Morgana - POV
The river scene did not dissolve. It froze, then shattered into a million fragments of black glass, the sound of the baby's cry echoing in the shattering like a curse refusing to die.
And I was pulled.
Not to another fleeting memory. To a prior place. A place outside time, outside space, outside anything my mind could categorise as real.
My eyes sought form. Light. Something that made sense.
And found the incomprehensible.
A presence.
Bodiless. Faceless. Nothing my mind could process without threatening to fray at the edges. It was like trying to look directly at the origin of everything, at the moment before the first moment, and feeling one's own sanity creak under the weight of comprehension.
But I knew.
With a certainty aching in bones I did not have there, I knew I stood before something ancient. Vast. Predating the gods themselves, predating the idea that gods could exist.
I felt her essence.
The same spark I recognise in Azra'il. But here, at the source, it was a sun. In my daughter, it was a solitary flame, a shard carrying the weight of something that should never have been divided.
And then the presence moved.
The universe, as yet unborn, bent to accommodate it. Not like a servant bowing before a master, but like water moving to allow the passage of something immense.
A world was born.
Not in explosions of light and sound, not with the dramatic violence mortals imagine when they think of creation. It simply was. Unfolding from the will of the presence like a silent flower blooming in the vacuum, each petal a new possibility.
Mountains tore through the veil of nothingness, their slopes still hot with creation's fire. Forests coiled across newborn earth, wild and beautiful in a way that hurt, each leaf a note in a verdant symphony no one was yet there to hear.
Oceans poured from nowhere, filling valleys that had only just learned they existed. The sky cracked open in violent blue, and a young sun ignited for the first time, its heat a hesitant caress upon a virgin canvas.
It was beautiful.
And terribly lonely.
Then emerged the mortals.
Small. Fragile. So absurdly vulnerable my chest tightened to see them. They emerged from the earth like confused flowers, stumbling into existence, touching one another with hesitant fingers. Eyes full of a wonder that had not yet learned fear.
But time, cruel and impatient as ever, accelerated.
Centuries bled into seconds. Cities of stone and dreams rose and returned to dust. I saw the pattern repeat, the same sad story wearing different costumes. Fathers abandoning sons to the elements. Sons killing fathers for metal crowns. Betrayal, war, murder, lies.
The ceaseless noise of human hearts breaking and being broken.
And the presence watched.
Impassive. Cold. A disappointed creator watching her experiment fail in every predictable way.
I felt her thought leak through the memory, cold and sharp as ice cracking under pressure:
"Imperfect. Flawed. Error. Correction necessary."
But my voice was a lost whisper in a cosmos that cared not for my objections.
And then the sentence fell.
A voice that was all voices and none, echoing from within the structure of reality itself:
"From stardust I made the world. From mortal failure will come their ruin. Where there is life, I see noise. Where there is heart, I see failure. Creation is an error repeating until I break it."
The sun paled. The world held its breath. Mortals stopped in their tracks, waiting for an end they did not understand but felt in their bones, that primal instinct warning when something far greater than you has decided you should not exist.
The presence raised something resembling a hand.
But then...
Hesitated.
And did something no deity should do. Something I know intimately, for I have done similar myself.
The entity tore herself apart.
The universe screamed, a silent sound of pure agony. The presence ripped a fragment from her own essence. Not metaphorically. Literally. I saw the matter existing before stars dreamed of light being severed from the whole, a piece of primordial night and raw power, bleeding possibility.
And with the fragment, she shaped.
Slowly. Carefully. With a vulnerability I did not expect to find in something so vast. With fear, yes, fear, I recognised its texture; I know that emotion too well to mistake it for anything else.
The form that was born possessed a beauty that hurt to look upon.
Skin glowing with molten constellations beneath the surface. Eyes holding galaxies spinning in a slow, silent dance. A creature woven of light and maternal hope, the desperate kind of hope that makes a mother create something to love when the rest of her creation has disappointed her.
And when he opened his eyes,
He smiled.
