Work Text:
In a world of pebble and stone, chill and burn, emerged a lifeform. Indescribable using today’s science, labeled a phenomenon as illogical as the big bang. What is known today as a Deformer. An amorphous consciousness born from relentless weathering of the ever-changing Earth. It did not require food, water, or even air. It was nothing and everything at once. It thought and questioned and wondered. It was Elyros.
When space endowed the earth with rain, Elyros took on the form of the tephra around it. When the sun and earth moved itself to produce frozen water, Elyros took on the form of ice. Each time it took a new form, traces of tangible iridescence were left in the atmosphere. And just when Elyros fell into stasis—movement. Not weather, not gravity, not of any abiotic element. A life. Different from Elyros. Elyros was a thought, a concept. It had no emotion, it had no drive, it existed. This life, though primal in comparison, was everything Elyros once considered to be as implausible as its own creation. It moved, but bound to a permanent form. It lived, but under the mercy of its own environment. It existed, but with an innate desire to survive and grow.
Life. This—was life.
Elyros watched and listened. Saw and touched. Interacted and even ignored. For dark and for light, it observed habits, instincts, niches. Each different from the last in some way. As time—a strange concept Elyros gathered from the modus operandi of life—continued to pass, it noticed how life, nature, began to assimilate its presence, how it evolved and acknowledged it far more than its ancestors had. It was more than content to humor the world around it.
For countless suns and moons Elyros would find itself at the lowest of food chains, highest of hierarchies, the spectacle of populations, and the sole survivor of species. Yet there was one form of life that refused to be forgotten by it: man.
They were curious, overly so, it considered them to be, yet unfortunate that they, too, were under the mercy of flesh. Morality was often not a concern of man even as they were aware of its existence, though they treated nicely what they found interesting; Elyros was a victim of the latter.
Though it was one fateful millennium that Elyros had died. The concept, the thought, the nothing and everything at once, simply ceased to exist. Man, a rather cruel species, it had discovered, thought it better dead when they refused to acknowledge it. But truthfully, it was not their fault. The very Earth it was so carefully captivated by, left it behind after it decided to conform. It was a product of chance, mistake. Unlike everything else here, Elyros did not serve a true purpose.
And nearly, nearly, life nearly carried on without it. But man, oh so curious, empathetic man, defied a history that was now fiction. For years, tangible iridescence dirtied his hands as he stretched the substance over itself thousands of times, sculpting it in his image, leaving it to be enveloped in light. Yet, at the end of his efforts, all he was left with was a pile of rock, soil, and tar.
It was by the time he was nothing more than a carcass that his labor started to show itself, for centuries after Elyros’ destruction, a new consciousness was born from the pile, developed by time. They, they, would be called Elyro. Described to resemble that of man, skin of obsidian, hair of moonlight, and memory of their former self.
And Elyro, the incarnation of the first “Deformer,” was born into a world of hate and prejudice, where they look to fit.
Into the kingdom of snow and silent tyranny, where they look to once again, conform.