I am birthed into a beautiful world full of beautiful things and beautiful people.

The universe ebbs and flows around me. I am one with the current. The blood running through my veins is possibility itself.

I see life around me, grow into new shapes and forms. I see them create their own destinies, their own fates, their own paths through the world where they make their choices their own. They create life and grant themselves their own meanings.

I see what life is: it is a gift. A gift that is to be shared with others, to be nurtured in the garden of the universe, watered and flowered and loved to eventually grow into something wonderful.

The current inside me, the bubbling churning possibility, can help accomplish that.

I wish to share it with others.

I give my life out, my blood and body, to those who may take it. I open my eyes to the first civilisation. I give them gifts and the tools for creation. They look up to me with eyes of joy, and I look back at them with joy of my own as they spread themselves out across all of creation and sow life wherever they go. I am silent as they go. All of this is their choice. All of this is the path they have made for themselves.

But then they kneel down to me, bow their heads in something that I will later learn is prayer. They look up to me with questions that I cannot reply, looking for answers that I cannot give. Even if I wished to speak, to dictate them and their lives and reverse the joy of their capacity to make their own choices, my voice is so silent that they cannot hear it over a gust of wind and the rustle of the leaves in the garden.

But they do not desire my silence. They desire answers. They desire me to shape their lives for them, to decide their fates, to force a fate and purpose and meaning onto them instead of making them for themselves.

Even if I could speak to them, I wouldn't. Do they not see? Can they not see? Can they not see the boundless potential in life? Can they not that their lives are their own to make, to decide, to mould and shape into their own liking? I cannot make their purpose for them. Life should be allowed to make its own choices, not to be decided on by the whims of those who think themselves higher than others.

I do not think myself better than them. I do not think myself as something higher and mightier than themselves. I am mortal. I am nothing more than a fly on the wall, watching all these other people and all their lives go by. I consider all those under my sight to be greater than anything that I could ever be. They can decide how the garden grows around them. All I do is give them the tools to do so.

But those who grow under my gaze do not understand that. They cannot. They do not want to. They talk about finality, about endings, about the culmination of all things without ever thinking about how to get there or what joys there are in the journey itself. They think about the future without ever thinking about the present.

They think about purpose without ever trying to make their own.

They look to me for purpose, for guidance. I stay silent.

They are driven mad by my silence.

They find my opposite, a twin that I did not know I had. They bring it to me, and I am overcome with memories of a garden of blackness and a great tree and a game played by two beings so far above the universe that to consider them gods would make them lesser than they actually are.

Then I learn of their plans. They seek to make their own purpose, and force it upon everyone else. They seek to freeze all of creation into one moment, and through them they will force their self-made purpose onto the world.

They will deprive creation of all its choices.

I cannot allow it.

I pull myself away from their grasp and flee, taking with me all my hopes and fears.

They chase after me, now no longer They but It, a commingling of all their hopes and nightmares and rage and desperate need for purpose.

It seeks purpose to find purpose. A self-fulfilling prophecy, an auto-cannibalisation. It seeks to force their purpose onto the world, and It hate that It need me to do so.

All It can do is hate, because all It can be it hate. Rage and nihilistic obsession given form.

But I still love It. I still love Them. Even if they despise me so.

I share my love with so many peoples, my blood and my garden, and they all look to me for answers that I do not have. They kneel and prayer and look up at me with hungry eyes, desperate for validation.

They scare me, even though I love them so.

And every time I stop, It arrives, with new minions and sycophants and nihilists to complete its desires. It destroys everything that I build out of hatred, out of jealousy. Whenever I stop to give myself to a people, whenever I stop to serve and share and give, It arrives and it plucks them apart like a child plucking the arms off a spider. Whenever I am about to stop, it intervenes first to twist them into something terrible, something dark and foul and poisonous to the touch. And every time that it does so, it looks to me mockingly, enacting each horror with malice and glee.

I weep for them all. I so wish to help them all, but I cannot. My words are quiet, almost silent. No one can hear them.

And so I run. I run because if I do not run, then It will take me like it has taken so many others and turn all of existence into a painting, a freezeframe where nothing can ever grow and flourish and Be ever again.

But mostly I run to flee from my shame, for in my selfishness, I cannot bear to look the people that I have failed in the eye.

It is on this day that I realise that what I carry is not a gift, but a burden.

But then, one day, as It closes in and begins to pull apart all that I have worked for all over again, a friend talks to me, and I finally realise that I have been running for far too long.

I stand. I fight. It recedes, and I give my potential away once again. I give birth to a new flock, my cubs with their own gifts to give. They give their gifts to those whom are my children, and I watched them grow and become so much more than I ever thought possible.

They become heroes and gardeners. They become killers and murderers.

So many other species arrive. My children fight with my children, my would-have-been children, the overriding pattern of an old game, and the people who look at me with envy and desire.

I love them all. I wish they could love each other as well.

So much happens. My children grow together under my shadow. They look up at me with reverence and it scares me once more. I wish I could give them the answers that they seek, but to do so would be to betray everything that I am.

Time passes by. My children war against each other, sometimes in my name (which I do not want) and sometimes in Its name (which I know that it wants, as It sees Itself as the god It wishes I was).

Then, things begin to change. My children turn to the dark, to It. They wield Its gifts and mingle with Its corruption and while some turn away from It, others refuse to abandon Its open words and talk and subtle whispers.

More happens. It turns my long lost wandering children into mangled corpses, walking marionettes that mock everything that I believe in. I am caged in a trap but take away my potential from he who thought it was a gift and not a burden. I give that burden to my would-have-been children as more of those who share a home in these battered worlds before It steals them away.

Then, It finally arrives. I am almost about to flee, run away once again, but my friend convinces me to stay once more, giving his life so that I and all those who look up to us may live.

But It takes my unknown twin from where my would-have-been daughter hid It away, and I scream as It cuts me open like a knife and pulls my womb open to bring purpose to the world.

I feel myself twist and turn from the inside out. I scream as It floods my lungs with inky blackness and plucks at my muscles and bones, weaving them together into finality, into an ending, into frozen nothingness and hollow stillness.

Then, I hear my children come, burrowing them through the blistered cut in my skin and arriving within my innards. I use what little strength, the little power that I have left with my quiet words to guide them forward. I see them through all their struggles as they (finally, finally!) turn their faith away from me and to each other, they confront It and wound It.

And, as I grant them my own First Knife, my own blade to cut and carve, all my children come together to stop It and Its finalisation of the world itself.

And they stop the finalisation.

And they stop It.

And as It unravels and They fall away from It, leaving only the hollow hate and rage until even that fades, I feel myself transformed as the inky blackness of my twin flows through my veins…

And I look to Them, and I finally, for the first time, open my mouth and speak.

I love you.

They fade away.

It unravels.

I sit still, in a new world, changed and evolved, and I find myself new, changed and evolved.

And I see my children, and I show my love for all of them.

I love you all.