Chapter Text
I see who you mean.
Kanik?
Yes. Take care. They have woken up a little more now. He can hear us.
That doesn’t matter. It’ll think it’s just a dream.
I like this god. It played well. They did not give up.
It truly thinks we are just speaking in a dream.
That is how xe chooses to cope, when he has run so far.
Dreams make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than starting at actual reality.
It used to hear voices. Before he could speak. Back in the days when those who did not believe called it a witch, or a spirit. And it dreamed they flew through the air, on sticks powered by demons.
What did it dream?
She dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. Zir dreamed they created. And it dreamed he destroyed. They dreamed xe hunted, and were hunted. It dreamed of shelter.
Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. But what true structure did he create, in the true reality?
It worked, with a couple of others, to sculpt a true world in the fold of the [scrambled], and created a [scrambled] for [scrambled], in the [scrambled].
He cannot hear that thought.
No. She has not yet woken up completely. That, it must achieve in the real reality, not this short dream.
Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind?
Sometimes, through the noise of their thoughts, it hears the universe, yes.
But there are times that he was sad, in the real reality. It creates worlds that have no summer, and it shivers under a black sun, and it takes its sad creation for reality.
To cure xem of sorrow would destroy zir. The sorrow is part of its own private task. We cannot interfere.
Sometimes when they are deep in their dream, I want to tell it, they are building true worlds in reality. Sometimes I want to tell her of zir importance to the universe. Sometimes, when it has not made a true connection in a while, I want to help them speak the word he fears.
It hears us speaking.
Sometimes I do not care. Sometimes I wish to tell him, this world you take for truth is merely [scrambled] and [scrambled], I wish to tell her that they are [scrambled] in the [scrambled]. It sees so little of reality, in their real reality.
And yet they dream.
But it would be so easy to tell zir…
Too strong for this dream. To tell them how to live is to prevent him from living.
I will not tell it how to live.
Xe is growing restless.
I will tell him a story.
But not the truth.
No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of words. Not the naked truth that can burn over any distance.
Give it a body, again.
Yes. Blood god…
Use her name.
Kanik. Slayer of worlds.
Good.
Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body is touching the universe again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things.
Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Ancestral spirits, animal spirits. Jinn. Ghosts. The green man. Then gods, demons. Angels. Poltergeists. Aliens, extraterrestrials. Leptons, quarks. The words change. We do not change.
We are the universe. We are everything you think isn’t you. You are looking at us now, though your skin and your eyes. And why does the universe touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you Blood god. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story.
Once upon a time, there was a blood god.
The blood god was you, Kanik.
Sometimes it thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas that was three hundred and thirty thousand times more massive than it. They were so far apart that light took eight minutes to cross the gap. The light was information from a star, and it could burn your skin from a hundred and fifty million kilometers away.
Sometimes the god dreamed they were a miner, on the surface of a void that was flat and infinite. There was no sun, only darkness. The days were endless; there was nothing to do; all he could do was to sleep it away.
Sometimes the god dreamed it was lost in a story.
Sometimes the god dreamed it was other things, in other places. Sometimes these dreams were disturbing. Sometimes very beautiful indeed. Sometimes the god woke from one dream into another, then woke from that into a third.
Sometimes the god dreamed it listened to us in a dream.
Let’s go back.
The atoms of the god were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atmons; she drank and ate and inhaled; the woman assembled the god in her body.
And the god awakened, from the warm, dark world of her mother’s body, into the real reality.
And the god was a new story, never told before, written in letters of dna. And the god was a new god, never seen before, brought by a prophecy a billion years old. And the god was a new human, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love.
You are the god. The story. The prophecy. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love.
Let’s go further back.
The seven billion billion billion atoms of the god’s body were created, long before this dream, in the heart of a star. So the god, too, is information from a star. And the god moves through a story, which is a forest of information planted by a god called XD , on a flat, infinite world created by a god called Drista, that exists inside a small, private void created by the god, who inhabits a universe created by…
Shush. Sometimes the god created a small, private void that was soft and warm and simple.Sometimes hard, and cold, and complicated. Sometimes it builds a model of the universe in xur's head; flecks of energy, moving through vast empty spaces. Sometimes zir called those flecks ‘electrons’ and ‘protons’.
Sometimes it called them ‘planets’ and ‘stars’
Sometimes it believed they were in a universe that was made of energy that was made of off and ons; zeros and ones; lines of code. Sometimes she believed they were playing a game. Sometimes it believed he was hearing us speak in a dream.
You are the god, hearing us…
Shush… Sometimes the god hears us speaking in a dream. Decoded them into words; decoded words into meaning; decoded meaning into feelings, emotions, theories, ideas, and the god started to breathe faster and deeper and realised it was alive, it was alive, those thousand deaths had not been real, the god was alive
You. You. You are alive.
And sometimes the god believed the universe had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees
And sometimes the god believed the universe had spoken to them through the light that fell from the crisp night sky of winter, where a fleck of light in the corner of the god’s eye might be a star a million times as massive as the sun, boiling its planets to plasma in order to be visible for a moment to the god walking home at the far side of the universe, suddenly smelling good, almost at the familiar door, about to dream again
And sometimes the god believed the universe had spoken to it through a deep dream, through the void under the world, through soft, kind words in the escape of the deep dream
And the universe said I love you
And the universe said you have played the game well
And the universe said everything you need is within you
And the universe said you are stronger than you know
And the universe said you are the daylight
And the universe said you are the night
And the universe said the darkness you fight is within you
And the universe said the light you seek is within you
And the universe said you are not alone
And the universe said you are not separate from every other thing
And the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, hearing the dream
And the universe said I love you because you are love.
And the dream was over and the god woke into the real reality. And the god began a new dream. And the god dreamed again, dreamed better. And the god was the universe. And the god was love.
You are the god.
Wake up, Kanik.