Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Author's Note: I find that there is a severe lack of Origin stories on this site, which kind of makes me a bit sad because I think Origin is a fascinating character and he's kind of a vital piece to the entire storyline. So, I decided to write something for Origin myself.
As far as Photographs of Freedom goes, I've hit a bit of a block because my mind, being the strange mind that it is., seems to come up with everything in the future tense, and I already know what the last lines are going to be and the last few chapters, but I can't seem to bridge the gap in between. So it might take a while to get this next chapter up.
I was able to go see Wicked this weekend. It was absolutely incredible and, thus, I had some of the songs running through my head, particularly No Good Deed, Wonderful and the Wizard and I.
-/-/-/-
Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree, because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch, or you might simply get covered in sap, and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors, where it is harder to get a splinter. ~Lemony Snicket
-/-/-/-/
A voice was calling, calling something almost familiar, like a song in which one only remembered the melody, but not the words. "…Gin…Origin…"
That was his name, once. Perhaps it still was, if it had not yet been lost to the sands of Time. It had been many years since he has spoken to someone, since someone remembered that there were Spirits that still guarded the world—centuries or decades, he is not sure, for he doesn't feel their weight on him like mortals do.
He returned to his altar, built lifetimes and eons ago by a civilization long gone. There were four people standing before the altar, but his eyes first notice the area. It is wooded, now, with sturdy trees whose slender branches arc and twine over each other in sinuous embraces. How strange. Had this place not been a field surrounded by mountains when last he saw it?
"Origin." He focused his gaze on the speaker, who was a small, slender thing with sky eyes and sun ray hair. Beside him stood a woman who was pretty in her plainness, brown eyes with leafy hair braided down her back. They were children of the forest, these two were.
There are two men beside them, one who stayed warily back, a hand on his sword, as though unsure of his place here. A smart man, for he knew that very few people had ever even found this place, let alone gotten him to come back to this world to speak to them. The other stayed near him, but his eyes—like the ocean—stayed focused on the woman.
"Have you come to beg for my assistance, like so many before you?" He asked them.
The boy's eyes flashed with temper and pride, like lightning across a summer sky. "I came to ask, not to beg."
"Then ask and be gone."
"You haven't even heard us out!
"I have no need to."
"We need your strength to stop this war!"
"Do you think that you are the only ones who have ever needed my strength? I have given my assistance before and wars have been stopped. Look at where we are now. In the same place, reliving the same script. No, I shall not help the world again."
"But this time could be different!"
"And why is that?"
"Because people change!" The boy insisted. "We learn from our mistakes, even if it takes us a while. This could be the time we learn, when we won't fight anymore. Maybe this time, people will stop hating each other just because they're of a different race!"
He studied the boy, studied the desperation in the sky eyes, the determination in his posture, the hope on the youthful face. "Why should I help you? How do I know that you are not on the wrong side of this war?"
"Because we're not on anyone's side! We want to end it, end it without sacrificing any more lives. And besides," the boy added in what seemed to be a sudden stroke of inspiration. "What does it matter to you if things don't turn out the way we want anyway? You'll keep living on, long after we're dead. You don't have anything to lose, so why should it matter to you?"
Origin felt the stirrings of anger, an emotion he thought he had left behind him. "It matters because this world is as much mine as it is yours, so yes, the outcome of this matters a great deal to me!"
"Then prove it!" The boy challenged. "Make a pact with me and change all that's happened."
Damn, but this boy was interesting! "…Make your vow, then, summoner."
That was the first time he met the boy that history would know as Mithos Yggdrasill, the Hero.
-/-/-/-
Mithos talked with him often. It was strange, as not many summoners had thought to do that, simply accepting the power of the presence gently pressing in the back of their mind, but never seeing the identity that went along with it. But Mithos was different, very different.
He had an insatiable curiosity for all things and they were often on different sides of various arguments. Sometimes, even Kratos and Yuan—the cautious human whose red-tinted eyes were too old for his young face and the branded half-elf who watched everything, cataloguing it all for future reference—would join in as well, their fiery opinions coming in from new, unexpected angles of the argument.
Kratos and Yuan were dangerous by themselves, both powerful warriors and skilled magicians, but together they were deadly.
It was the forest woman, Martel, who tempered their fire and passion with cool reasoning and the patience of a mother. She was polite to a fault and he assumed her simply as a Healer, another woman who was only an aid to the men.
The Yggdrasills were adept at proving him wrong.
Martel had a spine of steel beneath her gentle disposition and her magic, though a different brand than that of men, was just as powerful.
They are strange, these new dreamers, these idealists, this family.
-/-/-/-
"What do you see?" Mithos asked one sunset.
He looked over at the boy, standing beside him on the hill. The land fell out around this hill, the horizon far and away, the mountains rising up in the east. "I don't understand." He said.
Mithos nodded out at the landscape. "When you look at this, what do you see?"
