Eternity. It was a paradoxical concept abhorred by the very nature of reality. Every interaction, every exchange, every moment passing to moment carried with it erosion, entropy, and death. Of all the domains of all the Archons, that of the Electro Archon could be said to be the most alien, the most unnatural. The world had no tolerance for Eternity. Not even the smallest thing could embrace it, for all things would eventually perish. To strive for Eternity was to strive for the impossible.
Ei knew this, as had her sister. On the surface, it might seem as though the twins were cursed with a terrible fate, a hopeless duty. Eternity, as Ei had told her friend, was core to their being, and not something they could simply choose to ignore. She and her sister, the two of them together would bring Eternity to the world. They would make the impossible possible.
After thousands of years spent in meditation, sometimes one sister, sometimes the other, contemplating Eternity had not been an effort in vain. Eternity DID exist in the world, after a fashion, and it was inextricably intertwined with the very concept of life itself. All living things strove for Eternity, in direct defiance of a universe that forbade it.
Even the lowliest of life forms sought to extend their lives, to continue to exist. As perpetual existence was forbidden, life created progeny to carry some part of themselves beyond their own lifespans. But it was not enough. These efforts, too, were futile – not even whole species of life could exist eternally. Extinction was as inevitable as erosion and death.
More advanced forms of life such as humans, and even including such august beings as the Adepti who had the temerity to claim immortality (ridiculous, of course – not even the gods themselves could pretend immunity from the relentless lathe of erosion), were blessed with wisdom, and used it to find other ways to carry parts of themselves beyond. Ideas, words, and knowledge had no physical form. As long as there existed a medium to carry them – the hearts and minds of an endless parade of mortal beings – they might be considered eternal.
But this, too, was merely a shadow of Eternity. Not even whole worlds could be considered eternal. The very planet beneath their feet, as endless as it might seem, would one day, too, face its end, as would every life it once nourished. With none capable of wisdom to carry it, knowledge, too, would be torn to oblivion.
It was progress, however; the sisters had agreed that, without a doubt, Life and Wisdom were two of the pillars upon which Eternity stood. Two of how many, they could not yet guess, but it still gave the twin gods hope that their efforts might one day bear fruit. Eternity was struggling to be born into a world that utterly rejected it, and it was their duty to bring it about. For this reason, Makoto and Ei continued to pursue their impossible mission with determination, rather than hopelessness.
It was a hubris that could not go unanswered. And the price for that hubris was Makoto's life.
With her sister taken from her, for the first time did Ei look upon her mission with despair. Makoto had her own way of viewing Eternity, one that she had attempted on multiple occasions to explain to her sister – but it was one Ei could simply not understand. Makoto's Eternity of Transience, of endless, connected moments… It was beyond Ei's comprehension. Makoto, too, could not seem to grasp Ei's own understanding of Eternity as an unchanging stillness, where moments ceased to have meaning. It was not a bad thing, they had decided. The two of them would be approaching the problem from two different directions. Perhaps, once their paths intersected, they would discover the answer they sought.
Now, one path was gone. One perspective forever lost. Without it, Ei had lost the confidence that she would ever find the path to Eternity. She had tried. For five hundred years, she had meditated, and in that time her efforts had stagnated. Just as Yae had said, she had been caught in a rut, unable to progress or even accept that there was a problem.
Because of the interference of the Traveler, Ei had gained new insight. The tide of ambition unleashed against her by those whose Visions had been taken had been a shattering blow against her convictions. That they would so utterly reject the Eternity she held in her heart was both troubling and enlightening. Life and wisdom, she and her sister had decided, were among the keys to Eternity. Ambition, Ei had once taken to lie in opposition to her goals, an agitation which rippled the tranquil waters of Eternity's perfect stillness – but as it washed over her she could feel its drive. Ambition struggled against oblivion as strongly as did life and wisdom, and Ei came to the realization that it could be another key, another pillar that neither she nor her sister had managed to discover.
If only she could somehow recapture her sister's understanding and add it to her own… She dearly wished to know how Makoto would have interpreted her new understanding of ambition as a driving force for Eternity. Her recent meditations had been, indeed, to try to glean Makoto's perspective, delving through ancient memories of the many conversations she'd shared with her on the topic, trying to wrap her mind around alien concepts she had struggled with even when her sister had still been alive to explain them. Suffice it to say, it was a daunting task.
It was a daunting task made no easier by the fact that some clumsy mortal had just dropped a stack of dishes in some far room of the Tenshukaku. Ei's eyebrow twitched in irritation as the distant clatter of wooden bowls and the panicked yelp of their carrier disturbed her meditations. She also became once more aware of the feeling of cloth upon her skin, the flickering lamplight, the cool, circulating air of the chamber; all the tiny distractions that she'd managed to set aside came rushing back.
As she set about the process of clearing her mind of these distractions once again, a voice rang clear in her mind. "I would speak with you," it said.
In an instant, the body of her Excellency, the Almighty Narukami Ogosho, God of Thunder flopped inelegantly onto its side as its wearer abandoned it to retreat to the Plane of Euthymia. Hopefully, no one would stumble upon it before she returned.
Author's Notes:
Early on in the life of the game, the domains of each Archon were hinted to us: Freedom. Contracts. Eternity, Wisdom. Justice. War. Love. From the very beginning, Eternity stood out to me as an outlier. One of these things is not like the other! All of them but Eternity require sapient beings for them to have meaning. All of them but one are concepts we can relate to.
I also found it to be pretty annoying. "Eternity" seemed like such a vague, nebulous concept compared to the others – and, indeed, when it finally started to crop up in-game, it became apparent that even the writers didn't have a clear concept of what it was supposed to mean. Even Ei herself, the literal God of Eternity, who spends basically all of her time in meditation contemplating it, changed her mind on the topic over the course of the plotline!
Add to this the fact that nothing in the game suggests that anything even is Eternal. We have all these so-called "immortals" prancing around, but they die left and right – hardly Eternal at all. Even Zhongli, one of the oldest of them, is starting to feel his age at a paltry six thousand years, which any geologist could tell you is a laughably short period of time.
But what, I thought to myself, if that was the entire point. Eternity DOESN'T exist. Eternity CAN'T exist. What does it mean to be a god of an impossible concept? That was my goal for this chapter – to show the readers (and myself!) the perspective of such a god, and to explain how their domain could actually make sense.
I also wanted to show that Ei has her work cut out for her. The other Archons, they have their domains handed to them on a silver platter. Ei doesn't have it as easy – she has to spend a crazy amount of time just THINKING, trying to work out how to make Eternity real. None of the other gods are shown spending their time meditating on their domain. They don't need to, because their domains are present, and easily demonstrable.
As a result… well… I didn't really advance the plot much. But it's all interesting, at least! Or so I hope.