A smile so pure, so genuine, so full of the simple joy of existing, that my own ghostly eyes stung with tears that could not fall.
"Elyon." The presence's voice changed. Still vast. But there was something new. A crack in her omnipotence. Tenderness. "The light born in the night."
"Go," she commanded, voice now a whisper moving worlds. "Walk amongst the flawed. Study their nature. Discover if they deserve to continue."
Elyon descended.
And the descent transformed him.
The light retracted, the galaxies in his eyes dimmed to become mere distant stars. When his feet touched the ground for the first time, he stumbled.
And laughed.
A sound of pure wonder at the strangeness of gravity, at the novelty of having weight, of occupying space, of being in a way so different from before.
Time advanced, but slower now. As if the memory wanted me to see. Wanted me to understand.
I saw him feel the first rain on his face, eyes closed, an expression of sheer bliss. I saw him taste a peasant woman's soup, eyes widening with a surprise almost comical in its intensity.
"There is... warmth in this," he said. "There is the memory of the hands that made it."
He became a wanderer. His presence, an anomaly of kindness in a world that had forgotten what kindness meant.
I saw him arrive at a starving village, where despair was a bitter taste in the air and people shared a single basket of mouldy grain. He did not conjure banquets from the sky, did not force a miracle down reality's throat. He sat with them, in the dust, as an equal.
He took a handful of the grain they barely had, the sacrifice of their last crumbs, and lifted it as if it were treasure. I saw his lips move in a silent prayer of gratitude, not to the heavens, but to the earth itself.
Then, he broke the grain with his own hands and shared it, returning it to the basket.
And I watched, marvellously, as every person in the village came and took what they needed, and the basket never emptied. The food did not merely multiply; it became enough. The bread made that night fed not only the body, but the soul, and tasted of hope.
I saw him walk through villages where disease had become a shroud, a "Grey Rot" clinging to skin, draining colour and life, leaving the afflicted like statues of ash waiting to crumble.
He did not banish the plague with fire or holy light.
He sat beside the sick. The untouchables. Those abandoned by everyone else. And he didn't just touch them; he held them. As if there were no risk. No disgust. As if each of them was the most precious thing he had ever found.
I saw him hold the hand of a dying child whose breath was a ragged thread. Instead of commanding healing, he breathed. He inhaled the grey shadow from the child, taking her despair into his own lungs.
I saw the pale colour of death creep up his arms, a frost of mortality on his divine skin.
And then he exhaled.
A breath of warm golden light entered the child, returning the flush of life.
He did not destroy the pain. He absorbed it. Transformed it within himself. And returned it as healing.
And I saw him walk away, paler, wearier, having paid the price of that miracle with a shard of his own vitality.
I saw him standing before a forest fire, a wall of orange flame advancing to consume a village, a hunger of orange and red that knew no mercy. Villagers fled in panic, screaming, carrying what they could.
Elyon walked towards the fire.
He did not summon rain. Did not command wind. He simply opened his arms, not in defiance, but in silent invitation.
And I watched as the fire, this thing of pure fury, flowed into him. Not burning him, but being absorbed. Its rage dissolving into his serenity like salt in water.
In its place, he left only gentle warmth and the scent of ash and ozone. The world's fury silenced by an act of absolute acceptance.
Followers came, drawn by his miracles. But they stayed for his words.
A soldier asked him: "Master, how do we break our enemy's sword?"
And Elyon smiled, a gentle sadness in his eyes, like one who knows the answer will not be heard as it should.
"The sword is not broken with another sword, for that only creates more sharp fragments. We melt it in the forge of compassion and reshape it as a plough."
He placed a hand on the man's shoulder. "Vengeance is a fire that warms you for a night, but burns down your own house first. Leave the ash behind, brother, and plant a flower in its place. That is justice."
A man whose brother had been murdered cried for revenge, face contorted by the pain only loss can create.
Elyon placed a hand on his shoulder, not to restrain him, but to share the weight.
