“This is folly on a scale undreamt of. The only reason we will not be remembered as the most foolish beings to have every walked this world is that there will be no one left to remember us at all.”
“You’re very likely correct, but, tell me, aren’t you still just too curious to pass up the chance?”
“The chance to cast down the divine? The chance to become what they are? I was curious to see how the Divine Codex ruled out such madness, but not that we stand on the precipice of annihilation and it’s clear that the Codex offers no protection against such folly? No, no I am not curious at all. I am terrified. As you should be. As all of the others should be. Why would you risk so much? What you seek cannot be worth the sacrifice.”
“I just want to know. I have to.”
– High Accessor Beildan, who was planned to be the 14th Neoteric Lord but was cast down before the Sunfall and High Accessor Helgon who cast him down.
I, occasionally, make bad decisions. They, always, have unpleasant consequences. In that sense, it wasn’t surprising that my latest bad decision, which was probably the absolute worst decision of my life, had commensurately the least pleasant consequences of any I’d experienced to date.
But that was a good thing.
By all rights, the consequences I faced for opening my body, mind, and soul to the beast that had devoured gods should have been too instantaneous to present any problem for me at all. I am, as many have observed, not large. The amount of time it would take something which can damage a god to obliterate me could also be described as not large.
Rather than being obliterated though, I was merely melting and exploding and burning and many other conditions for which I’m pretty sure there were no words in any language for.
The key though is that I “was”. I existed. Granted that didn’t seem much better than being a “had once been” or a “was no longer”, but in hindsight at least, I’m glad that I continued existing. For as terrible as existence was in the eternity of those moments, it was still worth it to reach what was beyond them. I knew that even when I knew nothing else and, looking back, there were a bunch of time in my life when I hadn’t been able to say that when facing consequences that were far less severe.
Probably shows how much I’ve grown as a person. I mean, not in wisdom. That’s right off the table. But, you know, in other ways. Grownup ways.
If it seems like I’m not fond of remembering those moments and that I’m talking around them, I would have to offer congratulations on accurate perceptiveness. When I say it really was not fun being mingled with the beast, I am only understating things because words, as a concept, cannot manage a proper statement of how bad it was.
The important thing to know though is that all of the cosmic miserableness eventually faded. Or maybe ‘faded’ isn’t exactly the right word? It’s probably more accurate to say that from a non-physical, fractured conceptual state each mote of my being found a path back to the rest over the course of several trillion lifetimes, and that what I’d once was retained enough resonance to stitch together something that was a vague approximation of what I was still given that time is an illusion and the point in time when the whole process began was the same as the eternity through which it persisted and the singularity of sensation where it met its final expression. Honestly though, that sounds like nonsense to me even as I try to fit the words I stole from Sola together to make sense of it.
Where things start coming back into a frame that I am capable of describing (somewhat) is when I saw the star.
The star wasn’t Sola. I knew that right away. Which was impressive in its own right since knowing anything after your being was blown to agonized dust that stretched across the cosmos is a feat even the gods didn’t manage. Not that I’m bragging or anything. I’m sure they put up good fights. It’s no reflection on them that I put up a better one.
Yes, I know I’m going to pay for that, but since I’d already fallen to the depths of creation and then below even that, I wasn’t too worried about how much further pride might be able to knock me down. I may have mentioned the lack of wisdom thing already?
Anyways, the star.
Sola was, or had been part of, the sun. Thanks to understanding her, if even just a little bit, I knew the sun was a star like the ones I’d never seen in our empty sky. I also knew what a star was and had a borrowed memory of the blazing grandeur the night sky had once possessed. Sola’s view of it had been a bit different than mine would have been, encompassing colors and motions that were outside my ability to perceive. Even with a far more limited view though, I could tell it had been beautiful.
The star in front of me was different. For one thing it was tiny. Stars are supposed to incomparably huge, far bigger than my entire world. This one however was smaller than me. Also, it was in pain. Which I could sympathize with.
I was pulling myself back together still at that point, regrounding the disparate bits of my soul and identity into the body which remained solid despite my foolishness. I feel its important to note though that the ‘ground’ I found myself standing on was not any part of the world I lived in, so my ‘grounding’ lacked the comfortable stability something like an avalanche might offer. The space around me wasn’t a part of my reality either. The body that I wore? Also not exactly real. What I was experiencing was more what I knew I should be experiencing and who I should be experiencing it as. I was Little and until that changed Little’s body was mine.
