Common

When the first of the guardians arose: they were leaders chosen during the collapse of their respective worlds. Having collided in various ways, with evolving combative prophecies over divinity and future landscapes. They traveled throughout the universes, seeking new worlds to conquer. Their factions and others naturally followed, for mutual benefit or laborious servitude with underlying malicious wants brewing beneath. Causing the guardians to collide against infinite matters, warring over planets to covet, comingling with peace when exhausted.

The guardians: grew vast and varied, gaining leaders and losing others, condemning whole generations to damnation. Usurpers became the usurped. Although emotions were shared across the board and experienced: in a variety of ways. A universal vagabond community was born, and cultures followed: a view was held, and general opinions agreed upon. Moving through worlds and parallel universes – using the “Littlings of the Damned” eternal energies to travel - leaving destruction and universal famine in their growing wakes. Until, the guardians and the damned found themselves desperate: without prospects for further undiscovered, functioning, material habitations lavish enough to tastes, or large enough to provide for the masses.

Having lost half their guardians and damned, expending the last of the littlings energy to escape a world that withered at their first landings. Their desperate travels: left them stranded in a world inhabited by a lone orphan of unknown origins.

The temple was built by the damned: to hold the guardians’ treasures. The guardians undertook another era of peace, venturing to live together, with intentions to move above the stars, with some wishing their gathered treasured belongings would remain intact in their next ascent.

The first temple became a beacon, throughout which a city rose.

The temple - meant to pierce the skies, for appearances - was designed to be a marvel. A feat met only by the guardians, a sanctuary only for the guardians. The damned that flocked about them, whose labor and lives - brought the temple into existence - were but a sign of achievement, happenstance of glory, natural steps: there to ascend upon.

The temple was everything their present dreams had hoped it to be. The guardians elevated above, safeguarded from the damned: who savor their formative power and beg them for the favor, or the pleasure of a glance: an affirmation of real presence. Citywide riots would break out over the more favorable glance and what it meant for the one blessed enough to have received it: a predilection of superiority for themselves and their clan. The practice: passing through generations; as the grounds beneath them, sank. Sucking their perspectives into a pit, with the temple at its ovate center.

The guardians’ awareness only peaked when they overlooked the city beneath them. But when gazing to lands, they marked as possessed. The guardians were greeted with the cold monolith walls of the earth - caging them in - making their temple diminutive, in comparison to the looming hills of soil: intent on swallowing them whole. From the peaks, their temple appeared no more substantial than the surrounding city dwellings, connected to the core of the temple like heartstrings. Compacted so tight, it became impossible not to dampen and invade the other.

The guardians felt they had become too commonplace in form. It had become a frequented occurrence: the damned let in, in place of guardians, and guardians turned away like the damned. One generation of guardians: proclaiming solitary: the fashion of virtue, casting unsympathetic judgment on those who chose to leave the sanctity of the temple. Another age of guardians deeming free escape from the temple, an offense punishable by imprisonment. The mere want or need - of anything - beyond the temple doors was a cause for vigorous recourse - amongst all generations of guardians, with group expulsions and executions becoming favored traditions. All they knew for sure: there was something above and not enough below, and the guardians felt they deserved more.

As the lone orphan of the land, watched the burden grow.

Taking dominative control over the city in the pit, the guardians renounced the temple as tainted and cursed. So, began the pilgrimage of the awakened to the surfaces up above. The guardians retreated from the uproarious stampede of the temple. Ascending the peak of the pit, to build anew. Their temple above the city in the pit: will serve to deliver that mortal wound to the blackness that hung overhead and mocked their irrelevance in size, decreeing, once more, to inject themselves where they must belong: above all.

The abandonment of the first temple creating a multifaceted set of circumstances, fulfilling some wishes, granting other needs; serving as a gift, or reward; a backhanded offer, a curse; an endless catch, a burden; a stroke of luck, absolute damnation, a world-shattering torment. Karma for the worse and for the best.

The city went up in riotous flame, one taking the other. They set to destroy what felt like the noose hung around their necks, shedding the rags that marked them, and left behind the treasures now meaningless to the promises of a life held within the temple. Suffering: was the complacent and content; when their existence went to ruins, as the wave caught them up. Some unable to stay firm in place or fight against the violent current that flooded for the temple: once the guardians made their leave. And from their journey above: the guardians watched the smokes rise and let the screams of jumbled joy and terror fill their beings like sweet music of sacrifice and survival.

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The pandemonium succeeded in decreasing the city in a pit’s population by half, as well as increased births of littlings by three quarters. The amount of unsettled and unsheltered reduced: as the damned filled every floor, room, closet, stairwell, nook, and cranny – of habitable space – of the temple, with bodies and possessions.

Families became extinct, while others began; children became orphans; wives and husbands: widows; friends wiped away, and acquaintances: forgotten forever. New tribes were made: refreshed societies, businesses, homes. All packed inside the temple; outdoor bazaars: once scattered across the pit’s eclectic streets. Now, stood almost atop each other: located on the temple’s ground floors. Pitched tents, some grand and some: but a sheet held by a stick (or the last bits of clothes interwoven); creating a hive across all open levels; rooms: mansions, and closets: sanctuaries. Highways of hallways; back passages and stairwells: streets and roads; a hidden shaft in the core of the temple from its zenith to bowls: unknown to all within but one.

The world sheltered inside; and deemed those who could not find a place inside (or a doored room): the others. Praising the guardians for their generosities, fawning with rekindled envious hopes towards the pillared tower at the peak. Where the guardians resolved to rebuild so that their new temple of success could shadow the first temple in infinite contempt, a novel visual reminder of perceived positions in the developing new world.

As the lone orphan looked on from the temple's peak. Now, shunned with the damned, but confused for a littling and hunted by the guardians.

She never felt more alone.