Free Will, Fate, and the Human Being in The City of the Gods
A deeper look at the theological heart of Jason's mythological debut.

The Question at the Centre of Everything
Every great work of speculative fiction is ultimately about something real. The dragons in Game of Thrones are about power. The dystopia in 1984 is about surveillance and truth. And The City of the Gods, Jason Patterson's bold mythological epic, is about one of the oldest and most urgent questions human beings have ever asked: do we choose our lives, or are our lives chosen for us?
The novel stages this question as a literal divine conflict — a wager between Will, the God of Free Will, and the twin goddesses Fate and Destiny — but its emotional and philosophical weight belongs entirely to Chelise: a young woman who did not volunteer to be the test case for the nature of human freedom.
That tension between cosmic abstraction and deeply personal consequence is what makes the novel's central argument not only intellectually rich but genuinely moving.

The Theological Landscape
The City of the Gods imagines a world in which every deity from every culture and religious tradition is real, and all of them coexist in an uneasy celestial metropolis governed by the Creator — referred to simply as The Boss. This is a radically pluralistic cosmology, one that refuses to privilege any single tradition. Greek gods walk beside Norse ones. Islamic divine figures coexist with Roman deities. The implication is quietly revolutionary: all of them are real, and all of them are flawed.
This flatness of hierarchy — with the exception of the Creator's supremacy — is part of the novel's architecture. It strips the gods of the moral authority we might habitually grant them and replaces it with something more honest: they are political. Jealous. Insecure. They form alliances and rivalries. They make reckless decisions. They are, in the deepest sense, very human.
What the novel asks, then, is not whether the gods are good. It asks whether they are right.

Will: The God Who Bets on People
Will is the novel's most charismatic theological figure. Rebellious and unpredictable, he loves the chaos that comes from genuine choice. But his position is not simply anarchic — it is deeply principled. He argues that without the freedom to choose, humanity becomes something less than human. That a life scripted entirely by fate is not a life but a performance, hollow at its centre.
His recklessness is the point. Will cannot bring himself to stand at a careful distance from human lives and pronounce philosophical verdicts. He's in it. He cares. That care is what the twin goddesses find most objectionable about him — and, in the novel's quiet moral logic, it is what makes him most right.

Fate and Destiny: The Case for Order
The twin goddesses are not villains in any simple sense. Their argument has genuine force. They point to the destruction that follows from unchecked free will — the wars, the self-inflicted wounds, the catastrophic consequences of choices made without wisdom. They believe that the best thing that can happen to a human life is that it unfolds along a path that has been wisely prepared for it.
The problem, of course, is that a wisely prepared path still removes the one thing that makes a human life specifically human: the author.
When Fate and Destiny reach out to the Anti-Creator — known also as Iblis — in a bid to win their wager, they cross a line that their own logic cannot justify. They introduce destruction into the system they claim to be protecting. It is the novel's most precise irony: the goddesses of predetermined order make a reckless, free choice, and it nearly destroys everything.

Chelise and the Weight of Being the Question
Chelise does not know, for much of the novel, that she is the centre of a divine argument. And this is crucial. The wager is not a game she plays knowingly — it is her life, with all its grief and instability and quiet endurance.
Her choice at the novel's climax is significant precisely because no one forces it. The gods are weakened. The City is collapsing. The Anti-Creator is at the gates. In the middle of all of this, Chelise chooses — hope, belief, life — not because she is instructed to, not because a god whispers the right answer in her ear, but because she has decided that this is who she wants to be.
That choice restores balance to the universe. The gods are revived. The City rises as the City of Phoenix. And Chelise returns to Earth not transformed in her circumstances, but transformed in herself.

What the Novel Is Saying
The City of the Gods does not argue that fate doesn't exist, or that circumstances are irrelevant. It argues something more nuanced and more honest: circumstances shape us, but they do not determine us. The universe needs both order and freedom — not one at the expense of the other.
And it argues, most radically, that the gods need us. Not the other way around.
In a cosmology where divine power depends on human belief, the relationship between the sacred and the mortal is not one of dependence but of mutuality. The gods are real insofar as people choose to believe, and believe in, something larger than themselves. When Chelise chooses hope in the darkness, she is not obeying any divine command. She is generating the divine. She is the source.
That is a profound theological claim, and Jason makes it with remarkable lightness of touch.

The City of the Gods is available now. The wager is still open.