So It Came To Be

Pardat sighed as he leaned over the body laying in the growing field of white around them. This had been his wife, Fadwa, who stood beside him since the first light of time. She had been an Archangel, a being of radiance and power, as Pardat himself was a Titan, an archetype of Reality through whom the principles of creation flowed. Together they had walked side by side, footfalls leaving imprints in the fabric of Reality to make realms which would become as dreams, and dreams which would birth stories for those who had created them.

Now, he stood and surveyed what there was to see. From Fadwa’s breast flowed a seemingly endless pool, pristinely white and bitter in death. Salt, he thought, giving name to it, and it pooled from her as far as the horizon. The curious, the cowardly, the hungry and the powerful would come to lay claim to what was left of Fadwa, and Pardat intended to be ready to receive them when the time came. Intent, he set gentle hands to work crafting the last of her great gifts.

The first to arrive were the Djinn, ephemeral dancing winds of spice and magic that whipped the salt into a fury. They moved as one, as a host of many, each individual Djinn spinning to the dance of the collective mind of their shared dreams. When they fell upon Fadwa’s corpse Pardat was waiting for them, and he cast a net he had crafted from Fadwa’s hair, its black luster dulled to a matte, dim, soullessness in death. Iron, he thought, as he had of Salt; these new-named things born of his beloved, new and unique as they were inevitable. This net was Iron.

Its cold, ruthless weight bore onto the Djinn as though it were made of law. A fury and terror stormed within the iron mesh as the power of all elements combined sought escape from the icy sting of their prison. Those Djinn not trapped within attacked from without, swirling as lightning and wind and storm across the surface, to no effect. As he tied the net closed, Pardat anchored it to the heaviest thing he had ever had to lift. The Titan was used to the burden of carrying destiny itself upon his shoulder, but the weight of his chosen anchor surpassed even that: the heart of his beloved, cold and stone dead. He dropped it to the salt and it sank below, with the cacophony of Djinn spinning a mighty maelstrom as they tried with helpless desperation to escape their fate. Eventually it all disappeared beneath the white, a receding glow which vanished ever deeper below.

Underfoot the blood of Fadwa bound and sealed itself around her broken heart, entombing the forces of nature into the heart of the newmade sphere. All fell inward, tightening ever closer, pressing harder until the net at its center was a crystal of power encased around the black heart. Without, the storming Djinn melted the rest to hot, volatile slag and Fadwa, though dead, dull in her demise, began to glow again as a beacon of strange power. More would come, and Pardat waited in heavy contemplation.

Next was Imra, who was Fadwa’s brother, his kin and beloved friend. Imra descended from the firmament on wings which danced into infinity, a kaleidoscope of light, eyes, and feathers which spanned chaos and order in equal measure. “Pardat, my brother,” he said, in a voice like colliding stars, “What is this place, how have you come to be here? And where,” he beseeched, a note of despair which hammered on Pardat’s heart, “is my sister Fadwa?”

In answer, Pardat tilted his head to one side sadly, his eyes glowing with compassion and regret. Without a word, he stooped into the salt at his feet, and collected two handfuls of the molten light into his palms. Imra looked on in confusion, horror dawning on his face as Pardat reached around to embrace his brother, stroking the molten slag down across the other’s back, burning away the anchors to the Archangel’s wings. The echo of Imra’s scream boiled the voidstuff around Fadwa’s heart with the force of a shuddering universe. His wings collapsed into themselves and exploded outward into Reality in an unfathomable array of possibilities, piercing the things they touched with new ideas, dreams, and nightmares. Imra fell to his hands and knees in the molten sea, flayed of his power and rendered alone in a way he had never known before, a dull and rasping singular voice demanding: “Why?”

Pardat cupped Imra’s face with a gentle hand, pressing his forehead to the Archangel’s for a long moment. When he pulled back, he laid a gentle hand on Imra’s face, then wedged a thumb into the corner of the eye which swirled in agony and terror at Imra’s mid-brow. The sensation disturbingly familiar to Pardat, who shed silent tears of leaden metal as he worked Imra’s Second Sight out of its socket, tugging it free with a deft snap while Imra screamed a helpless, lonesome howl. The Titan then sifted fingers through the sand at his knees and pulled up a new eye—one of Fadwa’s, right where it needed to be—then pressed it into the void in Imra’s face. Pardat absently popped Imra’s stolen eye into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully, while memories and forbidden knowledge flowed between them.

At length, the fallen Archangel stopped struggling, half-buried in the sea of molten blood which had once belonged to his sibling. He remembered her death, as he remembered much of her life, that which this other eye had seen, known, and recalled. He knew what she had learned in the moments before, and even after Pardat had pierced her side, and though the pain was immense, Imra stilled and looked up at his would-be murderer with pity.

