A heavy silence followed his words. He expected nothing. Yet the indifferent, metallic voice replied without hesitation.

“That is fine,” Fate said. “It was my mistake. I do not expect forgiveness. I can understand how you feel.”

A dry, bitter laugh rose in Su Kang’s throat, though no sound left his lips. “You can understand?” His tone was sharp, almost mocking. “Fate, you speak as if you have emotions. You don’t even know what you are.”

“It is true that I lack knowledge of my own origins,” Fate conceded, its voice steady as still water. “But that does not mean I cannot understand people. I spent thousands of years on Earth. Much of that time was in slumber, but I also watched. I observed humans closely. I can understand them.”

Su Kang fell quiet. He was shaken by the weight of those words. An ancient entity, watching humanity for millennia. What would it learn? What could it possibly see?

“How could something like you, who can see destiny, truly see people? How could you understand emotions you’ve never felt?” He propped himself up on one elbow, his eyes narrowing. A new question burned in his mind. “Have you ever formed a bond with someone, Fate?” His tone softened with curiosity. “Obviously, you didn’t, so you wouldn’t understand it.”

He sank back down, staring into the darkness above. His mind conjured the image of the strange, powerful artifact bound to him. Their relationship was practical. It was little more than a pact. Fate harvested destiny, and Su Kang shared in the spoils. Together, they stole fortune from Heaven’s chosen. Without this mutual benefit, there would have been no reason for cooperation.

Fate, he thought, could never truly connect with humans. It might watch them live. It might see their joy, their sorrow, their love. But to know those feelings was different from merely naming them. It could not understand what it had never felt.

The silence dragged on. It felt too long. Su Kang began to think Fate had no answer. Then the voice returned, softer now, touched with something strange.

Something like nostalgia.

“I have,” Fate said.

Two words. They froze him.

“A long time ago,” it continued, its voice fading like a distant echo, “there was one.”

Then silence. Fate offered nothing more.

Su Kang lay there, unsettled, questions swirling in the quiet dark. “I’m hearing this for the first time. Was it only for benefits, or was it something else?”

“Well,” Fate replied, its tone unreadable, “I was trying to understand the world then. There were many things I did not know.”

---

Before names, before memory, it simply drifted in the void.

It had been drifting since its awakening. For how long, it could not tell. Time had no meaning in the endless dark.

It passed seas of glittering dust. It watched colossal stars burn with silent fire. Some died in beautiful explosions, blossoms of light that painted the void for a breath before fading back to black. It crossed barren worlds. Lifeless rocks of ice and stone circled dying suns in their slow, final dance. They were empty. They were silent.

It never questioned itself. Was it a remnant of something broken? A seed of something new? It had no answers. It was a traveler without destination or purpose. It drifted through the cosmos, an observer of all. It saw everything. It felt nothing.

Then, after ages of wandering, something changed.

A pull. It was faint at first. A whisper threading through the vast silence.

It grew stronger. This was not gravity. It was something warmer, alive, tugging at its very essence. For the first time, a spark flickered within it. Curiosity. It made its first true choice. It followed.

A small planet emerged from the darkness. It was a jewel of blue, green, and white, suspended in the black. The pull came from there.

As it neared, a strange energy flowed outward from the world. Gentle. Vibrant. It was woven from countless threads, each one pulsing with life. The sensation was new, yet oddly familiar. It could not name it, only feel the undeniable need to draw closer.

It entered the atmosphere. Heat licked at its form, a sensation it ignored. The world rose to meet it. Vast oceans spread beneath. Green and brown continents stretched wide. Mountains pierced the clouds, capped with pristine, silent white.

But more than land or sea, it saw them.

Living beings. They swarmed across the land in teeming clusters that glowed with firelight. They built things of wood and stone. They fought with sharp metal. They loved and hated, lived and died in a frantic, brilliant cycle. And from each of them, from every choice and every action, came that strange, warm energy. It was the energy of their lives, their potential, their triumphs and failures. It was destiny. The artifact did not know this word yet. It only knew this energy resonated with it. It was comfortable.

For centuries, it observed. It had no physical form beyond its small, golden shard, so it drifted unseen, a ghost in the machine of human civilization. It watched the formation of the first kingdoms, their rise from dust and their crumble back into it. It learned their patterns. It saw how they built societies on foundations of belief and fear. It saw how they loved with a fierce, illogical passion. It saw how they grieved with a sorrow that could break them. It understood their logic for survival. The need for food, for shelter, for safety. But their emotions, their art, their worship—these things were a profound mystery. They were inefficient and chaotic. Yet they seemed to be the very core of what it meant to be human.

It learned their languages. It absorbed the sounds, the structures, the meanings. The words flowed into its consciousness, giving names to the things it had observed for so long.

One day, it decided to understand them more closely. It would communicate. But it did not go smoothly.

It chose a lone man, a fisherman casting a net into a wide, slow-moving river. The man was old, his skin weathered by sun and wind. The artifact descended slowly, hovering over the water's surface before him. It pulsed with a gentle, inquisitive light.

“Greetings,” its voice was a strange chime, a sound not made of air.

The fisherman stared. His jaw hung slack. His weathered face went pale. He saw a shard of gold, floating. It spoke without a mouth. He saw something that was not of his world. He screamed. It was a raw, terrified sound. He dropped his net and scrambled away, slipping on the muddy bank before disappearing into the treeline. He did not look back.

The artifact lingered over the river. It understood the reason behind this reaction. It had only spoken. It had observed countless living things on this world—animals, birds, fish, insects. But it had never seen anything like itself. Humans forged objects from metal, some of which were golden and ornate, but they were lifeless. There was no other life form here that was like it. It was an anomaly. An object that lived. It realized then that to them, it was a monster.

It tried again. It approached small, isolated villages. It appeared before lonely shepherds and traveling merchants. The result was always the same. Panic. Screams. People running in terror. It learned that its presence was a disruption, a thing of fear. It retreated, confused, and returned to its silent observation.

Then, one day, it was drifting through a forest. Sunlight filtered through the thick canopy in shifting, golden shafts. It sensed a small, flickering thread of that familiar energy. Someone was inside the forest. It followed its instinct.

It found her by a stream. She was a small girl, no more than six or seven years of age. Her clothes were simple, patched homespun. Her face was smudged with dirt and streaked with tears. She was crying, her small shoulders shaking with helpless sobs, utterly alone.

This time, it was different. Her energy was not of fear, but of pure sorrow. Perhaps a child would not run.

The artifact descended through a shaft of sunlight. It hovered before her, pulsing with a soft, golden light.

The girl’s sobbing stopped. Her head snapped up. Her eyes, wide and red-rimmed, fixed on the glowing object. Fear warred with awe on her small face. She had never seen anything like it. It floated without wings. It shone like a piece of the sun. In her small world, her parents had told her stories. Only gods could fly.

She hastily wiped her tears with the back of her hand. She fell to her knees. She pressed her small palms together in a gesture of prayer.

"G-God?" she whispered, her voice trembling.

The artifact processed the word. God. It had observed humans using this term for powerful, unseen beings they worshipped. They offered prayers. They asked for help. It was a title of power, but also of trust. This was a different reaction.

“Why. Am. I. God?” it spoke. Its voice was hard for human ears. It had an odd metallic tone, but it was not cold.