~ a short story
“Great volumes of water serve as a bulwark guarding sleep, and an augur of the eldritch Truth. Overcome this hindrance, and seek what is yours.”
~ Caryll, runesmith of Byrgenwerth
Father finally brought me to see the fire.
Waves of entropy lapped at the boy god’s feet. As far as his eyes could see there was a horizon of darkness being thunderstruck with the stars and stripes of invincible power made manifest. Distant clouds engulfed the formless void with the steam of creation.
Father’s fire ignited a new realm into being. Its first light nearly blinded.
Now, they both inhaled with grins as wide as the infinite sky they’d descended from.
“What do you want to do first, son?” Father asked with a persona of stern reservation he’d never dropped.
The boy was speechless. For the first time, the reins were his.
How do you make a world?
“Where you start determines everything else.”
Father’s words patronized and annoyed; he remembered the maxim. Cornerstones and primacies. Original casts couldn’t help but become entrenched empires. A world’s oldest scars would more than likely write its ending fate.
The boy giggled and began to waggle his fingers. Oceans roiled and roared to animation. Foam and mist wafted along self-sustaining currents. An axis of flow birthed and churned and summoned the deep. Cycles commenced.
Father frowned but the boy kept going. He dug trenches in the earth with his fingernails and exhaled twilight into the ruddy, aquatic spaces left behind.
Father grumbled but the boy proceeded. With a great heaving breath, he clapped his hands together. Soundscapes across the globe crackled into organized physis. The sharp stone betwixt his palms ruptured vessels under soft skin. The boy’s blood dripped into the waves and trickled down the expanses of the oceanic canyons.
Father held his breath and the boy cackled. The crimson gloom of melding nature and life swept along the waves, seeping throughout the world’s watery surface, and far, far below into the impossible depths the young man crafted in a thoughtless flash.
The boy’s eyes betrayed his heart and fell upon the stars above; Father sighed in understanding.
“Too much blood. A drop will do. You invoke the Elders? On your first try. Hubris…” Father lamented, his mirth turned sheepish and ambivalent. He’d not told the boy everything for his own good; he’d never admit to the very real unknowns. This was foolish. But he’d let the boy learn. They’d learn together, just as he always hoped for.
Now, they’d wait. But not for too long, to the surprise of the older and satisfaction of the younger.
Eyes on those glittering constellations, Father tensed in a primal, unconscious fear while his boy trembled with enough excitement not to notice.
To affirm the wild choice as much to put his own nerves at ease, Father placed a delicate hand on his boy’s shoulder in solidarity. His first act of tender fatherhood was an ironic omen, a presage to coming horrors beyond their comprehension.
~
More than a myth, the letting of so much godsblood would surely draw them out. Those inexplicable omnivores from odd realms far beyond Father’s nightmares.
Them. Reapers and sowers of only the most sickly of realities, lacunae lovers hungry for more mind and matter than their own dimension could ever service.
Them. Beings so starved for spirit, so comprehensive in their hunt, so fattened on the flesh of men and monsters alike that they’d only ever stayed one single step ahead of entropy itself, despite their many masteries.
Them. They’d ALL come for the boy god’s nutrient-rich blood, leaving half-eaten eons in their wake.
Them. They’d arrive soon to shape and rupture this world into proper amusement for a man and child so spoiled with endlessness that they’d forgotten who created them. ~