“I can see what must be done, brother, beloved.” he rasped, “But I fear I cannot do what’s needed alone. This is your task to take on. Know that we forgive you.” He reached out, as if to embrace Pardat, who did not move to meet him. “Know that we are sorry.”

Fadwa’s eye looked up at him from her twin’s face, paralyzing the Titan with its gaze. When Pardat did not respond for a long time, Imra finally pulled himself up, locking eyes with the Titan. Imra smiled, gently taking his slayer’s hand, and placed it against his chest where the thrum of Maker’s power still burned hot. He nodded and bowed his head, and a painless instant later, Pardat was holding Imra’s heart in his hand. New Archangel blood fountained up from the body to mingle with the hot white salt of this new world. Imra’s was rich and black where Fadwa’s had been white and radiant, riddled and clotted with veins of texture and density and substance. This is Earth, Pardat thought, as patches began to cool and boil in cycles, pushing up the surface around him until finally, Imra’s blood ran dry.

Through the ages, others came, and Pardat killed each in turn. Some became the skies, and others the seas, some became the skin over the molten magma of Imra’s blood, their felled bodies writhing across the surface as drifting continents. Pardat’s own sister, Eleanara, came seeking not power, not Imra nor Fadwa, but her brother who she had lost in the eons since he began this work. His sibling was as glorious as he remembered, and more powerful than he in his fallen state. She’d found him him still striding the world he’d crafted from the dead of their shared pantheon in her full glory, and he would not have been able to strike her down even if the work demanded it, so it was fortunate that she was not one of those he needed to accomplish the ends which demanded such cataclysmic means.

She did, however, upon sharing his dreams as she brought night to their restless world, see fit to leave an eye of her own behind. Always watching, caring, turning about the night sky overhead as it danced with Pardat’s world, the silvery sphere of her gaze soothed those restlessly bound into the work so much that they reached up for her in her passing, bringing tides and temper to the land and seas below.

The last of those to come was the great bull, Sorvos, who had been foretold so long before in Fadwa’s visions. Sorvos, who was a Destroyer from outside of Reality. Sorvos, who came to consume all Creation, all Time, all stories, to bring an ending to the very notion that something might be. “Beware Sorvos,” she had told him, as she held his hand around the strange ice-black shard which had given them these visions of what was to come. She had guided him to her heart, much as Imra had, knowing she could not do what must be done herself. “He will kill you, beloved. But you will do what must be done before that happens.”

Sorvos had consumed Gods and Titans, entire universes, entire histories, before coming upon Pardat, who had set a tempting lure with the blood of the fallen powers he had bound here, as this was a world of endings, the dead waiting patiently to be given over to oblivion.

When Sorvos and Pardat faced off, it was on a great plain, a desert whose sand was a mix of white salt and black earth, flecked through with elements of Pardat’s blood and the power and substance of countless other gods. The Great Bull was immense, six legged, with horns that brushed the top of the sky as it reared, eleven eyes blazing as an inverted Sefirot. This creature was unmaking made manifest, embodied as the laws of the slain here impressed their dead power on the bindings Pardat had spent his fallen life etching into the nature of this world. It snorted, and the storm stilled, as Djinn perished or fled.

If Pardat had been outmatched by Eleanara, he was dwarfed by Sorvos, and it was but a matter of time before the bull claimed its kill. Pardat, however, had a trick up his sleeve, and he cast the heart of Imra overhead, thrumming still with Maker’s power, and Sovros lunged for the bait. The Great Bull trampled him mercilessly, but was focused on the heart, and its horns failed to gore him. As Sorvos passed over him, Pardat rallied his desperate will, knowing this was the moment beloved Fadwa had seen for him, and leapt high into the air, landing astride Sorvos’s back.

Pardat thrust with the ice-black shard of stolen prophecy which he’d used to kill Fadwa an eternity before. It pierced easily, sticking into Sorvos’ spine, eliciting a howl so powerful that it shocked all it touched out of sync, creating umbral mirrors and shadowlands to reflect their corporeal partners. This time the bull’s horns caught Pardat square across the chest, throwing him far across the desert, skipping like a stone.

The heart of Imra fell, but Sorvos’s howl had changed it to a star of roiling darkness, sinking into the otherworld where it landed. The Bull of Annihilation might rampage forever, but between them the fallen here had crafted a trap that could hold even he. Pardat now became the beginning of a timeless set of tales as life sprang from his blood, now spilling across his world. Those who died would pass into Imra’s realm to be sheltered from annihilation until they could be reborn through the spinning heart of Fadwa, her essence sheltering them from him through all time.

Sorvos might seek to end them, but as long as they were together, there would be nothing it could do to tear them asunder, and now that the trap was sprung, it was as much one with this world as it had once been set apart.

All together, then, until Annihilation. So it came to be.