Work Text:
(This place is a message—
—and part of a system of messages—
—pay attention to it!)
Everything rots, in the end.
Skeletons lurk beneath the soil. Fungi cling onto dying trees. Beasts succumb to the cycle of life, through disease or murder. Blood and ash and bone build empires, and they bring them down just as easily.
(Sending this message was important to us—)
It is a balance. Life and death and survival and decay. Silver and steel. A balance. That’s how it is, how it will always be, and it is so very human. Cathedrals are not stained with dirt. Temples do not crumble. But humanity does. It rots, burning itself up and up and up until there is nothing left. Churches survive, pillars of marble and bricks of stone. Their priests do not.
(—we considered ourselves to be a powerful culture—)
His hands are stained with blood. It’s stuck under his fingernails, crimson-grey and flaking, no matter how hard he scrubs at the mess. When he returns, his mother looks at him, clean and precise and deadly, and does not smile. Her line of work is, to the untrained eye, the same as his own. The blood on their hands is the same. They are inevitable. She is the End, and he is the son of Endings.
But he is wild and he was born of nature and silver and death and decay. His teeth are too sharp. His mother is a creature from before Time, from before Chaos, and she is elegant and deadly and she does not miss.
Death is never wrong, after all. She kicks her way into the hovel of the poor and the towers of kings in the exact same way- quiet. She does not announce her presence until it is far too late, and she is deaf to the cries of mortal men, a muffler of her own making. She does not scream.
(His mouth tastes of ash.)
Telos grins, with too-sharp teeth, and moves past her to find a cloth to clean his clothes. He always knew he was going to become this. She did, too. A newborn, swaddled in cloth. The End looked at it and saw a monster. Decay and death, hand in hand. It is a horrible thing, they tell him. It is wrong. Callum is everlasting, and perfect. The divine do not die. And yet. (And yet.)
(This place is not a place of honour—)
Decay happens when you aren’t looking.
It is persistent, and it is inevitable. Your parents will age. The walls of your childhood home will be torn down. The apple tree you climbed will succumb to disease- or, perhaps, it will outlive you.
Decay happens when you aren’t looking.
His father does not come home anymore.
Telos finds his refuge in a nest of roots and dirt.
He hides amongst silver bark, invisible to the gods above and people below. He digs his nails into the dirt, presses his forehead against the soil, and screams.
Temples shine and people live and gods bleed gold and gods do not bleed-
(—no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here—)
-and he bleeds crimson-grey-black and it does not shine.
He screams, but his screams fall on deaf ears (mufflers of their own making). They turn a blind eye to his struggles, to his suffering. Decay will consume him whole and they will not know. They do not listen. They DO NOT LISTEN.
(Telos does not pray, anymore. There is no deity that would help him. The divine have given up on him. He will be abandoned, left behind- a failed experiment, a god gone wrong, left only as a whisper in the dark. He will not. He will not die. He will not die. HE WILL NOT DIE. He refuses. Even if it means he has to take hold of his fate, grab it by two hands and fight and claw and scream, he will live.
He reaches into the tapestry of fate, grabs ahold of something, and he PULLS-)
Callum falls quickly.
It was designed to defend against outside threats. Other pantheons, or humanity, in case they ever rebelled (of course they won’t rebel. They couldn’t even comprehend disobedience). They didn’t know the call would come from inside the house.
The gods scream, and Telos DOES NOT LISTEN. (He does, he does, he does). Children cry, spirited away by caretakers. Amores hide in the upper branches, and when they fall, they run.
“Why?” his people cry. “Why would you do this?” His mother does not ask. His father does not come home.
Why why why why why why why why WHY WHY WHY WHY?
He screams, and the people hear him, finally, finally.
A flash of pink and polished silver, and it is over. Butterfly pins and steel muzzles. Chains hold him down, chains of metal and stone and he cannot feel the soil. They have thrown him in a building of rock, and they have bound him with something cold and bright. His wings are lead, torn and ripped, dying dying dying.
“I hope,” Cupid warns him, “you understand what you’ve done. This is a lenient sentence.”
Telos does not hear him. His hands are stained with blood and dirt and they are too clean. They bind him with chains and they bind him with two others, innocent, green-purple-grey. And they take him away, away from the soil and skeletons and change and endings, to a place time forgot.
The power thrumming in his veins is gone, for the first time in centuries. The soil here does not speak. It does not rot. It does not die. Time forgot about his prison, in more ways than one. Telos can feel the dirt closing in around them, even if the dirt beneath his feet is silent. The Amores do not understand. They can never understand. They are here as servants of Cupid, fulfilling their duties. That is all.
He hides behind a sharp tongue and reaches out for decay, for the very thing that made all of this happen, that moulded him into a monster. But his prison is eternal, and imperfect. It does not decay. It grows.
And it is cold.
(—nothing valued is here.)