Gnostic
By Karen Hart
Disclaimer:
In no way do I own any part of the Xenosaga series, nor do I make any
money from this or other fanfictions. I write these stories for love of
the game(s), nothing more.
It felt the pull as they all did, that siren's call that set them to screaming, to agony and ecstasy. There was no hope for it but to allow it to pull them through, beyond all their ability to withstand. So, there they ended, bitter and cold, looming en masse above a burned and broken world like an army. The place felt like injustice, and the siren song ended, leaving them disoriented and bewildered.
But at least it was there, a heat that would be like deity to them, and so they swarmed to it. And there were others like it, or so they'd thought in the beginning, pinpricks of warmth that faded when touched, until they eventually extinguished. To it they had seemed false after that, tricksters playing feebly at god, and so they had to be removed, because only it could burn like that, and it was not a lie.
They continued their advance, and the tricksters pelted at them uselessly, unable to make a difference because unlike the tricksters, they pretended no warmth, only sought it, and thus were not lies, and no falsehood could ever withstand truth. It went on, along with its brethren, and drained the tricksters as it went by, becoming angrier with each one, for they seemed endless as vermin. Some of them were worse than others; there were creatures that seemed to lack the warmth completely, but pretended, and for this reason they could not be extinguished properly—but they tried anyway.
Advance and purge. They closed in on it, as swiftly as they could, and found that the tricksters had tried to muzzle it with crude barriers. Doubtless its fire would have destroyed them otherwise. It continued to search, stopping every now and again because it could feel it was close, and it basked in the heat, even though there was still a good distance to go.
Then they were there, crowding in with it, huddled and prone, screaming and silent before it as they wrapped themselves in its truth. They swarmed up it from all sides, cradling it in their collective limbs like children. There was honesty. There was perfection.
They discovered pale duplicates of it, as well, once they'd sated themselves on its warmth. No doubt they were its progeny, to close to it to be born from the tricksters. These, too, they held to, and promised the liars would be removed, an oath they keened as one.
But the tricksters stole its children away, and tried to subdue and pervert their heat, and so they followed after, and continued their hunt. And the tricksters committed an unforgivable sin then, as they sealed it off from them, and denied truth. So, after that, there was war in its most real and terrible sense, a slaughtering.
Occasionally they would find one of its children again, and would nurture and cradle and bask in the warmth, until the tricksters stole them it again, and the purge continued, though some of the tricksters seemed less false then others, and were deemed worthy of obtaining the honesty of their form. And then the tricksters learned to turn them into lies as well, hard and wrong and utterly terrible, and the tricksters began killing them, though the liars were not able to pervert their numbers on any truly great scale, and their ranks had grown to vast amounts on this side.
Even so, the purging continued, and eventually that side too would be without lies.
