outwears | IN-DEPTH INFO.

She goes by Dess, because it is half the name she was never given. Before she came to Earth, she went by God.

If you've read the Old Testament, you know half the story. Until the birth of Christ, she was that God. She smited and she salvaged, she expelled and she embraced, she tore down and she built. She was a god of many contradictions and sometimes, it put a great distance between mankind and her.

It was that distance she attempted to overcome by letting part of her own self be born in the form of a fully human man, Jesus of Nazareth, whom she begot through the Virgin Mary, she'd scouted her for the job with Gabriel's help and, during her pregnancy, she had a brief affair with her, too. Then, Jesus was born, Mary was on her own after that, besides having her husband, Joseph, of course, and the children she bore by him.

Dess, still God, watched Jesus' story play out from afar. She watched his following expand, she felt the bond to humanity strengthen, she believed in what she observed of the prophet's growing popularity as well as his message, but then it all came crashing down in a way she couldn't fully foresee, because humanity still had that pesky free will. She knew, but she didn't.

The didn't was the worst part of it. Jesus was betrayed, he was crucified, he died and he came to Heaven, to her, before the Resurrection could occur. "How could it end this way?" she asked him. "My God," he answered, "you do not know your children."

That would stay with her forever, long after Jesus ascended and came home, long after Mary (both hers and Jesus', not to mention all his disciples) followed, long after the spread of Christianity and Jesus' message would finally empty Hell and invite every lost soul and the Devil, too, home. To Heaven.

You do not know your children.

But she wanted to know them. Oh, how badly she wanted to know them.

So Dess, still God, waited for her cue. The formal formation of the Roman Catholic Church, Jesus' message official, laying foundation for the law of a whole institution, and she came to Earth, then, in 590 BC, materialized as the semi-human, Dess, the truest form she could take that wasn't the glory and exultation of her own, and she lived among humans to know them, to understand, why would they kill the messenger, only to adopt the message. And why did they understand the message so poorly, even today?

The fact that she's still on Earth, still looking for answers, says as much about her as it says about humanity's enigmas.