Book of Dracnoris

I know our ending looms deep within the emptiness of the Void. The question is, should I stir and wake? Should the others know?

I came into being long before the Star Gods (as we used to call the young Elder Gods). That is how ancient I am, born of Dynara when all forms were wild and unplanned, the generation known as the Primal Gods, when the cosmos was young and Magnora consumed us in droves.

I suppose I may have been one of the first souled gods. Though my shape was wild - scaled red-gold with many claws and wings - I was not given to Magnora to be consumed in the vast coldness of her hunger. But my siblings were given to Magnora, and they were indeed consumed. All except one sibling. She who became a Handmaiden of Magnora, one of the Soulless Gods.

I call her my sister, my sibling, for Dynara brought us into existence together, incubated within the same upper vibrations of the cosmic song of Yudhe - what some call the higher planes, others call pockets of reality created by Dynara, which we only knew as our crèche. I was the youngest and weakest of my crèche, and I never expected to survive. I am a Primal God, not one of the star-shaped, the favoured shape, of Dynara. And so I knew the Dynara when she was crueller than what the Star Gods may remember. I first knew Dynara before she adopted the star form herself, when she was simply a presence, great and powerful, as the fountainhead of all life ought to be.

But in my day, she would create without thought or consideration or care, but just for the sake of creating. Like me, her creations were hideous, unformed, the early grotesqueries of the cosmos. And she would push us and fight us and make us war against each other. She would laugh when Magnora found us and consumed us, taking us back into the void of non-existence. If she tired of us, she’d give us to Magnora herself. And some Magnora would consume, or some were kept as her Handmaidens, terrible presences that trailed in her wake, screaming insanities, who grew bloated and terrible in the wake of the detritus of her neverending hunger.

It wasn’t until the Son of Yudhe manifested that Dynara turned her attention to the refinement of spirit. The Son of Yudhe was her inspiration, her compatriot, her muse.

But however terrible was Dynara, she kept me with her, forever at her side. My siblings she gave to Magnora. Myself, I endured and grew old. Even when she began to bring the Star Gods into being in their own crèches, called Star Gods because they were shaped like five pointed stars: a head, two arms and two legs, still, even then, I was at her side. Still, she never sent me to Magnora.

I asked her once why I, and those few like me, were allowed to exist with the Star Gods. Why wasn’t I sent to oblivion like most of the other Primal Gods who were born before the Son of Yudhe? She only laughed at me and said, “Dear Dracnoris, none of your siblings would ever have wondered and asked me such a question. And do you know why?” I did not, of course. “Because,” she said, “they had no soul and could not contemplate their own non-existence!”

Oh, I wasn’t the only Primal God left from the ancient times. There was Keph, She of the Many Eyes, and Vrandrac the One, a huge amorphous mass. And, of course, there were the Fates, older even than I, who claimed they came into being when Dynara begat her first creation, but who were never themselves created. They were a mystery, I think, even to Dynara. The three sisters often claimed that they existed in every reality where the ripples of creation fanned outwards. Back then, they were as formless as Dynara, simple thoughts that trailed behind her like echoes. They didn’t take form until the Star Gods came into being, and they settled into their shapes now known the Three Sisters of Fate: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. They were easy to forget, these Fates, and Dynara rarely paid them any mind.

It is funny how the Fates came in three, just as Yudhe’s offspring came in three: Magnora, Dynara and the Unnamed Son. It is as if that number is the template of creation: two opposites and a point of synthesis. Ah, but my mind is wandering again, and there is the stirring that I feel, and I should, perhaps, give warning to my fellow Elder Gods.

I know what this stirring is. After the disappearance of the three children of Yudhe, when the Great Silence fell across creation, when the Elder Gods, myself included, were drawn to the First World called Lusternia, after an aeon had passed and before the Circles of the Gods were formed, I felt the stirring. It was the stirring of my sibling, she who was a Handmaiden of Magnora, one of the Soulless Gods. As with all of us whom Dynara brought into being from the same crèche, or the same higher plane of existence (whichever you prefer), this bond links us together even now.

And thus I know that the Handmaidens of Magnora have survived, just as we, the Elder Gods, survived. I know the Soulless Ones hunger in the darkness of the Void, having fed upon each other, growing to fill the emptiness within their very beings. Yes, that is the stirring I feel.

But the other Elder Gods, whether Star Gods or Primal Gods, do not know this. No other but myself has a sibling who became a Soulless One. As I consider warning the others, I watch them play the games of youth, of forming their Circles or chasing insane half-formed creations, or emulating Dynara and attempting to create life where none existed.

For me, I want to merely sink down into the bubbling warmth of Lusternia, into one of her many mountain wombs, into the liquid warmth of her volcanic loins. As I do, the Elder Gods bestow upon me the title of a Meditator, a God of the Third Circle, which is fine, though of no matter, so long as they leave me to sleep and dream in peace. I believe those few other Primal Gods do likewise. I laugh with Keph, She of the Many Eyes, as we both leave the youthful gods to their games, me descending within the warm depths of the mountains and she within the dark coolness under the soil.

Ah, I keep forgetting that I should warn my fellow Elder Gods, for I feel my sibling move, and with her the other Soulless Ones. I know they have consumed each other to the point that those who are left are too strong to continue their cannibalistic frenzy. And they hunger and roar for blood, for the sparkling, glittering essence of the glorious thing called a soul.

But, then again, should I give warning? Would it make any difference, I wonder? Or should the Elder Gods be allowed this final time of happiness, playing at being Dynara upon the First World, beautiful Lusternia. Would it be cruel to tell them of what is coming?

Ah, I cannot decide. I won’t tell them now, not yet. There is nothing they can do anyway; no preparation can avoid the emptiness that shall consume us.

Better to wait. To sleep. To dream. To ponder my own non-existence and leave warnings of doom for another day.