"I see a world that is both different and the same as the last one that I knew."
Mithos hummed in thought. "…Do you ever see ghosts?"
"Ghosts?"
"Of people and places. Do you ever see things that happened before happening in front of you right now?"
The boy didn't understand. He, as a Summon Spirit, as the King of Summon Spirits, saw the very mana running through the world, saw the way that it crept up into the trees like veins, saw the way it thrummed below Gnome's earth like a heartbeat. He saw things as they happened, far and away from here. Felt the pain that travelled through the air, felt the love that was worked into the ground and the wishes that drifted in the ocean. He did not see individual events, but saw them all flow into each other, sometimes crashing and creating splinters and other times running parallel or joining as a river joins the sea.
But when he replied to the boy's question, he said, "Sometimes."
-/-/-/-
It seemed like Kratos always had a book with him. Sometimes, his curiosity would overtake him—something else he thought he'd left behind long ago—and he will ask him what he's reading. Most of the time, it is the same worn copy of an epic.
Sometimes, Kratos would read aloud. (Yuan thinks that Origin doesn't notice the way that the half-elf will suddenly go still at those times, his focus entirely on the human no matter what he was doing at the time. They have that strange sort of relationship, gravitating around each other and at times, they only ever seem to see each other) Kratos' voice is steady and has an easy cadence that it usually didn't have, as though he were more comfortable reading the words on the page than he was with voicing his own thoughts.
He's grateful for the stories Kratos reads. He is too proud to admit that he wishes to hear the new imaginings that people have wrought. It was one of the reasons he loved mortals. Their lives were fleeting, even those of the elves, but their minds, their vitality, showed itself in everything they did, whether it be art or literature or simply trying to change the world.
-/-/-/-
Yuan was as curious as Mithos, but his questions were the much more practical kind. "Do you need to eat?" The half-elf had asked one morning. It had startled them the first time that Origin had appeared on his own, without Mithos having to summon him—really, the very thought that Summon Spirits needed mortals to summon them was laughable—but now, they were accustomed to his appearing at least once every few days. He couldn't help it. These people intrigued him.
"No." He had replied and Yuan had looked a little less guilty. (Mama had raised him that it was impolite to eat when others weren't, but times were hard and when times were hard, manners mattered a little less.)
"So what do you live off of then? I'm assuming you don't need to breathe either."
Yuan was surprisingly intelligent. He was no genius, but he saw the world as an infinite, shifting puzzle and he was constantly changing his opinions and his actions to suit this shifting world. He was not so different from a Summon Spirit in that way.
"Mana." He told him. "I am sustained on mana."
Yuan made a noise of understanding, but there was no surprise. With the simple information of Origin not needing to eat, the half-elf had rapidly put the rest of the puzzle together. "…So you've felt the Tree too."
The Tree that was dying, that had sustained the world for so very long. "Yes, I have felt the Tree. I feel it still."
"It's dying." It was common knowledge. Anyone with any sensitivity at all to mana would have noticed the thinner air, the less bountiful crops. But the words needed the weight of sound, needed the finality.
"Yes."
"Mithos thinks we can stop it."
"Dying is part of a cycle of life. The Tree was never meant to last forever." They both know how very stubborn Mithos is, but he also knows just how very difficult it is to shift something that was so very solid, so there in one's mind into believing it could one day be gone for good. Mortals had difficulty understanding that. He never had.
"So you're saying the Tree would have died regardless and the world would be without mana anyway." Yuan said flatly.
"The Tree would germinate. It is a natural thing as well."
"Yeah, I'll bet." A bitter smile lifted the half-elf's lips. "And it's all our fault, isn't it?"
He doesn't have to ask what it was that was their fault. Mortals were guilty of so very much, after all. "Yes. Yes, it is."
-/-/-/-
Martel was a gentle woman by nature, but she would never be the kind of woman to allow herself to be trodden over by anyone else. But the truly incredible thing is the effect she has on the men around her.
Mithos was utterly devoted to her, naturally. She was his sister. But she was also part mother, and she scolded him when he went out of line. She was his earth and sky.
Yuan was enraptured by her and Origin is struck by the wondrous capacity of mortals to love. For Yuan did love her. He fussed over her; he teased and kissed her. They were what love was meant to be, he thinks, and he knows for certain when he is told of their wedding. (Mithos related to him the tale, told him of the vows and how very radiant Martel looked).
Kratos was the safe one. Martel went to him to speak about things she could not with anyone else. She went to him to escape the fussing of her brother and husband. (They're such collies, Martel would say. Treating me as if I'm a defenseless sheep!) and while Kratos occasionally fussed, it wasn't often. They argued and challenged each other and yet, Origin sensed that Kratos would go the ends of the earth for her.
They all would.
