There can be only one explanation for the patterns we have seen in the rocks and stones, peoples and cultures, plants and animals. One explanation that will allow us to make sense of the seams that run through the fabric of the world. We, who are now One, were once Two
~Excerpt from “The WorldWarp” by Angelique Pyn.
“Some things end in fire, some things end in ice. But some things start with fire, and all must pay a price.
~Children’s rhyme, author unknown
In the universe floated Mishway and Culthet. Where they had come from was unknown, but what they would become is our story.
The mass hurtled through the sky, a tail of fire surrounding it as it streaked towards the stormy seas that made up most of the plane. Lightning bolts reached out from the pitch-black thunderheads as if to knock this offending source of light from the skies for its presumption.
But the mass continued unimpeded, striking the surface and releasing a huge plume of steam as it continued to descend. The water got blacker and blacker as what little light was present on the surface struggled to penetrate the waters. There was only a few seconds of warning as the water before the mass grew dark.
The mass slammed into the side of the seamount, punching through the inferior rock for nearly a hundred feet before coming to a halt. It was only then that it could be seen clearly, an egg-shaped thing of darkness, wreathed in bubbling Otherness that dissipated into the surrounding ocean, eventually revealing an old tomb from some forgotten empire from somewhere beyond imagining.
Within, the once-orderly passages that had been the last resting place of a nameless king were nothing but a memory, collapsed in the transit from beyond the reality of the universe. The king himself and all his treasure had been removed ages ago, stolen bit by bit by daring thieves.
Not that the clever creators had made the task of removing the gold and gems easy. Traps lined every wall, every door, every chest. Now-powdered skeletons had *also* lined the corridors, in some cases gumming up the works of the very traps that had taken their lives.
Only a single chamber, the one that had once held the King's body remained intact, and it had an occupant once more. A coherent shard of the Otherness, spun in the darkness, unable to escape. Upset, it let out a wail into the darkness.
And the darkness answered. Crawling from the walls, floating up from the pits and oozing from the nooks and crannies came souls, hundreds upon hundreds of souls from bodies stuck for centuries. The floor beneath the shard grew thick with slimy luminescence, the souls wrapping around and over one another before eventually turning their attention upwards. They wrapped around the Otherness, and then through it, absorbing small bits of the Otherness as they went. The shard grew smaller and smaller, yet the souls that had picked up part of its essence remained nearby. Finally, the last sliver vanished and the tainted souls coalesced into a vaguely humanoid form, souls coursing up and down, screaming silently as they traveled across its form. It spoke, and the remaining souls fled in terror.
Grass whistled breathlessly, floating languidly against Mishway's warm air. The plane was silent and empty. Empty, and forgotten. For aside from the breeze and the sun, there was nothing. Oh sure, there were some grasses and trees, even the occasional shrub – but that was it. There were no insects in the air, small mammals among the plains, or fish within the lakes and ponds. Nothing ever happened, and it seemed nothing ever would. The very fiber of the world stank of a monotonous sameness. So when finally, after eons of sameness and lassitude, one small section of air began to twist and dilute weirdly, nothing was around to bear witness.
“Oho? What’s this now?”
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. But again, Mishway did not seem to care. The wind continued to cruise along unperturbed, and the self-same sun continued its eternal radiation.
The tear began to deepen, and with a hissing pop a hole in reality was torn asunder, just long enough for something to fall through, landing softly on the grasses of Mishway. The form was female, and loosely garbed in a white dress. She clasped her arms around herself, shivering as if from cold.
“It’s so quiet. I wonder what happened here.”
The goddess (for that’s what she was) picked a direction and began to stroll. Everywhere was the same: balmy air, sparse patches of larger vegetation amidst fields of grass. She laughed.
“I dare say we’ve come upon something delightful” she said, to herself. She spun, laughing. “No, can't you feel it? Something happened here, long ago. This is all that’s left.”
The goddess smiled as she arrived at one of the strange, curled trunk trees. “No, this place is like an empty canvass. Whatever happened is long past. It is ripe for new inventions. Just think, dear Sonnet. We could be lords of creation!” The goddess leaned against the tree, still smiling to herself.
“Why? I can’t tell you why. This place has been cloistered, hidden from the likes of us. It was dumb luck that brought us here. But if we wandered into it, whatever has kept this place stagnant is failing.”
The goddess arced a graceful hand through the air. “I say let all which would be, be! Let all who would come, come! This place shall be cloistered no longer! I say, let them come!”
If you look past the plot and the voice acting, Metroid: Other M was an okay game. Not a great game, but an adequate one.
Not using the Metroid item collect jingle though? That, was a mistake.
