Trials of Stone

New Genesis

He came forth into void.

The light cleared, and there was nothing. The three pillars, each topped by their silent corpse-flames, stood in nothing, and he stood with them. He looked around, and there was simply nothing. No land, no sky. No light, no dark. No sound nor sight nor sense of any kind. It was not a gaping emptiness. It was not a hungry depth. It was not blackness nor lightness. It was, simply, nothing.

He looked down at his hand. All three crystals were there now, gently floating just above his skin. He looked back up, around him at the void.

He had completed the Trials of Stone, and this was what he had to face next.

Body, Soul and Mind. All three had been taken from the world that was. Now they existed only inside of him. If he wanted to restore the world as it had been, he would have to give them up. He clawed at the crystals on the back of his hand, but they would not move. He looked around, and brought his hammer against the three pillars, but none of them would break or crack or even chip. He stared at them, not frustrated, simply pondering what to do.

No, he thought. He couldn't give them up. The powers of the Lords, the True Power of Stone, was in him now, a part of him, and it would be impossible to separate them from himself. The restoration of the world would not come, at least not wholly, from that Power. It would come from him, and more than that, it would be him to hold it in place.

He focused on the three crystals, and found contained within them everything that had been and everything that was meant to have been. He touched upon them, drew them into his being, and suddenly felt it overwhelm him, felt his self, his consciousness, dissolve before the weight of it. He felt his self split into three, obsidian, marble, and granite, body, soul and mind, and he felt those pieces of self stretch out into the emptiness and carry with them what had been, and what was meant to be, and as they did he felt the emptiness of stone wipe him away.

But just before it did, he reached out into the vastness of the universe and made one, tiny change.

And then wind sighed through vast sandy deserts, and waves crashed against stone, and birds chirped and cities screamed and the universe spun as it had.

And, in a little hut on a hill in a valley, a woman played with her child, both of them happy but for a tiny, nagging sadness that something was missing.