"I don't think I belong here," he murmured, eyeing the floating, layered facade.

"There are no mistakes upon the plane of divinity."

"I was trying to opt out, y'know, by making myself a paradox."

"Instead it made for a rather notorious debut."

"That...wasn't my intention."

"Funny how a god's intention can be subverted, isn't it?"

"Yeah," he cracked a smile, " it's weird how we're beholden to ourselves."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we can't not believe in ourselves. Man can believe in whatever pleases him, at least within his own mind, but gods cannot."

"It is a strange thing," the other said.

"I don't know enough," the god of atheism suddenly declared, "I'm too dumb to be here."

"And yet here you are."

A pause. He waited for him to say more, but he remained silent.

"It's not fair, there's too much to know at this point anyway."

"You will find the shape of it somehow."

"But it's too much. I'm living in the elbow of a wild trajectory that stops being linear and becomes exponential. It's maddening. The Maya were right: everything is different. Everything has changed. I still don't understand how they knew that."

He paused, waiting for his companion to respond, but he seemed content in his silence, so he continued.

"I...have found one pattern among the gods. At least the two I'm most familiar with. Where they stood in society, and where they went. I always knew what Kapilavastu was, but I didn't know the significance of Nazareth, not until recently."

"Echoes perhaps?"

"One distinctly similar harmony, it seems."

"And you?"

His expression like a gray placid sea hiding turbulent currents.

"I'm an atheist."