To Slay the Wheel

The sky was painted red, as the midday sun hung high in the sky, eclipsed by one of the twin moons, "The Broken One" – bits of light breaking through the spaces between the cracks. The light, as if it shown from within, revealed the fragmented moon like a cracked egg – Whatever lied within still yet to finish hatching. The clouds that regularly blanketed the sky could not be seen. Like a raised curtain, it was as if the heavens themselves had revealed the final bow of the Comedy that was life.

The air felt even heavier than usual. Like an omnipresent weight that could be felt by everyone, and everything. Shadows were stretched and nature itself bowed, out of respect. Out of fear. All of the netherworld could feel it. But of course, how could they not. The birth of a Fallen had always marked the beginning or an end to an era.

Unlike all that came before though, there were no preceding signs in the plane of the living. None to represent the worlds hate, its sorrow, its loss. Its apathy. No, this was unlike all that had come before it, save one. None save the falling of Kasadaye had caused such a ripple. Kasadaye Tamiel the perfection, that he was fated to be; that he was cursed to be.

The Fallen one's confinement caused a quake that spanned existence instead of space. It was felt not in the soles of one's feet, but in the actual soul. Countless eyes turned to watch, none wanting to turn away. None wanting to miss the moment this new life was birthed. The moment someone, or something, was born to carry the eternal weight of suffering collected across the stars.

All were confused, but the netherworlders' confusion was, of course, grounded. Gods and angels, monsters and demons, they had all but disappeared. Gone, and forgotten by the cosmos – their time, their role, long since completed. Like all things, even beings born of infinity, were still finite when faced with infinity themselves. None since their time had fallen and the pervasive hopelessness that they had borne had found no shoulders since their absence to rest upon. A position that none asked for. A responsibility not held for eons.

Discontent were they, the one without a name, for they knew nothing but disappointment and regret. Feelings felt by all, sure, but they were now made whole by those emotions – the collection of them as they now were. All that existed in the netherworld were more spirit than flesh, their thoughts and forms shaped more by chaos and emotion than order and reason.

All eyes could be traced to one point as a blue pillar of light shone down with all the brilliance of a Blazar, the brightest of the solar bodies. The quake that followed came through in waves. First, the waves were small, barely perceptible by even the most acutely aware. But they built to a cacophony, one that could be felt by all, before they ceased. The void left by the shear accumulation of pure energy, and its sudden disappearance, however, caused more of a commotion than their existence initially did. After all, it did not just disappear. It was accepted, taken in as a whole, as none had ever done.

Each Fallen, no exception even now, had come to be in the same place. A place of worship, a place of power, of fear. A golden accretion disk formed around the event horizon of the point which was the Ouroboros. Having been a place to house the powerful emotions that rippled through the many universes and their infinite reflections, a place of abundance, where all culminated, it was Ouroboros, the point where everything started and ended. Where everything could be traced from and to. It was built more of a concept than actual brick, given form by the thoughts and imagination of everyone that ever has, or ever will exist, and it blinked.

The nameless one had peered into the abyss, and although it too peered back, the abyss blinked first. It was the coming of a new existence. Unique, not only as an individual but also as an existence. First, and last, of their kind, they were a paragon, the epitome of the Fallen. Emotions, of any and all kinds, were a powerful and primal thing – being the building blocks of the soul as they were.

Tears of red streaked her pale cheeks. Her eyes red, both in color and in strain. The irises of her wide-open eyes split, like those of a reptile, stared in objection of the inevitable. Alas, they were not angry, for they were fury itself. They did not despair, for they were despair itself. She, as all Fallen, and all that called the netherworld home, was not originally born of this world – rather she was once mortal in truth, only coming here following her passing from the cycle of life, in her step towards the inevitable chaos that was inexistence.

Squatted, she sat on the stone-like ground beneath her. Bare as a newborn babe, but she gave no notice to such a miniscule detail. While many possessed sight, few could actually see, as she had just learned. More than just colors, the wavelengths, or particles of light, all was laid bare before her in a way she had since forgotten. A place constructed in the abstract, more than just beauty lied in the eyes of the beholder – as everything in this world, as it were, was formed and given shape by the collective perception of all of existence.

A sense, akin to that of smell, reminded her of her time, from before her last life cycle, of her time before she was human. When she was, what she once was. Even the harbinger of the inevitable must come to face infinite, and the scythe come full turn. Death, the inevitable, the final word, born again at the rejection of the wheel, had come to reap the serpent eternal. She had learned the sin of the undying and sought life, only to find love, their eventual undoing.

She had lived a happy life – a normal life – up until the very end, when her family was taken from her. A fluke of flukes, through no fault of anyone's. It was as if fate itself had decided to skip a few years and came to collect.

Death had fallen. She had fallen from grace to put a stop to the wheel, slay the eternal serpent, and erase all that was creation. Afterall, it was the price to be paid for taking hers, before his first breath.