written for @wayfarer-exchange
first treat of the season goes to damsa drende, played by @kemsyne! ty for the wonderful wayfarer kem!
Damsa remembers the flowers in the gardens of her family’s estate. They were lovely, bright, almost magical. A cousin liked braiding them into her hair. Damsa wanted to wear one herself but was warned hers wouldn’t be as bright because her magianis status - the family’s little secret - would strip them of their sheen.
It made her angry. She looked at those flowers with envy and she made that envy known. Eventually, they gave her those flowers, cut them before her very eyes, and when they touched Damsa’s unruly curls, the flowers lost their shine almost immediately.
She didn’t cry then. It was unbecoming, in front of all those people. But she never looked at those flowers with anything but hostility. They were a reminder that she wasn’t like her family, as much as they loved her. What shined on them did not shine on her.
So when she takes one look at the serithans decades later, she knows what she must choose. She will never again have a visible wall between her and the highborn around her. She doesn’t need the flowers to shine.
A piece about Rowan as a god, featuring @kemsyne's Damsa since, wherever Damsa is, Rowan is sure to follow.
Nature & Life, Death & Destruction
He was formed in stardust, drifting through time and space, dormant. Until Life began and his eyes opened.
There were others before him, but precious few. There was Turmoil, Darkness, and Light, holding dominion over the cosmos. And there was the greatest of them all, the one who shaped them: Creation. Creation went before them, forming space and time and dotting new worlds here and there. Darkness and Light followed, filling the space between worlds, and Turmoil came last, setting those worlds spinning, poking them like an eager child to watch them collide.
In the beginning, Life followed behind them all, alone. The others were still busy with their domains for the cosmos was still young, still a delicate thing being turned in their infinite hands. The worlds were still forming, rocky and cataclysmic. Being alive was a fragile state, like a single mote in a solar storm. If one did not cradle it gently, it would be annihilated.
And so it was. Like siblings, the others would squabble at times, and the cosmos would quake in response. Life cared little for their petty quarrels but — through their strife — he found that his dominion expanded. Now he was a cycle. Life and Death embodied in one being.
He spent those early millennia marvelling at the beauty of the process. He watched algae struggle to form as fire rained down around it, wondered at the resilience of cells as they bloomed under the perfect conditions of a nearby star. He was a gardener, encouraging life to flourish even in the most tumultuous of conditions, and pruning all that wilted and faded from the world.
Over time, the worlds changed. Many were ripped apart by Turmoil, or frozen by Darkness. Many more were swallowed whole by Light, engulfed in flame until only cinders remained. He stayed with these worlds until they passed beyond his domain, bearing witness to the end of his charge in its infancy. He wandered the planes until there was no fertile land or water in which to renew the dead to life. He sifted through the debris, raking through ash and ice and rocky dust to pluck the seeds from their tombs and carry them on to new worlds still waiting to be sown.
So it went for millions of years.
Until, suddenly, there were worlds that his siblings were not permitted to touch. Worlds that Creation claimed, moulded to its will, a testing ground for new ideas. And, with them, came Life.
It was almost overwhelming, in the beginning. He was all places at once, all worlds where life must be cradled into existence and death must be swiftly dealt. He sowed the seeds he had gathered. Creatures and plants that had stood no chance in the face of his siblings flourished on these worlds. Fish, rodents, grasses, and the first trees, tall and proud under clear, blue skies. It was beautiful and pure.
When others began to emerge, he saw her for the first time.
She was formed in the fires of the world, deep in the molten rock where Life could not go. But he felt her awaken. He felt the death surrounding her birth like waves breaking around him. He felt the mountain shudder and the creatures cower as she stretched out her limbs and took her first breath. He watched the fires scorch the earth and wondered how long it would be before this world would be swallowed whole.
She was wild and capricious, like all his siblings. She ran with the wind, whipping up fires to blanket the ground. She swam in the oceans, forming great tidal waves to drown the land. When she slept, she burrowed deep in the earth, and the quaking formed great chasms. The creatures spoke of her in urgent, hushed tones. They feared the power of Nature and came to him in vast droves when she was abroad in their lands.
With her came the seasons, each one more fraught with peril than the last. Spring and flood turned to Summer and drought, to Autumn and decay, followed by the long, cold of Winter that only Darkness could have formed before her. For the first time, he walked the lands on physical feet, donning a heavy, warm cloak to keep her blizzards at bay and preserve life where he could.
He was protective back then. He was still young, relatively speaking, still learning his role in these new worlds. He was naive. After the chaos of the cosmos, he wanted to keep order in these new lands. He saw her as a threat to Life, mistook her as a child of Turmoil.
But he was wrong.
