The courtroom was empty.
Mithra sat upon his throne of light, the eternal scales of justice balanced perfectly on his knee. Before him stretched the infinite hall of final judgment. Souls passed in an endless, orderly line. Each case was resolved with divine precision. Each verdict was absolute, flawless, and utterly predictable.
For the first time in ten thousand years, the God of Justice felt… nothing.
He watched a soul step forward—a mortal king who had waged war for greed. The evidence unfolded in the air. The scales tipped. Mithra spoke, his voice the sound of crumbling mountains.
"Guilty. Ten millennia in the ninth purgatory."
The king wept. He begged. The sentence was executed. The soul vanished.
Next.
A mother who stole bread for her starving child. The scales wavered. Mithra's eyes saw the full tapestry of cause and effect, of societal failure and desperate love.
"Innocent. Rebirth in a realm of plenty."
The mother cried with relief. She vanished.
Next.
Next.
Next.
Mithra's divine mind processed infinite cases per second. There was no error. No ambiguity. No surprise. Every soul, every action, every consequence was a note in a symphony he had heard a billion times before.
He was the perfect instrument of cosmic law.
And he was bored to the point of agony.
A flicker of something unfamiliar stirred in his chest. A divine heart that had beat with the rhythm of absolute order for eons… skipped.
He looked at his hands—hands that had never trembled, never aged, never truly felt anything but the weight of the scales.
What is the point?
The thought was blasphemy. It was impossible. A God of Justice did not question. He was the question and the answer.
Yet, the thought remained.
He gazed beyond his hall, through the layers of reality, into the vibrant, chaotic, messy realm of the living. Earth. The 21st century. A place where justice was not a divine absolute but a fragile, human construct. Where laws were written in flawed ink, interpreted by flawed minds, and executed with flawed hands.
A place where a verdict could be… wrong.
Where a judge could be… murdered.
Where the line between guilt and innocence was blurred by emotion, corruption, love, and hate.
A place where justice was not a destination, but a desperate, stumbling journey.
The divine agony within Mithra crystallized into a decision.
He stood. The infinite hall shook. The line of souls flickered. The scales of justice chimed a note of alarm.
"I resign."
The words were quiet. They carried no divine thunder. They were the most powerful words he had ever spoken.
The universe did not accept resignations. A fundamental force could not cease to be. But it could… change.
Mithra walked away from his throne. With each step, his divine radiance dimmed. His eternal form softened. The weight of infinite knowledge began to lift, leaving behind a terrifying, exhilarating lightness.
He was shedding his godhood.
It was not a transfer of power. It was an annihilation. A suicide of the soul. He was choosing to become finite, mortal, and ignorant.
He focused on a single point in the mortal realm. A flickering soul that had just been violently extinguished. A vessel now empty. A man named Daniel Thorne, a 35-year-old District Judge for the city of Veridian, found dead in his study from an apparent gas leak two days ago.
A lie.
Mithra saw the truth—a silenced pistol, a professional killer, orders from a shadowy boardroom.
A judge killed for doing his job.
How… interesting.
Mithra let go of his last divine anchor.
The universe screamed.
And he fell.
Pain.
It was the first sensation. A deep, throbbing ache in the skull. Then came the smells—antiseptic, stale linen, a faint hint of flowers. Sounds filtered in: the steady beep of machinery, hushed voices, the rustle of fabric.
Mithra opened his eyes.
White ceiling. Fluorescent lights. A window showing a gray sky.
He tried to move. His body was heavy, clumsy, a prison of weak flesh and sluggish blood. He looked at his hands—pale, human hands with short, clean nails. No divine light. No cosmic power. Just… skin.
It worked.
"Daniel? Danny? Can you hear me?"
A woman's voice, thick with tears and hope.
He turned his head. It was a struggle. The muscles felt foreign.
A woman in her late fifties sat by the bed, her face lined with worry and exhaustion. Her eyes were red. Behind her stood a man about the same age, his jaw tight, his hand on her shoulder. A young woman, maybe 25, with puffy eyes, leaned against the wall. A teenage boy stared at the floor, fists clenched.
They were all looking at him.
The woman—his mother, his new memories supplied—reached out and took his hand. Her touch was warm. Calloused. Real.
"Thank God," she whispered. "The doctor said… they said you might not wake up."
