Death, And Therefore Rebirth

Oddity, And Therefore Wonder

“It’s perfectly natural to question weird events.”

                 
           When Priara died, so did everything else. Only the twins survived, but ever since, existence was skewed. The seventeen elements were no longer united under a single deity, and as a result, Murn and Cosme were unfamiliar with most aspects of existence, including time and pain. This wasn’t a problem for long, however: in the year 1, Cosme gave birth to twin sons. For the first time in the Living Universe, the act of childbearing was short and painless. However, it would also be the last time, as Cosme had just given birth to Time and Pain.

               Disease, the element that had killed the last universe, was reincarnated in the form of a writhing miasma containing every sorrow and illness that would be known to man. It was an agent of pain, a combination of several elements† that would become the scourge of all life, along with time. Yet upon his birth, Pain was embraced, and christened Mard.

             Even though the new god was too young to be seen as a separate entity from pain and disease, Murn and Cosme became attached to him, despite the former’s prevision telling him not to. In Murn’s defence, not even the clearest foresight could have prepared him for what pain felt like. However, the two quickly learned with Mard’s birth, for he was born with every ailment that a human or god could get. This resulted in him dying just three days after he was born. The nature of Mard’s death was nothing short of tragic: he was essentially killed by his own element, which did not die with him. Instead, pain and its agents lived on to find several million victims in the coming millennia.
 
            The second victim of disease was Mard’s elder brother, Croth. For six months, he’d been constantly exposed to various illnesses in the womb to the point that he was born sickly, yet immune to death from natural causes. When he was born, Cosme had thought that he would die before Mard. The fact that Croth did not made her so relieved that she began to prefer him over all of her future offspring, which would make Murn’s projection recoil in horror. In his case, foresight was an agent of pain, as was time.

              Krathe, the Ætani word for both time and age, was a product of fate and disease. Like disease, it was fatal and painful, but like fate, it was a vital component of reality, and therefore unavoidable. The people of Ernalda--or at least some of them--imagined that Croth and the spirit of his dead twin were invisible mists that hung in the air, unnoticed by all. Life had no choice but to breathe in the toxic mists and succumb to them. They would inevitably cause your death: it was just a matter of time. It could take them the lifespan of an ephemeron to do so, or it could take them eighty-seven years. And the two had different ways of killing you.

             Pain caused suffering; he broke hearts and bodies alike, while Time preferred annihilation. He would hasten his victims’ deaths before proceeding to turn all evidence of their existence into dust. Their remains, their life’s work, people’s memories of them, the curse words that they’d carved into a wall when they were thirteen...all would be dust once the mist of Time was through with them. No wonder the twins were referred to as akiti murdal, or bringers of death, by those who dared.

*†*
             

            For several decades, there was nothing substantial in the two aræ. Murn and Cosme’s true forms, which were colourful expanses of dark blue and other hues, were intertwined in permanent coitus. The mist of Croth was between them, and that of Mard was somewhere in Murn. But that was it--the only things in Existence were things you could feel or see, like colour or pain. There was nothing to touch, nothing that offered a sense of solidity and reality to the Ara Vitea. In 71, however, this changed with the birth of Lythe Plerea.