apparently little else, growing strong and wise as the dark stain of blessed earth crept outward, expanding God’s divine realm with each passing year.
She was The First.