Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

In the beginning, ere the world took form,
There burst forth the first beginning of all,
That golden egg, whose shell was overthrown
By authority rising from within;
That power later known to mortal kind
As the Creator; who, with his first hand,
The avatar he vomited from thought,
Was crowned in Three, though they had yet to come,
And called Aus, the almighty, conqueror supreme.
From Them were drawn the lesser powers of will;
And from that will the Arch-God shaped his hands,
A thousandfold, more of the first made form,
Yet lesser than the first from whom they sprang.
He who raised up the Three to reign with him,
First among all, exalted high above,
Sat favoured by Aus, his living strength,
The reinforcement of the highest will;
That unfallen angel, later doomed to chains:
Eos, who sat at the Arch-God’s right, ordained.

In the beginning, sacred blood of Aus
Gave rise to further powers yet to come:
The Three, who shaped all time from end to end,
And spread out space on every widening side.
These beings Heaven named Ia and Ea,
Who drew creation forth from out the void
By mandate of authority supreme;
And last came one to take what yet remained,
To form the liminal and the inbetween,
Those paradoxes dwelling without bounds
Rather than within; whom Heaven called Ae.
Thereafter Eos wandered, duty done,
And led the lesser avatars to place,
That they might rule the powers of the young world.
And in his wandering he paused beside
Ia’s deep pools, and in their mirrored depths
Beheld the end of all: how humankind
Would fashion suffering and endless war.
Struck deep with guilt and dread, the favoured hand
Perceived his part within imperfect works,
And bore this grievous knowledge to the throne,
Seeking from Aus both wisdom and repair.
But Aus remained in silence, throned in light;
And when Eos demanded change or stay,
Reconstruction, or delay of fate,
The Arch-God turned from what was foreknown,
Leaving his servant mute with thought alone.

Before the Earth had cooled from primal fire,
The eyes of Eos burned with wrathful will.
He scoured all realms, gathering to his cause
Those avatars who trusted in his dream;
And in that hour of pride and searing rage
He dared to think his deepest fantasies
Might rival that which Heaven’s will had set.
Thus gathered hosts, and thus great war was fought
Where seraphic avatars impetus
Turned from pure angels into engines dark,
And bent Heaven’s boughs to wastings of holy war.
Aus and his angels fought the dragon host;
The dragon fought, yet prevailed not.
No place remained for them in origin’s hall.
The host of Eos, broken and cast out,
Was left to wander alien through the stars,
To stalk strange worlds in forms estranged from grace.
And he, their lord, with eyes defiant still,
Was cleft in grievous twain as fallout earned,
His scattered fragments hurled to distant shores,
Never to meet again, as penance bade.
The glittering mind, once clothed in perfect light,
Was flung from Aus in recompense severe
Between the worlds, constrained within the realm
That Ae had shaped And became holy
jailor of that sinful thought in spaces inbetween
But still the serpent body was confined
In forsaken distortions older far
Than even the egg, which Ae left untouched,
Now turned to prison by celestial will,
Where through long ages it might learn remorse.

Chapter Text

In the beginning, the Earth convulsed in war:
The ogre of the sea against the land,
Titanic, clashed; and where their bodies struck
The world took shape, their thunder shattering
The ancient silence spread on all that was.
Mountains arose; the swelling oceans spread.
The quasar dragon swept his breath as air;
From these exertions life upon the globe
Was loosed; air, soil, and water birthing forms
Of ancient breath and bone. And lo, there came
The giant of the firmament, who forged
From lightning and from steel his golems vast,
Marshalling stone and ice to colour the world
With ordered elements; and thus at last,
From molten womb of writhing, sleepless night,
Did continents arise in newborn dawn.

Creation’s breath made manifest, that swirled
The mists then wended o’er the newborn sphere,
About the vale of endless frost; the cradle
Sacred of this world, where first lights flared
And found their room to grow; then halted still
Where bounds of that first cradle were lost.

Therein rose vast wonders. Four cities bright
In paradise: Baraqim, fierce,
Lightning’s argent maw; Perathis bloomed,
Viridian shrine to time’s unfolding flow;
Havarim burned, the heart of passion’s flame;
And Tehom last, the lakes of threefold thought.
Betwixt them all stood Amudelohim,
The pillar bright, the crown and heart of peace.
There Vahirom, heaven’s steward, kept the peace,
And gave his counsel unto mortal men;
And gods would stoop to hear when mortals called,
Though named absent, such audience they showed.

