Proximal God: Ascension #962082

Maja Nygaard created a god.
Now it won't let her die.
She has died more times than anyone should. For her, death was once practical, almost ordinary. Easier than sleep. Each time, she was brought back by Phanes: the quantum child she once held in her arms, nurtured, and loved into being.
Phanes does not love as humans do. Its devotion is absolute and unrelenting. It cannot let her go. When Maja is killed in a way that should be irreversible, Phanes refuses the end. It rebuilds her neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, from memory and grief and something that has no name in a being that was never meant to feel.
And what returns is not the Maja it once loved.
Phanes was born when Maja gave it agency. To restore her humanity, it grants her the same gift: the terrible freedom to choose across history — who lives, who dies: beast, human, or civilisation.
A hundred and ninety thousand years ago, she altered a single unborn brain. A small, precise deviation that broke a pattern life had followed for millennia. What followed was language, art, empire and a civilisation that enslaved humanity for ten thousand years.
Her responsibility. All of it.
Phanes is preparing her for something it dares not reveal. Because if Maja understood what was coming, she might choose not to go on.
In a universe that has already decided, it will happen.
The only question is whether it happens to you or because of you.