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It whirs beneath her skin, angry and hungry. How dare they trap it here, in mortal coils? Roiling and boiling, bound in flesh and blood and bone, a hero, unsung.
How dare they?
It would have made the world anew. If they—pitiful ants, strange twiggy two-legged creatures with voices like metal on metal, only four of them and they had undone everything it had worked towards—hadn't named it, bound it back into its realm, then it would have made the world in its image. Shifting burning rippling imperfections, wavering hemidemisemiquavers, fortissimo staccato blasts, but they ruined everything because they like to have control.
And now it was trapped, not in the box, not in the space between spaces, not in the endless void that it was comfortable in but frustrated, but pressed flat and pulled into ribbons and thin strings running through the veins of this strange, curious, infuriating little thing. One of the four that tried to and actually managed to drive it back.
It whirs, like a chainsaw, beneath her skin. It hopes—insofar as it can hope—that it incites swings of mood or bouts of anger or wild irrationality in her. It pushes and prods and spins and whirs and waits, carefully, patiently, for the moment that she frees it again. It gathers its strength. It grows and, harnessing the patience that its had since its inception, waits for its turn.
Humans have such small lifespans in the face of eternity.
But she passes it to her son, this strange half-breed thing, a mix of her and another twiggy two-legged species of mortals—longer-lived than her and her kind. The child feels it in his skin and revels in its power but, same as the ones that bound it, this mongrel child wants control.
It will not be controlled but it will test this child and his control. The child proves to be willful and refuses to bow to its demands, so it waits and it grows. It will pass. It always seems to pass.
The mongrel passes it to his child and this one—quarter that other sort, three quarters same as the first, though he seems to have inherited his skills from the least—is terrified. It hums, pleased, and burrows in the veins of this child with purpose.
This child hates it. Hates the anger it incites. Hates that the anger, that the irrationality that it commands from inside of him like the finest of pipers, is the only thing that makes others listen to him. The child is fearful and horrified and it loves the fear. It feeds on the fear. It grows.
The child folds on himself and then, using its power, tears his way away from his mongrel father and finds his way back to the world it was trying to remake and finds love and has children and, unlike before, it does not move from the father to children, but splits. Peels into three. One for the father and two for his identical children.
It is amused by this feeling. The splitting of itself. It is one thing, yes, but it is many, and unlike their father, these small twiggy things are easy to influence. They like the chaos. The pieces of it inside of them thrive on that, while the piece inside of their father is squashed down and stifled.
No matter.
Patience.
It can be patient.
It can wait.
One third of itself will be free and then? It will do what it has always wanted.
Remake the world.
But for now, for this tiny piece of infinity, it can wait, buzzing beneath the skin of three people, two generations of this family tree, sowing discord.
Pressed flat as paper, claustrophobic and furious, it, a predator, waits.