Chapter Text
Never will thy limbs buckle with age or ailment.
Never will thy hammer fracture, thy armour tear, thy bones splinter.
Never will thy flesh lose its gold lustre. Never will thy children know hunger, thy lovers discontent, thy vassals despair.
Thy choices will stand absolute. Never will the unworthy rise to meet thee. Thou’lt be a queen most radiant, a paradigm of rule.
This is the want of any lesser being - is it not?
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In the beginning, their words had no shape. I hadn’t the tools to decipher their language, nor even to hear the tones in which they spoke, and so I spent my days in a muddle of half-awareness, prone to fits of heat and delirium, ever aware of the frayed sense of void - of infinity - that lingered just outside the scope of me.
The speakers of those oaths, makers of those luscious promises - were they one or many? Were they small or large, ugly or beautiful? Were they capable of loyalty, of treachery, of love?
I could not say. Their existence denied such concepts. The very words dwarfed by what I, at the edges of my mind, knew them to be.
I was a conqueror then. Fog-addled, my feet bloodied by the march. I was the greatest of my host, second to none in strength and honour - so say the stories. But truthfully, I remember only flashes in the dark of what I was: the fall of my hammer, the sweat in my wounds, the hiss and spark of my forge, the pleasures of my war prizes, and the raw gravel of my throat, shouted hoarse in pain and victory. The rest is a pittance - a mote of ink on a volume vast as the sky. Offered personhood, would one recall one’s life as an ant?
Ere our accord I was a speck. After it, a sun.
How stunningly I warred, magnified by their power! Spears of light appeared in my hands. Holy colour brimmed from my eyes and mouth, my hammer-strokes fit to split the earth. I forged steel that could cut the wind in twain, arrows that flew the length of a continent, armour that could blunt a falling star. My countrywomen wept and fell to their knees in worship. The howls of our enemies dripped with sweet bestial despair. We left flashing footprints in the mud, stamping our claim into the earth. It was a rapturous age - a simple age - where there was only myself, the cursegrown enemies under my boots, and my vast unthinking love for the thing that had come from nowhere to drench my hands in gold.
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I began to crave structure. I wanted terms for my rule; a latticework in which to reign. At first I believed it to be my own will, a natural progression from disorder to law - though I had never wanted such things before.
A curious dogma crept out of my belly and shaped my rule. It straightened my back and tidied my speech. It compelled me to hide my nudity, and bade me lower my hammer, lest I be thought excessive in my bloodlust. It made me proper - a word that had no place in the mouth of a warrior.
These notions were theirs, of course. My devotion and discipline a reasonable payment for their gifts. And these laws were themselves a boon, they whispered -
Their jealous touch on my face.
Their promises sweet and sticky as honey. A perfect trap for my mortal fear.
For we creatures of the earth were so terribly small, you see! Smaller than we were built to comprehend, than any of our words or sciences or mathematics could describe. Placed next to the entirety of existence we would be as dust to a star. Without structure to arrest those mystifying geometries, those expanses of empty possibility, the truth would surely unspool our minds.
Without order, our bodies would lack form or beauty, drawn downward in primordial vulgarity. Unmoored from each other, we might act chaotically, nonsensically - and unbound from the earth, we might lose our footing and fall into the sky, where the vacuums of nothingness would stretch us thinner than a thought.
Like the blend of light and colour, like the formation of meaning from sounds, so would these principles stitch our world together: birth, pressure, causality, utility, obeisance, breath, blood, regression, gravity, beauty, light, heat, propagation, purity…
All things great and small. Too many for even a god to name.
I fell to my knees in thanks for their beneficence. How close we had been to madness and obliteration! All I needed was a single glimpse - the tiniest incision in me, through which a bit of the blackness of the universe could ooze - to know that their guidance was necessary. I would not have known the first thing to do with freedom absolute; with infinite potential. It would have peeled me apart.
So we ruled, they and I - a brain and its mouth. Determined to rescue the world, as I had been rescued, from the madness of reality.