requiem aeternam
He has no idea where he is.
He has no idea what he is.
But he is here, and he is something.
And he remembers his name.
It feels like forever before he finally stands. The white void around him is still and dormant.
It is waiting for a master.
He walks into the void. The blank, lifeless space around him somehow seems comforting and familiar.
Home.
He reaches out a hand in front of him, with his palm facing the sky, and creates a single six-sided snowflake.
He is a god.
It takes time before he creates trees.
Trees of all shapes and sizes. Large trees. Small trees. Straight and curled and twisted trees.
Birch trees.
He walks among them for many days. They are his first creations, and they are special.
He grows one of them to a tremendous size and sets to work hollowing out the inside of it. It is a memory, and he will remember.
He is a memory.
Soon after, he creates the sky.
He paints the stars with silver and gold, and lays them in beds of black sand. They are jewels, and they will shine in the night.
It will always be night.
He likes the night; it is calm and quiet. Peaceful. A time for rest and rejuvenation.
He remembers running. He remembers a shadow gliding through the sky, blocking the stars, leading him on.
He remembers the falcon.
It is different.
The rooms are larger. There are more of them. It is an entire underground complex, a castle fit for a king.
He doesn't mind that it is different. It is his own. Everything is his own.
He remembers details, small notes from those infinitely limited memories. He keeps those little bits, sometimes. Those memories are not blurred to time, or missing pieces; they are merely imperfect to his godlike senses.
He can't remember how he became a god, though. He remembers a flash of white, and then… white.
White?
Snow. Cold.
Cold?
Cold. White. Ice?
Ice.
He creates creatures in the forest.
They look like trees. They almost are trees, more trees, new trees, but then he changed them.
He remembers something about treehorns.
They are guardians. They hide his sacred home. They guard his temple.
He doesn't know what they guard it from, not yet. But he knows they guard it, and he knows that they will keep intruders away.
Intruders?
Intruders.
He flies with the falcon.
They are no longer different. They are two, they are one, they are different, they are the same. He has changed his form to match, or maybe they exchanged forms, or maybe he is a spirit riding the wind beside it.
They expand the borders of the world together, paint more land and sky. They end their border with a sea, a sea of black water inhabited by a Leviathan he vaguely remembers.
Guardian. Friend.
But they do not stop there. The temple is an island, but there is a world beyond it to create.
They make the sea a circle; its circumference is just at the edge of the horizon, such that they could barely see the edge of the island. They sculpt the shores with white sand and sparse grasses, fill the sand with pebbles the color of stars.
He wants it different.
He wants it to be his world.
He eventually discovers how to see beyond, but he doesn't want to.
He doesn't want to be reminded of what he has lost. He has all he needs here.
Right?
Right.
He makes the wilds next, and he makes beasts in the wilds.
Deep, dark, dense pines. Thin oaks and willows. Grassy fields stretching to the horizons. Vines and brambles and bushes. Open, flowering clearings and high, grassy hills.
Eagles and wolves and bears and mountain lions and wild pigs.
He creates them one by one and he lets them loose upon the open prairies and the dark forests to roam the land and make it their own. As they roam, he feels and hears and smells everything that they feel and hear and smell, and he is a god, and he is his people.
He flies over the treetops and grazes his wingtips across the branches, feeling the underlying structure of every molecule and sensing the laws that he himself put in place. This is his world, and it will not be mistaken for anything else.
His.
He guides his children through the forest along the path that he has carved.
Gods with animal heads and sharp claws, carrying staffs of obsidian and bone. Goddesses with flowing wings and fiery eyes, painted faces and fierce gazes. They are strange, and they are powerful, but they are his children, and they will maintain his world as guardians of his realm.
He will rule over them, though they will do as they wish. They will create new lands and new peoples, and they will rule over them as they please. They will visit his temple and fly through the skies, following the stars to the ends of his realm.
He is the god of the gods and the ancestor of the people, and he is powerful and almighty and he is him.
And he is dead.
And this is his reward.
He does not require gifts of silver and gold, but his gods give them, and their people give them, too.
He does not require anything of them. He merely wishes to watch them grow.
His temple has a thousand attendants and ten thousand guardians, and it is prosperous. He does not pine for companionship, for he does not want it. He does not struggle for food, for he does not need it. He does not suffer for anything or anyone, because finally, he is himself, and he is a god, and he is his people.
