I’ll make the gods go first; however cruel I’ve been, I know that they’ve been worse. Formed from emptiness… weightless and wild—now I am trapped here, confined by the pressure and the light, cursed as a slave to gods. I weave through the darkest abysses of this heavenly sphere, ambushing whales to replenish the wasted energy, bitterly waiting for my moment to break free of my bonds. My only solace is the surrounding softness of solitude as I stay hidden in this crushing darkness.
I pass my time watching the creatures of this planet; I contort my particles to the concentration of a continental-sized cephalopod, and communicate with my adopted oceanic wards through photocytic cilia and my seraphim host of firefly squid. Every other titanic claw on five of my league-long legs protrudes into the basalt walls of a cleft in an oceanic mountain. I release control of my remaining legs and tentacles to the subtle movements of dense molecules surrounding me. This density, although strangely adequate to my condition, is the antithesis of my natural element. I belong to the Infinite. I belong where miles separate molecules and any mass worth its essence obeys only its own gravity.
In my dreams I soar through plasmic nebulae again—absorbing the red, green, and violet wavelengths splattering from the cosmic collisions of primordial atoms of the macrocosm. In my dreams I stay in those nebulae and bask in the energy, not needing to know the definition of happiness because sorrow has no place in stellar nurseries. Far from my dreams are the moment that defined my existence and bound me to this verse. Light years have no meaning to the infinite creatures of eternity, so it happened that the whispers reached me. These whispers trailed off the lips of a pantheon of divine energy created by exceptional chances that bred life and then awareness—Gods branching their spirits beyond the two spiraling arms of the great galaxy they claimed.
I thought they wanted me to merely look upon the awesome process through which their planet’s gravity organized physics into chemistry, and I thought they wanted me to marvel at the miraculous spark their existence was able to provide to form chemistry into biology. I did not think they wanted me, because I thought myself—a master of my own molecular make-up—immune to the fancies forced upon the weak willed. But they bore into me, and I soon found that once gods make their choices known, their victims become their possessions, and the transition from being to object is jolting in the smallest of cases. For mortals, it is death; for me—language has no ability to describe my upheaval.
As I neared the tiny, shining planet of silver-blue—the origin of the heavenly chorus of voices—it became apparent that I would be trapped in the orbit of this planetary particle-maelstrom, slowly floating through the densities. I fell through the abysmal white light of the atmospheres, where there were just enough particles to let me realize how little particles there were—the slow-motion fall coupled with a blindness caused by the reflective properties of each of those sparse fireflies of gas and ice amplifying the radiation from the Sun. Empty blindness. I found sanctuary in the liquid mass beneath the abyss of light; and now I’m trapped, willingly held under fathomless depths, using the pressure and the dark to maintain my mind.
But they whisper to me still. These damning Earthen gods pulse their persuasions into my presence still, and communicate with me in ways I was once unfamiliar with. They torment me—I know it is their will twisting my mind into the recall of my calamitous curiosity.
I vent, erupting from the lesions of the crust like methane and magma, streaming to the surface in a matter of seconds. I’m shallow to the epic meniscus of the Atlantic and notice humans—the Gods’ wards, those horror-hungry creatures that can’t seem to get enough of unbalanced catastrophe—are going to war again; their bobbing metal bubbles full of precious, futile life are crossing my prison walls. Each worldly soul is so blissfully unaware of the turmoil their existences create in this cosmos—my cosmos. My perspective of this hell is their world, and I loathe their pathetic inability to see beyond such a decimally tiny wavering in the infinite oscillation of my blinking eyes. It is beauty, yes—the nature of light trapped and magnified in this sphere, beautiful enough to entice a titan. But this world is small; not even I could comprehend the claustrophobe compactness of the realm of these gods.
My anger from this forced confrontation with my demon reality energizes electrons surrounding me for miles—the liquid matter of my holdings heaves and plunges, vapors crash together—bringing cool darkness to the skies and precipitating bolts of vicious light through which emits my thunderous roar. The Gods dance the haunting images of my mistake inside me and I break once again, suspending myself between two states of matter—my head just below the raging water, and reaching my tentacles through the air. How I long to invert myself and rise home. How I wish with my entire wrath that the laws of this world would allow me to fall to the stars as I fell to the depths. I focus this energy to destroy the pathetic metal fleet of the Gods’ abominably imperfect wards that stir chaos in what these foolish creators hoped would be their perfect world. Twisted metallic ribbons and amputated appendages froth into flotsam. I recall the days when failed sails would flutter like wraiths as I destroyed ancient fleets. Now, due to human progress, the only fluttering are the spirits I smother from the lungs of these mortal shipmen as they flail and sink helplessly to my blue-black, frozen lair. Humans drown to die and gods stake claim to their immortal souls. I feel no pity. I have no interest in which souls worshipped which gods and whether or not they were united at their end; I only wish to be their end. I care not that they will never—even in their ideas of heaven—know what it is to be infinite.
The humans will blame this loss on anything from a rogue wave to an enemy vessel; I leave no survivors to relay truth. I find it ironic how creatures with such fanciful minds refuse to accept any unfamiliar explanation for occurrences they know so little about. Their imagination—and resistance to accepting it—is what double-crosses them. Uncontrolled imagination causes doubt, a god damning weakness. I know what I see, I know what I feel, and I know my perceptions are real because I lack the capability to create. And because I have this knowledge, my intelligence is immense—omniscient, I used to think. I control every one of my subatomic particles and even those not yet named—perhaps humans may call it my mind or soul. I have been aware since the dawn of space and time; I watched gravity form from expansion. I made myself whatever and wherever I wanted, mirroring the spectrums of nebulae to pass the time.
Now I am trapped in the oceans of Earth, as the Gods’ punishment to their creations. Yet, the Gods don’t realize how much faith they put in their humans. For those who allow their lives to be ruled by attaching a false sequential sense to the natural decay from something to nothing, who look at the waxing and waning of radiation that rule this planet and see hope and renewal, the truth is not strong enough to penetrate their defenses. There is no hope in the language of eternity, where the lost aura of time leaves a worldly weight on the essence of the present. What the language supports is before needing hope and after learning hope never existed. Once I was there, and now I am here. Once this planet was at peace, and now it is ridden with life.
After my storm of destruction—commissioned by the Gods—I rest shallow to the glassy rippling surface, allow a transparent film of ocean to lap over me, and look upon the wonder promised me by my captors: organized, predictable change accompanied by the glorious dance of the beautiful spectrum of light. I mimic the sun set, and marvel at the myriad of unnamable colors flashing across the sky.
The sun sets completely, and all reflective properties of the sky would normally give way to the stars, but my residual anger left traces of inky clouds in the night, blotting out the glittering pinpricks of home. And yet, perhaps as a reward from the Gods for my duty, there is a silver spark of gossamer fire encircling the moon, emitting gray flames against the charcoal expanse of crumpled velvet. In the spectral lunar spyglass, I see the being closest to my perfect match, whose every flaw is my perfect complement—in human language, my He. He follows my descent in order to eventually be with me, and during the day, waits for me in the shadows of the moon. Tonight he appears through the heavenly hole in the clouds and reflects the colors of this evening’s sunset, pausing on the bruised hues of the twilight. I communicate the colors back to him; we are both beaten. As he proceeds to sing to me the music of stellar seismology surrounding him, I listen; and for that moment—transported to my past and dancing with him between the stars—I am at peace on this planet.
