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In the beginning, you cared.
It was hard to remain distant, the role you had been given. You barely remember the oven, but even then you could hear the whispers of the witches as they discussed your powers, and the voice of your soul jam beckoning you.
To help cookies create nations anew
To guide them as their kingdoms grew
To witness as they fade into history
To renew them as they rise from ash
Rise oh Herald, bearer of the Soul Jam of Change.
Welcome, Abundant Spice Cookie.
The early kingdoms were the hardest. They were stubborn, trying to bend nature to their will, all in a desperation to survive. You helped them, turning that stubbornness into a willingness to learn. You taught them to adapt, to hunt, to grow, to feast.
Once they got that, it was as if you’d wound up something and released it, never to return. They composed songs, created instruments to fill their homes with music. They learned to record, writings soon littered every corner of society, books becoming as valuable as gold. They began to construct buildings much too extravagant simply for survival: these were for living.
You were a constant presence. You advised the architects when they were confused. You were an attentive and supportive audience to the artists, of all kinds. Children, so small with so much potential to change, flocked to you, and you welcomed them with open arms. Cane Sugar Cookie would always tease the few times you two met. She was the first of you, the bearer of the Soul Jams.
“ It’s so sweet how they dangle off of you,” she cooed, as one girl attempted to swing from one of your arms onto the floor. Another child, a boy, sat in your lap, weaving flowers into chains that his sibling, who was somewhere behind you, fixed into your hair.
“Honestly, it’s so heartwarming how they adore us, isn’t it?”
You nodded along at the moment, not having any reason to disagree. But as time went on and their appreciation soared, you began to feel a touch uncomfortable.
They were so grateful to you. They called you, and your colleagues, a god, fashioned statues and temples in your visage. It was all so much, you remember confessing to Sifted Flour Cookie. She had been baked some decades before you had, and you valued her wisdom as much as she valued your company.
“Take it as a compliment,” she urged you, pouring another cup of perfectly brewed tea. “It makes my heart swell whenever they praise me.”
You are hesitant. “Please take no offense, but doesn’t indulging in such praise defeat the selflessness of the task?”
“I once thought so too. But I’ve realized their praise means I’m serving them right. It means I’m fulfilling my purpose, and you are fulfilling yours.”
It was a comforting perspective. As a result, you became more open with your denizens. You accepted gifts, from the grandest statues to the tiniest notes. You ate with them, laughed with them, comforted them. Joy flowed abundantly, and in your naivety, you never considered that it wouldn’t last forever.
You had met the sky god once. Her arrogance was intimidating, but you knew that she would never disrupt the cycle of nature out of selfish reason. Meaning that the drought that occurred that decade was the natural course of things.
You tried your best. The few crops that wouldn’t dry out were grown, the little water left was spared. But there was no use. Food ran low, and famine joined its sister drought, devastating the few kingdoms, your precious friends and family.
You watched.
The rain came and washed away the cries, the anguish, and the stench of those who didn’t survive. You recalled your soul jams voice from long ago. The cycle of change called for such loss. Your job was simply to rebuild.
The same process again. These new civilizations were quicker to adapt, more determined to survive, and all the more eager to create. They created new art, new songs, new buildings, new writings.
They created new rules. Most were for the wellbeing of society, but some seemed to establish certain cookies in a position of dominance. You tried your best to nudge them along a different path, but it seemed as if this is simply the way cookies wish to function.
So you accepted. The cookies declared that some were enlightened, and some were fools. Some were beautiful, and some were revolting. Some were rich, and some were poor. Despite your concern, you left them to these decisions, doing your best to manage the damages.
Regardless, they thrived again. You tried not to think too hard on what had been lost. You tried not to see the face of long gone friends in the cookies that surrounded you, ignored the laughter of children who remained so hauntingly similar even after all these years. You did your best to let the past go, and enjoy what filled in that empty space.
Then came disease. Drought was bad, but disease was awful. Witnessing their dough sink in rather than crumble, or jam oozing out of sores, or worse. They did their best to negate it, but sickness was everywhere, touching every cookie but you.