"Vengeance is a poison one drinks expecting the other to die," he said softly, voice a balm on an open wound. "It fills the well of your soul until there is nothing left to drink but bitterness."
He looked at the dry earth beneath his feet. "Do not dig deeper into your pain. Where the thirst for revenge sinks its root, let the fountain of forgiveness overflow. For a garden cannot grow in poisoned soil."
I thought.
But light attracts darkness. Always has. Always will.
Kings and priests viewed him as a threat, not because he did harm, but because he made people think. And nothing is more dangerous to those holding power than subjects who begin to question if that power is deserved.
Betrayal came.
Not for silver; it would be almost easier if it were. It came from fear. A village elder, fearing the people's devotion to Elyon undermined old traditions, delivered him to the local king.
I floated there, a helpless witness, before a monolith of black stone that drank life. They chained him to the cold stone, chains of iron and malice, forged specifically to contain the divine.
He did not scream. Did not curse. Did not invoke the power I knew he still held, which could have reduced them to ash, could have proved them wrong in the most definitive way possible.
He just looked at the sky.
Not at the vast presence that had created him, not to ask for salvation or vengeance. But at the mortals killing him. At those holding the chains, tightening the knots, watching with a mixture of fear and satisfaction.
I saw the light of his essence slowly draining into the stone. The stars in his eyes dying one by one, like candles blown out by a patient wind.
And I heard him whisper.
Voice weak, but clear as crystal. Words echoing through the ages and lodging in my own soul, not as an excuse, but as the saddest of truths:
"Mother... do not blame them. I finally understand."
A small smile touched his pale lips, the kind of smile arriving when one reaches an understanding that cost everything.
"I came seeking their perfection, but I was wrong. It is their imperfections... their cracks... that make them so terribly, painfully beautiful. It is through these cracks... that the light can finally enter."
And then, he died.
There was no final dramatic gasp. The light in his eyes simply went out, like a star finally weary of burning.
And his body, his mortal form, did not fall limp. It dissolved into a silent rain of stardust. Particles of golden light that the wind gently collected and scattered over the earth he loved so much.
Every particle, a seed of memory and hope.
I watched, powerless, as the purest light I had ever witnessed was extinguished by the darkness it tried to illuminate. His final truth, a whisper left for the wind.
And then I felt it. It was no longer observation. No longer distant testimony. I was swallowed by it. The creator's pain. The mother.
It was not the sharp, cutting pain of a breaking mortal heart, I know that pain, I have felt it, but this was something else. Vast. Terrible.
It was like feeling a star collapse in on itself.
The silence following Elyon's death was filled by a shockwave of pure grief, a pain so cosmic it made the very memories around me tremble and distort. Reality's edges bowed under the weight of that suffering.
I felt her conclusion form. Cold. Absolute. Forged in the agony of loss:
"I gave them light, and they chained it to the darkest stone. I gave them compassion, and they drank it to the last drop, leaving only dust. The seed is rotten. The harvest shall be oblivion."
I felt her intent gather, a power so vast it was not a storm, but the terrifying stillness at the centre of a collapsing galaxy. The sky of the world she had created began to darken, not with clouds, but with a void swallowing the light.
Stars began to flicker and die, one by one, like candles snuffed by invisible breath. The world was about to be undone. Creation's wound finally cauterised by annihilation.
I, a mere ghost observer, felt the fabric of that reality begin to fray at my edges. But then, amidst that cosmic fury, I felt her hesitate.
A single image. A single memory fragment. It shone stubbornly in the darkness of her pain, refusing to be erased.
Elyon, face smeared with road dust and eyes shining with pure wonder, tasting a peasant woman's soup for the first time. The warmth. The simplicity. A stranger's kindness offered without asking anything in return.
That small, insignificant memory of mortal kindness became an anchor against a tide of divine pain.
The wall of fury cracked. Not enough to stop the flood. But enough to divert it. And instead of destruction, she chose exile.
Fury did not vanish. It transformed into something colder, heavier: resignation. I felt the presence withdraw from the world she created, not with a bang, but with a silent retreat, like a star moving away until indistinguishable in the night.
