Annihilation and Genesis

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Story

I saw the god called Annihilation, walking forth on a pair of leathery wings. He towered in the dark and gloom, his three long necks bowed with three heads of ibises. His form was composed of shadow and shifting smoke, disappearing at the edges of my vision as if made from distant memories. The figures of birds and beasts leapt from him as thousands of ghosts sublimed from his body, dissolving into mist and then to nothing where they met the cave walls.

The god moved slow and with grim certainty. Like his father Death, he was not a hunter, and so I did not fear his form, but I was afraid of his heart. His heads changed places, and the pale ibis stretched towards me. He turned aside to fix me in his wide eye and I saw a vast emptiness, but there was no malice there – only that true darkness, the dark of the great yawning maw.

He spoke to me from a deep place, and so said, “You become great spirits in your own right. You send thousands to my domain and make me balk at your resurrections.”

His other heads came down and fixed me between three wide eyes. I saw all of them at once as the cave turned about itself, rock and mist transmuting into each other and back again; leathery wings came to surround me, and I felt in my chest a heart with such weight that I knew it belonged to the last of my kind. Faced by such immensity of loss, I fell to my knees and felt myself forgotten. I saw a funeral with no one left to mourn the dead.

The heads drew back in a pose of solemn pride, and with no parting words the god was gone, his body dissolved into vanishing ghosts as the humble darkness of the cave returned.

In the sudden silence, I heard many small feet, and saw the cave salamanders moving towards a tunnel that shone with faint light. I followed the creatures and was surrounded by them as they swarmed like a river, my feet as two boats that it parted perfectly around. I was no longer cold, and there was a bright light coming down the tunnel.

The salamanders fanned out in a delta, and I came into a room. There I saw Genesis, sister to the grim god. Her body was long and coiled and shone in every color with a million scales of pearl. Her head was that of a great and ancient shark, and when she turned her eye on me her gaze was that of a wild creature, both gentle and fierce, timid and proud. Steam rose from the shallow spring where she lay, and she stirred it with the many sheer wings that lined her long flanks. Intricate spirals went out and fed the red moss, which grew on the crystalline walls.

She did not open her mouth, but fanned her gills in the air as if underwater, and her voice resounded with silver tones. She told me to come, and I went to the edge of her pool, where tadpoles danced in currents of yellow light. The goddess bowed to lay her head in the water, her face reflected and watching me twofold. Her throat went as a bellows, and her ripples lapped at the edges of the pool and splashed my hands. Her tail danced across the water, tipped with light like a glow-fly.

As my feet touched the surface, the room about me was flooded and I felt myself stepping into shallow air. I breathed in the water and saw Genesis in another form; glowing beneath her skin her were all of her descendants who had not yet been born, all manner of creatures dancing in blue. I looked down to the tadpoles swimming in air and saw the same dancing within each of them, and so too in the red moss.

Genesis was gasping, and she began to change. She became all of her prior selves, growing younger until she was only a point of bright light. I followed that point as a guiding star and was pulled into the air again, standing before the tail of Genesis in the cave pool. I saw that all living things follow the light of her tail.