TCE 34--Enough

Alright. So right now I am multi-tasking like a sunnofagun, and only have a chance to post the opening of my Chrysalis story. I'll be taking a rather liberal view of the prompt, but I tried three different (indeed, completely different) stories, and they all fell flat on their, uh, faces. Not that they have any. Faces, I mean. Whatever. And here we are...

Anyway, I shall be posting several things today, including the next portions of this story, so if you happen across this, and it's all nice and titled and happy and shiny with completion, count yourself lucky. Everybody else, sorry! ~ 

LATER EDIT: Very unhappy with the end. MrAAaaaghHH!

TCE prompt: "The first time I walked into that classroom was also the last."

Enough

 Sometimes, there are situations that cannot be avoided. Conditions that ought to have been foreseeable, but weren’t. Waste that could have been restrained. Creatures to whom we never should have owed allegiance.


Existence is a tricky sort of situation.

I knew what the priest had done; heard the hushed suggestions to his master. Enough, he said. End them, he whispered. Forsake them all! With them, you shall never be at rest. Priest did not recall the echoes that abound in the vast halls and chambers of our Mother. His master heard him, yes. But so did others. So did I.

I did not necessarily think Priest was twisted or evil, but I did note the effect his sewn discord reaped. It was moments—or would that be years, or ages?—before we were assembled on the great battlefield, to make war against She-Who-Created-Us. But we had grown in power just as she. Our sons and daughters had wrought more havoc upon the inner plains of our Mother’s body than even she could have imagined; cyclones that were so destructive they formed a raucous music within their circling. And then we were born a king, strong, and goodly—when he could be—and true.

We are just the bastard children of her first consummation. Her first born, her first castaways, for we had killed her Consort, lest he destroy us all. She wielded vengeance as a tool for upheaval. Her minions, foul of face and limb, putrid to every sense and more, fed off her rage. They were called the Eleven Princes, by their side in truth, and by our side, in horror. For they were sent to destroy us.

This is the tale of the Battle, and of the time and that which was not time, which followed.


###


Deep thunder shook the cavern surrounding, there, at the center of all things. There was no darkness. There was no light. And from the between, over the clamor of the many voices, the King threw his voice, beginning as he always did:

“My brothers and sisters, my sons and my daughters,
Too long have we suffered the wrath of our Mother,
Now Her army of royal terrors. See the fangs,
They drip with poisonous blood! See too the scales
Wrought as tough as rock, shining with unholy light,
Spanning the coiled lengths of those twisted bodies!
See their hate, their pride-ridden grins, ‘longside Mother?
It is She who leads us all to doom! She who laughs
At the mighty that fall beneath her gaze and wings!
And shall we quake before her thund’rous rage?
And shall we let her love of chaos reign supreme?
And shall we be enslaved?”


We cried aloud for the King, cried and screamed and the battle rage climbed through us, and he continued:


“No! We shall not shrink from our ordained destruction!
We shall not cower in fear! We shall not bemoan
That which awaits us one and all in our battle!
For we shall smite them, one and all, with righteous ire!
We shall fall upon them; rip that which is putrid
From their very bones! We shall taste the sweet, sweet doom
Of victory; remake our destinies ourselves!
And then I, King of Us All, shall rip the Mother
In two, and fashion a land and a sky from Her,
Where we might dwell in peace! Now let them hear our voice!
Let them shake at our battle cry in the thunder!
Here, at the beginning of beginnings!”


And so we marched to war, to create an end and a beginning, and to go where we knew we should never go again.

Between our ranks and Hers stretched an expanse of valleys and pits, alternated with sharp crags. King roared; we roared with him, and the pound of our feet over the sharp terrain caused rocks to loosen and roll from the craggy peaks. She stood behind the line, flicking that forked tongue over her fangs, dripping; smiling. Their general, a vast and undulating serpent-like creature with numerous clawed arms, thumped one of his many swords to one of his many shields. King roared again, and rushed at General, sword held high, and we followed. We followed.

The hacking began. From each limb we tore a blood that sizzled spewed, and where the drops of it fell, all writhed with pain. Still, we followed our King. The bodies of our kind clashed into the line, climbing the great, sinuating bodies , hewing them when we could. Sometimes it we fought one to one, sometimes we crawled upon them in numbers that covered their visage from Mother entirely, and all that could be heard were their sinister squeals. I remember looking to my left; many of my kindred lay aground, hacked beyond existence. I looked to my right; there too were the broken avatars of my family. But we were winning. We were winning.

The twilight surrounding grew thick with the stench and smoke of war, and at last there was none left opposing us, save for Mother. Those of us remaining stepped back from the battle field, and King, almost unrecognizable from the festering blood that bubbled over him, threw back his head and howled at her, and She laughed. But what She did not see was that the blood he had bathed in was not his own, and power shined through him as he pitched himself against her. Her laugh took on a terrible, fearsome, high note, and for a space of many moments, we children held what is now called silence—but in those days, there existed no word for it, for it had never existed before.

And then he did as he had foretold, and tore her body clean in two. With it, the battle field and twilight—and all of us the battle had not taken—dissolved into Nothingness.


###


There came the first sunrise. 

There came the knowledge of light, of color. Of shadow. Of the sun which made light and color and shadow. It strode across our brand new skies, high above our heads.  We lay down in what had suddenly came to be a field, thick with blades of shimmering light--the first grasses. It tickled my back; it crunched under me, but in a soft way.  The blood shed during the Battle had made the feild rich. 

As we lay there, catching what we came to know as breath, gulping the plant fumes into our bodies, tufts of brightness chased the sun across the sky. Then the sun fell, and came the moon, and the grassy soil beneath us cooled, and we knew that there would be sounds, some night, that rose and fell and rose and fell again, along with the sun and moon; the sounds of the creatures of life. But that would come later. For the time and space of being, that is all we did. We lay and formed the world around us, and the world formed us, and we each formed without and because of the other. I had but a moment of curiousity, a moment of disbelief, but we all were too tired and sad, and I let it pass.

It is not known for how long we lay as the cosmos and the world came to order. But one grey, dewy sunrise, I saw a moment far down the field, in a shallow knoll. King had stood, and he stretched, and stretched, and stretched ... as if he would pluck the sun from our beautiful sky. It looked so agreeable that soon, we all stood, feeling ourselves in our environment, actively interacting, for the first time.

The talking began; there was a great deal of it. Too much to encompass now. But we all wished--we all knew--the beautiful, peaceful world should teem with life. One by one, the followers were brought into existence. Creatures that lived  under the soil, and on the soil, and upon the plants, and in the air, and through the water; all sniffing and wriggling and making life. But the beauty did not yet teem.

That chaos to which we had grown so accustomed during our long years inside Mother; it too has a kind of beauty, and that beauty, like all others, deserves homage. And so King gathered us all, and we thought and thought. Finally, the Children of the Frrst Children were created, and they filled the world, filled it until it screamed with life; our prayer of forgiveness to She-Who-Created-Us. Such social, curious, random creatures. Their love of chaos makes all the other sniffling and wriggling and life-making dim in comparison. 

What little we could pass on was enough; they see the sun rise, and the moon rise, and the hurricanes and tempests, and the things which crawl and fly and swim upon the earth, and that is enough, as well.