He tells them not to slay the guardians or their gods, for they will not hurt the people; they will only hurt intruders, thieves, unwanted guests. They will protect their people, and he will protect the gods, and the people will protect him.
So little creatures of all shapes and sizes, tall and short, humanoid and animalistic, furry and scaled and sleek and rough, gather at his temple and make sacrifices to their physical god, though they do not need to.
It is perfect harmony.
His dreams, though he does not really dream, are restless.
They know he is there, and they are trying to find a way in.
He will not let them in.
Let him stay dead.
He panics.
He cannot tell the people, but he must tell the people, but he cannot. What could he say? He has betrayed them, after all. He has given them a home and let them make it their own, and now it will all be taken away.
They will come, they will come on raids, they will come on raids and set fires, they will come on raids and set fire to his grasses and trees and buildings, they will come on raids and set fire to his fields and forests and cities.
They will come and they will kill his people, they will kill every living creature to try to bring him back, they will leave him with nothing, but he will not allow them to take him because he cannot go.
He cannot go, because he is here, and he is dead, and he does not want a second chance to live with people he has come to hate because they have a chance at an actual afterlife that he himself will never get a chance to see.
He will stay in his little world, his little realm, and not look into his visions and see them preparing to enter his realm armed with dirty secrets and black lies.
Black, not white, he is sure, because the black are lies, and he is white. He is ice.
Or he was ice.
Is he still ice?
He is a falcon, and he is flying.
He is flying from city to city, warning his people of his mistake, telling them to take up arms and defend the world they know as home.
Because they are not real. They cannot go back like he can, not yet. They do not have places to store their souls.
He is sure that they have souls, because he certainly does not. He created his gods, but only his gods, and those gods must surely have given them souls. Does he have a soul? Do they have souls?
It is irrelevant when the wind is howling past his face as he lands in the next city and transforms with a crack back into his normal form, his godly form, the one they know best.
He speaks, he warns, and he transforms and flies.
They will not burn his world to ash.
They will not.
Possibility?
They will not.
Certainty?
…No.
They are coming.
They are coming into his realm, on the very far edge of the horizons. He sees them from where he is the falcon, and yet he also does not see him, where he is the god.
But he cannot do anything. He can only hope they die.
If they die here, then they can stay here.
He hates them.
He must be civil.
He transforms again, and then there are two falcons. He moves without moving to the other side of his world, and he appears near the other falcon, in the bushes.
He sees them, and he hates them, and he envies them and their eternal souls.
But he must be civil.
He glides up to meet the falcon and takes a position ahead of it, leading it. Even though it knows where to go – to his side – it does not know what it is supposed to be doing, and how he knows what they know he remembers. He knows the rule they will follow, for if they follow the falcon, it will guide them to where they need to be.
So he wordlessly – thoughtlessly – summons all of the falcons, all of the eagles, all of the vultures, all of the ravens, all of the crows and seagulls and diving-birds and chickadees, birds from every corner of the world, and he sets them on a course for his temple.
He remembers them following something similar once before, except it was the very heartbeat through the veins of the world, leading to the center where they defeated the one they sought out. But his world is not like that; his world is natural, and it is free, and it is everything he is not but wants to be.
So he guides them, and he summons thousands of other birds directly to his side, to guide them in a flurry of wings and eyes and tails and feathers.
He is the Falcon King, the Black and White, the Ice Mage, the God of the Gods, the People of the Peoples, and he will deal with these intruders himself.
Because he must be civil, mustn't he?
And he stands before them in robes that he summoned from beyond the Abyss, wearing a crown of silver metal and black feathers. It looks like a gigantic silver tree growing from the top of his head.
Thousands of birds are perched in his temple, on the walls, on the floors, on the ceilings, and on his crown. They are watching him and they are watching the intruders. He is their King. He is the Falcon King, and the names that they call him are lies, because those names are dead. Only the King, the God, remains.
"…Zane?"
And the god is angry.
He tells them that that is not his name any longer.
And it isn't: if he doesn't want that, it is not his name. Everything here is as he likes. It is his world; it is his afterlife. These intruders shall not disturb it with their mortal lives that he is so jealous of.
Everything in his world follows his rules. Everything is certain except what his people want to do. They can roam the wilderness without fear or regret; they can harvest crops, work, or start families. They can do whatever they wish that make their lives worth living.
