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Book 11

Pain issued, and my soul denied. For a long time, I felt as if I held myself, as if I had a stomach.

- “Mother! Mother, please! Mother! Answer me! Answer me, Gaia, why aren’t you anymore?”

All was denial. All I could not believe.

I was back home, and, still, there was home no more.

The old earth, a dry and desert place. There were no more rivers. There was no more wind, and there were no more seas.

A huge mass of plastic remained in the deep ravines of the dry salt lakes, reminding me of the times when humanity, my humanity, existed and prospered.

Some volcanic ash and smoke covered the skies sometimes, but any small stellar wind would dispel it - because there was no more atmosphere, and as such, the planet was long dead.

I knew not of what had happened, or when. But earth was no more.

Still, that would be acceptable. If only… if only the old spirit wasn’t there still.

As I feel into the planet, I could feel it. Something breaking inside of me. Something dissolving. And despair taking its place.

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And for a long time, as I denied the truth, I could only run away from it.

That’s until I finally came to know a few more like me. Spirits. Souls. Ghosts of a long-lost era.

Children desiring to return home.

We populated all its surface. Of the planets’ surface. Still, I only managed to notice the existence of such beings after a long, long time of digging holes, feeding on magic and burying myself deeply on the planets’ mantle.

Every time I tried to use my own soul to create a pseudo-body, I was stopped.

Be it inorganic, or organic. Be it an attempt to create a body of rock or DNA molecules on some lost pond in the middle of some continent, where a few conditions still needed for life managed to still exist.

Then, when I finally accumulated enough distraction with this to be able to drift my thoughts from the hard truth I had been trying to deny, I managed to notice other souls.

Some seemed to be crazed and violent, but I was somehow protected from those. I had all mastery of magic and qi, but I didn’t had the blessings of Tiphoon upon old Gaia, so the Wild Hearts of the crazed and maniacs around me, as well as my own crazed heart, could easily be overcome by those around us which had managed to retain control over their emotions. Such are the laws of the world - Qi obeys Magic, and Magic obeys the Heart. The True Heart.

Slowly, but steadily, I managed to regain memory and sobriety. I managed to grow and calm down.

I managed to overcome the hard truth that Gaia was no more… because it never Were in the first place.

- “I Am Here.”

The planetary spirit I someday called mother… why had I believed that it was somehow different from Tiphoon itself?

- “I Am. But I am not Gaia.”

I never noticed it, but Tiphoons’ tone and way of being were always changing. The angels it carried on itself were always changing their own ways of addressing it.

- “I Am. But I am not Mother.”

Always changing. At the end, I was the only one still calling it Tiphoon. Not only that, why had I felt such longing to return? It made no sense. I hated the idea of having been used. I despised in contempt at the face of how Seeds needed to be nourished for one to become Immortal. I despised as I thought of what it meant to be Immortal without sleeping, without being in charge of the whole planet.

- “I Am. Grow and let it go.”

I never had a Mother. I never had Gaia.