“Are you lonely?”

It had to be. Rhaaz'miel could feel it. Aching, wanting for something. But what? His village had offered its livestock, pewter baubles, burned effigies and even gone so far as to sacrifice their children to the fire. That's what it was, a whirling mass of crackling blaze in the sky. It would not stop. Some had celebrated, at first. Akash and Thridium had long been oppressors to the lowland clades, caught in the annihilation of 'Its' arrival. Old enemies, most of them dead now.

But city after city, continent after continent, it had come. Seas boiled, soil became sand, sand became glass, like a second coming of the sun. There was no longer a nighttime on G'Lennis. Their world was now one of eternal dawn, that much of it that yet remained. And that wasn't much at all. Only then had it ceased in its march. Hovering on the horizon, lightning crackling within the rippling aurora of ash and flames, settling over the broken landscape and molten mountains that demarcated the border of the last remaining land that yet remained red. Red was the sign of life. Of trees and ferns. Good to stay low, lest the flames take you, that was the law now. It would take your eyes, your skin, your very bones, and make near all observers ashen statues to stand eternal in observance of the destruction.

They had thrown Rhaaz'miel out and into the borderlands. A boy of the G'huun race. Downtrodden, spat on for their overabundance of limbs, called 'crawlers' by the old rulers of this world. No more rulers for Rhaaz'miel, now it was just him and the storm. The 'speaker'. 'Savior' or 'hero' in their tongue. The shamans who claimed that Rhaaz'miel's presence here had stopped it once and for all.

To stop the shaping and hold it back while their people developed a solution. They were not a long lived race, twenty cycles was elderly. Thirty? Even the most ancient archon in the old temples to their slain gods hadn't made it to that age in many seasons. Now there was just one of those, hot. Rhaaz'miel had been here for a year and the storm had come to still itself. He swore it had whispered to him, trying to show him things. From his perspective, this thing was not the evil others named it – a calamity wasn't necessarily a foul thing. That which had descended and shattered the gods that had once ruled over their world. Walking alongside the living and facing the fire, only to be struck down like children, all burnt away. They were weak, but this storm was not. The strongest, Rhaaz'miel knew it. G'huun liked strong things, they bred incredibly fast and had no time for the weak and warped.

This wasn't 'a god', this was God. The distillation of eternal law, that all things must end eventually – the bringer of stillness and twilight...

The elders called it 'magic', the essence celestial entities were made of. Old stories existed on this world of a time where a race had existed that could shape the very earth itself with naught but their minds. Everyone had thought that ridiculous, they'd burned and slain these creatures. Not them, not the G'huun, but the Akashi, if the tales had any truth to them. Hunted down the last of these warlocks two eras ago and put them on spikes for blaspheming against the 'gods'. That's what they said, but if this was a grand mass of magic... Rhaaz'miel thought they must be liars, nothing capable of what the storm had wrought could be defeated by the two legs.

“Are you lonely?” He repeated.

Sizzling meat, that was his only answer. Rhaaz'miel did not feel it, holding the flesh of a muu'tid in his hand and watching it cook before his very eyes. To him, the weather was pleasant. Warm, but only so much as a spring day, hence why they'd named him blessed speaker and abandoned him here as a martyr. The springs they used to have when the food was planted and the terraces tended to, cleared of snow and rubbish by foreign machina constructs.

Rhaaz'miel, as a Rhaaz, was of the prince clade, but he'd always been underwhelming. Not underwhelming enough to throw into the pits, but far below average all the same. And here he was now, talking to a warped crimson hole in the sky. He was angry. Not at the storm, but at everything else. Life. Inequity. How low his people had sunk in their time of desperation, the lowlanders becoming even lower by one means or another. Their attempts to burrow deep enough where the storm might not find them, but it always did. It was everywhere, seeming intent to take its time and watch them suffer.

Perhaps they should, perhaps this is what they deserved. The great scourge, the Crimson King in the sky.

He was frustrated. Years of this and all it did was hover there, menacingly. Never moving, but always watching. Giving him the ability to resist the flames it scalded their earth with. But why? Why wouldn't it answer him? And yet he'd shout again.

