"That is an interesting thought - I never considered this point of view," Dwin memorized this idea and put it on a shelf to think about later. "But - can they really be neutral. I mean, if... if they favour you for some reason, then they are not truly neutral. Or if they grant you a favour... but then... wouldn't it be fascinating to hang out with the gods just once? To see, where they live and how they handle things?" that would be something, but she had a feeling that Ash Paw would consider such thing a heresy. 

"Would you like to be a god for one day?" she asked. "What would you do, if you were?"

"Well, they would have hard time squashing you, if you were a god yourself?" Dwinn pointed out, but she had to agree - most gods in the stories were fickle, acted on emotions and regretted nothing. Oh, and they had tons of parsley bed encouters too with mortals, other gods and... had there not been stories of interspecies crossing too? 

"If they tried to squash you, you could squash them back! Or do something jolly. I don't remember, who, but my mom told me about a god, whose mate cheated on him with another god and in retaliation he merged them together. Just think a merged wolf - eight legs, two tails, two heads and it is a boy and a girl at the same time. Both inside and outside," she explained. "So - what if you were an all powerful god, who was the squasher not the squash...ee? What would you like to do in the world? If you had unlimited power and everything," she mused. 

"I never truly thought about it either..." Dwinn realized. "I mean... well... it is not impossible though - before all great Greek gods there were other gods too. Titans - weren't they? And they were destroyed during a huge war, where the present gods - we know now - won," and for some reason the end of these gods had never come. "Maybe killing one another, when you are the victorious party, is not very wise?" she mused. "Though... yeah... They had rule and order and everything and... the balance you mentioned earlier, but just think," a new idea was born, "there is this idea that any particular god is alive as long as people believe in them. So - if people stopped at some point, that either means that the god died or it had to morph into something else to please the masses." 

"It is kind of like with a king or a pack leader - they are all powerful and mighty as long as people tolerate them. But there is always the chance of ending him too. I think that gods are just as dependent on us as we - well, you - are on them," she finished. Then she listened to, what Ash Paw wanted to do as a god and found it absolutely wonderful. "I think - and don't take me wrong - you would be a god that I would prefer over your bear compatriots any time," she told her softly.

"Is there much difference between being dead and being torn to pieces, scattered, sentient, but unable to do anything?" Dwin proposed, noting to herself that the latter fate was way worse. In case of death there was some finality and at least some kind of hope of starting new. Being rendered helpless and reminded of it every single day could cause trouble in the future. "Ooooh, just think,"  she exclaimed this for n-hundreth time during this conversation. "What if someone grew unhappy with the present set of gods and set out on a quest to rebuild titans, create an army of them and then send all that Olympus lot to hell?" which... belonged to another god. Hades. There was no way of escaping that was there? "Or... I dunno, besides believing in gods they have to have another weakness. True immortality, in my opinion, does not exist," she concluded. 

"Are you really free though?" the girl wondered. "What if they force you in a situation, where you have to choose between two options and neither are good? It is, of course, not like Zeus striking you with lightening, when he does not like you, but the way you described Sos seems like a thing he could do. Just out of spite? Or cruel fun?" Dwin thought a bit more on this and added: "What if you think you have free will, but only within the boundaries that your gods have set. And, when they decided to tighten their grip, you might find out that you have never been free to begin with." 

"Me - a god? I dunno," she shrugged. "I would probably ask questions to other gods. I have a lot of them and then see, how they fare," she smiled knowingly as if hinting that even after 3 pages long thread on this board Dwin was nowhere finished with her mental exercise on mythology, life and morality. "I have a feeling that we make them out to be much greater than they actually are. I would want to find out, who is the smartest of them all. And who actually has a heart. A-a-a-a-nd I would probably want to meet some of my ancestors. There are plenty of people down or up there - wherever they decided to go after death, that I would want to ask more questions." 

"Why can demi-gods kill gods, but gods cannot kill other gods?" Dwin did not remember hearing this theory, but she did not claim to know everything either. It did not make sense that a being of a lesser power could beat something that was immortal and supposedly all-powerful. "I don't think that is true. At least not with Greek myths that is. Demigods can die, but gods usually do not. They are supposed to be timeless," she was contradicting her earlier statement  - question on, whether gods could be killed. "But... I think that maybe these Olympians never died in the legends, because somehow the story still continues - who knows, maybe we will see in our lifetimes their end and birth of new set of gods to take over," she finished. Dwin was about ask, whether Sos and Atka could die, but she recalled that just earlier she had stepped no Ash Paw's toes on this matter and did not want to do that again. 

"But aren't god's plan for a person and fate one and the same?" she asked, when Ash Paw insisted that these two were seperate and intertwining things at the same time. "That is the true fountain of youth, my mom said this. Never growing curious of the world around you. I can't imagine that a person can ever grow bored. There is so much we... I do not know!" she told. "Why should the gods be strict about their Underworld rules? I mean, there are plenty of stories, where they themselves are not good at observing them." 

"Who do you think would win in a fight? A Zeus or one of your bear gods?" Dwin asked, realizing that this question might insult Ash Paw (and probably not the first time during this conversation), but there was a new theory behind this. "I think your bears would win. Do you know why? In your belief system all the world power is divided between two entities. Greeks divided all the power between many. Strictly speaking - yours got more power points than the lot living up on the hill," she finished. 

