He did not die dramatically.
There was no final battle, no last confession whispered to a loved one, no slow fade with orchestral weight. He simply stepped off a curb in downtown Chicago, distracted by a half-eaten sandwich and a work email about quarterly projections, and then a delivery truck solved the problem of his continued existence.
His name had been Daniel Reeves. Thirty-four years old. Systems analyst. Reasonably good at chess, bad at relationships, excellent at finding structural inefficiencies in data pipelines that his supervisors took credit for. He had owned a single houseplant, a stubborn succulent named Gerald, and he had secretly believed that Gerald would outlive him.
He had been correct, though not in the way he expected.
The space between dying and whatever came next was not darkness. It was more like the moment after a question is asked and before the answer arrives — a suspension of breath, of expectation, of self. He was aware without sensation. Present without location.
And then, without ceremony or fanfare, he was somewhere else entirely.
The first thing he noticed was that he had a body again.
Not his old body that had presumably been spread across a Chicago intersection in a manner he preferred not to think about. This body was his in the way a new house is yours after you sign the papers: familiar in structure, strange in feeling, as though the proportions were slightly different and the light came through the windows at the wrong angle.
He stood on a plain of white stone that extended in every direction until it met a sky the color of deep water before a storm. Not blue. Not grey. Something between the two that human language had not bothered naming because humans had never needed to.
He was not alone.
They were everywhere hundreds of figures standing across the white plain, each of them wearing the same expression of disoriented bewilderment that he suspected was currently on his own face. They were not all human in appearance. Many were, but others wore forms that suggested humanity had only been one possibility among many: beings with eyes like polished amber, figures whose edges seemed slightly uncertain, a tall woman to his left whose hair moved as though she were perpetually underwater.
None of them spoke yet. They were all doing what he was doing cataloguing, measuring, trying to understand.
Observation before action. Old habit.
He took stock. His hands were solid. His breathing, unnecessary but present, was steady. He felt no hunger, no cold, no particular discomfort. He felt, if anything, very slightly larger than he remembered being — not physically, but in some interior sense, as though there were rooms inside him that had not existed before.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
It was not loud. It did not need to be.
*"You have been chosen."*
He turned, along with everyone else, though there was nothing to turn toward. The voice had no direction. It simply was.
"Death brought you here. But death is not your destination. You stand at the threshold of divinity — each of you a spark that has been found sufficient. You will be tested. You will be shaped. And you will compete."
A murmur moved through the assembled figures. Not quite alarm. Not quite excitement. Something that lived between them.
He said nothing. He listened.
"Each of you will receive a world. A seed of reality, primitive and unformed. Within it, life will begin. You will guide it. Protect it. Shape it over eons of mortal time, though to you the passage will be compressed, observable, manageable. Your civilization will grow. Your power will grow with it. Faith sustains gods. Conquest shapes them. And in time —"
A pause that felt deliberate.
"— you will meet each other. And only the strongest will remain."
The murmur shifted into something sharper.
He absorbed this without changing his expression. A competition. A long one. Between beings of varying power and unknown capability, across civilizations of unknown scale, toward an end condition that had been described in the broadest possible terms.
His analyst's mind had already begun sorting variables.
What do I know? Almost nothing. What do I need to know? Almost everything. What can I control? Unclear.
A figure approached him from his right a man who looked perhaps forty, with the broad build of someone who had spent considerable time outdoors and the cautious eyes of someone who had learned wariness as a survival skill. He was one of the more recognizably human ones.
"You're taking this well," the man said quietly. His accent was faintly Eastern European. Polish, maybe, or Czech.
"I'm processing," he replied. "Taking it well implies I've finished."
The man almost smiled. "Fair." He extended a hand — an oddly mortal gesture given their circumstances. "I was called Marek. I suppose that's still my name."
"Daniel." He paused. The name felt suddenly small. Ill-fitting. Like a coat kept from childhood. "Though I suspect we'll be given new ones."
He was right.
The voice returned.
"You will each choose a divine name. The name you carry in this realm becomes part of your authority. Choose with intention. A god's name is not decoration."
Around him, figures began murmuring to themselves or to neighbors. Some looked uncertain. Some looked as though they had already decided.
He thought about it for exactly forty-three seconds.
Names carried meaning. They carried expectation. He did not want a name that promised power he didn't yet have, or nobility he hadn't earned, or war he wasn't prepared to fight. He wanted something that described what he intended to be not what he hoped others would fear.
Burden. Endurance. Foundation.
Atlas.
The titan who held up the sky. Not because he was the most powerful. Because someone had to, and he had been chosen for the task, and he had accepted it without complaint and done it for longer than anyone could measure.
That felt right.
Not heroic. Practical.
