For the micro story: 33?
In which a former mechanist once again sees the fabric of space and time, and panics about it.
{Hopefully you don’t mind I used an original setting / character for this}
[I ALSO REALIZED I GRABBED THE WRONG. PROMPT FOR THIS. Consider this a bonus, as I will be writing the correct prompt tomorrow! this is originally ‘Trembling Hands’]
Ouranos’s hands started to tremble.
He was alone in the bar he owned, the Transdimensional Raven, as he usually was if he was not in Voxwell, the capital of the Winter Court of the Dreamkin. In this bar, he could travel anywhere in Sylan and even traverse into different dimensions; however, this night, what haunted him could not be run from. He’d see it no matter where he went.
He had been used to the endless gears and machinery of the plane of Mechanicron, the sprawling and mostly empty machine-city, growing up. His mother had, alongside the lessons of a normal childhood, taught him how to handle Mechanicron, and how to weave the tapestry of Time and Space with the physical machine. But seeing what Mechanicron only modeled... seeing the true machine of the universe always filled Ouranos with dread.
His mother Cella, and his father Ybris, could see the true machinery of the universe too. Ouranos couldn’t remember if they had told him when they started to perceive the cosmos as it truly was. He knew, though, that asking them how they coped with that knowledge was pointless. They didn’t cope with it - just as people in the material Sylan didn’t ‘cope’ with the fact the sky was blue or that mountains exist. It’s just how things were.
His father Ybris would always rebuke him for caring too much about the material. He’d always say that the beings and the places and all that made up the land of Sylan did not matter outside of the fact that they were the moving parts of a grand, cosmic machine. “Why do you care about the gears so much, my son? They are working perfectly fine.” He’d ask. Ouranos didn’t understand how his father could be so cold and callous about the lives and existences of those 'gears’. Him and his father would have row after row about the subject, and Ouranos’s identical twin brother would usually get involved, though usually to take their father’s side.
Ouranos’s mother agreed with Ouranos, though she often approached the conversation with Ouranos as a conversation of detached philosophy. While he didn’t understand his mother’s seeming distance from the subject at the time, Ouranos felt like he understood her now. She had always approached the weaving of Time and Space, and the fates of all those who lived in Sylan, with the utmost care. To Ouranos, it felt like she believed she had to be distant; her lifespan was the immortality of a God, so getting too attached wouldn’t end well.
Ouranos’s hands started to shake worse than they were a couple of minutes ago. Whatever particular mixture he had taken of whatever was behind the bar, as well as a dosage of dreamgrass, to try in vain to stop himself from seeing glimpses of the True Machine had only made the situation worse. It was all he could really see, now, as he shakily reached for the wood of the bar to stabilize himself.
His mother and his father could live with the very knowledge that made Ouranos panic and shake with existential dread, and that was one of the things that was a particularly sore spot with him; if they could deal with it happily, why couldn’t he? His brother, who had taken to calling himself David, would tease him for it every time they crossed paths. “Oh, little brother mechanic, you’re scared so much by the machine you’d run away, and yet you constantly fondle the gears and stick your dick in them,” he’d taunt. Ouranos was sure that David was just jealous about the fact that Ouranos had seen the True Machine and David hadn’t yet, hence the taunting and snide comments that would always leave David’s mouth when they saw each other.
The first time Ouranos had seen the Machine, it had been his last night in Mechanicron, the place of his childhood. He, being a very young man at the time, was filled with overwhelming dread upon seeing it. He shut himself in his personal room and screamed in terror, then sobbed in pure fear. If it had been his mother, Ouranos thought, it probably would have turned out better; she knew how to calm her children’s fears. However, it was his father Ybris who arrived first, annoyed at the ruckus that Ouranos was making. He told him, coldly and angrily, to get over it and move on, brushing aside Ouranos’s terror as irrational and very, very stupid. Ouranos had already had a shaky relationship with his father and the brother who listed to every word that came out of their father’s mouth, and that night was the last nail in the coffin of him ever getting along with Ybris in any sort of polite capacity.
Even the words of Cella, his kind mother, couldn’t convince him to come back to the gear-halls of Mechanicron after that night, though she did keep in constant contact.
Ouranos had disguised himself for 4,000 years as a Dreamkin in the Court of Winter, disguising his time and space magic as ice, snow, and dreamkin magic; and had gotten involved in the affairs of both dreamkin and mortal alike. He had used the Transdimensional Raven as a way to travel across the multiverse as a cover for the fact he was bending space and time to travel as he did. But now, because of Ybris’s disappearance and the necessity of his hand as a mechanic of Mechanicron now that his father wasn’t at the helm, he had to admit to everyone of his true nature, of a family he had distanced himself from.
Ouranos looked down at his hands that were shaking the bar and making the drinks sway. His shaking hands were starting to freeze and be engulfed by icy gauntlets; the first signs of his mind switching to the Huntsman’s. Ouranos closed his eyes and steadily worked to calm himself from the state of panic and dread that was coursing through his body, and after a few minutes the ice around his knuckles melted. He looked up, and only saw his bar and not the machine of the universe. A heavy sigh escaped his lips, then a chuckle.
Tomorrow, he’d have to face David and Mechanicron. But tonight, he could point a few aimless wanderers to the right places, and make sure that all his children were still doing all right. The gears of the True Machine could be pondered and panicked over tomorrow.