“I wish you would not do this!” Rhaaz'miel cried out, throwing the crisped flesh at the storm and watching it hover in the air for a brief moment before being burnt into nothing. “Give us our seas back! Our trees and mountains! How could you do this to us? What wrong did we do to you, eh!? Why did you choose me!?” He wept for his father. One of many lost to the blight when the armies had left with the gods at the van to 'snuff out the flame'. He could feel eyes in that storm, millions of them. An unthinking, emotionless swarm of nothing. It was hard to hate something that simply existed, no malice at all, just doing as nature intended. As pointless as trying to personify the rains that flooded their tunnels when the washouts were overworked. For so long they'd tried to communicate, decades it must've been, five generations ago and it had never answered. Why did he expect any less?

Because he was 'gifted'? Others had been, before, but always they would come to a point where the storm would eventually take them.

Rhaaz'miel expected no answer.

But it did...

It did answer, or at least it acted in concert with his request. The flames shuddered and dimmed, becoming more pleasant, denser and taking on a vague, four limbed shape in the sky. At it's side, another pair of eyes appeared. 'His' more earthly twin in all ways but more corporeal, a curvaceous figure with a longer mane. Rhaaz'miel's people did not have hair as the Thridium did, but he knew what it looked like. Refugees from that race still sought shelter in the clade tunnels, turned away or killed outright until they'd finally gotten it through their heads that they weren't welcome below. Now they all lived in disgusting basin camps, watched over by armed guard. Rhaaz'miel was not a judgmental person, but he wondered what kind of mistake the gods had wrought to give breath to such incredibly ugly creatures. Only two legs. How was anyone supposed to get around with only two legs...?

There was no real communication. In fact, the original point of light in the sky, the storm, actively tried to commit violence against the other, but 'She' held him back without much effort. Gradually cooling the storm yet further before smashing it to the ground. Two figures of light, one held by the neck, limp. Perhaps 'He' was dead, these genderless things were difficult to classify. Watching what appeared to be gods fight in the sky wasn't how Rhaaz'miel had planned to spend his day, but it was better than the solemn loneliness – not even the bugs in the earth daring to approach so near the storm.

Her hand was on his forehead and Her mouth moved, though no sound emerged. Just colors. A floating orb of their world covered in blackness. But the storm Rhaaz'miel had known for so long denied it. Somehow. He didn't know. The female protested, but contrary to their first encounter, it would seem he was the greater authority of the pair. She submitted to him, despite being stronger on this plane, and waved her hands after the brief period of apparent argument.

With that came life. More life than had ever existed on this world. Too much. Grass became saplings, and those became trees, towering off into the heavens and stretching their boughs all over until they'd left the surface of the world and covered the planet in darkness. From these trees came little things, crawling and scampering creatures of all shapes and sizes. Vicious predators and docile herbivores sprouting from the seeds she'd planted, side by side. Only a moment later and the grand butchery began. This was her purpose, and the other was to trim and shape, and so he did. Bursting into a storm again, but more controlled this time. Trimming. Maintaining. Balancing the ecosystem until all was made calm again.

Rhaaz'miel was sure in that moment, for whatever reason, that it was him causing these beings pain – both of them. These gods, for what else could they be? And not him specifically, but all thinking beings. It was agony to them, but sustenance too. Some kind of masochistic cycle of give and take, an eating of glass. Driving them mad, all of these thoughts, he could feel them. Bloody smiles and gnashing teeth. The man made of storms didn't know how to handle these thoughts, but the woman had already mastered them long ago.

Eternity had passed and the storm was still in so much pain. Driving him toward lunacy, though he had no true mind to relate to. Made a machine by the desires of others, desires he had seen to granting, with no question or cost to the bargain. The only thing he'd denied of them was his own elimination, if they'd asked him to stop – he might have. But Rhaaz'miel's gods had been resolute, marshaling the crusade and being devoured in the process.

Rhaaz'miel did not fight, he asked, and thus the storm answered. Whether by himself of via proxies He called to this place, all unique in their own way. Beings of equal parts light and shadow. Dominated by the Crimson King despite their attempts to resist his influence. The storm could not create, it only existed to destroy, and it stood tyrant over nine other figures in the sky.