You watched.
Eventually, the worst of it faded. Everything changed, irrevocably. There were new cities, new families, and new civilizations. It was reliving and bittersweet. For every new name and face you learned, you knew you’d forget one from the past. They seemed to grow faster, desperate to be grander than their ancestors. It frustrated you ever so slightly. Rather than to simply exist, to simply live, they were always in pursuit of anything and everything.
Oh, they had spread too. What was once a few tribes that you could easily traverse through, becamea vast series of nations, each with different resources, goals, and motives. You loved each and every one of them, but committing them to memory, the people, was much more of a chore.
Still, the one commonality they all shared was their worship of you. You were still their god, who granted them wisdom from eras past, who existed as a proof that progress was happening for cookies, who used his extensive powers to create the impossible while still making the time to bless and dote on their children.
Still, differences are differences. Some could be worked through and discussed. Many couldn’t.
War. At first you avoided it. The screams and cries of cookies as they did unspeakable things to each other out of rage, out of hurt, out of passion, out of revenge. You locked yourself in your palace, hoping that they would come to their senses. They didn’t. It dragged on. It dragged, and dragged, and dragged, until everything finally went quiet.
It was a strange sense of tranquility when you stepped onto those jam soaked sands. This anguish was a different one, one more vile than the others. This was their choice, one you could discourage them from making but could never stop. It mattered not. The fields were littered with the dead and those they left, sobbing and screaming. Everything a dying nation does.
You watched.
You understood now, how this game went. New nations were born, and under your eager hands, they flourished. Soon enough, something would arrise and wither them, and you would watch as it happened and patiently awaited a new seed to grow from the old ones.
You learned that famine often struck after periods of great harvest. No matter how much you warn them to save, cookies tended to overindulge in times of surplus.
You learned that for every disease, there was a cure, but many would remain unfound. The Fount of Knowledge, Blueberry Milk Cookie was eager to help most times.
“If you could, get them to try newer methods,” he insisted, thrusting her notes in your face. “Herbs are wonderful for the body and do wonders on their own, but certain illnesses need a bolder approach. They’ll listen to you,” they said with a certainty that was quite frankly annoying. His role, as Keeper of all Knowledge and as the Virtue, created right after flour and right before you, made her rather oblivious or downright ignorant to others opinions or theories.
You try. All you can do is try. You explain to them the mistakes of their ancestors, and they swear they will never repeat them. They do every single time. If that in itself wasn’t maddening enough, they managed to create new problems: class, gender, and place of birth all became these strange tellers to how a cookie should be perceived. Thefighting that resulted every single time sickened you.
You were ashamed, in the beginning, when you first picked up a weapon. To choose a side, to slaughter those who you swore to protect. But war would drag on endlessly without intervention. You simply…chose to aid the civilizations that others relied on the most, and swiftly ended the conflict.
At times you wondered if they felt betrayed seeing you stand there. You knew how to lead, how to fight. They had little chance. But it mattered not. Soon, rather than to temper their conflicts, they seemed desperate to have you on the front lines to “resolve” them. You hated it, but it kept the violence brief. Often, conflicts would fizzle out as soon as you announced who you would side with. You accepted it. You accepted everything.
The years blur. You can no longer distinguish these nations truly. All new,different, and innovative, were all just imitations of the past. You’ve stopped remembering faces. You rarely learned names. You don’t bless children.You can’t bear to consider one of those little doughlings may one day slaughter with the hands they use to grasp at you.
In hindsight, the decline wasn’t sharp. You had some joyful moments sprinkled through the monotony. You still ate plentifully. It gave you something to do with yourself, some routine. Your son. It would be long before he saw the light of day, before he broke out of the shell you crafted, something that would contain his powers to keep him safe. You’d been called a father of nations by some civilizations in the past. This was a new fatherhood, one you simply had to wait for.
You still contacted the other virtues. Except, it seemed now you’d all write to each other rather than see each other. You had no qualms about this, duty was pressing for all five of you. But it still did little to prevent the gap between all of you from widening. You wrote when you could, but it became rarer and rarer. There were occasional wine gifts from Sugar, tea blends from Flour, and some books from Milk, but absolutely nothing from the youngest of you five, Sea Salt, who seemed content to wander across continents with little contact.
