I had long since discovered a force, a reservoir of thoughts and truths through which I had previously gained my ability to create life alone and to take solid form. I was now to return to it, to delve further than I had dared before.
This force was a link we Divines share with the world. We used it to learn what we knew, to surface the answers within ourselves and to awaken our power. To reach it was no path for feet but one of trance. And it was a dangerous and painful one to endure.
Once I had found a spot removed from any and all that would disturb me I fell to my knees and felt myself sink inward. I do not know for how long I remained in this state, but never did I intend to stop, not until I had what I’d come for.
My pain only filled me with a thirst for theirs. I would not be sated until I drank from the river of their blood. They would fall, and I would watch.
I felt my body begin to to change the deeper I went. I permitted it—that my body was becoming a grotesque monstrosity mattered little to me. I let myself grow long and serpentine, and all down my body my skin was coated with scales of a shade I had grown quite attached to: crimson. The color of blood.
More importantly, I learned what I was. I was chaos. I was distruction.
I was Discord.
And more, I found my cure, my vengence. I found a plague, a most curious curse of contradiction that once unleashed would only kill that which could not die. Their fall would not be enough. The world they made would also taste my claw. The land would quake and rupture. The sky would rain bright flames. The sea would storm and the forests burn. More, I released unto the world the cockatrice, the manticore, the dragon, and all other monstrous being my hatred could conceive.
But then came something I hadn’t expected. My masterpieces from before united to fend off the onslaught of creatures, and thrived where they should have been extinguished.
And then came something stranger still. As the Unicorns and the Pegusai fell victim to the Blight they called to my own beings for aid. The Beasts’ offered them their blessings so that their legacy might live on through them.
Those who received the wings of the Pegusai became the Seraphim and were given the ability to shape weapons and armor from the very clouds, which were solid to them and where they made their homes. The greater refinements of knowledge were eventually lost to them, but they served as the ideal protectors of the society they formed with the others.
Those that came to the Unicorns were given their magic in the form of a mark like that of the Makers’. Over the years their studies and practice took their toll on their bodies. They withered physically but emerged as scholars and artists. These, the Starcrest, would give the grand society the culture it needed to unite the races.
But those who did not answer the call, the Earthbound, were strong enough to farm, and skilled enough to invent tools for whatever challenge they faced. Moreover, it was they that retained best that with which I had endowed them. They were beings to whom fate was a mere suggestion. They constantly spat in the face of destiny: if their future ever seemed set in stone, it was their right to break the stone. It was their pattern to break patterns. They could learn seemingly without limit; their trade was by no means their identity. Their name betrayed them—they were in truth the most liberated, most inconceivable of them all.
I emerged from the will of wisdom to find that two of the Makers had survived—and none other than My Lady Fair and Her Closest. It had been for their necklaces, no doubt, their instruments for commanding the great globes above.
They came for me. The three of us crossed deserts, plains, oceans. They healed the land in my wake as quickly as I could ravish it. I was denied even a moment’s pause. My divinity kept me conscious, but I tired beyond fatigue. But that was hardly the worst of it. Their unfailing precision in regulating the sun and moon all the while was the true thorn in my side. Knowing they could give chase and perform their obligations with no sign ever of faltering at either while I struggled to keep moving was true agony. And more, I knew that this was a battle I could not win. It was only a matter of time.
If I could not run, I would hide. Beyond a forest I found a single mountain, and in its face, a cave.
The tunnel ran deeper than I’d expected. Always one bend after another. It was tight in places, despite my slender shape, and I was grateful my body could lose its tangibility where I needed it to.
I do not know how far I went, but I stopped when I heard a faint noise ahead of me. I felt my appearance might not have been appropriate for whatever may lie ahead as even the largest of chambers I’d passed could hardly contain me as it was. I decided in favor of the form in replica of the Makers. The change was not too difficult, though it felt unnatural, like slipping into a costume.
I peered around the unhewn wall into the next chamber. The glow from a diffuse light overhead shone on a dark, curled figure that seethed raspy breaths as it quivered. It took me the longest time to recognize her, but once I did, she was unmistakable: it was the pitiful one from before. It was Astrid.
I proceeded into the chamber with caution, as not to startle her. Her robes, while full of holes, were still in one piece, though when she saw me she froze as though I’d seen her naked.
She was different now, in a way almost frightening to behold. Her skin was hard and plated, dark with a sickly green shimmer. Her slitted eyes and matted hair shone the same unsettling shade. Her wings had lost their feathers, leaving only the tattered membranes.
Her new cheeks were smeared with blood. Her eyes fell shamefully to the rabbit she held, opened at the belly with tooth and nail.