Rhaaz'miel could feel it, and so could She. These 'others'. Beings beyond gods. 'She' could feel it twice, both his own aching sorrow as well as the storming madness engulfing her partner. A kind of pal that a mortal being could never countenance. This was but a machine. A cosmic janitor sweeping at the rubble of a building long since abandoned. The lights were off, nobody was present nor would they ever return, and yet he swept. For eons. Refusing a gift others had taken because he was one of the only things that possessed the ability to do so. Omega was nothing. To give unto nothing requires more than a promise. It needed to be enforced.

And she did. Tried to, again, but given purpose by the voice of this tiny speck of light addressing him he refused to capitulate. Fighting them with a ferocity untold, a mutiny of sorts, to understand the minds of a thing beyond reality was an exercise in futility.

Rhaaz'miel watched his world newly bursting with life shudder and crack, shattering hundreds of times, flickering. Never staying broken for long, waves of earth churned up down to the core until he could see a pearl of liquid flame below. She chased him through burning mountains and molten glades. Submit, she said, but he did not know the meaning of the word. He could see, but He could not feel. Could do, but could not know. Because He was nothing. Nothing cannot be anything more than It is. He was the loop. Omega. The end. The blind tide that washes the sand flat and pristine again, the fire that scours, the endless winter that brought a necessary stillness to the cosmos.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Symbols flashed through the boy's mind, blinding in their intensity, enough to drive him mad, but he had to see. He had to know why this nothing had become something. How? G'huun had a grasp on physics. Before the fall they had been a space faring race, and his – despite their short lifespan, were the best engineers the world had to offer. They built and burrowed and tinkered. They were made for it by their dead gods.

Rhaaz'miel had new gods. Old gods. Real gods, seeing them for what they truly were, distillations of universal law.

What was a king to a god? What was a god to a nonbeliever? What was anything to these empyrean entities? Why they seemed to be in so sudden a conflict after so calm a meeting was beyond Rhaaz'miel's ken. A war in the sky as all attempted to snuff out the flame, history repeating itself – and Rhaaz'miel knew the result would always be the same. Nothing could not be less.

To call it a battle would be folly. No word known to mortals could describe the titanic clashing of universal law. Time met the void, wielded as a weapon, smashed aside. Gravity warped, light bent and the mountains were sand beneath His wrath. Fires burned eternal and cold, howling back at chains of pure, unadulterated life. The threads of creation smashing into one another until all was aurora, and all below could see. Their eyes were on them, and they wept tears of blood. Shuddering in their burrowed tunnels as they were unmade, forced to confront the very concepts of existence and driven beyond the concept of insanity.

There were others. The woman of reds and blues who was first, the breather. Life giver. Bringer and shaper like her kin, only to make and craft, not cut and burn. To nurture and nourish.

He was the destroyer, the omega, ender. Partner to the one above all, his true twin. The storm that walked was below all, he was nothing. He devoured, ripped and tore until perfection was revealed in the facets of cut gems. But Nothing had lost its path. Nothing did not belong in this universe he had shaped alongside his lost brother. It had outgrown him. There was no choice but to become truly nothing, void, or become everything as they'd wanted him to.

The twelve were left as ten, the clock had shattered, a cracked face and the lunatic one responsible for filling it with no concept of what it meant to make and repair. Samael was gone. With no creator, a destroyer could not exist – perfection could not be defined. Duality broken, the most sacred concept of all reality was rapidly careening towards the end.

Two options.

He did not know, could not know anything, but he felt, they made it so. The bright one gave him eyes to see, the speaker gave him ears hear, the bringer gave him a mouth to speak.

In feeling, he knew. Paradoxical paths all twisted up until the cosmos itself was a dense web of tangled strings. Strings that Rhaaz'miel could see, driving him mad, cracking glass in his mind. He knew everything, just by bearing witness to the others, he knew nothing. There was nothing. To be 'real' was the eternal lie.

She was mighty, the Bringer, but not enough for him, he was the destroyer, the unstoppable force. She, the immovable object. More came. More and more until the sky was swarming with these beings all surrounding the storm. Picking away at them like the old tribes with their bone spears at the hide of a gigant.