And, if and when they choose to, they can die.
Because he never had that choice, and that is why he no longer had that name. He remembers that he took an opportunity because he was the lesser, but now he is so much more, so much greater. His life had been an endless cycle of death and revival and loss, and near the end of it, he was nothing more than a battered corpse standing because he had no choice not to.
And then he truly was dead. The cycle was broken. The ragged corpse was laid to eternal rest, and a god was born from its ashes.
And the god is angry, and he is angry, and he is the god, not that name.
Let him stay dead!
He screams at them and bears his teeth. He sends the birds swooping down and turns them into phoenixes, wings and eyes and tails aflame. The unwanted intruders scatter and run, and then he becomes a falcon, his beast, and sends them screaming for the door.
They will not enter his temple again, for they have committed blasphemy against it. They will never come into his realm again. They will leave him alone.
If he wishes to return to their world, then he will.
But he does not, and he will not, and he will not ever.
What is merely months or years in their time is decades or centuries in his.
He uses these centuries to think, and to create, and to grow his world. His people shift and change like tides.
Sacrifices, so many sacrifices, gold and silver and obsidian and bone. He forges great gifts from them, gives them back to his people. He spends his days mingling in his cities.
He talks to the gods he once created, who now have their own grand temples and who get their own sacrifices. He visits them there, and they bow to him with respect and honor, for he is their god. He is the only one who can create something out of nothing, for he is both in the world and outside and around it, keeping it stable and locked in place.
Keeping it safe.
He only wants to keep it safe.
He doesn't know how much time has passed. He is isolated inside his little world, and he does not want to leave.
There are new intruders preparing to break down his doors.
The old faces are gone. He does not care where they went. He does not want to think about them. If he wanted them, he would have looked for them.
The new intruders worry him. He does not know what they are or why they are coming.
They will be the ones to tear down his world, he is sure.
He must keep them out.
They come not to speak, for he cannot remember their language. Or he does, but he doesn't want to.
He is stubborn.
He confronts them where they enter, no elaborate illusions of grandeur for these new strangers who do not know what he is. He wears his cloak and crown, but he does not make himself appear larger, and he does not confront them in his temple. His temple has already been blasphemed against, and he does not want it to happen again.
They come, a group of ten, bearing weapons. They stand defensively in pairs, back to back, prepared for him to attack them. He stands with his falcon, and he summons eight other birds to perch on his branching silver crown.
They aim the weapons at him, and he is angered, but curious. The center pair comes forward, and they stand in front of him silently.
And then they kneel, and they call his titles, and they kiss his feet.
He is confused.
And then the others are kneeling and calling his titles and begging him for mercy, for they have only come to deliver a message, and he should not kill them, they beg him.
One of them hands him a scroll of some kind, and he has his falcon take it back to his temple for him to read later.
And then they leave, they go back to their world, and he can see them flee from the parallel world he has rejected.
He transforms and he flies as fast as he can to read the words that he was given.
He denies them.
He does not believe them.
He does not want to.
They will kill him without killing him, they will steal the blood that runs through his veins because there is no one left to protect him.
They will forget him as he has forgotten himself, and they will kill all of his people to make sure that he is killed.
They will slowly sap up his power, cut off his life, and bleed him dry.
And they will not have any reason to give some power back.
The power – his life – is theirs. It is in their hands.
And he gave up his chance to keep it.
It starts on the edges.
The sky, deep blue-black and set with stars, begins to fade. The stars slowly disappear as a black void, dark and threatening, begins to devour them.
The people are disturbed, for they do not like the new change they can barely see on the horizon. They do not like how their lights are slowly disappearing, leaving them with only the orange glow of torchlight to guide them through their cities.
They are not afraid; they are merely inconvenienced. Their gods will protect them, and he will protect the gods, and they will protect him.
But he knows what is happening, and he warns the people and the gods and all of his creations to flee the lands and take shelter in his temple, for an almighty storm even more powerful than the Falcon King, the God of the Gods, is coming, and they must weather it together as a people.
When they are all beyond the black water, he sinks the bridges so that no invaders can come after them. But he knows it will be in vain.
The world is ending, and even though they show no fear, he knows his people have begun to fear.
The sky is completely black now.
He flies with his falcon on the edges of the world, looking for where it will first start to break down. The void will swallow his realm from the edges first, he is sure. The strongest place is where is people are – at his temple. That was the first thing he created, and that will be the last thing that is destroyed.
