Work Text:
.
In a galaxy, in a universe, in a small corner of space insignificant, unimportant, forgettable, there is a planet. Like all planets, all worlds, it has history. History, a past, a place from whence it was born. A story to its birth. A myth. A legend. A creation theory. A religion.
Gods.
/Tell me everything that happened, tell me everything you saw. /
Once upon a time there was nothing.
Then there was Earth.
The planet’s creation is widely accepted as a process of asteroids colliding, large chunks of rock shaping and chiseling one another into essentially spherical shapes, who would then gravitate towards a large hunk of fire and gas that would become their sun.
But it’s not the creation of the planet that’s important.
It’s the creation of the world at the hands of the Gods.
/They had lights inside their eyes. /
The story goes like this.
Once there was a girl with stars in her eyes, says the legend. And the pictures and murals and storybooks show hair as black as limitless as the depths of the universe and a dress adorned and embroidered with starlight and green eyes twinkling with the light of a billions worlds waiting to be born.
She didn’t create the planet, they say, but she made it matter. She allowed existence. In an infinity of galaxies and universes and planets and lives nothing matters and nothing is significant and one flaming rock is the same. But she bred the world. She bred it so that it was special, so that the flaming rock would have purpose. Would cool and have life. Would grow.
She is sometimes called the Gardener. She is sometimes called the Witch of Space. She is sometimes called the Frog Breeder, as frogs represent the transition from life in the mud to life in the sun.
She is the Goddess who bred and tended to and cultivated civilization.
She is drawn and painted and written as beautiful with silken hair and porcelain skin and beautiful almond shaped eyes and shapely curves and is every bit a Goddess.
An aging man visits her temple, lifts a hand to touch her unblemished face on stained glass, and whispers, she was a little girl.
No one hears him.
Once there was a boy who held time in his hands, the legend says. Sometimes his hair is painted gold. Gold like wheat, like corn, like that precious rare gem. Othertimes it is painted white like snow, like milk, like nothing, like emptiness, like the blank white of a clockface. Consistency is in his eyes. Red. Red like the armor and cape he wears, red like the garnet in the hilt of his sword, red like rubies and rust and red like blood.
His blood, the legends say, is what keeps our timestream flowing.
The beat of his heart that keeps his blood flowing, they say, is the beat of time here.
He is the orchestrator behind the past, the present, and the future. He is the great conductor who guides the beat of time and the rhythm of events and weaves them together into a great symphony of fate and what is meant to be.
He is informally called The Fixer, his job being to erase and correct and ensure that the flow of events leads to the most favourable outcome. To bend the past to fit the present and save the future. That each action, reaction, and effect fit together and play a favourable melody like various instruments working together to make the song of the world.
Sometimes The Fixer. Sometimes The Conductor. Usually, his title is The Sacrifice. For every fixed event and tweak of time there is a version of him that is dead. The bloodred stream of time flows ceaseless from his veins, and the tick-tock of his heartbeat is consistent throughout all his bodies that die. The constant beat of his soul keeps meter for the world. The one heartbeat and one spirit that remains through all the deaths.
Valiant, in shouldering this painful duty. Noble, they say, like a Knight of Time.
He is drawn and painted with red all around. It is his trademark. The Red God. His face is always resolute and his jaw is chiseled and there is a grand painting of a hundred dead hims stoutly facing their deaths. Noble, unyielding. Brilliant and Majestic.
He would hate, says a man, standing in front of the painting with baseball cap pulled low and eyes hidden, that they never draw his shades.
He is ignored.
Once there was a girl who saw pathways of light, the legend says. She is the Lady of Light and the Lady of Sin and the cause of great dispute among those who follow the legends. She is drawn ivory white or gray like asphalt and with gold tresses for hair or the scraggly white of one fallen into wretchedness. Her eyes are white and blank and devoid of compassion or love only anger, or her eyes are amethysts and orchids with the twinkle of the sun deep in their center.
The extent to which the darkness claimed her is argued upon, but it is not disputed that she fell. She fell once, and she fell hard, and her lips and nails are always black.
It is ironic, some say, because she is the pathfinder and she lost her way. Her role was to find, and to guide. To see the paths that were illuminated with light and guide herself and her comrades and the world down them. To understand what future needed to be reached, what road would lead to that future, and how to get to that road.
There is controversy, and there are arguments. Those who favour her say she was the strongest of the Gods, for she had found her light from the Darkness into which she fell. Others say she came into herself too late, and that if she had opened her eyes to the pathways of light from the beginning perhaps the Knight wouldn't have had so much to fix, to die for.
She was tricked, they say.