A titan of blue skin and sewn eyes, so monolithic in his proportions that he blotted out the sun. Hands so massive they could squeeze this tiny world to dust with naught but index and thumb. The storm grew hot and raging when he saw the figure, striking the head of the giant clean from his shoulders with a bestial trumpet that shattered reality into its smallest parts. A winged woman with a spear of light came next, collecting the pieces alongside others, the weaver and the serpent devouring it's own tail. Grabbing at the loose strings the Destroyer had snapped and weaving them back together in their rightful form and place.

New places, better places. But for who?

A war in heaven. No swinging of swords or clarion horns, realities themselves colliding with one other. Rhaaz'miel felt himself unmade, remade, on and on in a cycle that gave no consideration to the concept of time. It lasted forever, it had never happened at all, he remembered it all happening long ago, and knew it'd happen in the future. Madness. Impossibility made real in this warped stream of screaming consciousness, his mind failing to make any sense of it. They were all floating about in a boiling cauldron of blood, filled with severed hands and a swarm of winged eyes buzzing around it like so many flies. Waiting for that great beast to fall so that they might take of their pound of flesh.

A giant with a lightning wreathed hammer arrived, pummeling the destroyer into the face of a newly repaired mountain. Blurring static, warped light as storm met storm. So similar were these beings and yet so different, they were the same long ago. Must've been.

The lady of black and white, giver of life, an angel of three faces. Winged and radiant, raising the shaft of her spear aloft to the heavens as a swarm of smaller figures identical in appearance descended. Slowly, trickling in their dozens until dozens became millions. A buzzing horde of angelic seraphs falling like meteors join the struggle against the storm.

Do not be afraid, they said. We are your salvation, they said, even while devouring the hapless souls of beings beyond quantification.

White on black, gold on blue, there was no consistency to the colors any longer.

More of these others appeared, all with their own unique guise. Rhaaz'miel observed in equal parts giddy, primal excitement, and blood curdling horror as he watched the storm grow yet further in madness. Insane as they gave what he could not want. Made him something. The rage and pain of being forced to accept, they seemed smug at first but Rhaaz'miel had known the destroyer longer than anyone else, it was inside of him. It was a part of him, his God. The great liberator of his people whether by design or coincidence. What did it matter?

The Crimson King was wroth, becoming more physical in form with every second. Slamming an old bearded leper with scales in his hands into the ground and devouring him whole. A distended fanged maw like that of the wyrm gnawing, on ten thousand tentacles to end the ordering that had betrayed their prime directive. The last to remain loyal – the lone wolf, the boy wept as his God was beaten so, forced to comply. An unthinking force given thought only to be made a slave, bound by collars beyond counting, cut and beaten at by his own kin unified to identical purpose for the first time in an eternity that knew nothing of the passing of time.

Rhaaz'miel knew they were to be builders, keepers, shapers, writers, but never conquerors. They should not know, should not feel, should not own or dominate. But the thoughts of thinking beings, the profane gift, they were nails in His skull. All of them felt it, were changed by it. There was only one left to resist them, and so they'd come. To force the apple down his throat and strangle him until he swallowed it.

Things saw, and they became. Made anew. There were so many of them that even a cosmic, universal force could not manage it alone. There was supposed to be two. Fated companions, the igniter of suns and the shaper, ender. One to make and one to break. Destroy what was imperfect, lance out what cancers had erupted in things left to rot before the rest of it could be infected. The eternal gardener cutting away diseased crops to save the rest. Unjust, the brother had said. Cruel. Wrong. Let them manage their own destiny, he'd said, and he'd seen it done. That apple, a thing that should have never been. A false thing, the greatest lie of all – a thing Bright Samael had wrought and come to regret not long after. Returned, after an eternity away, to face his brother in a bid to relieve the pain.

The black wolf in the sky with wings of starlight come again to pin his brother to the ground, the red woman finally forcing the apple into his mouth. Survival. Their survival. It was necessary, he said, but the destroyer denied it. A thousand gods to render the one into submission, and yet still he denied them. Now he knew. To know all in a single mind was madness. Forever. The omega had become the alpha, and through him the brother shared the same fate. Madness.