"So - strictly speaking - my fate depends on, what I want to believe in? In the end there are only two options - either you believe that everything is predestined and live accordingly. Or you decide that nothing is certain at all and... move with the flow," she said. "I got an idea - what if... wouldn't it be an interesting power, if the Dark Lord of the Underworld made bargains with souls? A dead soul of your choice for a living one? That should technically not upset the balance, right?" Dwin was not sure, what she would want to exchange souls for, but having it as a some kind of odd currency, sounded morbidly fascinating. 

Thinking about time travel, logics and consequences of it was the same way as wondering, how big the universe actually was. The deeper you delved in the subject, the more complicated it got and the less knowledgable you felt about it. Same went to all the "what if" scenarios and trousers of time - moving through the world was kind of like swimming. With every stroke you made the water molecules shift and in the end you would never find out, how far-reaching were the results of just one action. Dwin found these topics fascinating, but at the moment did not feel like pursuing them in detail. It required proper mindset and timing. 

"Here's is an idea - if you go back in time and kill a person, who becomes a bloodthirsty and mad dictator in the future," Dwin began. "Would that really prevent bad things from happening? Or according to the theory of balance - someone else would come in his or her place?" she paused to let this question sink in. "And then... what if this bad, bad wolf does a lot of harm, but at the same time changes paths of other people, who end up to do a lot of good? Would it still be worth of killing a person in the past, who is to become a despot in the future?" she added. 

"Well... I murder deer and rodents, and lagomorphs to feed myself. The reason, why I do it, is because I do not see them as equal to my species. If I did not eat, I would not survive. So their death means that I live. Come to think of it... I am a combination of numerous deaths," Dwin mused, wondering, how many dead bodies had contributed as building blocks for her living ones. 

"And I think - I have never met a wolf, who killed another - that maybe it is something similar. Maybe murdering another wolf in the eyes of the killer is the same as killing a mouse for a meal," she suggested. "Maybe... I dunno for sure of all the justifications, but, if you do not consider other's life worth preserving, consider them being things, something disposable or maybe edible... well, then you kill. Just like that," she finished and did not quite like the idea of becoming an object in someone else's designation of the world around them. 

"Have you met a wolf that has eaten another wolf?" she asked. "Do you think that they devoured not only flesh, but the soul as well?"

"But it seems to me that in the end the distinction of whether a murder is murder or a necessity of life or something poetic lies in your beliefs," Dwin concluded, because that was exactly, what Ash Paw implied. What did make a wolf life different from that of the prey they ate? Good thing that the young Blackthorn was not attempting to become a 100% saint in her life, consuming only water and sunlight until she withered and died. "Someone might believe that murdering other wolves is not dissimilar to us hunting and killing other creatures. That is, what we do, don't we? Why are some animals within that circle of life sooner than us?" she asked. 

"So - do you think that reincarnation happens twice? Like once, when your soul goes somewhere new and twice, when your shell turns into other creatures," she wondered. "Oh, do you think my dead aunt has also disintegrated from a single being to - say - thousand and thousand little worms. And what if all those worms have a collective mind that is hers? Mom said," and again - I will note that this implication did not prove that Maia had ever claimed such a thing, "that bees have a collective mind."

"So, according to your knowledge, if I kill a wolf to eat it, it is not a murder, but a necessity for me to survive?" Dwin did not like this explanation very much. "Or is it a matter of perspective again... I think that for any hare my necessity to kill it for food is the same as a murder?" but she was careful not to delve too deep in this particular argument, because she did not want to end up feeling too sorry for her lunch and surely she could not survive on water and sunlight alone. "If I eat plants - does it count as a murder too?" she referred to those occasions, when she had eaten grass. "Or... if I pluck off the heads of dandelions for fun - is it still a murder or a violent dismemberment?" she figured that it could be both. 

"Why just three times and what is Elysium?" she asked. 

"You know... I think that there is no right answer there in the end. One man's friend is the other one's meal," Dwin concluded with a sigh. "Though I do not like the prospect of ever becoming someone's lunch, like ever, I should probably be careful and see, where it takes me in the end. And if I do get eaten - well, that's just one way to go," she finished this topic, glad that she would not have to discuss this in the future ever again. Together with Ash Paw they had come to a golden middle-way of a very important problem. 

"Is that pocket of afterlife any worse or better than the others? How many pockets are there? What are pockets?" Dwin had all her attention on the next subject on the seemingly never-ending list of things to talk about. It did not look like Ash Paw had got too tired either. "I don't think I would want to become a hero. I would want my life to be interesting. What do you want your life to be?" she asked, once Ash Paw had filled in on the first three questions.

"Ooooh.... that sounds like a mind palace," Dwin exclaimed excitedly. "You know, where you have pockets and pockets of memories that you can revisit, when you wish to," she explained. "But I do not understand it whole and I don't think my mind could hold that many pockets," meaning that at this point in life Dwin's brain was an organized chaos. She had a good memory, but it was not calibrated on anything. It processed everything that was tossed at it and saved/deleted files randomly. 

"But I think... have you done world-building in your dreams?" she asked, inspired by yet another sudden thought. "I have these some recurring dreams time from time. They are always the same and they consist of a place that I have totally come up with. And it feels real. Maybe that is kind of a pocket too. Inside dreams," she told. "Mom told me that there have been people, who are able to leave their body while sleeping and travel, wherever they want. But they always need to be careful, because there might be body-less souls wandering around and they could hijack yours. Or... even worse - you might forget, where your body is!"