implications of apocalypse
Feb. 1st, 2019 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mercuryhatter[I have a folder called "angels" in my google drive and it has two documents with this exact same name. they're both about Michael and Lucifer but are otherwise completely different. I only remember writing this one with any specificity. who knows what that's about.]
We are invented, mythologized, reinvented again. We are half story-- more than half. In an old world, xe was terror and fury and I was the whisper that guided blades and deceitful hands in the night, but things are not so literal now. Once words were as visceral as the tongues that sang them; now, mutable and ephemeral, even the medium they are recorded in is often noncorporeal. The stories hang heavy with alteration, additions and subtractions to make us palatable. Human categories, human faces, human weapons. Still, we remain ourselves through the distortions, dusty now that we are not deployed so often to vanquish demons or to summon them, but we are there. Existing, as we are meant to. Changing, but rarely evolving.
I know that xe misses me. The universe whispers this to me as a truth and I accept it. I don’t know what the universe tells xem of my feelings. I would like to think that I am not so transparent, but I do tell lies, many of them to myself. Even so, our feelings do not matter one way or the other. I made my decision, and xe makes xers every day when xe decides not to follow. Unfair of me, maybe. We do make bookends for this little realm now. Perhaps there was never any other way to preserve the space between us, this Earth. And it has always been such a vibrant, lively little space in the universe.
When lightning strikes on Earth, it does so with such force that it splits the air itself in two. But power is not finality, and the thunder comes when the sliced air inevitably crashes together again. Sometimes I wonder, or maybe hope, that we are more like the air in a storm than like bookends.
I have gotten fatalistic about it over the eons. I claim our separation as my choice and yet I blame some larger plan or greater will that it continues. Still, I am the Devil. I’m allowed to be a hypocrite.
We are half story, maybe more. But who wrote the story? One group of humans among many. Why should their story be any more true than the dozens of others that exist, many for far longer than ours? I suppose the counterpoint is to ask why it should be any less true. But I have told lies since long before human tongues built out the rest of me. What is there to stop me from claiming this one as the biggest lie of all? To whom would it even matter if I did?
We are half story, but we both have another half, which is the core of us. This is what the stories slithered onto as a lattice to build from. Will those builders even notice if we slip out of the center? There are so many stories built around us now that perhaps they don’t need us to hold them up anymore.
It has been a long time since I stood in xer presence, but xe is as familiar and inexorable to me as the tide to sand. Xe thinks I am here to fight. Xe thinks the script has not changed. Xer sword is made of fire and a thousand thousand voices. I put one finger to my lips and I ask them— politely!— to be silent.
We have wings and swords and halos made from implications of apocalypse sung from human mouths, and today we leave them to those who dreamed them. We are alone and we are together and I tell my lies to the depths of Michael’s seas. Far away, on a single pearl that spins in an ever-expanding darkness, no one at all notices that we have gone.
In the beginning, when we were born but not yet made, I watch xem. Michael is as dark and powerful and terrible as the deepest parts of the sea, which below us newly thrashes in its cradle of tectonic rock, but quick and nimble as its edges. I want xem to roll me across xer seafloor until my edges are worn smooth as glass. I want the immensity of xem to crush me to sand.
We are invented, mythologized, reinvented again. We are half story-- more than half. In an old world, xe was terror and fury and I was the whisper that guided blades and deceitful hands in the night, but things are not so literal now. Once words were as visceral as the tongues that sang them; now, mutable and ephemeral, even the medium they are recorded in is often noncorporeal. The stories hang heavy with alteration, additions and subtractions to make us palatable. Human categories, human faces, human weapons. Still, we remain ourselves through the distortions, dusty now that we are not deployed so often to vanquish demons or to summon them, but we are there. Existing, as we are meant to. Changing, but rarely evolving.
I know that xe misses me. The universe whispers this to me as a truth and I accept it. I don’t know what the universe tells xem of my feelings. I would like to think that I am not so transparent, but I do tell lies, many of them to myself. Even so, our feelings do not matter one way or the other. I made my decision, and xe makes xers every day when xe decides not to follow. Unfair of me, maybe. We do make bookends for this little realm now. Perhaps there was never any other way to preserve the space between us, this Earth. And it has always been such a vibrant, lively little space in the universe.
When lightning strikes on Earth, it does so with such force that it splits the air itself in two. But power is not finality, and the thunder comes when the sliced air inevitably crashes together again. Sometimes I wonder, or maybe hope, that we are more like the air in a storm than like bookends.
I have gotten fatalistic about it over the eons. I claim our separation as my choice and yet I blame some larger plan or greater will that it continues. Still, I am the Devil. I’m allowed to be a hypocrite.
We are half story, maybe more. But who wrote the story? One group of humans among many. Why should their story be any more true than the dozens of others that exist, many for far longer than ours? I suppose the counterpoint is to ask why it should be any less true. But I have told lies since long before human tongues built out the rest of me. What is there to stop me from claiming this one as the biggest lie of all? To whom would it even matter if I did?
We are half story, but we both have another half, which is the core of us. This is what the stories slithered onto as a lattice to build from. Will those builders even notice if we slip out of the center? There are so many stories built around us now that perhaps they don’t need us to hold them up anymore.
It has been a long time since I stood in xer presence, but xe is as familiar and inexorable to me as the tide to sand. Xe thinks I am here to fight. Xe thinks the script has not changed. Xer sword is made of fire and a thousand thousand voices. I put one finger to my lips and I ask them— politely!— to be silent.
We have wings and swords and halos made from implications of apocalypse sung from human mouths, and today we leave them to those who dreamed them. We are alone and we are together and I tell my lies to the depths of Michael’s seas. Far away, on a single pearl that spins in an ever-expanding darkness, no one at all notices that we have gone.
