Anaia was the beginning. There was nothing before her, but there would be those that came after her. She evolved from nothing and out of space built stardust from the desire for light. In the small ways that mothers can become, she created because she could and because she wanted to.
As she evolved, Anaia began to wish for more than the stars as company. The stars were not unkind, but cold and distant, they also did not sing. Her existence remained quiet, if lighted softly. Between the starlight, she could see the space for more creation, and so she thought. There existed no color but silver yet, but Anaia imagined a blue, a cerulean blue that ebbed and flowed and held the stars within its depths. As Anaia thought it, she named it: water. Water there was and soon, Anaia sank within it. The water, cool in places, warm in others where the starlight played across its ever-moving surface, still did not sing to her. It hummed, thrummed in a way that relaxed her, gave her refuge and sanctuary… But the pool did not offer her companionship. For that was what she desired. Anaia sat up; she wanted another like her.
Within the water, Anaia thought. She pulled together colors in her mind, imagined once more, considered potential, drew energy from within herself, and within the water, she created a single being. With a long tail to flick through the heavy waves and a top to reach up to her, should Anaia choose to return to the sky on occasion, the being knew Anaia immediately as its mother.
~.~
~.~
For a while, Anaia and the Mer, for that was what Anaia named the being, existed in the ocean together. But when Anaia returned to the sky to sit amongst the stars, the Mer grew lonely, hungry, and eventually passed out of existence. Heartbroken and furious, Anaia threw herself into creation. Out of reds and oranges, the very ends of the light from the stars she drew fish and coral. From the darkness in between, she designed creatures that could only survive at the very bottom of the sea. She gave the sea a sandy bottom, far away from the light of the stars, and once she had furnished the ocean, she once more created a Mer. This time, she created two. If I take time away from you, she told the two creatures, you have each other.
And they did. When Anaia returned, however, she discovered that there were more Mers; her creation had offered her yet more life. Delighted, she held the baby Mers as they learned to swim, and as the moments passed, she watched her creation populate the ocean.
After a while, however, Anaia began to feel as though something had changed within the Mers. While the elder Mers had passed into the sands below the seas, their children, and their children’s children, did not see her as an equal. Instead, Anaia gasped, they saw her as a Goddess. They revered her.
When Anaia returned to the sea to treat with them, they feared her, feared that she might rescind their right to be. Some grew angry with this fear. Some sought to safeguard their existence and drew power and energy from the forces around them, leaving fish dead, coral white as bone.
Anaia grew angry at this; she wanted companions, she did not want to be revered, but neither did her creations have the right to make war upon each other to defeat her wishes, even if her wishes were not what they perceived.
In this anger, Anaia created once more. In memory of the dead fish, the mountains of coral now crushing the ocean floor, Anaia created a mountain of earth. Not quite sand, the earth bore the dark anger of Anaia’s heart, brown and yet hopeful. The soil surged outward, covering the dead coral until the sea surrounded it and upon its face, nothing moved, nothing lived.
You see! Cried some of the Mers, whose tails had turned black for the lives they had taken. You see what she would do to us who do not revere her! Anaia turned her back on these cries, ignoring the Mers who still called for her help, who believed in her goodness.
In her making of the world, Anaia too, changed.
Between the echoes of the cries, Anaia sought not to create another species. She had enjoyed the singing of the Mers, the lullabies and the symphonies of their existence, but it had all ben for naught. Still lonely, and perhaps even more so now that she could see love between creatures, Anaia sat upon her hearth and thought. She looked towards the horizon, for now there was a horizon, and called upon the stars. What would you do? She asked them, what would you make?
But the stars did not answer her, for they did not have the language that Anaia did. And in the soft silence after her plea, she began to walk. As she walked, Anaia thought, and in her thoughts, she created. Flowers and plains and mountains and hills. She created forests and rivers and clouds and the rain. And in her creating, Anaia thew forth her sorrow, her regret, her disappointment with her first failure. The earth absorbed this feeling, sealing it within itself. The land did not ring with the glee of the sea; it harbored a borrowed nostalgia not its own, a secondhand sorrow. And in its adolescence, it waited.
Anaia walked the land for a long time. The voices of the Mers soon quieted, convinced, she knew, that their creator had abandoned them. She had. She missed them, but she would not have the companionship she craved under the sea. So Anaia did not return.
Instead, she found herself in the woods one night, under the starlight that had accompanied her from her beginning. She felt the sting of bark along her skin and watched as her own blood pooled in her hand. Without warning, she thrust her hand into a trunk, breaking her fingers as she did so, and reached the center of the tree, the point around which all the circles grew, marking their memories. Opening her palm, she closed her eyes and let her blood trickle into the tree’s center, marking its memories, bringing it a different kind of life.
When she opened her eyes again, the tree seemed to blink back. Withdrawing herself, Anaia fashioned the branches, closing some together, roping muscles under the bark, smoothing the skin of the tree into something that resembled her own. As she finished this creation, Anaia sank down, exhausted. The being looked around, startled at its own existence, perhaps its shape unexpected. Slowly, it pulled one leg from the ground and then the other; its roots transforming into bare feet like those Anaia rested upon.