Almost in answer, a crack rang out through the intervening stillness. The source was a tree, perhaps a few feet away, perhaps miles, it was impossible to tell in this most austere of environs. The tall grass bowed to the sound as to a sovereign. And another crack. A great tree, perhaps tall, perhaps not, hung with great spheres of colour had delivered one such orb onto the breezy grass. Only it wasn't a sphere. A single fissure, a crack, was racing along the smooth surface of the sphere-that-wasn't-a-sphere, splitting and spider-webbing, dividing the bright orange shell. Then a piece came loose and a cry rang out, like the crack, but not. The shell fell apart and divulged its contents into the waiting world.
A twisted creature, still dewy from placental juices, came screaming into the silent world. A great curved beak stretched from the face of the creature, the tool to bring it to life. Its arms were spread with downy feathers and its hands and feet were gnarled, hooked appendages of cruelty. The thing flopped feebly onto the grass, writhing and screaming.
But almost the moment it fell, the thing began to change. The feathers were growing back into the arms, the scaly skin smoothing to smooth and supple flesh, and the beak shrunk to a nose. A woman was now lying amidst the evidence of her birth, blinking birthing juices from her eyes and staring at the world.
The woman stood. In a smooth movement, she wiped the fluid from her face. Then she proceeded to do the same to the rest of her body until a woman, perhaps plump, perhaps not perfectly shaped, but a woman, stood whole and clean in the grass. And she took a breath.
"Dearie me..."
She spoke slowly and clearly, and the now rushing winds carried her words to the distant figure of the woman.
"Is this life?"
She cast an appraising eye over her pale limbs.
"Rather dirty, isn't it?"
She cast her eye forward, to the woman, and stood there, appraising her slimmer, more supple form, and knew at once she was different, alien. When she next spoke, her tone was colder, and the wonder was gone.
Under a million tons of ink dark water, stone, the cold core of the world, lay. No fires seared the belly of the plane, all long since burned out, leeched away by the oppressive cold. Stillness did not reign, however, thousands upon thousands of white, threadlike worms slipped through the crevasses of rock, seeking only to cannibalize their own kind.
A century, by mortal ken, passed, and one worm grew larger, feeding upon the flesh of its brethren. Two, and the loathsome thing expanded from the length of a finger and the width of vein a monstrous creature two meters long and six inches thick. Had the other worms, growing scarcer now as it devoured them, possessed brains they would have called it God.
Five centuries now passed, half a thousand years, the thing, the great worm, had consumed the last of its kind, stretching twenty meters in length, cracking stone between its massive teeth. The old igneous rock of the core groaned beneath the prodigious weight of the beast's girth. It wandered a year, insensate to the passage of time though it was, seeking more food, finding none.
At the end of its year of wandering, the creature uttered a wail of agony, hunger pains writhing in its belly. The souls of a thousand thousand worms, insignificant as they were, cried out for life, wailing that primal demand. The universe heard.
For too long the waters of Culthet had rippled with echoes of past deeds, breezes carrying shouts and cries half remembered. The land, the very fabric of being called out for gods and mortals, deeds of glory and atrocity, new divinity to fuel the fires of existence.
The essence of the plane, forgotten wonders, vanished treasures and dissipated luxuries flowed into The Worm. A whispering legion of voices, all in a silent chorus of despair and lust for famous days, exploded into the mind of The Worm, blasting its crude brain into a new form. An instant passed, neurons fired and rewired, the voices howled their triumph, before, like ancient parchment, disintegrating.
Into the void of the remade brain, sentience awoke.
Davos. That is my name. The Worm.. The Aristocrat. My titles.
All along Davos's body, new protrusions emerged. Spindles of flesh and cartilaginous pseudopods, each tipped with a pore oozing clear, acidic fluid. With a burst of newfound power, Davos hurled himself through stone, carving vast tunnels that in centuries past would have consumed decades of his labor. The acid from his skin left weird patterns on the walls and floor, inscribing everything with a bizarre symbology of unconscious divinity.
After a time of this exertion, a new thought entered Davos's recently reformed mind.
Where am I from? Who am I? Where am I going?
Tentatively, Davos stretched his thoughts away from his corporeal form. At first, when ever he thought of something else, the worm began to dissolve, matter sloughing off. Horrified, Davos recalled his will and recovered for a time. The questions, however, continued to plague him. When he made a second attempt, he was far more successful. Leaving a fragment of his power to secure the material of his body, Davos expanded his consciousness out through the world, seeking some other source of power, some other divinity.
Syreene watched as once more the plane's cloister lapsed, and divinity was...messily... thrown forth.