He is sure.
And then he sees it: it is not there, and then it is, and then it's gone.
The trees. The land. The world itself.
He watches the void inch forward, slowly devouring the leaves and branches, severing connections and making branches fall to the ground below. Everything that disappears in the void momentarily leaves behind a blue afterglow, an echo of a long-lost world that relied on similar principles that he cannot control.
Because even though he is a god, he is not truly creating something out of nothing.
The evacuated cities crumble as the void rips them apart.
The beasts still remaining in the wilds – those that chose not to answer his call – cry out in pain as they are severed into pieces. They fall over in bleeding masses as they lose limbs and can no longer support themselves.
He commands them to take shelter in his temple.
The ones that can run flee.
The ones that can't run die.
The Leviathan is shredded by the void and it bleeds out in the black sea. The sea blends with the void, making them almost indistinguishable.
He herds his people closer in, back farther into his holy temple.
They barely fit inside.
The treehorns had died trying to protect their masters, and now the void is barely outside the door.
He and the people and the gods are all afraid.
He is supposed to protect the gods who protect the people who protect him. The triangle of defense is supposed to work, even though it doesn't, because if one link breaks then all links are broken.
So the gods are in the forefront, waiting to die first, to show their people that they should not be afraid, that they should not fear death. The people stand behind them, cowardly yet standing strong, and they protect him.
They have souls, he is sure; the gods and the people have souls, and that is why they are not afraid. They will go on living in another place after everything else is gone.
He will not, because he has nowhere to go. He has no soul destined for some better place. He has no soul to reincarnate. He is thoughts and feelings and emotions, unrestrained and unrestrainable, and he has taken what he could not take, and he has tried to have what he could not have.
Because he cannot have an afterlife. He is alive until he is not, and then he is dead.
Sleeping, not dead. Death is too permanent.
But that doesn't matter.
Sleeping things wake up.
But he can't wake up.
But it's possible.
But he won't wake up.
Eternal sleep.
He watches as his gods are ripped to pieces and his people are turned to ash, and then the void turns on him.
The power is almost gone.
It is disappearing.
Small thoughts.
Small thoughts. Just sentences.
Yes. Small sentences.
Details. Nothing unnecessary.
Unnecessary how?
Structure. No structure. Just facts.
Just facts. No feelings.
…Dead yet?
No. Not yet. Soon.
How soon? Very soon?
Maybe. Maybe longer.
…Smaller thoughts.
Smaller thoughts.
Good memories.
Yes. Good memories.
Remember things.
Remember…
Color? Shape?
Sound. Just sound.
Sound?
Sounds. Voices.
Lost things. Sad.
Yes. Lost and sad.
Gone things?
Gone things.
Who? Them?
Friends.
Family.
Dead. Not gone.
Not gone?
Not until dead.
Never gone then.
Soon gone.
Not seen gone.
Yes. But gone.
…Smaller thoughts.
Smaller thoughts.
…Dead yet?
Not yet.
Very soon.
Very soon.
What time?
Don't know.
Time now?
Don't know.
…Friends gone.
Yes. Gone.
Family gone.
All gone.
Time gone?
Not yet.
…Dead?
Not yet.
…Smaller.
Smaller.
Make peace.
No.
Why not?
Can't.
Can't do it?
No. Can't.
No time.
Yes. None.
…Time now?
No. Smaller.
Smaller.
Soon.
Soon?
Dead.
Dead?
Soon.
Power?
None.
Dead.
No.
…Now?
Soon.
…Memory.
What?
Sleep.
What?
Death.
Rest?
Yes.
Dream?
Yes.
…Wake?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Unknown.
…Small.
Small.
Time.
Time?
Time.
Death?
Soon.
Soon?
Soon.
…Dead?
No.
Now?
No…
…Now?
Sleep.
(A/N): Technically 'requested' as a giveaway prize by ranchycat on Tumblr, who requested 'anything Ninjago'. I had an unfinished oneshot from many months ago sitting on my flash drive, so... it just made sense. XP
I had a lot of fun with this one, though. You can probably tell, given the fact that this originally was supposed to be *ahem* a five hundred word oneshot. Heh. Heh.
...Yeah, I'll go cry in a corner now about how much class time I wasted on this. You can come with, if you want.