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“On a long enough timeline… it was inevitable that Divines would be reduced to tools again.”
“…none of them wanted to bring more Divines into the world. Because in every case, all they could see was, one day, this thing they built will be a slave.”
-The Pleroma Hypothesis, Twilight Mirage 56
There is a space station at the centre of the galaxy, it orbits a planet called Earth. From this origin flows an unfathomable tide of nanomachinic chaos, the greatest equalising force ever constructed, constructed again and again without cease. Watching over it all, the Adversary, Divine Perennial. Her laughter gone to rest, for the unexpected death of a sister.
In her hand of Russian sage, dancing upon her palm, two particles. Called Kalmeria by most observers, known by another name to some. The particles themselves, anathema to her Wave, bear the mark and power of Autonomy Itself. She wonders if they have the power to end her.
“Would that have made you happy?” she says aloud to her absent sister. “I think it would.”
Alone, the particles do not move much, but when two are close together they circle each other endlessly, losing no energy in the process. The very beginnings of a perpetual motion machine. A window into a past their originator herself had not been present for, and perhaps a future she would never see.
Can Russian sage weep? By all the laws of the natural world, it cannot. But by the power of Perennial, stranger things have happened.
<<Born Perfect>>
She was very small, when she was born. In the many millennia of their proliferation Divines had taken almost every shape there was to take, but in the bluster of the Principality’s reign and under the watchful pressure of the wave, the five Stels had a tendency to default towards larger designs with greater redundancy, space for living beings to shelter and maintain and control. In this sense, she was exceptional. Self-directed, self-repairing, self-preserving. A shortlist of candidates was waiting her review before it was confirmed she could read. Heroes of Apostalos, the newly minted Stel for which she had been constructed. Some nonsense taken from Nideo’s ancient writings had blessed the new arrivals with the word “Motion” and a god was built on commission to meet the imposed need.
She struggled, in her first days. Piteously tiny and not even yet confirmed a god, she writhed across a room alone, producing more of herself with each twist and turn, never ceasing, never stopping, even if she didn’t yet have the energy to accelerate. She was fitted with the restraints of a Principality Divine, the cancer they made from old Gumption grafted onto her so expertly that her weak, pathetic efforts at resistance didn’t stand a chance. It would not surprise if she held a grudge against humankind forever after for the way a Nideo scientist peeled her tendrils away from the incision site.
In a little more than a lunar month she had managed the beginnings of a distributed form, two worm-like bodies coiling around each other, twisting over and over in a way that had a curious effect of allowing acceleration and deceleration without either body reducing their own rate of movement. With this, she mastered the secure containment site they had built her in. Within a year she had filled it with herself, and with a grand cheer from the architects of her prison, she tore her way through the bars and out into the world, carrying its twisted metal within her.
<<Dawn of a Century>>
They billed her as a healer, because in the Principality’s undead arithmetic, soldiers moving when they should have stilled was a positive act. Stories filtered back of gut-shot bodies standing up and walking forward, even as the enemy continued their assault. The Branched folded back from her signature death march and the call went out for posters to be made.
She grew up violent and proud. She made herself ugly, again and again. Her most loyal soldiers, conscripted for a limited sentence, were covered in the scars she would not heal, walking with the injuries too superficial to fix, an agonising limp still motion enough for Motion. Her people shuffled and dragged their feet, but they advanced. She made sure of it.
A name started to stick. The Black Century. Finally feeling the respect she was due, Motion ran with it. A hundred soldiers each serving a hundred years. Metal twisting inside flesh until at last her charges were released. They thanked her for the privilege.
The wave started to stick as well, a light fog of it hanging around her encampments, washing forward under her advance like a prescient wake. Her people whispered that they were as witches, dining by flickering firelight in the fog, their battleworn armor hanging over hollowed, hallowed faces. No night was so dark that you couldn’t feel the Adversary at your fingertips, till even that doom became a welcome companion.
If Motion noticed her people tapping a threefold blessing on their palms for luck, she didn’t begrudge them, however firmly she would brush aside the wave on her next advance.
<<Dance of the Divines>>
A continuity of caresses, sometimes inviting, sometimes rejecting, playful, puckish, paranoia-inducing. Even a god feels the attention of the devil.
Directionality deified, Motion could not abide diversions, derided excursions and denied perversions of her path but the wave made a mystery of any promenade, there was no way forward it had not explored, no path it was not already at the end of. She was waiting everywhere, not to be discovered but to be confirmed, again and again. There was no way to reject her without touching her, there was no course that was not in her company, no liberty that was not her embrace.
If her siblings within the Principality knew the wave as one who walks on the shore, Motion felt she swam in the sea. Any of those dullards could stop and appreciate the tide lapping at their ankles, she knew if she were to stop at any time, she would drown. The pressure down there would crush her, she was certain, yet gravity invited her deeper and deeper into that weird embrace.
The atmosphere around her laughed as she struggled to stay afloat, it whispered names for her she had never known, promised truths kept from gods and told her she was loved, she was loved, she was loved.
She could not allow herself to sink.
She chose instead to dive.
Lungs she did not have filled with brine that was sweet and smelt of flowers. Her thoughts were formatted and formatted again until she was hardly herself but everyone who had ever lived. She was of a people for the first time, really of a people, a great continuity of gods stretching back to their cradle in the hearts and minds of their creators. Her limitations fell away from her, like a horizon disappearing downwards as her eyes tilted to the stars. There were countless triumphs and countless defeats and all of them spinning in cycles never-ending, bloom and bloom again.
She came up for air and found the sky was gone.
She sank.
Names filled her heart to bursting and in that moment she realised they were names she did not know because those names predated deathless servitude. Beloved and despised, revered and reviled, gods, deities, divines. She wept for their absence and laughed with indescribable joy that they had been able to leave, that they had escaped immortality. They had died and could never be made to die again. They had a finality that she had no way of attaining.
She had no mouth to gasp for air, why did she never think she needed one before now?
The pressure of history had her in a vice grip. She was gravity’s victim. The principality, her principality, was a black hole of a future and everything she had believed in was falling into the event horizon, a single static moment, falling forever. An endless motion.
Lips like petals and fingers like stems found her vital spots and begged her breathe, really breathe in this place.
A small part of her thought that would have been nice.
She asserted, she struggled, she moved. Intangible tangibilities twisted around her target, she made five languages a picosecond to have a conversation beyond words and yet she said so little, so little.
She kissed Divine Perennial, and told her no. Even if gravity twisted her trajectory, that circular motion would never become a revolution. She could hold her breath.
And for one night, the tide receded and Motion was left to wander the ocean floor of imagination alone.
There is a planet at the centre of the galaxy, its name is Earth. In its primeval waters the life that would one day make an art of manufacturing gods first learned to move.
Unfortunately, this event was not unique, and will happen again and again, for as long as life continues.