The loneliness became more potent as the years rolled by. Immortality became a burden, knowing that everything would leave you, and you had to witness it. It ate at you so much,you find yourself almost envying the cookies.
Death. Life’s only equal, forever taking from you. In the beginning, you despised it, feared it, cursed it. Now it entranced you, captured your attention in a way nothing else could. No one knew for sure what came next, if anything came next. By the witches, it was different.
Death would come for everyone . Everyone but you.
And you would simply watch.
So began the apocalypse of your psyche, your soul, and your heart.
You kept up appearances at first. Dragged yourself to observe new cities. But it didn’t matter. You watched as they swarmed you, unmoved by their praises. You spent more and more time in your palace, locked away from those who adored you.
Watching, and watching, and watching, and watching.
It was inevitable then, how bored you grew.
The light of change burned in a different flame now. You were changing. You began to itch with something, this burning inside of you that made your skin crawl. The hands that you once used to build began to weigh heavy by your sides, such a bother. You were being reborn. However, something was missing, something had to change.
At last, you gave way.
It happened as sudden as a wildfire. You gazed upon the very walls of your palace, the chatter of your servants fading within the turmoil in your head. You traced your fingers along the walls, walls constructed by cookies you can’t recall.
The walls needed to be restructured, the reasonable side of you thought. It felt too weak under your grasp.
You pushed. You knew of your strength, stifled unless truly needed, too much for cookies who crumble so easily, for walls which were already weak. You pushed until you heard the creaking, the crack, the sound of stone becoming dust under your calloused hand.
It was a symphony of its own, a music of your own making.
Everything began to blur then. Your hands began to fumble, forcing their way onto everything in reach. You wondered if this was how the Turmeric Pigs felt, tunneling through the earth and tearing through what was in their way. This wasn’t born out of wanting to make space, but born out of wanting to break.
You continued until the walls were bare of any ornament, until the decor was shredded and the only thing that remained was a mirror that had paralyzed you.
You weren’t finished. You were far from finished.
You felt like an animal. One that would raze its way through whatever it saw. Right then, your eyes fell to your other 4 arms. They were more difficult to use than the others. You always saw them as more symbolic, the balance that you were meant to bring. Now they hang there, as useless as you have felt all these years.
It hurt to part with them. Keeping them would have hurt more.
You felt lighter now, swifter. You felt like moving. Sitting on your throne would’ve killed you at this very moment. Your feet and hands buzzed to kick, punch, stomp, and tear. You needed to be out of this place.
The kulfi had mentioned a new civilization popping up. Small, oh so vulnerable. Something that long ago, you would’ve cradled in the palms of your hand.
This time, you were precise.
You didn’t let your excitement cloud you this time. You took note of every sound, smell, and touch. Every scream, every shout, every plea, and every cry. Every desperate clawing at your legs, every foolish attempt at disarming you, everry crumb that you felt in the crease of your jammy hands. The smell of ash, the sour taste in your mouth, the wetness of jam. You’re delighted in every grotesque detail of this.
And then the very best part, the silence.
You knelt. Among the crumbling buildings and the piles of corpses, nothing was spared. This was total and absolute. And it was quiet. There was no life aside from you. The silence enveloped you, the turmoil in your mind stood still for just a moment.
A part of you thinks, “This is what death will be.”
You are rather proud of your work. But the fire within you isn’t satisfied. Before, you were a herald, a symbol, a witness to change. Now, you were its deliverer. This cycle ended in destruction, why not bring it about yourself?
You grinned. Today marked the start of your own cycle. You had been reborn a beast, a creature that left nothing standing in its wake. You would live for the throbbing of your heart in your chest, for the destruction that makes your jam boil, for causing endings and halting beginnings. And at the very end, when all of earthbread was devoid of life, when jam smothered the dirt and nothing would ever grow anew. In that silence, maybe then you’d know a form of death.
Perhaps then, you’d know peace.