A slender girl with short black hair wandered around a desolate wasteland. The sky was black and hid the moon and stars behind dark rain clouds. Water hadn’t fallen in years and left the rivers and ponds empty with only dry, cracked mud and dead fish who couldn’t escape fast enough. Leaves had fallen off bushes and trees and brittle tree trunks had collapsed and toppled over one another.

“Who am I?” The girl was wearing a white dress made of a very thin material, almost completely transparent, that was torn and dirty. She had cuts up her legs, down her arms, across her stomach and back, and one thin red line going down her left cheek. It started from the space between the corner of her eye and her hairline, followed her cheekbone, and ended just before her jaw-line, but it was so thin it was hardly visible.

The wind carried with it a breeze that seemed to whisper her name, “Kahla,” it stroked her bruises and caressed her blood soaked hair from her face. “Kahla,” she looked in the direction the wind was blowing and saw the figure of a divine woman painted in the air. “You are Kahla,” the woman whispered her name to her in the soft voice of an angel who drifted closer and closer, carried by the breeze but not at its pace.

“Who are you?” Kahla spoke slowly and quietly as she looked up at the heavenly woman.

“My name,” the woman smiled kindly, like a mother, “is Shika. I am a goddess.” Kahla’s mouth opened slightly in awe.

“Amazing,” she whispered, unable to move. Finally she was able to come to her senses, “where are we?”

“This will be Etheria, my home, if you ever come back. You are in another dimension Kahla; this is the world of the gods.” The girl couldn’t manage any words so Shika continued, “you were a goddess.”

“I was like you? And I lived… here?” Kahla looked around at the empty river that were once overflowing with sweet water and the sky that was once clean and clear.

“You were not like any of us. You were Kahla, Goddess of the Lost Paradise, and there you stayed. There is where you are, and there is where you have to be.” Shika watched her sternly.

“But I’m not there now, I’m a human and I live on Earth. Can you make me a god?” Confusion was clouding her mind.

“I cannot answer that, but if you do succeed in coming back, this is the home you will have to come back to.” She made a sweeping hand motion to remind Kahla of the destruction.

“But if I’m destined to be a god, do you mean I’m destined to kill everything? How can I stop it? How can I stay human? There must be a way to avoid all of this, tell me! I don’t want to be the cause of this!” Kahla was desperate for a way out, anything to avoid the chaos that had ensued in this god forsaken world.

“Too many questions I’m afraid, all I can say is that it is unavoidable.” Patience and rationality were necessary and Kahla lacked both.

“I’m the goddess of the Lost Paradise, that’s what you said?” Shika nodded and closed her eyes. “I’ve had dreams of being in Paradise.”

“Yes, you’ll never reach Paradise, but you can argue for it.” She faded into the darkness of the sky and was carried away by the wind.