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// Ashes, Ashes 
// Story: Autumn 
// by canonkiller 
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     When you were born, did you ever dream? Was it possible for you to see fantasies and hopes when you had not yet known their names or their reasons? Did hope even exist to you, or was it simply that you came to the conclusion that you had a purpose as you grew up? Did you end up aging, believing that in some fateful way, you would find your purpose and be remembered forever? It doesn't work like that. It has never worked like that. Since the dawn began being, not only in the multitude of solar systems in your universe, but in all the universes in an onmiverse, and all the omniverses beyond that, in every single heart, soul and being of every single life form that has ever looked up towards their sun and their moon and their stars and told themselves they would find their purpose, they have all been wrong.
You do not grow into your purpose, just as you do not begin dreaming when you learn words and sights and smells. In the womb you begin dreaming, closing your infantile eyes against the warm blackness and dreaming in colour and sounds and smells, dreaming of trees and meadows, of rainbows and birds, before being born. And after you are born, you realize all the things you dreamed about, in your puerile hopes and thoughts of nameless things which you cannot describe and cannot name, all those beautiful gifts Gaia has bestowed have been replaced by stone and metal and oil, by smog and pollution and orderly rows of chemically grown crops, by airplanes and submaries and cars, by wars and death and famine, and upon noticing your dreams are nothing more than that, you are stunned.
Upon birth, your knowledge of your purpose is eliminated with that sight of industrial spires in the place of towering pines, there is no surprise that you are stunned. In this shocking revelation. you lose everything that Gaia bred into you while you were unborn, and again you must learn her teachings, of speech, art, song, and these take longer to learn amid ironworks and stone fortresses, and so, in time that passes faster every day, you learn. And maybe, with a flash of hope and those colourful, vibrant dreams of your blind, deaf, mute life, as you lie on your deathbed you will remember even a single sliver of one of those indescribable dreams, and will remember how the earth looked before it was mined and corrupted, and in that last breath you take, of stale, empty, worthless air, you will taste the fresh hint of spring grass that used to be, and as that breath fades back out of your body, and your eyes close, as the tears begin falling, as the blood stills in your veins, you will remember your purpose, and you will realize that you have lived up to it or have not, and those who have will feel glory and joy in their final, fading moments, and maybe even those that did not know that because they failed, someone out there succeeded.
And so you do not grow into your purpose, as many believe. You do not begin dreaming only after you see. If we did not dream until we could look around at the populous ruin our earth has become, then our dreams would be filled with gray haze, and our purpose would be hidden in the same. 

This was the unforgiving reality Kha'dighreel had been born into. Through some flaw in the unchanging network of time, he had been created. He was not without form, as many believed, of those who knew of his being, which were few in their entirety. He had form, but it was not that found in mortal or immortal. Even the planets could not create a match for his form. They had attempted replicas, yes, and these replicas varied en masse, but they all shared one feature.
Dreams.
Kha'dighreel did not choose to be above immortality. Sometimes he wished he was mortal, for then his suffering could end. 
How can a being that not only symbolizes but is the eternal overlord have sadness? 
The feeling of sadness exists in levels varying from pain to agony, and between these is devastation, which is loss of material possesion. These are categorized, from mildest to strongest, as pain, painful devastation, devestating pain, devestation, devastating agony, agonizing devastation, agony. Mortals can feel from pain to painful devasation, from losing family or material possesions, not nessecarily in that order. Immortals can feel from pain to devastating agony, from seeing gemerations lost as age slips past, until eventually they have distanced themselves from anything else and age endlessly alone and broken until they disolve into dust under the weight of their own sadness. 
Kha'dighreel existed alone in the plane of agony. Pure, unmarked agony. It is simply impossible for any mortal or immortal to feel sadness on this level. It is not because their troubles are less, but because they cannot understand the grief under the feeling of knowing that now, as your eyes scan this page, someone has died, possibly surrounded by family, possibly alone, and in some omniverse, an entire civilation has been destroyed by simply moving too close to the sun, while another perishes by drifting away. You cannot comprehend knowing that while even immortals fall and are reborn anew, that you have not changed, that you cannot intervene, that you cannot warn of that traitor with the blade, or that snake with the fangs, or that water with the whirlpool, and instead must watch as millions fall. And then you blink an eye, trying to hold back the death that has been assulting your mind, only to see it projected on the inside of your lids, and when you open your eyes you are again surrounded by the dense colourless fog that makes up your universe, while death and destruction ravage your mind and eat away at your soul and purpose, and that unstoppable carnage once again begins, waiting for you to blink again so it can show itself in full ravaging detail until your eyes open once more.
You cannot sleep for these pictures. Your dreams of sunshine and hope and beauty have fallen under swords and guns and bombs long ago, and when you do sleep, the only peace you can wish for is a gruesome stalemate in some war, for a few blissful moments of precious silence, before the guns are loaded again and the shots ring out in their deadly cacophony. 
You do not understand even now, as moments forgotten are written in words that simply cannot describe even a single one of these moments, for the words themselves have lost their meanings through translation, as only eyes can see, and words cannot live up to the senses you have been gifted with. Look around you right now, take a break from this text. You do not have to move from where you are, just simply lift your head and look around, and find something to describe. Think of a few aquedate words, and say them out loud. Red? Scarlet? Crimson? These simply do not show the difference between the brilliant orange-red-pink-yellow-light of a sunset or the dark, pooling black-red of blood, simply because there are no words, no alignment of letters in any written or spoken language, that mean these colours or scents or sounds, and these missing words cannot be filled in because no mere letter can write them and picture them clearly.
You cannot tell another of your dreams because of this. Whether it be a nightmare or a blissful, sleeping heaven, noone else will feel the same fear or happiness that you felt, because words like fear and happiness simply do not begin to explain, and not amount of adjectives will aid in that glorious lack of description.
And there is a reason words like that have not been invented.

It is because one day, Kha'dighreel's eyes will open again after blinking, and instead of endless gray fog, they will see ashes and fire and blood - blood from the earthen form he now has - and dappled light and he will smell fear and hate and death, and will hear laughing and metal creaking and muffled cries, and he will not be able to describe them in a personal fear that words simply will not do.
So he does not speak.