Maruts
Once upon a time the Earth grew heavy with love or rage or longing, and all the generations of gods and demons assembled to hold council together. The detente had lasted as long as any of them could remember, just as the blind Fates had decreed. They were built to strive with one another, to vex and to thwart -- but never to conquer, not truly, and never to rule. This was unerring law.
Then, as now, to rule was to write the death of one's people.
The Earth groaned with her coming child, and gods and demons and mortals and Fates all trembled with their scrying. This creature would upset the balance of power, the prophecies showed, but even the Fates could not say in which direction.
They strove together, then, binding the child still in the womb, and Earth cried out through the aeons with birth pangs or a mother's grief.
And yet, in the long march of time, neither words of power nor the endless press of bodies could hold back the young one any longer -- not when this was the yearning of creation itself. The head emerged, and the Fates tugged at their endless web. One genuflection and Storm was forced forth from the throng of gods, lightning bolt in hand and weeping perhaps; he might be father or cuckold, but the blind ones have never been known for their mercy and they held him now like a puppet on a string. The lightning flew from his and the child--
The child was broken to pieces, true, and knocked insensible for too long, and yet it would not die.
They woke to themselves, the many-shattered; endless faces lifted their fen-fire glares toward the Fates, and endless voices leveled oaths: "This is not our world, but we will die defending it all the same."
They escaped in that moment, departing on the wind, and they became a generation.
The stories tell us that they live in the thunder, waiting to be born. By then, Storm assures us, they will be many.
Other stories insist that this has happened already, and we have never in all our lives heard true thunder -- only an echo through emptiest space.
Then, as now, to rule was to write the death of one's people.
The Earth groaned with her coming child, and gods and demons and mortals and Fates all trembled with their scrying. This creature would upset the balance of power, the prophecies showed, but even the Fates could not say in which direction.
They strove together, then, binding the child still in the womb, and Earth cried out through the aeons with birth pangs or a mother's grief.
And yet, in the long march of time, neither words of power nor the endless press of bodies could hold back the young one any longer -- not when this was the yearning of creation itself. The head emerged, and the Fates tugged at their endless web. One genuflection and Storm was forced forth from the throng of gods, lightning bolt in hand and weeping perhaps; he might be father or cuckold, but the blind ones have never been known for their mercy and they held him now like a puppet on a string. The lightning flew from his and the child--
The child was broken to pieces, true, and knocked insensible for too long, and yet it would not die.
They woke to themselves, the many-shattered; endless faces lifted their fen-fire glares toward the Fates, and endless voices leveled oaths: "This is not our world, but we will die defending it all the same."
They escaped in that moment, departing on the wind, and they became a generation.
The stories tell us that they live in the thunder, waiting to be born. By then, Storm assures us, they will be many.
Other stories insist that this has happened already, and we have never in all our lives heard true thunder -- only an echo through emptiest space.