The Muscle Thief

Daira had for centuries felt his license for godhood being on the verge of termination. Like so many others he once stood strong in a great pantheon feeding off the devotion of the warriors from the dark corner of the mortal realm that he called his own. He gave those warriors’ leaders of incredible strength, bravery and cunning and taught them to love the battlefield as a gateway to a soldier’s sanctuary and glory.

Like the other pantheons of gods Daira's was driven into the twilight by the rise of the great desert god, a god that was intolerant of all others and demanded the conversion or death of their followers. From his followers he promised nothing if they neglected to bestow upon him absolute fear and love in equal measure. The desert god’s rise was so complete that in the present, through his various diverse religious institutions and sects, he controls the fears, thoughts and actions of the vast majority of mankind. Daira’s survived through the millennium by relying on mere cults, sometimes only a handful of scattered followers as devoted as they were mentally unstable.

In modern times his followers were far from faithful, donning his distorted regalia and spewing his creed merely as a counter-culture lifestyle choice, fashion statement even. They were far more likely to play a fantasy war than fight in a real war – which they would protest against. Yes, Daira watched as the desert god’s followers would memories every line of his scripture and build their conscious around it, wage holy wars in his name and topple great atheist empires for him. Contrast such devotion to his own bearded, pacifist, vegetarian followers who were more likely to cycle and chain smoke than squat and engage in martial combat. Even if he could be content with such a pitiful showing the simple trajectories of mankind were a guarantee of his death, the culture which hosted all his followers was small and obscure, the language in which his warriors wrote and was used for his scripture is bordering on being dead even within said culture. The writing was on the wall. Do and probably die or just die.

Like the desert god two millennium before he would fall from the realm of divinity and gamble it all. And so he fell. As his spirit crossed the great barrier between the divine and the material his thoughts vanished, his entity divided. One part remained in divinity, his conscious, inactive and emaciated, starved of its necessary devotion, it required immediate relief. The relief was to come from his entity, his pure instinctive unthinking will, now plummeting towards the mortal world to try and find its prophet.

Who Does that will possess?