Death, And Therefore Rebirth

Rebirth, And Therefore Oddity

“This is bizarre, right? How could I have been revived?”

             The Turi and the Peri were two different races. The former was divine, and the latter merely human. One race created and controlled nature, ruled the underworld, represented part of man and was the law. The other race was man, broke or followed the law, took advantage of nature and eventually went to the underworld. While a god could do one or two out of the four things that were mentioned in the third sentence, a Peru, or human being, had no choice but to do all four of the things mentioned in the previous one.

          Deep down, however, the two species were similar in demeanour and character (which the ædeta will get to later,) despite several key differences, one being how they came to be. All the Turi had been born, and the first Peri merely made. However, both gods and humans alike could claim that they had been brought into being, either directly or indirectly, by a celestial Tura known as the Ara Merna, or the Universe Mother.

             Other than being a divine matriarch as well as the personification of the ara, or universe, the Ara Merna had control of the seventeen elements that made up all existence. The elements in question were: sky, darkness, light, earth, water, air, fire, wood, law, spirit, mind, body, disease, war, the underworld, fate and sex. Overall, most of these elements were natural in the sense that they made up nature and affected the body, while the others were more immaterial and affected the spirit and mind. The first eight were needed for life to exist. The tenth, eleventh and twelfth together were a life, the product of the first eight. The final one was a means of producing it, and the others provided death and balance.

          Most Turi could only control five or so elements at the most, but the Ara Merna had access to all seventeen! As such, she was all-powerful, all-knowing and all seeing. Among her innumerable powers were the ability to conceive asexually and conditional immortality, the condition being that she would be able to die upon the birth of her seventeenth child. Upon her death, her eldest daughter would inherit the heathen mantle. This entailed absorbing the previous Ara Merna’s body and powers, as well as eating her siblings and their descendants (if they had any.) Once this happened, she would stop ageing until she had her 17th child (after that, the ageing process would begin anew, albeit at a much slower rate than that of the average Tur.) She would also add the suffix -ara to her name in order to indicate that she was now the universe.

          The first Universe Mother was simply named Ara. Born hundreds of billions of years PK, she was the descendant of all the primæval elders. The elders in question were a group of seventeen Turi who each had the power of an element and were feuding with each other for æons. However, two of these fighting elders, Fer and Sari, had loved and married each other, and realised that they wanted the war to stop. To one of their fellows, they’d proposed a solution to the feud: a child composed of all Existence and wielding its collective power. Ara was that solution, over a thousand years in the making.

         In her five hundreds, she used the power of the universe to destroy everything that ever existed, save for herself and including her ancestors. As the Universe Mother, Ara used her powers to ensure that no feud could take place within her-- this was not an easy task, given that war and destruction were essential to existence and her own equilibrium. She had 17 children, and made it so that all her successors would instinctively do the same, thus starting and then perpetuating the Fura Area, or cycle of the universe. That cycle lasted for æons before its abrupt end in the year 444 PK† with the death of the twenty-third Universe Mother.