Mostly Void, Partially Stars

Deep in the forest, Ash mixed with the moist dirt, but they did not give life. They poisoned, they shriveled the plants and scared away the animals, they became so sickly, so Rotten and poisonous, that the forest fell around it, until tree and flower and creature alike turned inside out, its skin melted and bone dissolved into a sickly-sweet slush, leaving nothing behind but Ruin and Rot. 

I never meant to kill. 

I never meant to take that power into myself, to become Ruin, become Rot, become Ash. I only wanted to save myself. I only meant to run, but I did not see the direction the sun was setting, did not smell the poison in the earth, piercing Her hide, reaching for me. I truly never meant for any of this to happen.

That is to say synthesis requires both thesis and antithesis, and I would be a liar if I said that I never wanted the power, that I did not chose to keep wandering into the forest.

I am not a liar. 

Why can’t a moth resist the temptations of a flame? Are they so overtaken by fascination that they do not consider the possibility of consequence?

Or maybe they know exactly what they’re doing, exactly what they’re risking, and proceeding all the same. Better to die having risked, having seen, having fought than to exist in eternal stasis.

To this day I still can’t decipher who was the moth and who was flame. I liked to think of myself as the latter, so irresistible that men would die to get a glimpse of me atop my blazen horse. For millennia I watched them destroy each other with their blunt limbs and sharp tools, all the while believing this was what worship felt like. They were doing this all for me, all because they couldn’t get enough of me.

Now, though, I wonder if I was the one who did this to them.

I admit, they intrigued me from the start, knowing so little of each other and the world they were bound to. I was determined to enlighten them, to shed light into their dim minds. It seems that instead I’ve only maddened them. I didn’t consider that instead of clearing their minds I may have set them ablaze. Or maybe I did and I just didn’t care because I was so entranced by the thought of sharing my radiance.

Maybe I am what the gods have warned us of.

Maybe I will be the one to burn the world.

Maybe I’ll ruin everything.

Maybe I already have.

Maybe all I’ll bring to this earth is despair.

Or maybe, I’ll bring beauty, just like the rest of you.

Maybe I’ll create the bridge between dissonance and harmony.

Maybe I’ll be that bridge.

I am not sure where I stand on the ever-shifting balance of good and evil. I’m not sure whether I burned or was burned or will burn. My purpose, once so clear to me, now lies a mystery deep within the embers at my core. But it matters not. The gods chose us to share our gifts with this world and so we shall. It is my turn now.

Let us meet in the Garden, siblings.

Let us find out what the Fates have in store.

There’s a place. It’s somewhere far away. No one is there. The life of civilization, barren, leaked out the cracks of futile human mortality. And everywhere there is dust. Dust of their crops, withered and dried, dust of their ground, cracked and hardened, dust in the houses, no longer lived in, and the dust of their own, as their bones turn to sand.

I used to shine. Scattered among space, I shined and I glittered and I created.

That’s something they never told you.

Once upon a time I created. I created everything luminous and sacred and whimsical. 

The humans called me magic.

I created them too,

Crafted them from stardust and ambition.

Just as I was.

Careful hands threaded needles of physicality through cloth made of souls. 

I always thought that humans were my greatest creation.

Stardust. Moondust. Faerydust. 

I can’t listen to those words anymore. All they do is serve as a reminder for all I was.

And all I could have been. 

I didn’t see it when it began. I should have seen it. I should’ve known. 

The dust settled into my bones, turning magic into disease. Turning stars into stone. 

I must admit, I got greedy. I tried to keep my creations to myself. But when you take and take and take… Well, even the shiniest metals can rust. 

I used to be great. Now I am nothing.

But that’s only true in a sense. 

I still exist. I exist as the spirit of nothingness, the taker of crops, of rain, of lives. I’m the invisible hand that steals from my own creation, slicing my sickle across the stalks of their sustainability. I am the spirit of striking ribs and shaking hands; the one present when plants die, when drought prevails, and when villages wither away into silence. 

I was forgotten for what I was. 

Tell me, have you ever been forgotten?

It’s gone. Everything I’ve worked for is gone, burned down with the flames of my own initiation. 

The ashes are all that’s left anymore. 

The ashes and the smoke and the dust. So much goddamn dust. 

Humans know their stardust creation. They attribute it to someone new, someone bright and glowing. She reminds me of who I used to be. 

They fear me as someone different. Running away from the hands who created them.

If I can’t have them nobody can.

If I don’t deserve them then who does?

I was forgotten, but I wasn’t always alone. Even when the dust turned my shine to clouded gloom, still, I caught Their attention. They lowered Their blade and extended Their arm.

And so I took the hands of Death.

Tonight: Time stands at the edge of the lake, afraid of nothing. 

For a moment, she stares at her reflection in the flat mirror-surface of the water and thinks not of the echo but the elegy, coaxing truths like thorns out of her mud-caked feet. Flowers sit withered at the bow of her lips, the hollow of her throat, the space between her two cupped hands: irises and water lilies and feathered reeds, turning themselves inside out and twisting free of their tender prisons. Always giving, always taking, she thinks, giving, taking, giving, taking—giving way to sweet ash and dirty ruin, and the pungent finality of rot. 

Time asks, Do you hear? The elegy falls away. And the answer comes: Destruction is consumption is beautiful.

She turns to face her, Destruction, Consumption, her old friend—the one who plucks her name from fragments of loveliness, the dead Earth’s soil. As she watches, her lips peel back from her teeth, as red and wet as bone marrow. 

Time knows of it, has had this vision more than once. In it, Purity is an ally with her slick-edged willing smile, and the plague is a beating shadow. In it, they stride into an elegy of lake water, and Consumption pulls away at the sheet of her skin, dripping.

Time has come, she says, in all her wild, wicked beauty. I have come.

Pestilence’s smile curves like a shadow over her face, as sharp and sweet as knives. Yes, she says, hungrily. Yes. For time is worth all the blooming.

Not me writing up an entire granny square pattern instead of studying :)

I hope it makes sense, and other people enjoy!

People who requested the pattern tagged under the cut:

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