A seer shouldn’t have been, others argue.
But she was meant to be tricked, they say. It was the path they were meant to follow.
There is dispute.
She is the Fool who Fell. The Lady of Sin and Darkness. The One who was Grimdark. But she is also The Pathfinder. The Pilot to the Sun. The Seer of Light. And alternatively, the Seer who saw to late.
A particularly famous painting has her against a mirror, with one side being her in her glory. A Goddess, bathed in light and cloaked in orange and yellow and divinity. And the other side her at her worst. Encased in darkness and black and sickly purple. There is no way to tell which side is the reflection and which is the real her.
They’re both her, says a woman. Elegant and fashionable and reeking of alcohol. But she didn’t trust anyone enough to let them know that. She never trusted anyone.
My fault, she slurs, and her makeup smears and runs in rivulets down her face.
She is drunk and disregarded.
Once there was a boy who played the wind, says the legend. He is blue, blue, blue like the sky like the endless heavens like limitless possibilities. His eyes are always large and brilliant and blue like his hood and garments and the aerial kingdom that he rules. He is always painted with the air moving him, with his hair tousled and his clothes blowing and his feet never on the ground.
He is meant to soar and the ground is unworthy.
Of all the Gods he is the most favoured and the most celebrated. His role was similar to that of the Witch. But while she grew life, he breathed life. He breathed joy and happiness and he breathed love and laughter and he breathed friendship and family and he breathed everything that makes a soul.
But while his breath was bliss, his wind also blew sorrow and heartbreak and betrayal and hurt, and he never knew he blew these things because he was blind. Blinder than the Seer. He is known for not seeing for not knowing, because he breathed emotions but sadness never touched him. His winds blew away his sadness and his pain and it spread across the world, and he breathed happiness but he sent gusts of his sorrow and it is in this way he is the bringer of both pain and joy.
He is the leader of the Gods who could not afford to be sad and cursed the world to bear the burden of his sorrow so that he could rule with a clear head.
He is blue, blue, blue. The sadness that cannot touch him surrounds him and carries him and bears him aloft. He plays the wind but it plays him as well and he is the Pianist of Pain and the Bringer of Joy and the Heir of Breath who inherited the responsibility of the world, and the people and the joy and the sorrow. The God that is both celebrated and pitied.
Blue like the sky and blue like tears he can’t shed.
There is a chapel with a grand mural spanning the entirety of the ceiling. It is a blue and white and it is the Cerulean God of wind in all his glory.
A smart looking gentleman tilts his tophat back as he peers up at it.
I’m sorry I never taught you that it’s okay for men to cry, he says softly, but I’ll always be proud of you, son.
He stands in silence, isolated from the other people there, with their flashing cameras and their awestruck gazes and the drone of the tourguides telling the condensed version of the legend of the Gods to enraptured audiences. One grim-faced lady looks at one of the paintings on the wall, of The Gardener standing in pools of melted snow with an expression that could almost be described as lost.
Do they seem too real to you? She asks the tourguide, frowning slightly. Too human?
The man smiles a little, and shakes his head.
Of course not, he says, gesturing about the church. They are Gods and Legends. Larger than Life.
The man in the tophat stiffens, and he turns around, with the intention of heading outside for a much-needed puff of his pipe.
They were kids that I once knew, he says softly, his hand on the wallet that should contain pictures of a little boy, but does not because in this world the boy is a God.
They were kids that I once knew.
/I can say it, but you won’t believe me. /
He stares at the ancient drawing of a girl with flowing black hair and green eyes sparkling with stars.
She looks like she misses her dog.
The people around him laugh.
They are Gods with the worlds at their fingertips, they say, I’m sure there’s nothing they miss.
He is silent.
/It’s hard to know they’re out there. /
The smoke drifts up into the night air, and the smell burns his nostrils and stings his eyes, but he inhales and squints up at the sky.
I wonder if you’ve died again.
I wonder if you’re dying right now.
He closes his eyes, filled with images of the brother he never had and can no longer protect.
/It’s hard to know that you still care. /
The glass fills, then empties. Then fills again. Her eyes water and redden and her vision glazes over but in her mind she can still see. Her senses are numbed and her speech is slurred but her heart still hurts.
I’m sorry, she sobs, tears running down her cheeks, and she chokes back another drink but the one memory and thought she wants to fog up remains clear and painful.
The daughter she couldn’t stop from falling.
They were kids that I once knew…
He hits a single note on the piano.
They were kids that I once knew.
The sound resonates around the house, in harmony with the laughter of the boy who never lived here.
The son he once knew.
They moved forward, and my heart died.
They moved forward, and my heart died...