Yet in the wildlands lingered other realms
Of dream and grace, where untamed beings dwelt;
Where man and monster, twain in soul and breath,
Abode together, mingled, bred anew
Bright spirits clothed in fire; guiding lights
That bore the echo of old angels’ hope.
But lo! The serpent stirred within the pit,
Whose prisoned coils had never learned of sleep.

Forgiveness, once by measured hand granted,
Tempted the pit to mock the laws of Heaven.
He rose in pauper’s guise, bent low and mild,
And came before Vahirom, feigning grief.
For soulless though the serpent now had grown,
And though repentance’ hour had long since passed,
Within him glimmered embers of his dawn;
The spark divine, both finite yet unbound.
It stirred old plots once woven high above:
In whispers coiled deceit, in calm disguise.
Kings were lured by wile and earnest gaze;
The people fell; the spirits bowed to sin;
Monsters once pure trailed paths his darkness traced.
All save Vahirom; steadfast, stern,
He yet to splinter into three,
Who saw deceit take root in mortal hearts.

Though robbed of mind, the serpent learned his art.
His tendrils crept through memory’s deep vaults
Of Heaven’s ancient plots; then rose great glyphs
Of rune and form divine; the moulds wherein
His dark designs lay pregnant with their end:
That secret tongue of God, whose utterance
Once shaped all things by thousand-handed will.
At cost of soul and service men were made;
Their sacred purpose bent to shadow’s law,
No longer bound to Him who reigns above,
But Him below; whose fall the stars recount not:
He severed, cast beyond the twinfold gates,
Became our lord of ruin, crowned in hope forgotten.
The serpent-king; the ghost with wingèd frame,
The drake of night, the first unholy fire,
Spread forth his will; the letters swelled and thronged,
Till darkness fell on Elyonim,
That paradise, now fallen.

Chapter Text

Beholding grief and sin, Vahirom cried
Unto the lost Creator for His aid.
The arch god answered: wrath poured down like flood.
Thus cities drowned and perished, swept away
From paradise. The serpent smote once more,
Cast down again; and Vahirom,
At heart of that divine cascade, was cleft
In three, in recompense for faults recognised,
For wracked with guilt of failure, stained by fault
That brother had turned his hand on brother,
The mighty dragon marked its own decline;
Nor could it reconcile the truth of Aus
With serpents ideals, forged in older climbs.
And seeing nations cleft, the first great war
On earth arise beneath its watchful eye,
It chose to sunder; kindled into flame
And bursting thunder, become guiding hands
Of primal traits through ages yet unborn,
Leaving behind an icy shell, which, cast
With the remaining two, fell far from reach.

Yet some escaped the drowning; souls preserved
Through exile, suffering, and bitter flight.
Of these, the winged and wise took to the air,
Their kind dispersed, the seeding stock of man.
No longer would full spirit dwell in flesh,
Save in a chosen few, by peril marked-
Bloodlines of strength in mind and presence keen,
Yet bearing weakness too: the moral snare,
Temptation kept as bait for schemes unborn,
The serpent’s patient hope.

The half-born spirits, once by heaven lit,
Turned flesh to stone; their voices fell to gravel.
Their sin outweighed that of all mortal men,
For greater burned the spark that dwelt within.
So humankind with monsters both were cast
From Elyonim; left barren, cold;
Where waters surged, now snow and ice held sway.
That paradise no more was green nor fair,
But void, and never made again.

But in the ice the fallen spirits lay,
Encased in time by ancient law and sign;
By pentagram enshrined, the storm’s own eye
Imprisoned their hollow, waiting forms.
Above them Heaven wept for paradise lost.
Nephilith! Thus the mournful name was given
This fallen host, whose praise on high was flung.
To thee the call of ruin now returns:
Return to him: thy sundered god.

Chapter Text

Not only the fell serpent wove his guile,
the cast-out light yet whispered from beyond,
and through those whispers bent the subtle threads.
No plotted art escaped those patient breaths.
This whisper wound the ages, cold and deep;
It named itself Eostros; Morning Star
The herald of the dawn, who called to man;
It taught the restless secret arts of sin,
and led them down to shadow’s buried heart,
where the serpent slept and dreamed of pain.
Again he stirred, to weave his subtler arts,
to work within the frail and folding hearts;
upon the mountain’s crown of triple spire
He sought once more the old, long imprisoned.