If that sounds like I wasn’t put together quite right, that would be correct. Reassembling myself from disparate motes of confused soul essence was not something I was even vaguely capable of. But I didn’t have to be. Sola was with me and I was with her. What I couldn’t do, she was more than capable of, and what she couldn’t be, I was more than ready to embody.
We’d assembled me enough though that I was able to start walking towards the star. There was no road, but there didn’t need to be one. Not in that space at least.
I didn’t have a plan exactly. I wasn’t put together enough again to manage that, but I knew something was wrong there and I knew that running away was going to make it worse.
Which felt weird.
Running away was really my strong suit.
But I wasn’t going to run away this time.
And I remembered why.
Zeph.
Was she still there to be saved? Did I honestly think I could save her? Maybe? I’d been lost inside the beast from the moment it devoured me, but I thought, or hoped, that I’d held its attention by not becoming the food it wanted me to be.
Being inside the beast had created a form of communion between us, one neither of us wanted. I’d been bombarded with perspectives and understanding and visions of things that I wasn’t equipped to handle. I’d thought at the time that if I took them in I might be able to find a path to the other side, to someplace where I could comprehend what the beast truly was and understand what we needed to do to fight it. I’d been gambling on the durability that being a real part of the world had seemed to provide me.
Had that worked? Not really.
Had it had unforeseen consequences though? Oh, most definitely.
The creature I was reassembled, the ‘me’ that I knew, wasn’t exactly the ‘me’ that I’d been before. Which was okay. People change all the time. Whether we want to or not, everything we experience shapes us and alters who were are and who we can be. Most of the changes do not involve no longer being entirely sure which parts of you remain from your mortal life and which parts have become reflections of the beast.
To be fair to me, it wasn’t the least rational thought that, if it was going to eat me, I should bite it too. Ratkin do have pretty decent chompers so biting things that are a danger to us is a perfectly reasonable response.
Not the correct one it turned out.
At least not if I wanted to remain exactly who I had been.
That’s not the unforeseen consequence which captured my attention though. It was the star I hadn’t foreseen, and which I was sure the beast hadn’t guessed would happen either.
Before we met, the beast was nothing more than a fragment of an entity which was lost to an endless abyss of hunger. I knew hunger, not as deeply as the beast did, so absorbing it’s hunger wasn’t revelation for me. It absorbed something from me though, and that broke it.
Because I was broken.
Not as a new thing, or the result of what the beast had done. That was simply who I was. Little, a small and broken Ratkin girl. I hadn’t thought anything about it. Everyone breaks and we all carry on. It didn’t make me special to be a shattered mess who still got up and dealt with the day before me.
The beast though didn’t understand what it had taken. It hadn’t understood that it was broken. That it had always been broken, even before it was fragmented from its larger self.
I wasn’t exactly myself anymore after drowning in the beast, but, unbelievably, it wasn’t exactly itself anymore either.
And that was the star.
I drew close enough to step inside it and found the beast waiting for me.
It was laying down within a chamber of brilliant light, it’s body fully furred in the dark colors of ash and cinders.
It stirred when it saw me and opened its jaws to show the terrible teeth it retained.
It didn’t speak, it hadn’t absorbed that much from me, but it did fix me with the stare of its soot dark eyes.
And then it whimpered.
It was broken. It always had been. But from me it understood what that meant. I’d shown it what it meant to be weak, to be powerless, to be Little. Quite reasonably, it hated the idea. It should have hated me too, but it didn’t.
I should have hated it right back, but I didn’t.
“You didn’t know, did you?” I asked.
Because it hadn’t.
I didn’t understand it like I did Sola, and I could barely remember anything of the time we’d been mingled together, but my brain had room for a few small revelations.
“They called you here, and you came because you’d already destroyed your home,” I said, not as condemnation, though destroying a world would have been a reasonable thing to condemn it for, but as a measure of understanding.
Because I did understand.
The beast wasn’t real. Not in the sense that I was. It had been though. In its own reality it had been as solid and real as I was. Until it had destroyed everything there.
Why?
Because it’s reality sucked. Or so it had believed.
Which I understood. If I could have wiped the world clean of all life, there had been plenty of times when I would have done so.
But not anymore. Not since I’d felt Sola’s love for all of us. Whatever else I believed, I knew that there were people out there worth preserving the world for.