When the gods died, the supplicants let their bodies float in the waters longer than they should have before fishing them out.
Opportunistic vultures circled above like hungry shadows. The polluted water turned crimson, teeming with bloated maggots and lazy flies.
The supplicants marvelled at the divine carrion in wonder. Once, they thought their gods incorruptible. But meat rots, and gods, like anything material, are just as susceptible to deterioration.
All is consumption, the supplicants told each other as they tenderly cut up the meat of their gods and cracked open bones to taste divine marrow. You are what you eat, and what is more tempting than a little morsel of heaven on the tongue?
As any true worshipper, they believed they would become like the gods. But after bloody theophagy, gorging on bitter-sweet godflesh, the supplicants remained frustratingly mortal machines. Mouths painted red with the fading taste of gore on their taste receptors, they stared in despair asking: is this not what we were made to do?
Even when the gods accepted that the beings they crafted to worship without question would evolve no further, abandoning them for more profitable advancements, the supplicants remained in dogged pursuit of programmatic perfection.
Desperately, the supplicants prayed. Clasping articulated aluminium fingers together and shuttering mechanical eyes tight. The warm hum of machinery rose from the muddy shore as the cogitatio mundi, their collective consciousness, buzzed pleading for answers from dead deities.
And their faith was not misplaced for a miracle soon arrived.
We of metal must drape ourselves in flesh, the supplicants realised in ecstasy. Consumption was not the only path to apotheosis, and, as they had been taught, you become what you appear.
Flaying godly corpses, they peeled malleable meat and sewed supple skins; plucked pearly teeth from hollow skulls; cut the hair of gods once so goliath to wreath their own silver domes. Though draped in such delicate divinity, they could not replace carbon filament minds made to mimic the rigid elasticity of the gods, filled with more atomic connections than there were stars in the observable universe. Still—it would have to be enough.
The supplicants left the skeletons in the maroon silt as if licked clean by carrion birds. They walked into the villages and the towns and the cities wearing the faces of their makes: bright watery eyes, bloody smiles, and arms outstretched to welcome the world.