Our ancestors dared call Them gods. Worshiped at Their feet. Built shrines of piled stone and, later, towers in Their honor. Waged war and dedicated every drop of blood spilled on the snow to Their names.
Parasites. Every last one, parasites in the skins of winged giants, cloaked in shadow and the soft scent of ash. Parasites that sucked and fed and drew away the joy, the anger, the fear, even the deepest of despair, leaving only emptiness and hope in Their wake.
It’s a strange thing, hope. The barest sliver of it, and you’ll suffer any indignity, any grief, any pain, so long as there’s the shadow of a chance that, perhaps, it might get better.
It doesn’t make a difference that never does.
#
And so.
We remained.
Sheltered under the shadow of Their wings, Their voices whispering in our ears. And—oh!—such beautiful voices. A hum brings you to tears with the enormity of it. Listen to Their words long enough, and you’ll be deafened by it.
That’s what happened to this ear. Oam, She of the Sleepless Night, whispered and I listened, unheeding of the danger. I listened so hard and lost myself in the song of her voice, and after she released me minutes—no, moments—no, eternities—later, I never heard another sound in this ear again. It was worth the sacrifice, I thought, for that fraction of infinity, for that taste of omnipotence. Convinced myself in the years following that I’d been given the most gracious of gifts.
Never did I consider what Oam received in that transaction. Never did I see the woeful imbalance.
For what’s a fleeting moment of eternity compared to the permanence of flesh?
#
The Outsider came down from the mountains. She wore strange hides. She carried no weapon.
She was not of us and yet, knew us.
Her whispers were quieter than our gods’ but her words weighed more than whatever mountain had birthed her. She reintroduced us to spite, to hate, to our long-starved fury, and united us behind a cause: bring down our gods and, for the first time in nineteen generations, grieve for what They took from us. We’d weep, she promised. We’d scream and rage. We’d curse every one of our ancestors for bowing to what They did to us. And we’d laugh at the sheer absurdity of our fate.
#
Our gods broke her in retaliation for her impudence.
They took her to Their tallest tower for four days and three nights. When They had finished taking Their toll in blood and fear and pain and hopelessness, They dropped her corpse off the edge of the parapet, returning her to us.
Which, perhaps, was Their greatest mistake.
For we now had a symbol to marry with the Outsider’s purpose.
We, the products of nineteen generations of war, let fall our axes and our spears and our knives. Stone by stone by stone, we dismantled Their towers and tore down Their shrines.
And we starved our parasites out of existence.