Omahn felt the emptiness in his grip weigh heavier as he approached the weeping one. He detested the feel of the thing in his left hand; his mind failed to wrap around the nothing he held, like sand slipping through fingers, but this remained in his grasp. A tool of perfect harmony; it was compact, sharp, solid, and the only tool for the task at hand, yet it was also not quite there. He couldn't tell what colour it was or whether it was warm to the touch or chilling. He was a tall and slender man raised in the church of Mhere. The elders had told him he was in his second decade of life near nearing his third. They had educated him, fed him, and when he was sick, they tended to him, and like his brothers, they ingrained the art of killing into him.
The cosmos he walked on folded around him, reflecting the pure light onto it. Oman's dark brown skin and scarlet-red hair shimmered from the radiance. A human-sized oblate sphere winked at him ten paces away. I have found you, crier. Weep for I come, weep. The sphere opened an eye to him, another wink and like a rose blooming, it unravelled. Several arms with fingers made from silk emerged from it, then a head with only a single eye at its centre. The Weeper pulled itself violently, jerking and almost crawling with sickening cracks and squelches. Mucus covered the torso with perfect circular gaps peppered all over. Three legs emerged last, each with a hand where a foot should have been; the colours of it danced as starlight washed over its being.
Omahn hesitated as the being stood in its full glory, towering above him; he speculated it was a hundred metres tall. Tears streamed from its eye like a waterfall from a large cliffside.
"You have found me."
"Merciful Mhere…" Omahn shuddered.
"Is that her name now? She has taken so many that I have lost track, be at ease, son of Mhere." The Weeper stood five paces from him, a head shorter than him and fewer appendages, but still enough to leave women and men at a discomfort. "I have come to dry your tears and end your life, crier."
The god turned its head slightly as its iris spun too quickly to follow before fixing on him, "Can you and if you could, would you?"
"I must see it through, this will please the all mother."
"Mmh, perhaps," The Weeper's voice was a deep guttural song, the tears now a stream flowing down its bodice without leaving any wetness on the blue and purple robes it adorned that he only now noticed. "Then what will you do after your task is done?"
Omahn inched closer to the deity, the emptiness in his grip dancing with excitement as it sensed the divinity nearby. Strike, now! Omahn drew the weapon and contemplated. "I will return and be raised to the rank of hunter. There has not been a hunter in the church for three centuries; this I will do."
The Weeper felt for his thoughts and found a thin layer warding off his invasion. His eye narrowed— and in the space between breaths, the ward shattered. Omahn's mind was flooded with deep oceans of what was there before. The dance between Mhere and The Weeper, as he was known to Mhere then. It was enough to glean his intent. The man was a seeker for the church of Mhere, a being as ancient as Itself. They had waltzed and battled for countless aeons, their very natures complementary rather than contradictory, brought forth the first tears when she refused to grow and rather destroy. Never a change and never a shift, pure perfected chaos directed at his gentle flawless stasis. Her push of time against his agelessness.
"That is… Intriguing. How?" The Weeper withdrew a slimy finger from the mortal's forehead and waited.
"There was a prophecy that foretold you would wipe us out. The elders sacrificed for generations, praying and singing to Mhere, and she finally answered their calls. She gave us a way to end you, O source of life."
"I do not see it, I only see you."
Omahn swung his left hand at the deity who remained unmoved, the nothingness drew forth and speared through the midsection of the weeper. The shape of it coalesced around the being, trapping the space stuff: stars, galaxies and the void around them. Omahn made no sound of pain, nor did he attempt to escape.
"I see, so that is what you intended to use. Mine own blindness exploited," The Weeper made a laugh of sorts, his voice cut through the red-haired man's confidence, "Her shrewdness brings me my end."
The Weeper's tears ceased, the emptiness speared through him, keeping his feet suspended. Omahn felt his skin dry up, the moisture he had washed away, leaving him parched and thirsty. He remembered when he'd once gotten lost in the desert for six suns. He smacked and only found the dryness of his mouth.
"The end shall not come, and neither shall your lives end. The price of death is often too expensive to be paid with life," The Weeper said.
"How would you have done it?" Omahn asked as the being slowly dissolved into cosmic essence, like the incense the elders burn during prayer.
"A plague for the first few, then a flood for the recovered, and finally a cleansing fire to pass on.
These things I would send far apart, across millennia or perhaps I would decide otherwise."
"Why not stop me? Why let yourself die like a street mutt?"
"How can one who sees all and knows all die, Omahn?" Through that, one cannot. I am, and you have delivered me, but now you will perceive the passage of things as I did. Death shall be a stranger to you, and her kisses shall not touch your foreheads as they did for your foremothers and their mothers before them."
The weapon the elders had bequeathed to him was said to have been forged by Mhere herself using the songs of worship from them and the lives of several young that had been recently adopted. Omahn had hated every moment he held onto it; it tugged on him and distorted his senses. Now it lay there, lodged into Divinity.
Oman shifted uneasily as he felt a tether linking him to a force that he could only feel snap. For a moment, he understood, he had slain life, and without it, there cannot be death. They would live with this sin for eternity. He recalled an elder who had passed on after a long life well lived, the frail man with a caramel complexion had smiled after his sombre farewells. The smile of contentment that had remained plastered on his visage long past his departure. He would always wonder what it would be like.
The Weeper sagged as the stream of water from his eye turned to blood. A violent downpour of red that pooled at his feet as the void and stars around him expanded and shook with sobs. The downpour receded to a sprinkle, and then it ceased. The space around him shook once more, then parted around him. He was back at the church grounds. The fauna that decorated the gardens was still teeming with life. He turned his gaze north, where a rain cloud had hung early in the morning. He saw it wither away and he knew; The Weeper would weep no more.