He spoke the name aloud, quietly, to himself, and felt something shift felt those new interior rooms arrange themselves differently, settle into their foundations with a sound he felt more than heard, like a building accepting its own weight.
Marek had chosen his name already. He did not share it, which Atlas noted as a measure of caution or privacy. Possibly both. He filed it away.
First lesson of this place. Information is currency. Don't spend it carelessly.
The sky above the plain began to change. The deep-water color lightened in patches, and through those patches descended shapes spheres of light, each one approximately the size his hands could cup together, drifting down through the strange air with the lazy inevitability of falling leaves.
They were worlds.
He knew it before any further explanation. He could feel it. Each sphere was alive with potential in a way that bypassed intellectual understanding and went directly into whatever new sense he had developed in the last few minutes. They were small and enormous simultaneously. They were possibilities.
One drifted toward him.
He raised his hands and caught it.
It was warm. Not temperature-warm something else. It pulsed against his palms like a second heartbeat, faint and irregular and absolutely real, and for the first time since he had stepped off that curb he felt something that was not analytical distance.
He felt responsible.
Whatever was inside this whatever might become inside this was his.
Don't drop it. And then, because the analyst in him could not be entirely suppressed even in moments of genuine wonder: Figure out exactly what it is before you do anything to it.
Marek had caught his own sphere nearby. He was staring into it with an expression Atlas couldn't quite read something complicated, something old.
"Do you know what you're going to do with yours?" Marek asked without looking up.
"Not yet," Atlas said. "You?"
"I have some ideas." He said it carefully. The way someone says *I have some ideas* when they mean *I have a plan I'm not sharing yet.*
Atlas found he respected that.
"Good luck," he said, and meant it, and also meant: *I'm going to be watching you.*
-----
The spheres carried them apart.
He did not experience the transition as movement. One moment he stood on the white plain with hundreds of other newly-made gods holding their fragile pocket universes. The next moment he was alone in a space that was his and only his a divine realm, small and undecorated, that existed adjacent to the world inside his sphere without being inside it.
The world itself hung before him like a jewel held up to light.
He could see it properly now, and what he saw was both beautiful and humbling.
It was a planet. Real and physical and approximately the size of Earth, though its continents were arranged differently two large landmasses separated by an ocean, each of them rough with mountain ranges and cut through with rivers, each of them enormously, intimidatingly empty. There were no cities. No roads. No fires in the darkness.
Just land and water and the first, fragile atmosphere, and the kind of silence that existed before anything had learned to breathe.
I have no idea what I'm doing, he admitted to himself.
The thought was not panic. It was inventory.
He had power. He could feel that much a pool of something he would have called energy if the word weren't so inadequate, residing in that new interior space. It was not vast. It was actually quite small. A single lamp in a very large house.
He had a world.
He had no instruction manual.
He spent what felt like hours simply observing temperature ranges, mineral deposits, water salinity, soil composition. Microbial life already forming in the shallow coastal waters, primitive and purposeful, building toward complexity one cell division at a time.
The eastern continent was larger. More temperate in the center, cold in the north, tropical at the southern tip. It had a great inland sea fed by three river systems, and around that inland sea the soil was almost absurdly fertile deep and dark with mineral richness, the kind of land that would forgive almost any agricultural mistake once someone got around to inventing agriculture.
The western continent was smaller and wilder. More mountain. More vertical drama. Harsh winters in the north, a desert plateau dominating the center, a long and complicated coastline to the west that would one day make extraordinary harbor cities for a civilization smart enough to build them.
The eastern inland sea region. That's where civilization starts.
He was still thinking through species design when the first message appeared.
-----
DAILY DIVINE INTELLIGENCE
Cycle 1 — Day 1
[Resource] The northeastern basin of the eastern continent contains a deep ley line junction. Divine energy harvested from this point costs 40% less than standard extraction. Current stability: 87 days.
[Opportunity] Microbial life in the eastern shallow sea has a rare genetic plasticity. Directed pressure in the next 6 days could accelerate multi-cellular development by 2–3 generations. Window: 6 days.
[Threat] Three neighboring gods have already begun seeding their worlds with intelligent species. You are behind the median starting pace.
[Observation] Your divine energy reserve is currently in the lowest 20% among gods at your proximity cluster. Efficient spending is critical in the early period.
[Opportunity] The western mountain range contains a mineral deposit of crystallized mana ore. Inaccessible for your current civilization for many eras, but divine energy stored there is magnified 3x. Consider early investment.
-----
He stared at it for a long moment.
Then he looked at the world hanging before him, and he thought about six-day windows and ley line junctions and the extremely uncomfortable information that he was already behind.
Alright. New priority order.
He reached toward the ley line junction first.
End of Chapter 1