She saw I craved explanation. She stood and said to me, “This is mostly of my own doing. I know you know me as the one with no title, she with no achievement to her name. When I realized all my efforts to leave some mark of my existence on the world around me were doomed never to bear fruit, I sought other means to make my life of at least some consequence, some value. I’d hoped that I’d be chosen to bear the sun or the moon, that I’d be given some responsibility or purpose, but no. They were given to them. They’d earned them.
“I saw then I had but one option. How do you make something worthless priceless? Same as the Makers did with their creatures: make it precious. Ask not how I made it so, but know that my life now has its limits.”
I saw it was true. She lacked the glow of the rest of them. I wondered how she could be brought to such measures. Not even my pain would drive me so far.
But then I checked myself. There was a time where I had known bliss, but here was one who had only ever known suffering.
“Strangely,” she continued, “it was the only way of escaping your Blight, it seems. I could die, therefore it could not kill me, is that correct? Still, it was not without its effects. What you see of me is the result of your curse.”
Just then a thought occurred to me. It wasn’t much yet, but it was quickly growing. “Do you resent me for it?” It felt strange to ask, but I had to know where she stood.
“Resent you? What for? If by that you meant for ridding me of those that had what I never could, I’ll hardly miss them. Else, if you meant this new form, then it is but the price I pay to be free of them.”
“Then,” my thoughts were reeling, “do you you resent them?”
“Them? With the moon and sun? They yet live?”
“And are after me as we speak. Please, would you help me against them, against those that have it all while you hide here with nothing?”
She hesitated before answering. “And how could I be of any help to you?”
“There is something more to you,” I told her. “Something dormant. Something I can see that you cannot. Something,” she gave a start as I reached for her collar, “I must show you.”
In an instant we were together in the well of secrets, and in another we were as we were. We had only glanced its surface.
“What have you found?” she asked, but her eyes told me she already knew.
I took her hand in mine and folded it, then unfolded it again. I felt a fine, iridescent powder collect in my palm. “Follow me,” I said, and took her by the arm into the next chamber.
It was enormous, by far the biggest I’d seen. The top retreated into the darkness and out of view. The floor was comfortably level. If any part could be called the heart of the mountain, it would be here.
I tossed the powder against the face of the rock wall, and it clung like moss. Green clumps of phosphorescence collected into buds and started to pulse with early life.
I looked to Astrid, and she obeyed. She paced around the walls, spreading the spores where she could reach. Then she stepped to the center of the room, and as she threw up her arms a great torrent of wind carried the spores up to the ceiling and all exposed areas of the stone surface.
“Your curse has been that not one of your beings would ever take form,” I told her. “Now you shall have an army of beings, each of a thousand forms. And you shall be their queen. With them, you can help me with my plan.”
“And what is that? What do you expect of me to do?”
“For now, only wait. Wait for my return.”
“And when would that be?”
“Not for many, many years to come. How long will you last?”
Again, she hesitated. “There is... something more to me. Beyond food and drink, I need something else to sustain me, and I feel these new creatures will be the same. We will live so long as we can feed off the goodwill of those around us. These were the terms of my mortality, and those I have accepted. With things as they are I can barely sustain myself. There could not possibly be enough to go around for as long as you say.”
This complicated matters, to be sure, but more, I could feel my pursuers’ presence at the surface. They had found me. I could almost laugh.
I was ready.
I did not warn her I was about to change between my forms. She gasped as I grew to fill the room, and screamed when I snatched her from the ground. A thin, green membrane spread between my claws and enveloped her.
“Just wait,” I told her. She beat against the walls of the enclosure, but her eyes soon rolled back in her head and she stopped struggling altogether. I released the encasement, and it held itself suspended in the air. “Sleep, and wait. I will return.”
I rushed up through the tunnel to the surface, all the while brimming with joy. I knew what would happen. I could hardly wait. I emerged to find them waiting for me. I did not resist.
I surveyed the land below us. It was the twilight hour. The first stars of the night were waking and the last rays of the sun fleeing, spreading a palette of colors across the clouds. My lungs drank in the taste of evening forest air. Creatures would be retreating to their shelters now. It could be heard in the silence that the world was preparing itself for rest, all with the promise of the morning to come. I savored the moment while it lasted, and found I had fallen in love, as I had before, with this time and this world.
And I simply could not wait to see it fall.
They knew they could not destroy me. They could only imprison me where I could be kept under watchful eye, but to keep me with Her would be an undue sentence on both our parts. Instead I would be sealed away into the necklace of She of the Moon.
The process was unspeakably painful, like losing your body an inch at a time to searing ice. I could feel my very being recede from its extremities as it was pulled from my body, leaving behind only stone. And all the while I could not help but remember how much more She had hurt me before.
And it was all according to plan. I could no longer contain myself. Despite the pain I felt I could burst into song; and I did. Yes, I sang, for all it was worth!
But I could only manage one note before my lungs were left as stone.