Consciousness began to slowly brighten in the darkness, like the first light of creation in empty nothingness. So gradual was the change that the creature did not realize exactly when it began to understand that it existed. Nor would the creature care about this knowledge if it were inclined to think about such things, at least not yet. The only thing it knew for now, for quite some time, was that it did exist.
Darkness was all that the creature understood for a time that could not be measured. There was nothing but the endless dark, not even any thoughts to break the still silence of eternity. The dark void was all encompassing and impenetrable; it provided no space yet it had no boundaries. It was everything the creature understood, and there was no thought that the creature could ever understand more. Nor, for that matter, was there any thought that there was more to understand at all.
Whispers broke the darkness, stirrings within the creature’s mind. They came unbidden, rising to bubble just beneath its consciousness from an ancestral place the creature could not comprehend. The creature’s conscious mind knew only that it was and that the darkness was eternal, and these whispers attempted to intrude upon the serene quiet. Stubbornly the creature ignored these whispers, thinking only of its existence and the surrounding darkness, but the whispers were more stubborn. They were relentless. They grew louder.
In time the creature could no longer ignore the cruel, intruding whispers, and new thoughts seeped into its mind like mist. There is more; that was the first thought. This confused the creature beyond measure, but the thought was inescapable and brought strange ideas. Ideas came into its head such as existence other than the darkness, which made no sense. Somehow the creature understood now that the darkness was not eternal and that it did not have to remain here.
Memories began to grow from the whispers. Strange visions of things that were not darkness assailed the creature’s mind. Images flashed by quickly and confusingly; some strange solid surface that existed in the same direction in all places, a surface on which the creature knew it could travel; the hard, rough interior surface of some sort of chamber; objects that protruded out of the traveling surface and pointed sharply up towards…something that was not the darkness but still seemed to go on forever. It was a strange color…blue, the memories called it.
No longer tormented by these images, but fascinated, the creature journeyed for some time through each and every memory that bubbled up from that ancient place in its brain. It learned from these memories, and even began to experience new sensations. These memories had strange vibrations that were not the same as experiencing the blue of that empty space or the rough surface of the chamber. Everything made these vibrations, when the something interacted with them or sometimes on their own. The memories called it sound, and it was fascinating.
More! The creature began to deliberately sift through the memories, rather than waiting for them to come on their own. It drew them from the ancient part of its mind and dove into them with complete abandon, eager to learn more. These memories were so much better than the darkness, they were everything and it was nothing, they were eternity and the darkness was empty nothing.
The creature ran gleefully through clusters of the large pointy objects; forests of trees that it could search without end. It explored the rough surface of the chamber; the cave walls were dry and very warm. Finally it soared up into the endless blue expanse; stretching its wings the creature glided effortlessly through the open sky, flitting through cloud banks and zipping around mountain tops.
More! The creature dug up memories of vast oceans, swimming to their depths and seeing that down there were also forests, caves, and mountains of a different sort. There were types of land other than forest as well; mountains that went up and down, the same kind he’d flown around when in the sky memory; deserts that were hot and harsh, the sand difficult to walk in; disgusting swamps of moldy water and rotting trees. All these places and more the creature explored, from the hottest oceans of lava to the most frigid plains of ice.
Time did not matter to the creature as it explored these memories, and it was pleased. Then came a day when it was exploring the memory of an endless expanse of ice when it discovered there was another creature following it. This memory was very cold which the creature did not like, and it was about to go find a different memory when it chanced to look down and see the other creature. When the creature really thought about it, it had seen this other creature before but had simply never taken notice.
It was very dark, this other creature, and it seemed to move when the creature itself moved. The second creature seemed to be flat along the ground, and it was very long. Annoyed, the creature tried to get off of its pursuer so that it could get a better look, but when it moved so too did the second creature. Thinking it must be quick, the creature took a very long leap across the ice and immediately turned to look behind it; but the pursuer was not where the creature had once been, it was now underneath again.
The creature began to grow truly perturbed and tried hopping from side to side in an effort to confuse the pursuer. This did not work, as the pursuer seemed to know exactly where the creature would hop and always went to exactly the same place. So the creature hopped faster, and much more randomly. Sometimes to the left, sometimes the right, sometimes back or forward. It took short little hops and big giant flying leaps, but always, no matter how far or in which direction, the dark pursuer on the ground was always there underfoot. The creature grew angry and began to run as fast as it could, trying to escape the pursuer. The pursuer was just as fast as the creature.
