He stared at the mirror, whilst turning on the tap and let it run. He took off the hat. His hair was down, they were about the length to the start of his neck. They were slightly wavy, and the heat made them clamp onto each other. He splashed some water onto his face. Despite a refined and rectangular contour, his face is unkempt, tiny stubble formed around his mouth and part of his chin.

  However, it is not the stubble or slight rash on his face that he is concerned about. He leaned closer to the mirror, focusing on his eyes, or more specific the iris.

  The shades of blue were fading from his right iris. And now a golden amber hue was starting to emerge. A strand of hair, soaked and slick, hung across that eye, half-hiding the change. Yet the glow beneath was still visible.

  For commoners, nobles, even royalty, such a change would be hailed as a divine blessing. Many would flaunt it, certain it opened doors to power, privilege, or divine favour.

  In the old days when trades like Pavlov’s prospered, the amber-eye elixir was the most coveted—a potion prized by many for its cosmetic charm, and by some for its usefulness in deception, or even outright fraud.

  As time went on, the people of Ljóseoree gradually came to associate divinity with fraud. What began as a local suspicion eventually filtered upward, reaching even the celestial realm. Many gods were outraged—though not enough to interrupt their divine obligations, which, if pressed, any of them might ponder for a long while, years or decades in human life span, summarise as idly watching mortals do things and then becoming upset about it.

  Eventually, however, word of the mortal insult reached a higher divine authority, and a minor deity descended to Ljóseoree to lodge a formal complaint. After several failed attempts, he was at last granted an audience with a lower prefect at City Hall. This came only after several days of queuing, wedged between citizens reporting urgent matters as overgrown hedges, improperly placed bins, and a particularly sprawling saga recounted in varying versions by multiple complainants, all centred on a single trail of horse droppings: first spotted fresh, then freshly trampled, later dried and compacted, scattered across cobblestones, transferred to a stranger’s boot, and eventually embedded in someone else’s carpet—at which point, amid rising outrage, it officially escalated into a legal dispute.

  His case was swiftly redirected, as it did not fall neatly under “Domestic Disputes”—the category to which, apparently, all else defaulted. He was referred instead to the long-forgotten department of “Foreign Disputes,” a bureau so ancient that no one could recall its original purpose, let alone its last meaningful activity. This was, however, a stroke of fortune, as the department had only recently been asked to justify its continued existence. Seizing the opportunity, its clerks scribbled a few symbols onto a form, stamped it with “IMPORTANT,” and promptly filed it into a cabinet discreetly labeled “Disposal.”

  Inevitably, the process had to be repeated.

  The deity, learning through trial, ceased visiting the office on Mondays, Fridays, or Thursdays. A random schedule of coin flips between Tuesday and Wednesday eventually landed him before a different clerk—one so thoroughly disillusioned with his post that he flung the freshly re-filled form into a senior’s face before storming out of the building. The senior, startled both by the impact and the paperwork, suddenly grasped the supposed importance of the matter and—after only a brief hesitation—passed it on to his own superior, who was at that very moment pacing the corridor in agitation, rehearsing a plea to justify the continued existence of the “Foreign Disputes” department. The timing proved fortuitous. Armed with this unexpected deity-related case, the superior made it the centrepiece of his argument. After hours of circular debate and extensive deflection, the assembled officials—though largely baffled—concluded that the department must, evidently, be doing something.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Though he finally secured an audience with the senior officials of the city, the deity’s troubles were far from over. Lodging the complaint was merely the beginning—proving his divinity required an exhausting, multi-tiered process that summoned officials from every rung of the administrative ladder, ultimately culminating in the involvement of not one, but two kings (the first having died of old age midway through the proceedings).

  Decades of heated debate followed, accompanied by endless revisions to divine iconography. It was eventually agreed that true gods bore distinct markings on their foreheads. This, however, sparked a new academic fervour: scholars proposed formal studies, alchemists and court magicians were consulted, and new departments were hastily assembled within universities. Degrees were invented, awarded, and promptly disputed.

  Educational pamphlets were commissioned and re-commissioned. Sacred relics were redrawn, repainted, and revised. Statues were retouched repeatedly in an attempt to reflect the newly agreed-upon ‘scientific’ understanding of the divine. And yet, for all the scholarship, the confusion only grew. Mortals—and a few opportunistic non-humans—began forging markings to match their golden irises, scrawling counterfeit sigils across their brows in ink, chalk, and, in at least one regrettable case, marmalade.

  In response, local law enforcement and self-declared protectors of public virtue began locking up anyone with amber eyes - actual gods included.

  Forehead markings, once hailed as the definitive sign of divinity, soon came under academic scrutiny as well—though not immediately. As is tradition, it took several human centuries for academia to acknowledge what had already become painfully obvious to the general public. Only then was a formal discipline established, and from it emerged a particularly enterprising professor from the Department of Interdisciplinary Divine Identification and Classification (D.I.D.I.C.), with a joint focus in Celestiology and applied Divinology. He published a sensational paper arguing that such markings could be easily forged with ink, soot, or jam—drawing from incidents that had long since faded into urban legend. His interpretations were dubious at best and the single article he referenced has yet to be located in any known archive. The original text read:

  “...such markings could be easily replicated through the application of readily available pigmentation agents and semi-organic emulsions—examples including carbon-based residue, botanical dyes, and preserved saccharine spreads"

  The paper received precisely one external citation per year—always from within the esoteric circle of “divine studies”—while the author himself continued to inflate the count by referencing it in every subsequent publication. Despite the scholarly enthusiasm repeatedly calling for “further studies”, “greater public awareness, and “governmental intervention”, no one stepped forward to advocate for the imprisoned deities.

  The general public had no idea what any of it meant, and government officials cared even less. Verifying divine legitimacy, after all, required time and—more critically—funding, neither of which Ljóseoree had in abundance, nor was likely to ever possess.