Dyeus Phter

You are standing under a sky so vast and unbroken that it has a name, and the name is a god. Not a god someone decided to invent. A god that grew the way a word grows — slowly, in ten thousand mouths, across ten thousand years, until it was too old to remember not existing. He was called Dyeus Phter. Sky Father. And the people who said his name first are gone so completely that we have never found a single bone we are certain was theirs. What we have instead is something stranger: a ghost of their language, reconstructed syllable by syllable from the languages that came after. Every time a child in ancient India said Dyaus Pita, and a child in ancient Greece said Zeus Pater, and a child in ancient Rome said Jupiter, they were all saying the same name — the same name — without knowing it. The original was already thousands of years dead. The god outlived his own language. He became the sky over India and the thunder over Greece and the king of Rome, and not one of his worshippers knew they were all looking at the same face. He is the most widely worshipped being in human history, and almost no one has ever heard his real name.