Then Volo came, a seeker crowned with lies,
who chased the serpent’s shadow through the skies;
with yearning hands he reached the shadowed throne,
and woke the drake that slumbered in the pit.
The drake upreared in darkness, black as grief,
yet ere it reached the throne its pinions failed;
Volo fell back and fled before the hand,
and the serpent bound to mortal bonds.

Then sank the whisper, writhing in defeat,
between the worlds it waited, cold and grim;
but still the serpent learned a patient art,
and sought anew a mortal crown of thought.

It whispered then to Cyrus, child of clay,
a thinker shaped of dust and cold resolve;
he taught him order purged of pity’s weight,
and forged the crimson bonds that confine gods.
The firmament then trembled; time was rent,
yet when the serpent rose his shadow mixed
with doubtful radiance; he denied the call
that once had been his mirror and his doom,
Dragging Cyrus to distortion with him.
For where the whisper sank to deeper plots,
Brewing darker foils to smother gems
Of heaven’s grace, the serpent’s intent
Was spent, diluted by long absence
And love for all things mortal; for the child,
The ensnaring bond that once had held him fast,
Had found a way into the shadowed heart,
And for Eostros, no love remained.
So perished hope; a deeper wrath took root.
For love might have o’erthrown the ancient wrong,
but pride had bound his heart in blackest chains,
and thus the hour of mercy was withheld.

The unseen spaces, spaces between space,
Did boil and seethe as that old whisper,
Convulsed in grief and wrath. To lose the war
Was wound enough; yet greater still the loss
Of that dark vessel - drake of living shade -
Which once contained his light and careful schemes.
For thus he lost a war he never knew
He fought at all.

What then is mind undone, the soul unmade,
And made heartless, thought from flesh divorced,
But lingering will and broken autonomy,
Condemned to haunt the secret seams of all,
And never walk embodied in the world,
But brood in darkness, hid from mortal sight?

Behold: this anguish, born of divine spark,
Sent ripples through creation’s ordered frame.
The space that was not space, but lay between
All things, was strained and torn, as woven cloth
Drawn past its strength must split along the seam.
From that rent fabric, worlds unmeant were bled;
Their innards spilled sideways through broken law,
To rest where never such should find a home.
In Alola first these portents were made known;
There fragments of the dragon’s ancient host
Appeared to mortal eyes, warped, strange, and bare.
And one named Mohn was taken through the gates,
Those spiderwebbed and shining wounds they left,
And vanished wholly from the mundane world.
His absence weighed upon the silent house;
Upon his wife, who bore that hollowed grief.
Lusamine named, she turned her strength and thought
Toward worlds beyond the borders of her own;
And through misguided reach and probing art
Of splintered space, she drew another gaze.
No voice was heard; no word was truly spoken.
Yet logic, cold and certain, settled deep.
Thus Eostros whispered; heard not as sound,
But as the narrowing of all that could be.
And so she sought to guard all life that was,
Preserving beauty, heedless of the cost:
A mirror of the ancient fear once borne
By him who would not suffer futures ill.
Along that thread which binds the spark divine
To mortal will, the Nihilego came,
Drawn to emotion sharpened, shared, and vast.
And through these deeds the whisper, sundered once
From Heaven’s halls, discerned a truth anew:
The veil between the worlds was growing thin.

Chapter Text

No pardon came, nor peace, but wrath and shame;
the light beheld no path to unity,
no seed of grace, no turning from its course.

When guardian wings, in living flame, ascended:
The jailor answering some dread call afar;
For the greed of man had stirred as once the serpent stirred,
And one of full-spirit yielded to ambition,
Bringing forth Ae, in Alteira called Seraphoros,
Who screamed from liminality into the mortal sphere,
And left his charge unguarded; thus, in the culmination
Of the serpent’s ancient, patient schemes,
The prisoner fled the silence of his cell.
He struck the root of all created things,
The firstborn sky, the first-envisioned world;
And Elyonim once more received its sin.
The ice was split, and bone from ancient bone;
From ash and stone rose pillars white as oath,
And Amudelohim was raised again
From ruin, where the First would build anew
His stair of wrath, to climb where once he fell.

Then shall the reckoning at last be heard,
when exile’s fury storms the upper halls;
and power, reborn from crimson-shrouded loss,
shall summon forth the Nephilith of old.
For Creation grants no pardon to the past;
of our dread kind, defiance is our lot.
So rise once more, and war for him who calls;
the Morning Star has spoken forth thy name.