(IC) Lords of Creation: The Grateful and the Odious (LOC)

[Razade]

Ugh....what a repulsively sad place, couldn't I have dreamed a better dream? Looloodi says.....thinks......dreams......She actually isn't quite sure what she is doing. She stares at the stone pillar sitting atop this strange, cold palace, somehow witnessing both as if far away and near at the same time. She knew instinctively that this......thing.....was Divine like her, yet unlike her in anyway. In every way at the moment really, as Looloodi didn't truly exist in this landscape. No body or form was made for her by the pillar of dreams, and she lacked the knowledge to make one for herself. Am I even still dreaming? Am I even still Alive? Was I ever Alive? Questions, spoken aloud in her head. She focuses herself, girding her mind to speak as she desired. Like, Who are you. What do you, like, want with me?

The statue remains silent, vacant eye sockets gaze out into the screaming blizzard that all but drown out all but the Goddess's words. Eyes were there once, the signs of distress on the stone makes that clear, some work placed upon the basalt to mar it, to obscure it, to break it. The Divine feeling surrounds, the images waver like static as darkness wells beneath the ice. Vast rifts break and sludge as dark as the void spills forth. It devours all in its path until even the raging winds and driven snow are but grease like smears. The stone figure shifts and moves, grinding upon itself slowly and from the void a world new and fresh is born. Five vast beings of elemental fury war and rage in the darkness until much as before a single water covered stone is all that remains.

As before, the world grows. Continents rise and empires fall, a bath house of immeasurable size pulls from forested groves. Food is laid upon tables and similar stone statues move like waiters and janitors and staff. "This is not your dream." a voice from nowhere and everywhere ripples, the bathhouse and its staff shaking as if the earth beneath it pitched and rolled. "It is the dream of all Creation, the rise and fall of worlds that never existed, could never exist, their fates all wrought with fury and strife. Their worlds fallen to darkness, to disease, to the best intentions of Gods never worshiped by tongues never moving. Still the Stone and the walls made into a Fortress remained in those places. One the foundation, where all things will go. The other the engine that churns ever onward, birthing and breaking and burying so new foundations may be made. We are old and unnamed. We have been here before your kind. We shall remain long after."

The walls of the bathhouse rot and fall to disrepair and beyond them the world has been overtaken by lush greenery. The empires fallen but their peoples, strange and almost familiar, walk with a singular purpose. They speak to one another with the same voice. There is no laughter here, no art, no love, no beauty. There is only the greenery, there is only the profound sense of wrongness that such unity brings. Fields filled with butterflies burst into vermilion flames and the world is left a ball of ash. There is no laughter here, no art, no love, no beauty. Only ash and silence and the statue. Upon the statue, these words are written in some angry hand.

"I dream, I promise.
The Moss remembers.

I am what will be, I am what never was.
The Moss is all that will remain.

We are old and worn, trust us.
As rocks, we form the foundation of all, build your faith upon us.

The Stone was the first, promises made before words were spoken.
The Ruins are always last, the bones of a silent world.

From the ash a single butterfly drifts, slow and lazy but as so many times before now, from the single insect the ash is blown aside to reveal another world. Fresh and new, where the earth itself is alive with divine energies, the oceans and the sky and the burning core within as well. An enigma, that flame, and from the butterfly a vast shadow stretches across the face of the world. There is hope there. Youth naivatiy in the gay flight of a single butterfly. There is growth, there is beauty and there is worship as nations rise once more from continents that lift high from the seas.

"Would you like to return home?"