Mithra—Daniel—processed. The memories of Daniel Thorne were a jumbled, incomplete file. Childhood fragments. Law school stress. The pride of becoming the youngest district judge in the state. The recent case against OmniCorp International. The damning evidence of environmental negligence. The guilty verdict he delivered. The threatening phone call that night. The sound of his study window opening. Then… nothing.
Then… him.
"I am awake," Mithra said. His voice was a dry rasp. It held none of his divine authority. It was just a man's voice.
"Don't try to talk, honey," his mother said, patting his hand. "The gas leak… it was a miracle you survived."
Gas leak.
The official story. The lie.
Mithra looked at his family. His family. The concept was abstract until now. In the God Realm, he had no parents, no siblings. He was a fundamental force. These people were tied to him by blood, by history, by love he had not earned.
He felt their worry. Their fear. Their love for the man whose body he now occupied.
A strange pressure built in his chest. Guilt? He had taken this man's place. But the man was already gone. And Mithra had not caused his death. He had simply… arrived.
The teenage boy, Liam, looked up. "They said you were brain-dead." His voice was accusing, angry, scared.
"Liam!" the father, Harold, snapped.
"It's fine," Mithra said. He tried to sit up. The world swam. His mother helped him, fluffing his pillows. "I am not brain-dead. I am… functional."
His word choice was odd. They all noticed. They exchanged glances.
"The doctors will want to run tests," his sister, Elise, said softly. "To check for… damage."
"My cognitive functions are intact," Mithra stated. "My memory is… assimilating."
Another strange word. Harold's eyes narrowed slightly.
A nurse came in, bright and efficient. "Ah, Judge Thorne! You're back with us. How are you feeling?"
"I feel… human," Mithra answered truthfully.
The nurse laughed, thinking it a joke. "Well, that's good! The doctor will be in shortly. Just rest."
She left. The family atmosphere grew tense again.
"Daniel," Harold began, his voice low. "The police… they asked questions. About the OmniCorp case. They said it might not have been an accident."
Mithra looked at his father. The man was afraid. Not for himself, but for his son. The emotion was so raw, so specific, it was like a physical touch.
"It was not an accident," Mithra said, with the flat certainty of a god stating a universal law.
The room went cold.
"What?" Elise breathed.
"I was murdered. A professional assassin entered through the window. He used a silenced pistol. A .22 caliber. The shot was to the temple. He then staged the gas leak to obscure the entry wound and cause brain death, making the murder look like an accident following a household tragedy."
The words fell into the silent room like stones. They were delivered without emotion, without fear, without anger. Just facts.
His mother's hand flew to her mouth. Harold's face went pale. Liam stared, his anger replaced by shock. Elise started to cry silently.
"Danny… how… how can you know that?" Harold asked, his voice shaking.
Mithra realized his mistake. A human with a head injury should not have such precise, clinical knowledge of his own attempted murder. He had no memory of the event—Daniel's memories ended at the window opening. But Mithra's divine perception, though now gone, had left a residual imprint of the truth he saw when he chose this vessel.
He had spoken the truth. He could not do otherwise. Lying was not in his nature. It was physically impossible for him.
"I… deduced it," he said, which was technically true, though the deduction happened on a cosmic level. "The official story is illogical. The evidence does not fit. Therefore, it was murder."
He saw the doubt in their eyes, mixed with terror. Their son, their brother, was different. The trauma had changed him.
"We need to tell the police," Elise said.
"It will not matter," Mithra said. "The evidence was expertly sanitized. The official channel is compromised. The truth will not be found through their system."
"Then what do we do?" Liam demanded, his voice cracking.
Mithra looked out the window at the gray human sky. He felt the ache in his skull. The weakness in his limbs. The confusing storm of human emotions radiating from the four people in this room.
He felt something else, too. A tiny, smoldering coal in the hollow where his divine power once raged.
A sense of purpose.
"I will do my job," he said, turning back to his family. "I am a judge. I will return to my courtroom. I will hear cases. I will deliver verdicts."
He met each of their eyes, his gaze calm and unsettlingly direct.
"And I will find the truth. Not as a god. But as a man."
They didn't understand his words. Not really. But they heard his resolve.
For the first time, the God of Justice, now Judge Daniel Thorne, experienced a human emotion.
It was not boredom.
It was anticipation.