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There are little pockets in time where a better god exists: benevolent and all-powerful, wrapping her children in a protective light infallible to human, demon, or astral machinations. Sentiment might tell him that he is ever so blessed to live in such a reality where archdemons did not bereave the peace and other-worldly gods did not threaten the world. Mercedes smiles next to him, a bright glimmer with all the earth’s light to adorn her like a halo of everything good and pure in this world. And yet, Ras—the goddess’s Ras, promised heir of the covenant with a heart as pure as Diche’s lily gown—mourns for this beautiful, new world.
A fresh morning, everything yawns to the sunrise’s gentle rouse, shaking off the dew that had settled during the quiet chirps of the earliest awake. Within the burrows, rabbits stir with sleepy ears and bleary eyes to the rustle of the squirrel above, digging up acorns from last winter’s cache to munch on for the day. A pair of young deer pass by, their proud winter coats still thick as the ground was slick with frost, but they would soon shed their coats in preparation for the summer daze heat. He is reminded that life and humans find a way, adaptable and persistent beyond such breathless fleeting as the oxygen that sustains them.
He wishes he could move on with them, but everywhere he looks, he sees the messy, human, fallible efforts of the survivors, donned in the cloaks of celebration but haunted by the lives sacrificed in the interim that shadow the hems of their finest dresses. The ones we lost along the way wailed into the wastelands, but with a new order, such desolate, despairing places had been all but erased from the face of Orbis. A new day, where we forget the losses of the past. Except him, Ras.
He suddenly remembers Vildred, his white robes with purple trim, and his hateful sword that spewed his rage from being forgotten and lost within the virtues of time. His final expression—the helplessness and hope within that Ras had reached for—seemed like a life-time ago.
How could it have become so easy to slip away, these forever precious, twisted moments of the past?
There are little pockets in time where a better god exists, but he is not convinced this is one such world.
The goddess shines on.