Playing a Game with Our Lives

I sit here a wonder if it is okay playing with our lives from the outburst around us, but we must have fun. I had recently been reminded of a Hindu Goddess by the name of Kali, the Hindu goddess of time and destruction. This is unvplanned, so no telling where this leads to, but I have got to know her a little more than usual. I am left turning to stone in which she has found me. It was a nice meeting, but not a factual one which made it fun.

A man of stone is an okay phrase I would say if we can say that. A man lost in space around us, but lost in time. Kali is typically depicted with dark or blue-black skin, a lolling red tongue, and wild, unbound hair. She wears a garland of skulls or severed heads and a skirt of severed arms, and she's often shown with multiple arms carrying weapons — most iconically a sword or scimitar. In one of her most famous poses, she stands or dances on the chest of Shiva. Each element carries meaning: the skulls often represent the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet (linking her to speech and creation as well as destruction), her dark color is associated with the formless void beyond time, and her nakedness in some depictions symbolizes that she is beyond the illusion (maya) of material existence. The meaning of her name itself is fun to use in writing. "Kali" derives from kāla, the Sanskrit word for both "time" and "black." She's understood as the power that consumes time itself — destruction here isn't random violence but the necessary force that clears away illusion, ego, and the old to make way for renewal. In Shaktism, she's revered as an aspect of Devi, the supreme goddess, and specifically as a fierce manifestation of Parvati or Durga.

One well-known story tells of Kali growing so intoxicated with bloodlust in battle that she threatened to destroy the world. Shiva lay down in her path; when she realized she'd stepped on her consort, she stuck out her tongue in shock and shame, and stopped. This image — Kali standing triumphant yet startled atop Shiva — is read in various ways: as a check on unchecked power, as the union of consciousness (Shiva, passive) and energy (Shakti, active), or as a moment of self-recognition that halts destruction.

Moving time around is a different way to be stronger in life and able to move forward no telling what could happened if the changes make things permeant, hah!

The Blood That Would Not Die

The battlefield reeked of copper and ash. Durga stood exhausted, her eight arms trembling from a war that would not end, for the demon before her had learned the cruelest trick of all: immortality through multiplication.

Raktabija — Blood-Seed — laughed as another arrow pierced his chest. A single drop fell from the wound before he could stop it, and where it struck the earth, a new demon rose fully formed, identical in size and fury to the first. Durga's blade found his shoulder next, and two more drops fell. Two more demons roared to life. The battlefield was filling faster than she could empty it.

"You cannot kill what refuses to end," Raktabija sneered, his army swelling by the second. "Every wound you give me is a gift."

Durga's brow furrowed, and from that furrow — from pure concentrated fury — Kali tore herself into being. She did not walk onto the battlefield; she erupted onto it, black as the space between stars, her tongue lolling from a hunger no mortal word could name. She wore a garland of skulls that clattered like temple bells, and where her bare feet touched the ground, the grass turned to cinder.

"Little brother," Kali said to Raktabija, and her voice was the sound of a door closing forever, "you've made a fine mistake."

She did not draw a blade. She did not need one. When Durga's spear found Raktabija's heart, Kali was already there, mouth open, and she caught every falling drop of blood on her tongue before it touched the soil. The clone-demons that had already risen, she seized in her many hands, cracking their skulls between her palms like ripe fruit and drinking down the blood before it could scatter and multiply again.

Raktabija's laughter turned to panic. He slashed at his own arms now, trying to flood the field faster than she could drink — but Kali only grew wilder, faster, her dance quickening into a storm of black limbs, her garland swinging, her feet stamping out the sparks of every demon before they could draw breath. The armies he had spawned fell one by one into her mouth, into her hands, into the endless dark hunger that was, in that moment, the only thing standing between the world and an army that could never be defeated by ordinary war.

When the last drop of Raktabija's blood touched Kali's tongue, the demon himself collapsed — hollow, hueless, undone. Silence rolled over the field like a tide going out.

Durga lowered her weapons. Kali stood amid the wreckage, breathing hard, drunk on victory, and for one terrible heartbeat it seemed the battle-fury in her had nowhere left to go — that she might turn, next, on the world itself.

But then her eyes found Durga's, and she remembered herself, and the dance, at last, went still.

The God Who Lay Down

Stillness did not last.

The taste of Raktabija's blood — and the blood of his thousand clones — had done something to Kali that victory alone could not undo. It was not enough to have won. Something in her still burned, and burning things do not know how to stop simply because the fuel has run out. She threw back her head and screamed a note that cracked the sky, and then she danced.

Not the slow dance of ending — the other one. The dance of a world unmaking itself for the joy of unmaking.

She strode from the corpse-field of Raktabija's army still hungry, and the ground did not survive her footsteps. Villages she passed went dark. Rivers reversed their courses to flee her. The other gods, watching from the heavens, felt the tremor of it in their own bones and understood, with a cold and specific fear, that they had loosed something they could cheer for but not call back. Durga herself, spent from the long war, could only watch her own fury walk away from her, wearing a shape too vast now to answer to any name that had summoned it.

"She will not stop at the battlefield's edge," murmured Brahma, watching from far off. "She does not know where the edge is anymore."

It was Shiva who moved. He did not gather an army. He did not raise a weapon — what weapon answers a force that eats weapons for breakfast? Instead he walked out alone onto the ruined plain in the path of her dance, and when he judged the distance right, he lay down in the dirt and the ash and was still, the way only a god who has died and returned many times can be still, the way a mountain is still.

Kali did not see him. She was not, in that moment, seeing anything so small as a single body in her path — she was a storm, and storms do not look down.

Her foot came to rest on his chest.

The contact went through her like cold water through fire. Something under her heel was warm, and breathing, and known to her — a familiarity so old it reached under the battle-fury and touched whatever was left of her that still remembered who she was before she was only hunger. She looked down.

Shiva's eyes were open. He was not angry. He was not afraid. He was looking up at her the way you look at someone you love who has lost their way home, patient, a little sad, entirely unsurprised.

Kali's mouth, still open from the war-cry, closed. Her tongue, red and long and wild, shot out in shock — the ancient gesture of a woman caught in a shameful act, of someone realizing all at once what her own feet have done. Heat rushed to a face that a moment before had known only cold purpose. She had put her foot on her own husband. She had almost — almost —

The dance stopped.

Where her rage had scorched the earth, silence spread outward like water finding its level. The armies of shadow that trailed her, called into being by her fury and sustained by nothing else, thinned and dispersed like smoke losing its fire. Kali stepped back off Shiva's chest, and for the first time since Durga's brow had first furrowed and torn her into the world, she looked, if only for a moment, uncertain.

Shiva sat up unhurt — of course unhurt; little in creation can wound Shiva — and there was no anger in his face, only the quiet satisfaction of a plan that had worked exactly as he'd hoped it would.

"You needed a floor," he said, "and I am fond of being useful."

Kali, goddess of time, of death, of the dark that swallows every ending — laughed. It was not the sound she had made on the battlefield. It was smaller, and stranger, and much more dangerous to those who love her, because it was the sound of someone entirely herself again.