Desperate now, the creature began leaping from memory to memory. It flew from the ice memory into a memory of a giant mushroom forest, and the dark pursuer was still there. Again the creature leaped, this time into an endless sky with only to see the dark pursuer leaping from cloud to cloud, so it flew to a memory of a fiery mountain. The dark pursuer was even there, stretching up the side of the flowing mountain, and the creature continued its flight away, determined to best this enemy. It flew to a memory of a valley with lakes, soaring over them as fast as…
The creature came to a dead stop where it was midair, not moving the slightest bit, just staring at its pursuer. The pursuer had changed somehow. It was no longer dark and long, though it was still along the surface of the lake as it had been on the ground. Rather than dark and insubstantial now, the pursuer was made up of a powerful body with four strong legs, a long and sinewy tail, two massive wings, a mighty neck that stretched up to the pursuer’s fierce and impressive face. The whole of the creature was covered in…scales…except for most of the wings. Most of it was a fierce crimson color save the belly, and its claws and horns.
Slowly the creature approached the surface of the lake, and the pursuer seemed to draw nearer from the other side of the water. Finally it was attacking! The creature surged forward with wicked joy to end this silly game, and plunged headfirst into the lake until its head buried in the thick mud at the bottom. Confused and angry, the creature burst back out of the water and looked around for its pursuer, only to find it again on the surface of the lake, now churning with waves after the creature’s emergence.
Not about to fall for the same trick twice, the creature immediately landed on the shore next to the lake, glaring down at the pursuer who glared right back with its impressively intimidating face. Hoping to intimidate the pursuer, the creature decided to grow larger, increasing its size tenfold to frighten this opponent away. The pursuer did the exact same thing! Now something clicked in the creature’s mind, and it cocked its head to one side to think. The pursuer mimicked the action.
Deliberately, the creature very slowly moved its head to turn to the left, watching as the pursuer did the exact same motion. With great suddenness the creature jerked its head away from the water and back to it, and again the pursuer mimicked the action perfectly. Strangely, this now made sense. The whispers of the memories spoke to him, trying to tell him, and he listened intently for their lessons. The pursuer, in its dark form…was a shadow; and in the lake’s surface…a reflection. Me. The creature blinked. Me! What is me? Who is me?
New whispers came to the creature now, and these were not the whispers of the memories. These whispers had always been there, just as the memories, but they were not from his mind. They were from somewhere beyond the darkness, and for an instant the creature found itself back there in the darkness instead of in front of the lake. Angrily it wrenched itself back into the memories, to the side of the lake, and looked at its reflection as it heard the whispers.
Dragon. It was not a creature, it was a dragon. Majestic and powerful, it was a dragon. Not it…him. He. Me. Not me…I. I am a dragon. Mightily the dragon let out a roar of triumph, a roar that echoed throughout the memory of the valley with lakes and came back to him magnified. He was proud, and he would never again be simply “the creature.” Yet the whispers from beyond the darkness were still there, they still had something to tell him. No, they had yet to tell him. The whispers of the memories said dragon, but the whispers beyond the darkness were saying something else. They were saying something very different.
It echoed in his mind for long moments, and he could not quite hear it. The words came from beyond the darkness, wafted through the valley like searing summer heat, and flowed across the dragon’s mind and soul like the caress of the darkness he used to know. They were everywhere, and yet he could not make them out. He grew frustrated and angry again; desperate to learn what words these new whispers were trying to teach him. He began to thrash about in his anger, tearing at the earth of the lake’s edge and sending it flying.
He flew from memory to memory, seeking a place where he could better hear the new whispers. He dove into the memory of endless ocean, but among the thick water and the colorful coral mountains he could not hear the whispers. Striking one of the mountains in anger, he sent chunks of coral floating down to the bottom even as he flew then to the memory of a tremendous underground cave with a forest of mushrooms. Here again he could not quite hear the whispers, but they seemed closer, and so he traveled to another memory. Mushroom trees collapsed as he barreled through them to the next memory, and he emerged in the fiery mountain.
Fire arced into the night sky forever here, raining tiny soothing droplets onto him just as the heat from the nearby lava flows brought comfort. Here the whispers were strong, and he surged to the top of the mountain, desperate to hear more clearly. There, next to the eternal pillar of lava that rained down around him in tremendous gouts of flaming stone, at last he heard the name. Aersventh. I am Aersventh! Pride surged through his veins like a fire in itself, and Aersventh threw back his head to roar with tremendous might. The mountain shook with his power, and even the other memories trembled at his call. The darkness shifted.