-/-/-/-
The boy—Mithos, he reminds himself, but it is difficult for he still seems so very much like a boy—is stubborn and unafraid of the human king who has been so very wary of the half-elves for so long. Even now, after peace has been negotiated and signed, the king doesn't take his eyes off of Mithos and Yuan. He, like so many men of the age, seemed to find Martel no threat simply because she was a she.
That kind of mistake had gotten men killed in the past.
It is afterwards that Mithos snarls and mutters under his breath and Origin knows that these people are not immune to the hatreds and prejudices of this time. No one ever is. But the thing that makes these people different is that they do not shirk from these hatreds. They are empathetic to them, look beyond them and that is why he believes that they can accomplish what they vowed him.
"Are you going to give up?" He asked the boy.
Mithos looked up at him, looking genuinely baffled. "Why would I do that?"
Yes, the boy would change the world, one way or another.
-/-/-/-
When the Kharlan War is brought to an end, the entire world breathes a sigh of relief. The tension still hums through the air; Origin can feel it, can see it, but now, perhaps, things can begin to change for the better.
And it is all because of the boy. Because of Mithos.
-/-/-/-
A lance of agony pierces through him, connected to him by way of the pact. When he appears at his summoner's side, he immediately wishes he hadn't.
Because Martel—lovely, strong, sweet Martel—was leaking her life's blood into the ground and Mithos seemed frozen at her side, like a terrible statue. Yuan is there, holding his love's hand and Origin can see the mana quivering inside him, searching for an outlet and Kratos is beside his best friend, his brother, an arm around his shoulder, eyes transfixed by the sight before him.
Martel's empty eyes stared unseeingly into the sky. He reached his hand down, carefully closing them. She had seen so much pain already. She should not see the pain of her loved ones.
"What are you doing?" Mithos' voice cut the silence. The fear beneath the trembling strength of his voice is apparent.
"She is gone." He says gently.
"No she's not. The Crystal…I can hear her. She's in the Crystal."
He looks down at the pale blue-green crystal that she wore on her hand. They were parasitic, but still something of the natural world. A woman trapped inside there was not. "You must let her go."
Mithos clutched at his sister. "I won't!"
Or rather, he couldn't. His earth and sky was here, nowhere else and he was already breaking.
"We have to make her dream come true." Mithos said, still trembling, still so powerfully breakable. "We promised."
This broken boy is a victim of the War, a victim of the cruelty of mortals and of circumstance. In another time, another place, things would have been so very different. "A world without discrimination."
Mithos nodded, still not releasing her. "That's what she wanted. We have to make it come true. We have to."
Yuan looked up at him and it is a broken shell of a man that looks out from his face. "It was her final wish."
"I shall do what I can."
-/-/-/-
The boy comes to him with bruised, hollow eyes and a request. "Help me."
"I already said I would."
"I-I need you to make me something."
The desperation in the boy's voice makes him ask. "What is it?"
"I need a sword."
"I was under the impression that you already had one."
Mithos shook his head. "No. I need a special sword. One that only half-elves can wield."
"Why?"
"Because that way, that sword will only work for me or Yuan."
"You misunderstood my question. I ask you again, why?" Not why the condition, but why the condition needed to be there. "There must be more to this."
"Th-there is. That sword needs to be able to do the impossible."
"Excuse me?"
"It needs to be able to bend reality. It's the only way Martel's wish can be fulfilled. I know what I need to do, but I don't have the power."
Yes, it always came down to power in the end. Had that not been why the boy first sought him out in the first place? Was that not what mortals wished for so fervently?
"You ask me to put the impossible into this sword?" Had the boy asked anyone else, it truly would have been impossible.
The boy hesitated. "No. I'm begging you."
Mithos wouldn't beg for the sake of the world, but he would for his sister. For Martel, he would do anything.
He almost refuses, almost says that this would lead to little more than ruin. But he sees the boy before him, shattered and desperate and so very small in such a large world, too fragile to be so strong and he would continue to break and break until there was nothing left, that he cannot deny him.
"I shall do as you ask."
That day was when the Eternal Sword was created and it was his first glimpse into the madness that would swallow Mithos Yggdrasill.
-/-/-/-
The bond isn't broken, won't be broken until the human, the steady touchstone of sanity through this all, died because they were tied together for this bond. But he doesn't answer when the boy calls because he is not a slave to the summoner, has never been a slave and refuses to be one. The boy perverted the world—or worlds—as it was now. The boy had abused his powers, had abused his trust.
He will not be part of the worlds again, will not see the grass—too bright in Tethe'alla, too soft-edged in Sylvarant—shall not see the sky, or see the mana, running thinner and thinner in both worlds and in a continuous hourglass loop between the worlds. He would not be part of this again. The worlds could fend for themselves now.
Origin, King of the Summon Spirits, would fade to little more than a legend now. Let the worlds forget him and he would fade into Time. Things would be better this way.
-/-/-/-
"I promise no good deed
Will I attempt to do again
Ever again
No good deed
Will I do again!"
-No Good Deed (Wicked, the musical)