It was not a departure. It was abandonment. A mother turning her back on a creation she could no longer fix and could no longer bear to watch.
I thought with a compassion that surprised me.
The darkness of her exile flooded the memory, finally dissolving into liquid night.
I was returned to the abyss.
Darkness became absolute. I floated in a silent, lightless nothing, the void between stories, the space where memories rest before being shown again. My body was suspended in stillness, and the images I witnessed were no longer a flood. They were echoes. Resonances reverberating in the quiet of my soul.
The dragon's scream. The casual indifference towards the slimes. Cruelty to a baby. And the cosmic pain of a mother losing her son.
Amongst countless other lives I saw, fragments of interrupted existences, crushed hopes, beginnings that never reached the middle. All this swirled within me, no longer separate stories, but threads of a single terrible tapestry.
And suddenly, in that void, I understood.
With clarity like a shard of glass in my heart, I understood.
The weariness.
The weariness in Azra'il's eyes, which I so often mistook for boredom or disinterest. It was not the tiredness of a child who hadn't slept well. It was the weight. The weight not of a single life, but the sediment of millennia of beginnings and endings. It was the exhaustion of a soul forced to carry the baggage of countless existences, each leaving scars the next would inherit.
The scepticism.
Her refusal to believe in the best of people. How could she, when she had been hunted by human greed, slaughtered for her innocence, betrayed by trust, and abandoned for her vulnerability? Each life, a new lesson on the fallibility of kindness. Each death, confirmation that hoping for the best was just another way to prepare for disappointment.
Her acidic humour.
The sarcasm she wore as armour. It was not merely sharp intellect, I always knew that, but now I understood. It was a defence mechanism. A way to keep the world at a safe distance, to dissect pain with logic before it could reach her, to laugh before the alternative became inevitable. It was the language of a soul that learned caring openly was an invitation to pain.
And the distrust.
Oh, the distrust.
The way she never surrendered completely. Always keeping a part of herself in reserve. Always planning an escape route. Always expecting the ground to give way, because the ground always gave way.
I saw the origin of it, burned into my mind: the image of a hessian sack sinking into a dark river.
How can one trust the world, when the first hand that should have held you was the one that threw you away?
Everything clicked.
Every quirk. Every defence. Every layer of her complex personality. They were not merely character traits. They were scars. Scars of a thousand lives, a thousand pains, a thousand deaths and rebirths.
The daughter I knew was not just a brilliant and difficult child.
She was a survivor on a scale I could barely begin to comprehend. She was the final result of a million breaks, glued back together with sarcasm and steel, black humour and silent determination.
Realisation was a silent knife, entering slowly, leaving a wound I knew would never fully heal.
As I floated in that abyss of understanding, the darkness before me began to stir again.
The void was not finished with me.
There was more.
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💬 Author's Note
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A small painful curiosity for you all…
This was one of Azra'il's oldest lives, if not the oldest we have seen so far.
At this point in her existence, Azra'il was operating on a scale of power that… well, anyone familiar with Aurelion Sol already knows the kind of cosmic nonsense we're talking about. World creation. Star ignition. Reality shaping. Just your average Tuesday activities.
But there is one fundamental difference between them.
Where Aurelion Sol embodies wounded pride and overwhelming grandeur…
Azra'il, even in this primordial state, already carried something quieter.
Melancholy.
Resignation.
And that persistent, weary awareness of watching her own creations repeat… the same mistakes. Over and over again.
And yet, and this part matters, she still had hope.
From that hope… Elyon was born.
Not as a distant construct.
Not as a cold experiment.
But as something shaped from a piece of her own essence.
Elyon can indeed be considered Azra'il's true firstborn across all her countless existences.
And for the very first time…
…Azra'il experienced what it meant to lose someone she loved, before she even understood that what she felt was love.
A maternal love.
Raw.
Instinctive.
And devastating enough to leave echoes that still reach the Azra'il we know today.
I'm very curious to hear what you all felt reading this part… 👀