Down the road, or across the stream? One leads to suffering. The other to salvation. The beginning, the end. Let's do it all over again.
For h0saki
I crossed the stream;
I had a dream
I: Prologue
White.
Purity incarnate.
(Or so it was written.)
White was supposed to represent a world free of corruption, of a time before the stain of original sin set itself upon the fabric of humanity. It was supposed to represent light, the good-willed half of the duality of man. It was supposed to cast away shadows of doubt and decay, to strike fear into the hearts of those who plotted harm and destruction.
A holy color, it was donned by countless men and women alike over the ages that took up the burden of its existence.
But white was so easily corrupted.
And white had been used for evil before.
Red never truly leaves white once it touches upon the other's being. Blood always leaves its mark on silk even if it is washed and scrubbed away. But red never fully recovers either, passing on to waters unknown as infinitesimal fractals, never to again exist as it were.
IN THE BEGINNING, there were the heavens and the earth, a great celestial dome divided by land and sea, a separation millions of years in the making as the planet was shaped and created.
The oceans and fields were desolate, fully formed and yet not hospitable. For countless millennia, rivers of lava flowed as the earth trembled violently at its foundations. Volcanoes shot great gouts of fire and belched dense clouds far into the atmosphere, blanketing sulfur-yellow skies with their filth. And when the Earth finally cooled and life flourished in all its abiogenesiac beauty to paint the planet in its colors, IT arrived, tearing trails into the skies and sending the newly populated world into turmoil amidst a backdrop of orange and red. Chaos ruled the earth at such a catastrophic impact, devastating earthquakes responding to IT's call as IT itself answered the call of an advance guard, a lesser fractal of its body that arrived among the lowly primitive species as a single thread. One pangaeic mass split apart to form seven unequal but wonderfully varied pieces. IT embedded deep into the earth, curling and twisting around itself to take the form of those surrounding it. And there IT took root, its branches traveling far and wide to ensnare the breathing and devour them whole when they were unfit to subject themselves as its host.
From death and destruction, the first inklings of humanity millions of years into their development were eventually created, naked and without shame in their immodesty. And it was in their development that they came across IT's sprawling roots, the parasites embedding themselves deep in their fur and gifting them with power in exchange for their very life essence. Guided evolution, where only the hardiest of these proto-humans survived its drain and thrived in battle against all others. Where only those best suited to their environment and its crushing demands for sustenance failed to perish.
Such is the fate of livestock.
IN THE BEGINNING, there were the trees of knowledge and life.
IN THE BEGINNING, these trees stood tall and mighty within the developing Pangaea, great avatars of conflicting goals in the Earth's infancy and adorned with fruits both agreeable and contradictory to their named natures. One gifted mankind with everlasting bliss and life, the other to a limited existence full of pain and sorrow. One planted near Gaia's center, one at the edge. For it proved fitting that one must be the center of all things and the other the end of all things in the strip of fertile land that stretched from ocean to ocean and was bordered on both terrestrial sides by unbearable cold and heat.
Infested with these parasites, mankind eventually was fooled into eating of the tree of knowledge and awoke. They realized their nakedness, fashioning themselves coverings out of fig leaves. And with this act condemned themselves to death, forever opening their eyes to good and evil and losing that which made them ignorant. Fearful of the unknown, they were cast far and wide, their identities forgotten.
It was Eba who first came across the true forbidden tree of life, to see it hidden away in a cave with massive branches curling toward the ceiling and illuminating its dark recesses with warm colors. She who invited life and death as mother of all living things was the first to approach its vast trunk and hear its voice, to receive its first and final gift to her. And soon in her hands, a shimmering ball of orange and red lay, its surface impossibly silky and emanating a soft glow.
IT said, "eat of this fruit, and you shall never know death."
Eba ate, and was devoured.
Her veins and skin became fibers, cloth slowly replacing flesh. In place of her heart, the fruit now sat, its grotesque beating form betraying its nature by now giving life rather than siphoning it. This first chimeric fusion of human and clothing. Having tasted of death long ago, she survived life's infusion, her fate ultimately to be forever twined with IT for eternity as a moving, talking part of its body. For as long as Eba remained Eba, she existed for many hundreds of years, gradually forgetting herself as fibers wholly replaced her body and urged her assimilation into the mass. Becoming the first of many that it devoured in the process. Her fate remaining largely unknown by the humans that roamed the Earth after her time, existence of her and IT's beings jealously protected by her blood-progeny. Successors that created myths and deified them, even as they were unable to do as Eba did and died attempting to become one with the fibers. Heirs that thought it a god and worshipped it thusly, serving its needs and cultured according to its whims when it spoke through her, encouraging others to do the same.
As fitting of domesticated species.
And as the continents continued to slowly drift away, humanity was forced to all corners of the land, unknowingly spreading the life fibers with it when they walked with glimmering strings and threads in their fur. Not knowing their role in the future to come, when parasite selected the best of host and sire and nature played its role with selective pressure. Strength and intelligence in constant rebalance, where the most adaptable and genetically diverse survived and thrived. And on the site of Eba's consumption (on what later became the Kiryuuin lands eons later), IT remained, sleeping and yet undiscovered by humanity at large, the small tribe of peoples that later became the predecessors to the Kiryuuins becoming lost to time. Forgotten, until the most loyal and devoted of all of them rediscovered IT, became the first in over a hundred thousand years to successfully merge themselves with the essence of life itself. To assume her position as IT's emissary, stylizing herself as something like a doomed prophet and setting into motion a plan million of years into the making.
Or so the lore goes.
Much of the tale has been corrupted, infused and tainted by beliefs carried by other tribes and clans, with even the true name of the Primordial Life Fiber obfuscated and lost to dead tongues as civilizations collapsed and languages changed when communities merged. Timelines were erased and rewritten according to mythos, with humanity's beginnings impossibly placed before the separation of the continents. Folk stories forgotten and misunderstood, the origin of the god-fiber's arrival forever wavering between beliefs. Conflicting ideals of life fibers arriving as a single thread before engorging itself on sacrifices of body and blood loyal Kir-yuu-in attendants dutifully gave or as a single thread acting as an advance guard in search of hospitable planets before hailing.
IN THE END, the Primordial Life Fiber met its demise at the hands of she who became one with humanity's disease, heart cleaved by the same person who also cleaved the heart of its protector and guardian. Purity redefined and white defiled by saving blood. Chains shackling humanity's future to a near demise broken, red threads of fate severed by scissors made from their being.
And yet, not completely.
Not while the last revelation remains unseen, not when IT's roots still remain undiscovered, spread far and wide throughout the land, safe from the cleansing fires of the Kiryuuin legacy's destruction.
Not until the very saplings that humanity had inadvertently carried throughout the land on their fur are destroyed.
For while the Primordial Life Fiber was indeed spun from the original fibers that colonized the lonely planet and was indeed slewn by its betrayer guardian, its form was merely the budded, matured phase. And while it had the chance to grow in genetic variability to best suit the environment and maximize its effects, it was humanity who lost most of theirs.
Codependence. Coevolution. The softening of a species.
For it is adaptability that favors survival. And fibers don't need humans for their own - humanity was merely convenient, the closest stepping stone to cross a shallow pond. And on the day when the heavens would be bound to the Earth once more (as it were in the beginning), it would be this trait that would allow them to infest the far reaches of space, weaving entire galaxies into one thread, one body.
One life and fate for all.
