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I have had the misfortune of knowing you – the god whose power was borrowed from the Heart of this world. Half-golden light, half-darkness – all blight, awash with empty words which so few will ever understand. I asked for peace. You gave me lies. No matter how hard I tried, I could not escape my fate. You say you have seen a tear in the tapestry, the blank space which became my place in lore and legacy. You’ve killed for less. I’ve killed for more. The blood on my hands will not wash clean – not after all I have done. Not after all I have been. Or will be.
My illusion of freedom was sundered the second I set foot in Seyda Neen. I could not know it then, not as time bent and warped around me. Sunset staining the far horizon red, all that was left was to move forward. Through dust and uncertainty, I persisted. And still do. And will. Because I must – or else, what then? Yet you, in your great wisdom, and with great force, insisted I turn back – as if destiny was so simple to twist out of shape, or cut away with blades unseen.
You’d tried that once – ages ago, while ash and magma flowed. The Heart. The argument. The spear that pierced, cracking spine and sternum. Things I should not remember. Yet, in dreams – if they are to be trusted – I do. Though my skin no longer bears its scars, the mark of betrayal remains – a stain on my soul, reborn into new vessel time and time again. I did not want to believe, until I saw the grief in your eyes. You seek forgiveness. I offer only that which you deserve. Sorrow, the haunting of a hollow promise – shattered, shapeless – and the memory of murder most foul.
You claim the pages of this book we live within are blank – this reality we weave around us is another kind of lie. If we are just dreams, how do we yet survive? If we are beyond time, beyond thought, how do we yet tread these paths? Where once I might have hung on every word, I have seen the world for what it is, and what you made of it. Of me. Of everything. There is no light, no justice. Like a loose thread, I have been stitched into the tapestry of time, a scrap of fabric mended in that fit just right. A convenient pawn, perhaps, or something more. Or nothing. Likely nothing. As always.
I do not see beyond – not in the way you say. I see disaster under guise of leadership – our people slain in their sleep to protect your gleaming lies. Should you stifle my prophecy, perhaps I would not arrive. But I have. And I will. It was a guarantee of consequences, blood price paid in full. And for what? Some semblance of a throne – this one composed of chaos. When you look over your shoulder, does my visage as you say it had once been still manifest itself in shadow? Do your fellow god kings bow to this poor semblance of power?
The world is smaller now than it was when this began. More people to placate, more believers to preach to. I could never be one of them – not then, not now, not ever. A blink, a smokescreen, a spell cast, and I can act as someone else for a time – if it will spare my life. I am no fool. I know I still have a part to play on this stage you have designed. Would that I could deny and turn back to wherever it was that I came from. An outlander, indeed. You would dress up these lies and feed them to the masses. How, then, is it my fate to fix your mistakes? History is, after all, warped by those who know the painful truth.
I have come so far, and yet have moved so little. Adrift, aloof – awash with worry that was not mine to hold. In my hands, I held the fate of the world. Had you not stopped the war back then, who knows where I would have been by now? Leagues away, or ages, or anywhere but here. Regardless of what you say you know of what once was and what shall be, I’m still me. I’ve built and rebuilt my life one step at a time. My strength is my own, not a thing bestowed as if it can be taken away on a whim.
There is no use wishing to return to the start. You cannot give back that which you stole – from me, from the world, from the Heart. Is it divinity won if it drains from your body like blood? While you grapple with the falsehoods you’ve formed in my absence, I fight with the fact that I have drifted so far from the person I was. Too much has changed since my chains had been thrown from my back. Where once I was meaningless – a speck of dust in the vastness of the ash wastes – my life has been altered in ways that cannot be undone.
It matters little if I become this Moon-and-Star. I am him. I am not. I won’t. I was. I wear his ring, and here I remain, still tied to this land. I am a symbol, a sentence, a saint, a surety. A hero I never asked to emulate. I am what you’d made of me, of him, of who I will be – a martyr whose life and meaning will not fade with time. Sent forward into the depths of depravity, I face the devil of your own making. I cannot rest. The self I had been is gone – existence long since erased from this world. Another of your executions, indirect, indifferent. That day in ages past, spear in hand, you forged a weapon, forgetting – or perhaps intending – that all blades can yet be pressed to the throats of gods.