Where Turmoil might have dug their fingers into the world and ripped it in two, she barely grazed the surface. Always he followed in her wake, chasing the trail of Destruction, sowing new life in her footprints. Oftentimes, it grew back more abundant than before. And, eventually, he realised that she was another part of his own cycle, a facet of himself more so than any of his siblings. But, still, he followed her, for that was his role. Not once did she turn on her heel to stop him, though he almost wished she would, if only so he could look at her face.
Those years were peaceful. They were the shaping and forming of the world. The coming of the mortals changed Life forever.
They were a creature in Creation's own image, so imbued with its essence that they, too, might Create. They were strange, so far removed from any animal Life had nursed before. They were more intelligent, more compassionate, more violent... Just more.
As they grew, they began to upset the delicate balance of Nature. Like a wolf amongst hens, they burned through too much and too fast. Creation made more siblings to hold dominion over them, siblings Hunt, and Song, and Love, and Sky, and many more besides. But they were different from him, and from her. Their dominions were lesser, their power limited, and that made them bitter. Soon, they turned the mortals against them both.
There was no place for Death amongst these creatures, no place for Destruction. Yet they revered Life and worshipped Nature, left little offerings and said little prayers. His siblings did not teach them the truth, did not show them the harmony of Life and Destruction, Nature and Death, how all things work in balance. No, like Turmoil, the mortals would rip them in two and keep only the halves they liked best. They were, and still are, fools.
As the years went on, the dominions became more muddied. Lines overlapped, siblings scrapped for parcels of power. Elements were taken from them both. Birth, Afterlife, Wind, Rain, and so it went on. The Creations of the mortals formed ever smaller domains for siblings to go to war over. War, that was another one. They gave that to her, the hypocrites. Did she even want? He didn't think so.
He'd seen her in the aftermath too many times, toes in the blood-soaked earth, fingers reaching into the skies to summon a storm. Wash it all away, pretend it didn't happen, go to sleep and wait for him to clear away the death. But War doesn't form new life. It simply stains the fields red. They were changing her, forming her into a mortal weapon, diminishing her dominion. It wasn't what she was made to be and, for that, he resented them.
The mortals felt his scorn but were too blind to understand it. Their own ways created Disease and Pestilence, and Sickness, but they laid the blame at the feet of Death. He readily claimed each domain as his own, for which of his siblings could stop him? Only her, and she was too busy bathing herself in their blood and losing herself to War.
So, he walked amongst them in his dark cloak, adorned with scorched bones and hands black with ash. He was a whisper on the breeze, a last breath at a deathbed, a shriek of pain in the dark. He gifted them their own creations, culling them like a gardener might rip out weeds. It was not enough. It did not stop the rot. It was too deep. It was in the roots.
The draughts were retribution. Rain withholding their meagre powers to punish Life, to scorch the grass and kill the tree, to push away the gazelle and starve the lion. But he has known Turmoil, he has witnessed the beauty of Destruction. He has watched worlds collide and stars explode and stood in the chaos of Death all his existence. The mortals wailed and cursed and begged for Life. But, even then, they could not fathom that Life and Death were one and the same. He continued his work, though his cloak grew long and dragged across the plains, and his crown grew heavy with bones.
Rain was a petty creature, stealing from Nature's domain. A distinctly mortal behaviour. It was only a matter of time before Nature took back what had always been hers. The floods started without warning, so the mortals would say. But he felt her coming. Always, he had followed her, and now he could feel her race across the dead plains like lightning, thunder in every footstep.
He watched her upon the mountain, watched as the clouds gathered in her hands and the world became dark. The first rains were a blessing, and the mortals rejoiced. But dead earth cannot bear the full force of Nature. As the waters rose, those few creatures still clinging to Life came to him. He took them to a high place, laid down his heavy crown and threw his cloak over its antlers and bones, creating a space where the creatures might shelter from her fury.
He rooted his feet in the earth, lifting his arms and face to the skies to feel her. The rain washed over him, the black ash on his hands trickling down his arms and mingling with the dirt as his feet, enriching it for the next crop he will sow. He felt a river of death pass through him as the torrents rushed down the mountainside, burst over dry riverbeds and streamed through the mortal cities. She washed away the bones and the blood and the filth. Sickness and Disease would always belong to him now, but, for now, she had purged the rot. Her laughter echoed across the valleys as she plucked the weeds and presented them to him like a bouquet.
After, it was quiet. So quiet, so peaceful. He found her on the mountainside, curled up in the mud. Her brow was furrowed, her body tense, her sleep plagued. War had changed her, but she was still Nature, still Destruction, still half of him suffering at the hands of mortal inventions.
He touched her then, a thing he had never done before. His clean fingers brushed her brow, and the world trembled at the touch. He would not let them take her, would not let them change her, even if he had to destroy the whole garden and start anew.
There was work to do now, much work. But, before he began, he left her a gift. A reminder of who she is, of who they both are, and how they share dominion over Life.