His throat burned with the fire of his pride, and Aersventh let loose with another roar of triumph. Fire, burning pure and raging true, surged from his roaring mouth into the night sky. It dwarfed even the pillar of lava that spewed forever from the mountain, igniting even the clouds that floated far above. This was power! Aersventh roared defiantly at everything that was not Aersventh, spewing flame on a whim and reveling in his own tremendous might! This was exactly how things should be, and how they would be forever.
For time immeasurable Aersventh traveled from memory to memory as the whispers taught him more new things, but simply exploring these places was no longer enough. He began to exert his mastery over them in any way that he could. He reshaped the fiery mountain, carved a home in the side and made the mountain larger. The desert he scorched to a blasted wasteland of glass so that he would no longer have to travel on difficult sand. In the memory of ice he melted everything, and where once there was a frozen wasteland he left nothing but an endless boiling ocean. In each memory he shaped things to be as he saw fit, he left nothing untouched. He was in his own eternity; Aersventh had become a god, so told him the whispers of the memories and the whispers from beyond the darkness.
At last the master of his domain of memories, Aersventh traveled one day through the forest he had shaped to his will; trees once lush and green were blackened husks. He found their withered, fragile shells entertaining to crush beneath his claws, for he now traveled in an extremely large form that towered over the mightiest tree in his memories. On this day however, something struck him as he was trampling large swathes of forest, and it gave him pause. Peering down, even deigning to reduce his size so that he might see better, Aersventh tilted his head to the side in thought, as was his habit. The puny trees had shadows just like he did.
He had seen this all before of course, but he had never thought about it before. Why did the trees have shadows? They weren’t dragons, they weren’t Aersventh. This simply would not do. Annoyed, Aersventh leveled the entire forest to nothing and left behind an endless field of ash. He sailed from memory to memory for some time, thinking about the trees with shadows. Originally he had thought that only he had a shadow because only he was Aersventh. Now though it seemed that things that were not Aersventh could have shadows too. Did this mean there could be other things that had shadows that weren’t Aersventh?
Incensed at the idea, Aersventh traveled to from memory to memory now in search of shadows, and he found them everywhere. Everything had a shadow! It was unacceptable! His raging destruction was stalled however, when the whispers began to speak again. He had not heard them in quite some time, not since they taught him to move his mouth to make sounds that had meaning. To speak, they had called it. Now they told him other things. Now they said there were other dragons.
Preposterous! Outrageous! This was getting far too ridiculous and Aersventh simply would not have it. He flew through his memories, tearing chunks out of mountains and boiling lakes until they were nothing, angrily seeking to escape the lies told by the whispers of the memories. No matter where he went however, he could not escape the whispers of the memories. It struck him then that the whispers had given him the memories in the first place. Exactly when it happened had faded with time, but now he remembered and the very thought galled him. No whispers would control his domain! He was the god! Aersventh! Not some paltry distant whispers!
Yet no matter where he went, the whispers of the memories were always there. There are more dragons, they told him over and over again. Aersventh raged and destroyed everything he could see, angered beyond comprehension at this idea. If there were more dragons, then there must be more than one Aersventh! At the instant this thought struck him, Aersventh ceased his destruction and became very still. He did not calm, however. Rather, his rage became internalized, and the mighty Aersventh began to collect his anger so that he may put it to good use.
If there was indeed another Aersventh somewhere in eternity, then it must also think that it is a god. There can only be one Aersventh, only one god to rule over eternity, and so this other must be sought out and destroyed. Aersventh knew he must seek out and destroy Aersventh. He began to search every nook and cranny of eternity. He searched through the ocean with the coral mountain, he dove into the boiling ocean that had been an ice field, and he crawled through every crevice of the fiery mountain. Aersventh searched for an endless age, and still never found the other Aersventh no matter how hard he looked.
Finally, reaching the only possible conclusion, Aersventh decided that he would be able to find Aersventh if there was nowhere for him to hide. With that thought Aersventh began to grow, and he kept growing, larger than he had ever been before. He dwarfed even the fiery mountain and still he kept growing. He grew until he was sure that he could consume all of the memories in one single gulp. Reluctantly he reemerged back into the darkness and gazed down upon all the memories of his eternity. Surely Aersventh was in there somewhere, and Aersventh intended to eat him along with all the memories. That would put an end to this egregious insult.
