Chapter Text
Ena does not awaken when called upon once again. THEY listen to the whispered pleas of their child, the offerings of new life, but do not truly awaken.
To resurrect an Aeon is to attempt to seize its authority, it is asserting one’s will in an attempt to enact another.
Ena hears THEIR child and does not wake from a sleep. To remove an Aeon is to consume them, but never remove their domain. Ena may have slumbered, but never did Order. Order will always permeate the fabric of existence, will sit alongside HooH in the crystalline lattice that balances the universe.
Ena responds to the call as Order is destined to, one calls and another answers. One offers, one accepts. One begs, the other gives. Ena’s domain is Order, not fairness, not equilibrium. Ena has never dealt in justice, and will not start now.
Ena lends THEIR power, funnels it through THEIR child’s siphon. Ena powers their dream, their vision, as Order was always meant to.
THEIR child’s soul speaks, it wails in anguish. The child’s soul is weighed down by the singular, desperate question. Why does life slumber?
Ena chooses mercy and answers, Because it knows it will wake.
Ena’s animated lyre defined it as so. Just as the moon must rise to call upon slumber, the sun too must wake. Such is the cycle of living, such is the cycle to suffer.
To live is to struggle, to struggle is to live. To suffer is to embrace vitality, to suffer is to learn. HooH eternally links the duality of good and bad, peace and war, struggle and victory. Without one, the other cannot exist, the other will not be meaningful.
HooH ensures the duality, Ena enforces it, Xipe offers it by proxy.
Harmony desires for intelligent lifeforms to discard their cowardly selfishness and shed the differences between individuals to fuse into one singular melody, but music paints itself upon the definitive canvas that is time. The Family stands above all to conduct the melody, providing the structure necessary for harmonisation. A choir is only in symphony when directed.
To question why life slumbers is to question the essence of meaning.
Ena provides structure, provides the tools for understanding, but THEY cannot provide the purpose. THEIR child understands that Order is a tool, but they do not understand that it is a tool for the individual. Order cannot be used to define others, Order is for the internal. Order is the frame through which the external becomes a part of the self, of how the self understands the other, how the self processes its very own essence, its very own existence.
THEIR child represents The Family and understands the need for Order, but mistook their power for the authority of an Aeon. THEIR child mistook the striding of a path for its full embodiment.
Ena resurrects but does not reascend, Ena has always provided Order and will continue to do so.
As Ena’s authority is wielded and expanded, so too does it consume the universe. Ena feels it shrink and grow, alive in the way that the concept of Order is. It covers and accepts within itself every form of life, artificial or otherwise. Order brings upon Finality as the logical endpoint of the universe.
As the dream expands, so too does its resistance, so too do those forces fighting against it. Order once again creates its own resistance.
Why does life slumber?
Because nothing is eternal, neither dream nor wake.
An eternal dream is as insidious as eternal unrest, as malicious as eternal pain. An eternal dream defies its equilibrium and brings about its own misery. What is joy without suffering, victory without battle, recovery without process?
A dream cannot define itself, Ena constructed Word but Word cannot exist without the framework of life to give it meaning. A dream is not slumber without the wake, is not utopia without the apocalypse, is not paradise without somewhere to escape from.
THEIR child, THEIR host struggles against the self just as much as the external. IX’s emanator slices through Ena’s dream, erodes its very fabric into Nihility and mundanity, but this is not the largest obstacle to their vision. THEIR child struggles to comprehend the power granted through the channeling of an Aeon and cannot help but question the validity of their desire.
Why does life slumber?
Because it must.
As Ena’s child falls, THEY gaze upon them, marking them Aeonically. Ena acknowledges the true embodiment of Order in front of THEM. To rise is to fall, to live is to die, to resurrect is to be destined to fall once again. To assert one’s desire over other life is to incite their own fall.
THEIR child has lived this fully and come to truly understand the principle of Order. To temper chaos is to exist within it as Order comes from within and one must follow the natural flow of their destiny. Life may choose its own path, may blaze its own trail, but must always return to itself.
Ena returns to THEIR slumber, no longer animated by the will of THEIR child, but Order is never truly gone.