She remained leaning against the tree, but called out in response:
"I am Syreene. I am the the spring growth that sustains the summer winds and gives birth to the Lord of Autumn. I am newly arrived here in this place. I would imagine that your... instantiation was unique. At least, that is not how I came to be here."
Despite the distance, her voice carried easily, amplified by the lack of, well, anything really, and her own divinity.
"I've given thy mine, now tell me thine -- with whom do I speak?"
If you look past the plot and the voice acting, Metroid: Other M was an okay game. Not a great game, but an adequate one.
Not using the Metroid item collect jingle though? That, was a mistake.
And then like a physical blow, modesty hit her. She marshaled the winds to her aid, and they whipped and spun about her, sending leaves and the long grass dancing into the air. Like an expert tailor, the wind wove the foliage about her until she was wrapped in a garment of soft teal, impossibly intricate and endlessly enveloping.
And then the two women stood there, one at ease, one at attention; one in simple garb, one in extensive dress. And the woman spoke.
"Why, I appear to be patron of this place, keeper of this country, owner of this environs, after all, you are other," her gaze was soft and pleasant, but her tone had a deadly edge to it, "And I see no other takers."
She was ashamed, there was no other word for it. Almost as soon as she had seen this alien creature, she had detested it oddity, its strangeness. And for it to have seen her in this most compromising of positions? This most vulnerable of states? Well, it was unforgivable.
"You may refer to me as your highness, or your majesty," she said, finding the words fell nicely upon her lips, "Or perhaps, the Monarch."
"Ah, but Monarch, that's the beauty of it, isn't it? Your world here is empty -- I know not the why or the how, but it is. Speak unto my truthfully -- have you no wish to fill these vast expanses with creations of your own devising?"
The goddess patted the ground upon which she stood, the curlwood tree at her back.
"Can't you feel it? This land itself is lethargic. It has remained too long static and unchanging. It cries out for anything, for us, to set it free from its limitless tedium!" Syreene paused. "No, I don't think I'm getting worked up." Another pause. "Well, we'll just have to play that by ear then, won't we?" Syreene returned her gaze to the Monarch. "Where were we? Ah, yes. Life. Change. As it is, as you say, your demesne, I shall allow you first go at it!"
If you look past the plot and the voice acting, Metroid: Other M was an okay game. Not a great game, but an adequate one.
Not using the Metroid item collect jingle though? That, was a mistake.
~Culthet~ Within the tomb, the creature, Itja-Rek, was busy trying to figure out just what it had become. Part of it was the souls of all of these thieves, explorers and even a few servants killed and buried with their lord. The god idly wondered for a moment if the king's spirit was somewhere within his form as well. His souls were, as a rule, terrified. Most of them had settled into a long, deep slumber, bound to their mortal shells by magical tricks of the master trapmakers, and were unprepared for their sudden servitude. Those were a quiet wailing in the back of his mind. Always there, but... he could tune them out.
A few, the bravest of the souls, were less afraid. Some were curious, others wary, but Itja-Rek had a feeling that soon they would start to express themselves in some manner.
As for the other part of himself, the part that had allowed all this to happen, the Otherness... it was still there, dispersed among all of the souls, but he could feel it like a weight in each one, binding them to his consciousness and his form.
Itja-Rek turned to directly face one of the walls and stepped forward, form dissolving into a liquid-like state and sliding through the cracks and seams in the stones until he met the outside water, where he reformed. It was black, but a faint light glowed in the distance.
Itja-Rek floated towards the light, but stopped as a presence made itself known in his collective mind, tickling it with its attention.
"Who comes into my brain uninvited and unannounced? Show yourself, or state your intent."
A gate appeared made out of finest steel. The gate was closed and no life behind it was seen. Then the gate opened and a being most fair took his first trembling step out in this new world. His legs shook, sweat ran down his forehead and his hair, black as the night covered his pale face as if it had been a veil made out of finest silk. Black wings stuck out of the being's back, a sword shook in his hand and black robes stuck to his frail body.
He looked like an angel...
Djaf as his name was fell down on his knees, his sword fell from his hand and pierced the fair earth as he raised his hands against the blue sky and screamed. As he screamed his voice grew louder and louder, the earth he stood on began to crack as the terrefying noise of a lamenting God spread across the newborn world.
Minutes passed. The gate behind him was still there...but no one else came...he remained as he were. A lone being dressed in blackest robes surrounded by the clear and fair colours of a world filled with the possibility of life.
His mind was suddenly away by a subtle hand. Memories, emotions and dreams, everything taken away to make place for what was to come. A plan was placed in the future God´s head and a flame was lightend in his chest. A flame of pure divinity.
He stopped screaming. He arose and made a shovel out of thin air and began to dig.