The darkness was so uncomfortable, though. He remembered a time before he ruled eternity, when the darkness was all that he knew. Now however, after having flown through endless skies and experienced so many places, the darkness felt claustrophobic. It enraged him now, to think that he was once so pathetic as to accept the darkness as his existence, and only fueled his desire to kill the other Aersventh. His heart raging, Aersventh opened his maw to consume the eternity of memories and the other Aersventh…and found his maw closed by some gummy substance.
A trap! Somehow the other Aersventh had trapped him in a black substance that was indistinguishable from the endless dark, and now he couldn’t move. His limbs were curled at his sides, his wings pressed uncomfortably against his back, and his tail was coiled around him. Unable to even turn his head, Aersventh began to heave with all his might to move something, anything. His claws flexed, trying to grasp at anything to shred, and his tail began to thrash as much as he could make it within the confines of the darkness. The more he thrashed, the more the darkness began to give way, and he began to feel himself shifting somehow in the endless void. He could get free!
Aersventh threw himself into this battle wholeheartedly, adding vicious movements of his head to shred anything he could with his horns. The darkness before him began to give, and he could move his upper legs. Frantically he began to claw, desperate to destroy the darkness and end the claustrophobic feeling. Finally something gave, and the darkness before him erupted in a bright light that stabbed Aersventh’ eyes, causing him pain he never could have imagined. Part of him wanted to recoil from this light and retreat to safety, but the rage in his heart only pushed him on further, to escape the darkness so that he might destroy this painful light.
Screeching in agony and fury, Aersventh let forth a burst of flame that melted what was left of the darkness before him, and the dragon came tumbling out of his dark home onto a collection of hot crushed stones. For a second or two he lay there, stunned and confused, unsure of what had just happened. Weakly, he turned his head back to see the darkness…instead he saw an oval shaped object, dark crimson and thick, torn open and burnt from his escape. Aersventh looked around to see that there were more objects, half a dozen that he could count and probably more behind them. The clutch was grouped on a pile of obsidian rocks, surrounded by a sea of lava within a massive cave.
Life, the whispers of the memories told him. They were fading in his mind now. They had served their purpose, had taught him all they could and would be needed no more. Their last message; this is life. It continues until death.
“Death,” Aersventh spoke for the first time. It bothered his throat; he never had a throat in the dream. He blinked his eyes, still gummy from the substance in his dark void, upon realizing that it had all indeed been a dream; the dream of birth, before life, where he had learned from the memories of his ancestors. Yet how real it had all seemed! How clearly he remembered it! Looking down at himself, Aersventh became highly annoyed.
Where in his dream he had been a large and powerful dragon, now he was puny and weak. His scales were thin, his claws were tiny. The legs he stood on were weak from the exertion of escaping his darkness, and his whole body was covered in the strange gummy substance. His tail, in the dream long and powerful and beautiful, was now short and trembling. Aersventh flexed his wings to find that they were small and flimsy, still too weak to carry him in the air. Infuriated, the wyrmling turned on the darkness from which he had emerged and reduced the oval object to a ruined heap.
A sound behind him caused Aersventh to whirl around, and on his unsteady legs he immediately fell to the ground. Frustrated and humiliated he lunged at whatever had made the sound and caused him to fall. He caught the other wyrmling just as it was breaking free of the shell. The fight was quick, the other wyrmling clawed and bit fiercely, but Aersventh was mightier. In seconds he had his jaws around his brother’s neck, and the dragon tasted blood. Never in his memories had he eaten; it wasn’t necessary. This was instinct.
The meat of his newly born brother was so delicious, and Aersventh found his stomach rumbling so fiercely, that he gorged himself on the fresh kill without even thinking. So involved was he with this new experience that he didn’t hear the heavy sounds behind him until a deep and rumbling voice spoke from above.
“I certainly named you well, didn’t I?” The speaker chuckled at the rhetorical question.
Looking up, Aersventh saw into the eyes of his mother. She gazed upon him with pride and chuckled again when he tried to bristle in an intimidating fashion. Neither of the two spoke a word for quite some time, until Aersventh looked back down to his brother.
“Death,” he said again, and looked up at his mother. She nodded and Aersventh knew he was right. This was death, the end of life. It was to be avoided at all costs, and sown throughout the world to any creature that got in his way; to all who opposed him; to the other Aersventh. Deep within the wyrmling’s mind, coiled amidst his growing knowledge of the world, there lurked the endless dark from whence he came. Somewhere in that darkness swirled the eternity of memory, and in the mad little dragon’s already broken mind, the other Aersventh waited.
------
Like my words? Please support my facebook page! Follow me on Twitter!
No comments:
Post a Comment