Slowly, it smiled, a great breaking of its face, and it considered Anaia in the way none of her Mers ever did. It reached out a hand, and taking it, Anaia rose.
“I am Winden.” The being said, voice deep like the thrum of a breeze through a canyon.
Anaia’s first creation to have named itself, Winden accompanied Anaia wherever she went on the land, but he could not follow her home to the stars. So she did not return to the stars. The stars grew lonely and distant, but they were accustomed to waiting, and so they watched the clouds roll over the land and the sea and caught glimpses of Anaia and Winden when the could. Something is coming, the stars suspected amongst themselves, something is changing.
And so it was.
Anaia and Winden, who had grown into a fine companion, were expecting a child. Anaia, surprised to find herself swollen with life she herself had not imagined, touched Winden’s cheek one morning. What do we do now?
This was not something Anaia had expected, nor did she know what this being would be.
We wait, Winden answered, serene. He was thrilled, and he pronounced his joy from the highest peaks of the eastern mountains and the lowest crevices of the eastern valleys. The rivers hummed with his bliss, and the land grew green and warm and fertile, just like its creator.
Then the moment came, and a great pain ripped across Anaia’s middle. In the center of the land, she collapsed, the same blood that had created Winden, seeping out of her into the earth. Winden did not know what to do, and so he held her hand, cradled her head, and cried as bands of pain ripped across his beloved’s body.
In the end, he could not save her. Anaia held not one, but two perfect creatures to her chest, before she looked up at Winden. Do not let me go, she said softly, but Winden, beside himself with grief, could not abide by her wishes. Instead, as her arms fell, he caught the babies and laid them in the branches of two trees from the forest. As gently as he could, Winden called desperately to the stars and lifted Anaia’s broken body into the sky, that she might return home, from whence she came.
In the sky, the stars caressed their creator with silver light, withdrawing her body from her true-named form, and cast her once more to the far edges of the existence. When Anaia woke in this original form, she screamed and the whole world shook. Never again could she return to the land she had created, never would she touch her beloved again. Never would she have the chance to forgive her Mers or teach them how to exist with her other creations.
In her sorrow, she withdrew, watching that which she had touched and molded, but never again would she be able to engage with the world the way she had. In her efforts, Anaia created a force, a painful force, a sorrow baked into the existence of her creations, a knowledge that all things can and will come to an end.
Winden could feel this pain, and though he did not regret his decision to save his companion, he too withdrew, leaving the twins at the mercy of the land. He named them, Sakjerst and Lettishae, though he did not know if these were their true names. Walking eastward, Winden collapsed at the feet of the mountains from whose heights he had so recently pronounced his ecstasy.
Sakjerst and Lettishae grew in the shadows of the mountains, walked between the branches of the forests, and soon, just as their mother did, grew lonely. Not knowing the pitfalls of creation, both began to work with the land, feel the force left from their mother, and both began to create.
Sakjerst did not seek the same singing as his mother did. He wanted knowledge of the future, that he might avoid the same fate as Anaia. In the forest whence his father grew, he created the Grove. He spoke to them, day and night, inviting them into the sorrow of his young boyhood, teaching them to understand the movements of the stars and the ways of emotion.
As they blinked to life, the Sakjeden could not see anything. There are no beings here whose futures we can know, they told Sakjerst. And so he began to create again.
~.~
~.~
Lettishae, who sought the sweet music of resonance like Anaia, had begun to create herself. She had followed the wending of the world, the curves of river banks and the crushes of ferns beneath fallen trees. She had listened to the way small things orbited each other, the lisps of leaves and the burbles of brooks. In between these spaces, Lettishae brought forward the Fae, each gifted with the impossibility of time and the willingness to take care of the land around them. She morphed each Fae to the space in which she planted them, those with long legs able to run like horses she named centaurs; she placed them in the plains. Those who spent time between the small flowers, Lettishae named fairies and pixies. She created the elves, the gnomes, the dwarves, the nymphs, and everything in between. As she filled the land with the Fae, her brother filled the land with animals, insects, and everything in between.
Finally, exhausted, they met in the center of the land once more. Why am I still lonely? Lettishae asked her brother. He shrugged. Sakjerst did not offer many words. It was not his way. All these beings live forever. Lettishae noted, but the land does not ache for this.
They can now tell the future, Sakjerst agreed, but this does not offer me refuge.
Together, the siblings sat, holding their mother’s sorrow in their hearts.
Anaia, watching her children from above, offered one piece of advice through the starlight. As they slept, Anaia wound into their dreams and offered both Lettishae and Sakjerst one more creation. These beings would embody her failures, her fears, her regrets, and her hopes. They would hold the abject love of family, of existence, and respect for death. They would be wicked and glorious, victorious and defeated, deceitful and honest and nostalgia incarnate.
When Lettishae and Sakjerst rose quietly from slumber, they had a name for this co-creation.
Human.
~.~
Comments