Chaos

PART 1 – TRAGIC

            To be tragic was to discover one was never meant for anything except death. To be tragic was to leave a world before anything with a false sense of importance could be achieved. To be tragic was to be a hero with a life left unfinished, a life left frozen in a sheen of ashes, and I could never understand its appeal.

            Other warriors craved it like their next breath. Within their puffed-up chests were expanded lungs and a heaving heart, one that pumped blood and darkly wanted it to spill onto the page of a history book where the words – just for a single sentence – were alight in glory.

            Such a tantalizing thing, glory was. I never wished for such a title, and I couldn’t help but condemn those who recklessly leapt into battle, attempting to claim and clutch it with their cold, lifeless fingers. 

            A dead man would never know if he succeeded. 

            I remembered one particular girl, a child whose bleeding lips had been smiling when we found her after an attack by the Erenki kingdom. The sword’s hilt in her small right hand looked far too heavy for her to hold, especially with the crimson of the foreign soldier next to her running down its blade, and yet, she’d looked proud. 

            It had been easy to pry the weapon away from her. The general gave it to the next hopeless warrior without a single grieving thought, and the girl was buried with the stuffed animal her widowed mother brought to her headstone.

            Instead of running, she chose to fight. Most named her an honorary warrior. I thought her tragic and grieved her young, stupid mind. 

            Being a warrior did not mean death to me. In fact, it meant the opposite. It meant surviving to live through the next battle. It meant breathing just enough breath to keep going – no more, no less. It meant repetition.

            I enjoyed my service to the kingdom of Agendire. I fought the breathless battles and did what damage I needed to. I moved on to the next, and the next, and the next, until they became a war and eventually dwindled back into skirmishes. Now, I patrolled the border, finding a comforting familiarity in the oak at the southeast corner of our territory and the winding river to the west.

            Every sunrise, I opened my eyes to the same successful life. I kept my head down in meetings and my voice raised in trainings. Once, I tried to instill my thoughts in a force of warriors fresh out of an academy that taught them there was nothing greater than dying on a battlefield. We were ambushed by Erenkins three days later. Two of my warriors were captured and never heard from again. One died in some arrogant show of strength. The two-hundred others found their own ways to die within the next few years, each death more or less the same. 

             Under my boots, the brown grass shuddered. Water in the river just ahead sloshed, overflowing onto the grassy banks and spraying my squadron. Thunder roared throughout the land. Under it came the eerie echoes of the screams of men.

            The others looked to each other for answers none had. I eyed each of the warriors and found wonderings of whether this was to be their moment or not. The sight chilled me to my core.

            I liked my warriors, but I had learned long ago how impossible it was to try to save any from themselves.

            I intended to return to the barracks and await orders from the general. Instead, I ran. I blinked and my surroundings were whirring past me as my feet moved quicker than they ever had before.

            The site of the battle rushed at me. Suddenly, I was swinging my sword. Far more power than there should have been within my arm sent my blade straight through one man I’d just watched attack the world.

            He carried a twisting green staff, one that fell with purpose and split the ground open upon contact. He looked at me with burning eyes and an anger in his twisted mouth when I drove my sword through his chest.

            I watched him pull it out and step towards me, his wound already sealed up.

            My mind willed me to flee, but my body belonged to something else – perhaps tragedy. 

            My sword swung towards him again, wanting desperately to watch him fall to the ground and die. I kicked at his staff at the same time, trying to dislodge it from his grasp, but he brought it down before I could.

            My throat closed as I was falling, holding in a scream I should have screamed. My breathing was heavy as though my lungs wished to float me back up to the surface. The atmosphere tried to brush my eyes closed, but I kept them open in defiance of the death that was taking ahold of me.

            The man with the staff watched me fall, and in my last thought, I wondered what I’d done wrong to fall into the cold clutches of tragedy. 

PART 2 – THE HERO’S DEATH

            I couldn’t let on how the hero’s death affected me, how even up in the skies, where I was safe from the war the gods waged, I watched the fighting closely and grieved its needlessness.

            This was not my doing. This went against my father’s wishes, but he was dead, and the remaining gods had no respect left for his wisdom. They certainly had none for me.

            “Osune.” I turned in my mockery of a throne. The writhing black cloak around Suali created a shadow in my golden palace, one I did not appreciate. “You are not down there fighting, young king of the skies.”

            “I am not.” The image of the girl falling to Kiuva and his staff sat at the forefront of my mind. I cared nothing for what Suali had to say, nor for what chaos she wanted to create.

            “Do you think this a protest?” Suali giggled as she circled my throne room, her sharp nails dragging along the walls. “You know the other gods would not be pleased to discover just how against this war you are.”

            “You know nothing of what you speak.” My voice rang far louder than I meant it to. I tried to control my breathing.

            Suali stopped at my side. I turned my eyes back to the war below, though her own breathing was a constant distraction. “Did you know her name was Vistral? Did you know her father named her the next protector when the last died? Ironic, isn’t it, that this one spent her whole life trying to avoid an unnecessary death just to be yanked into one by a destiny she didn’t know she had.”

            “Protectors were outlawed!” I stood and faced the goddess of chaos. Below, the others were working hard to destroy their once beloved creation. They couldn’t stand the violent nature of humans and had decided this world was over. 

            Suali shook her head, her sunken eyes portraying a sadness I knew she didn’t truly feel. “No. Your father only told you that to keep you from whining about its cruelty.”

            “It is cruel. Using magic to force a mortal to protect the entirety of a world or die trying is cruel!”

            “Oh, dear.” Suali looked from me to the battle below, though it couldn’t even be called such a thing. It was a slaughter. “Just be grateful the gods started where she was so that her death was not prolonged.” 

PART 3 – A BLIND EYE

            What the other gods didn’t realize was that time passed on differently for me. Sometimes, it was far too slow, such as my imprisonment in the stellar winds. I watched the birth and death of many stars before I was released. I learned all there was to know about patience, and I learned I was a necessity. There couldn’t be order without chaos.

            Other times, everything flew by far too quickly. I wished to revel in Osune’s realization of Vistral’s destiny, and more than that, in the realization that the others had talked him into this war, knowing of her existence. 

            In a flash, he was gone, but from his palace, I could see the decimation taking place in the world below. I watched his own destruction as he ordered Kiuva to stand down, to repair all he’d broken, just for Kiuva to laugh and imprison the young god deep within the earth.

            Osune would not die. It took eons for a god to die, and that thought excited me.

            Besides, for the time, he was happy to be buried beside the girl he’d always loved from afar. His original attachment to Vistral had been my doing. After all, chaos often brought great new beginnings, and I knew he enjoyed the way my strands of darkness had been one of the only things to ignite something with him.

            I played no part in the way he became a vine wrapped around her branch, nor in the increasing frustration within all the other gods at the violent, selfish nature of the humans. Fate found itself in my aftermath.

            Now, I got to watch it all play out. It took the gods very little time to lay waste to this world. Ash rested within the atmosphere and blood blanketed the dead ground. The gods turned away from it without a last glance and returned to their kingdoms beyond.

            Thus, the planning began for a new world. I indulged their occasional conversation and debate, giving my thoughts in just the right way that when they chose not to listen to me, they did as I wished. Years later, a new world was born, one they helplessly wished would be better than all the other ones that had failed in their eyes. Gods always expected perfection and never realized that they did.

            Most importantly, they turned a blind eye to their decimated world, to the precious, dead protector who still held her power within her and to the traitorous king of the skies who would feel like he’d died a thousand deaths by the time I saved him.

            They turned a blind eye to me, and the scraps of their tragedy became the beginnings of my story.