Born Lily Wood, she had tried to live a normal life, oblivious to the anomalous. Though, she had one small thing wrong with her. She was immune to any methods of memory alteration short of a lobotomy. For most people this shouldn’t be such a big deal, after all, what are really the chances you run into an anomaly and the Foundation catches you? Higher than you think. It wasn’t even a bad one! It was 4494! An ARCHON! Even if she had seen it, which she hadn’t, she could’ve easily just chalked it up to some theatre-kid street fighter. But that wasn’t good enough for the Foundation, obviously, since they dragged the eight year old girl kicking and screaming back to the nearest site and started drugging her up trying to make her forget she’d ever been there. Obviously it didn’t work, that’s kind of the whole point of being immune to memory damage, so their next best option was to pump her with bullets instead. Now, she really, really didn’t want to die, so she started trying to fight back. Being no more than a little girl from a low income area, her attempts did absolutely nothing except convince them she was dangerous. One of the 👁️⃤agents shot her clean in the shoulder and she had fallen, sobbing, begging for mercy, for her mother. That agent had walked up to her, and her cries turned to silence in her fear. They looked her in her wide, pleading eyes and announced her dead.
She had closed her eyes, praying the mistake would hold up and hoping that they didn’t cremate their bodies. The agent picked her up, one hand cupped over the injury in her shoulder, and took her outside the room. They had then quickly fashioned a tourniquet with a kit she hadn’t realised they had at all and smuggled her out of the site. A miracle, honestly. As they let her go, they had whispered to her:
[A CLEARANCE LEVEL OF ͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌ ͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌𒆙👁️⃤𒆙 IS REQUIRED TO VIEW THIS INFORMATION.]
The phrase didn’t make any sense. She chalked it up to mishearing, as was clearly evident with the growing ringing in her ears, the throbbing pain in her shoulder and the fact her head felt like it was somewhere else entirely, somewhere high up and far away. Once she’d made her legs bring her to a place she was at least kind of sure they wouldn’t see, somewhere behind a bush in the middle of the forest, she’d almost instantly sat down, realising just how tired the whole affair had made her. Leaning back until she was flat against the dirt, Lily had looked up at the sunny gaps between the trees and idly wondered what her guardian angel had meant. [THIS INFORMATION HAS BEEN REDACTED.] She let her eyes close for a second as she questioned the words, and only at this point did it occur to her that she might have been about to die.
She drifted off to a sleep she knew deep down she’d never leave, dully excited to meet her guardian angel before that too faded into something vaguely shaped like comfort.
She’d had a dream that night. She had been face to face with something beautiful, something so incomprehensibly perfect that she’d fallen silent at the sight. Was this her supposed guardian angel? Maybe. She didn’t know, she couldn’t know anything as long as she looked into the masses of eyes borne by this candescent freak of all nature’s design. And she found she didn’t want to. It spoke to her, it asked her ͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌𒆙👁️⃤͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌𒆙𒐫👁️⃤. And she told it that yes, she was. In a way, she always had been.
That day, Lily Wood died, and from the ashes of her life rose the embodiment of nuance, a paradoxical dichotomy that lived in spite of itself - the brightest day of one’s life, and the darkest of another.
There, in the endless sky, the being named itself 𒆙👁️⃤͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌𒐫.
𒆙👁️⃤͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌𒐫 was supposed to be perfectly contradictory. The dichotomy of its own self, existing purely as the physical culmination of a semi-conceivable concept. It largely passed through the thin gap between humanity and godhood, a seemingly flawless balance. Yet over time, this balance wore thin. No, Lily Wood did not die that day. Lily Wood died the day 𒆙👁️⃤͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌𒐫 relinquished its humanity, the day without time when it raised its hands and spoke a promise of revenge. And Lily Wood could not do anything - after all, she had died however long ago.
So 𒆙👁️⃤͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌𒐫 returned to that place - a different site, but a part of the same whole. One by one, over the course of decades, it found people unworthy of the ground below their feet and it tore them apart. Those people who tormented the innocent in the name of research, in the name of the greater good. It came to them and it took everything they had. And then, when there was only one thing left to take, it stole that too. It would cut them down with a blade that burned with the fire of revenge manifest, and the smouldered ashes became the fuel that kept it alight.
͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌͌𒆙👁️⃤ᛝאֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה 𒐫﷽𒀱 𒐫