These Darkened Sands

When the Earth was still raw with blood from wars of conflicting faiths; in the afterbirth that was the sloughing off of the old ways, Eilonwy witnessed a great many horrors.

The Dark Wars had been one thing. In those days, survival and the shaping of the universe had come in waves to wash ashore on the planet’s plane of existence. Clashes between forces ancient and tremendous were to be expected.

What she had not expected was the cruelty of man.

It should not have surprised her. They had been shaped in the image of a great and powerful Father, a vague figure of pure energy and fury and light and mercy. She had known His hand, she had even stood beside it at certain points; leant her own intensity to His will. She had been on a great many sides in her endless lifetime, and His was only one of them. It wasn’t always good, though He always was.

In time, she’d broken off from others, however. Religion became more…categorized, as civilization thrived. Cities took on aspects of their own beings, worship in the form of cobbles in the streets and spires on the buildings. The mundane and the material grew fat and luxurious, squashing those who could not keep up with the changing tides under their bricks and mortar.

Eilonwy, wearying of the way the world continuously churned, slipped under cover of darkness and water to meditate on the passing of time. Faith and war waged on, endless but less potent than the first days of conflict. There was something so petty about humans and their necessities. Or their alleged necessities. More land. More yellow minerals. More lovers. More, more, more. As if there was not enough to go around. All they really needed to do was better divvy up their resources, share equally, and understand one another. What they did instead was hoard due to fear and separate their cultures; languages, arts, and civilizations. Even their weapons shaped themselves differently.

All this and more exasperated her, and so the spirit dwelled beneath a Lake, trying not to seethe so much she boiled the water.

Little stirred her from her sanctuary of turquoise and shadow. She slept in and out of centuries, slipping through time’s cracks in whorls of whirlpools, peeking through windows only she could shape, emerging to offer a sword to a young man full of hope and energy; then. She emerged to take back her blade when he returned defeated, bloodied, and broken. She received also his lover’s corpse, golden-haired and still, wrapped in a pearly shroud and dragged off to an isle of mist and moonlight. The sorcerer, in his anxious despair, had cursed the corpse to rise again. Someday. When the time was right. Eilonwy had much to undo, there. She kissed the spirit trapped within and set it free. Perhaps if he saw fit, yes, he would return–a different man, however, and not the bloated thing that now fed her little fishes.

People made mistakes like so. Even people such as the sorcerer.

Mistakes driven by fear, by despair. Mistakes such as those that brought her out of the water (I emerge only to tell you all to cease), Mistakes such as the one that lay still and withering; silent, prone on a forest floor. She heard his final cries through her curtains of water and found him through an icicle window.

Eilonwy tired of the cries of humanity. Wailing like wind which had lost its direction. This cry, however, had been different.

She had heard it many a time before. She had heard it even in the wizard’s wail of anguish when his precious corpse slipped beneath the waters. She had heard it in times of joy, in times of anger, in times of utter loss. Never so pure, however. Never so bleak.

When she kissed his face with dewy lips, she blessed him, too, and swore to herself to give him a joyful life in this twisted, hobbling beggar of a world left crippled by the plagues of mankind. She would take from him his unnecessary and feeble humanity. She would make him strong, give him hope and happiness.

She had broken her promise since then–a vow to never let him cry again like so.

But these were not the days of old, and Eilonwy was tired.