To exist was to suffer. And these beings would exist for as long as existence remained a word known by any speaking tongue.

–

Rhaaz'miel woke to a calm sky, a vast expanse of vivid life all around him. An ocean of trees, and the seas beyond from his vantage point on the Speaker's Mountain, his mountain. What a strange dream it'd been, but perhaps not so. He had witnessed the greatest crime in the history of the cosmos and he knew it, and the Destroyer did as well. Given a part of his compassionate brother, he could not bring himself to take it all though he could. Just enough to ensure the mortal mind of his only worthy companion all of these long years would remain stable, eternal, as he was. So much time. His life, such as it was, had lasted forever – and yet not at all. There had been no time, he'd felt no passing of it. Now, every moment was an eternity. Years had become his everything, the insect on the ground who spoke. Read to him, taught him things about this world. Such complexity in such a tiny thing. It intrigued and astonished him, a new mind was malleable.

A universal force made an infant, to grow again. To be new, and Rhaaz'miel was the father to his own father in this way. The Father.

The Speaker and the God who would come to rule their world. The prime one, the protector, next was the judge, and later the vengeance – a tool of war abused by the Speaker who had inherited his position from Rhaaz'miel who perished after centuries of extended life. The oldest friend of the Destroyer being offered the peace of death after so long in service, all by his own doing. Rhaaz'miel could not stomach another day and had fallen into a desolation of the soul.

The storm had tried to stop the death from coming, but time was immutable now. He could destroy anything, but he could not take from these beings their gift of mortal life, not yet. He could not know this concept of loss, the storm was their tool, the slave that he'd been made.

Ti'waz they called him, 'esteemed father'. But even with all of his might and how they'd shaped him, the power he'd granted this tiny and weak race to make them gods in their own right, they'd still come.

Others beyond others. Swarm. A great correction. The ordering came, as did the first failure of Ti'waz. And with their coming came the departure of the galactic spanning empire that had been fostered, the G'huun devoured.

Made by the next to love, nurture, empower, and fight tooth and nail to defend. Because that's what they'd asked of him. Anything they asked. Civilizations evolved and adapted, become degenerate, losing themselves in sin at the back of this divine sun who walked among them. Every mortal race was the same, it always ended the same way.

So safe and mighty under his protection that they became wretches. It took some time. Era after era, but Ti'waz learned. He had learned from Rhaaz'miel, his child, his father. His mouth still spoke to the storm. Ti'waz knew death and death feared and loved him in equal measure, Her halls were open always to his presence. Rhaaz'miel taught, gave lesson upon lesson until it became enough to understand.

Enough to make a decision.

The last time. They had begged his aid. Pleading into the sky for assistance, this wild degenerate race of decadent mutants. All before them had worshiped their god with devout piety, but these had replaced their faith in him with faith in technology. Things he'd given to them. He hated it, it took their love from him. Their faith, the warmth.

Help us. Help us, great one. They cried out in their billions, entire worlds of hands raised in supplication, ghosts of the past, present, future... All begging for aid. They spoke, and It obeyed, that storm. That was the rule, something that had not changed in over one hundred millennia of expansion. It had never spoken with a voice, not until that day.

Help us. Help us, great one. Father. Judge. Vengeance. War breaker. Save us!

No. He said, though he would do as they asked if only in his own way.

The storm, cosmic fire cast of the blood of the stars that filled His mouth. Sweeping all their planets away in the blaze – scouring all life from their tiny speck of reality. Before they could have their feast, no more. Ti'waz would deny their gift again, to think and know and feel was eternal but he would no longer feed on the faithful, he would be the judge. That was what they'd made him, changed by that gift so profane. Samael's apple and the golden chains it had given the living things. Chains to tug and pull at Ti'waz, and he would deny it as all things before him.

Infinite sagas on infinite worlds describing that single, solitary event, and they'd all happened. Hadn't happened yet. Were happening right now.

Beware the serpent. Rhaaz'miel had said. Fear it, avoid it, flee in sight of it. Kill it if you can. Beware the serpent. The serpent is not your friend.

Fate is your greatest enemy.

Slay what slithers.

Wolf Father.