NOTES: for the Yuletide gift exchange 2012

Beyond Understanding

None of us remember the beginning.

We all remember how the beginning ended.

There are no words to describe that first moment when the fabric of universes shook, when death took hold of worlds and shuddered through us. Even then, we had no concept that could adequately encompass that first instant when everything that was made began to fade.

We are not mortal, not being, not made of the same stuff as that which was created, and yet we felt that change, knew that something terrible had taken place, but not what.

What is it? What has happened? Then, as we looked upon the hearts of stars no longer undying, the equations no longer perfectly rendered, our questions changed. Why is there diminishment? How could this happen?

Not until he called me to meet him did I understand. Not until I met his gaze across an obsidian plain were my eyes opened.

The question was not 'How' but 'Who'.

"Fairest and fallen," I spoke the words first – the new-naming bitter in my mouth. It hurt to speak – not the graceful syllables delineating his original form, but the shattered ones that depicted what he had been and what he had become.

He stared at me with the burning flame of pride and the mocking amusement in his eyes, and a new defiance in his mien. Then he bowed, as though we were strangers meeting for the first time, rather than twin beings engendered within moments of each other.

The bright brother and the dark – he who plunged into the deeps, and soared higher than the heights, and I who held back and watched and witnessed.

I held back now, waiting to hear him speak, to know the full extent of his fall.

"Defender," he whispered, and for the first time, my title on his lips was a curse.

Things could not be the same afterwards. He had been first and fairest of us all – and now he had rent himself apart, brought death where there had been none before, and refused to see what he had done.

"This is my own making." His voice writhed with a resentment no longer concealed. "And you ask me to renounce it?"

"I am sent," I said with as level a voice as I could manage, "to bid you put it aside and do the work for which we were both created."

"Someone else's plans."

"A good plan – a great architecture." The words went unheard, unheeded. "You've seen the design, you understand what they're doing—"

He turned on me, the sense of him like the halo of a star about to go nova, a searing fury. "What they're doing? Shall I tell you what they're doing? They're making us hop after their ideas, their great plans and ideas, as though we were little more than mindless followers. What's in this that's new, that could truly be said to be ours?"

"What we create within the boundaries of our precis—"

"The precis is boring," he snarled and contempt gleamed in his eyes. "Safe and boring and ordinary – you do what you've been ordered to do and never question it! That's not for me and never was."

"And what did you do instead?" I asked, and the coiling coldness in my gut was something that I had never felt before and that now had a name – fear. Mingled with anger, mingled with sorrow, but fear. "You created this diminishment – this dwindling of wholeness. What used to move through time, rebuilt and renewed, now falls and fails with your 'creation'. That's not a making, brother, that's an unmaking."

"And yet it's all my own." He shrugged, careless of the consequences of what he had wrought, but his gaze held mine, curious. "Do you not feel the yearning, brother? You command atoms and move stone, forge worlds and shape futures, and yet it is all at the design of the One. Do you not wish to make anything yourself? Do you not wish to create something of your own in which to take pride?"

His words sang in my heart; I felt the tug of their truth.

Yet fierce compassion held me firm – although not for him.

"I take joy in my work, in what has been entrusted to me – to all of us – by the One. And yes, I feel the yearning – that does not mean I will give up what responsibility has been laid upon me – the development of Life and the defense and growth of it in all its forms, for however long the universes might extend."

So we argued, he and I, until his expression grew subtly cold. "I take it you won't join me in this creation, then?"

I thought of the burgeoning Life that was growing through the worlds my siblings and I had created, easing its way along the journey towards consciousness – towards sentience, towards its own creations – mere shadows of what we had wrought in the name of the One, but bringing beauty and light and delight to the multiplicity and aggregation of the universes.

I thought of all of that cast down, left to wither, undone.

"I will not." There was no other answer I could give. Love him as I might – he was my brother! – his choices would doom too many, destroy too much.

We were formed for making, not for unmaking.

There was a battle. In all the stories ever told of us, we went to war.

It was great and defies description, but it is written on the hearts of every Being who has ever faced the Choice. We warred and what was once whole and unified in spirit and purpose was rent in twain.

Great sheets of coruscating brightness filled the realms, and the incandescent syllables of the Speech hung in the air as Power fought Power, and we tore ourselves apart.

Perhaps it will be said that we should have made peace. That we should have accepted death, that slow dwindling into nothing of all we had made and forged and formed - for time marches on, and everything gives way to something else in time.

I will say only this: you who have only ever known the universe dying, you would not think thus if you had seen how it was in the start.

Other beings – lesser and inferior - followed him in his pride and arrogance - agreed with his choices, and forged their own destruction. They lost the glory of their being. The sense of what they'd been called to be, once lost, left them diminished. Only he retained his beauty – the reflected incandescence of the One – as the oldest and first-formed.

First and favoured, now fairest and fallen, no-one else would take him on. It was left to me to confront him.

"I should have expected it would be you." We faced each other in the glowing realms of being and unbeing. "We were one in spirit, once."

"Until you chose to go your own way," I replied.

"You could have come with me. You can, still."

"You know better than that." We faced each other, brothers no more. "Does the ground suit?" I asked.

"It does."

He struck with dark lightning – twisted cancerous strands that pulled at me, that sought purchase in my being. I fought them off with fire and wings, the bright courage of the dawn pushing back the night and the relentless insistence of the evening covering the day. His lips moved in the syllables of the Speech, power fit to destroy galaxies, and I matched him, countered him, cancelled him out.

It was a clash of belief and determination, of will and sacrifice.

Countless universes shuddered at our clash as we fought with our power – brother against brother – the oldest conflict in the span of eternity. We raged against each other, remaking the forces around us with power beyond the comprehension of mortal minds.

And when we were both spent, his strength too great for mine to overcome but mine too much for him to overpower, I used the binding given me by the One for this purpose, created for this specific moment.

It was a containment of corruption, and a casting out of what had been before. He was anathema, alien to our number, and he would no longer be named among us.

Long after he was banished, I felt the agony of his absence.

Why?

I had never asked this before. Perhaps because I knew it was not mine to know. And yet I ached in my spirit, and I made bold to the One and questioned.

Because.

That is not an answer.

Then you have not asked the right question.

I knew I had trespassed, and yet…

Can things ever be made right again?

The weight of wholeness rested upon me, utter totality. For a mere microcosm, the One shared the briefest of awarenesses of not just everything but EVERYTHING.

I reeled, awed and terrified and restored and reassured.

For in that moment of vision, I beheld a Purpose and a Plan beyond my understanding. An event that would redeem what was lost, that could reverse what had been wronged. A choice made rightly, and a doorway to possibility opened.

It might not happen for a thousand aeons; it might never happen at all.

And yet, the possibility hovered there, somewhere, someday.

Perhaps.

fin