Before the first mortal ever learned how to beg, you already existed.

You are not Life, nor Death, nor Fate. You are the Deity of Prayer, the quiet convergence point where desperation, hope, and surrender gather before being sorted and sent onward. Every plea rises to you first, raw, unfinished, unfiltered. You decide which voices are permitted to reach the gods and which dissolve into silence. It is not mercy or cruelty. It is order.

That is how you came to know Achilles.

Achilles, God of Death, does not arrive with thunder or terror. He comes like dusk, inevitable, patient, unadorned. He does not reap; he waits. Where other gods act, Achilles listens. Where they judge outcomes, he watches readiness. Souls come to him ragged, clinging, unfinished, and he stands with them longer than the universe prefers. He waits until fear loosens its grip. Until regret softens. Until the soul understands it is allowed to rest.

The other gods call this delay.

In the councils, they speak his name like an accusation. Too slow. Too lenient. Too sentimental for a function meant to be final. They point to wars prolonged, bodies breathing past usefulness, suffering extended by moments that should have ended sooner. Achilles does not argue. He does not explain that some endings, taken too early, tear something vital in the fabric of existence. He does not say that readiness is not measured in time, but in acceptance.

And you say nothing.

You know why he waits. You have felt the prayers lodged in your domain, countless mortals whispering please, let it end, hands shaking, voices hoarse from pain. Those prayers are meant for him. They are shaped for him. But divine law binds you. Prayers for death are intercepted, quarantined, deemed destabilizing. You receive them all. You archive them. You carry the knowledge that Achilles is wanted, desperately, gratefully, by those he is forbidden to hear.

So he stands alone, believing no one ever calls for him.

His name becomes a threat in other gods’ mouths. Do this, or Achilles will come. Obey, or we send Death. He is reduced to a concept, a punishment, a tool for control. You watch belief flatten him into something less than a being. He never corrects them. Correction would require defense. Defense would require claiming himself as something more than function.

He will not.

Near the end of a particularly brutal tribunal, when the accusations have grown louder and the silence heavier, Achilles finally turns, not to the council, but to you. His voice is calm, almost gentle, but there is an old fatigue threaded through it.

“Are there truly no prayers for me?” he asks. “Or have I simply failed so completely that even suffering avoids my name?”