Act Zero: Intercessor & Adversary (1/3)

Once upon a time, and then again and again and again, a bitter and lonely woman cut a piece of herself and named it. I was the first.

Senses came to me in waves. Taste and smell brought the iron tang of fresh blood to linger on my tongue. Someone had bled to create me, and I knew her name before I knew my own: Melpomene, my Creator, my source, my everything.

Touch was next. I could feel fabric on skin, a cool breeze, and solid ground beneath my feet. I was standing. Melpomene—I would always know her touch, no matter the context—had her hands on me, dextrous fingers pressed to the side of my throat and playing with my hair. Her touch was soft and pleasant, yet oddly cold. Then, hearing.

“Okay, vitals seem good, not that those really mean anything for a homunculus like this. No, we’re not calling it a golem! Homunculus is way cooler, shut it. Refocusing. Hair is very soft, we did great on that. Should we have made her base appearance stranger? No, you’re right, it’s good to connect the base form to the template. Damn, I’m good. Shut it!”

Something shifted, footsteps echoed, and those soft, pleasant fingers moved to my back. I opened my eyes for the first time and saw the stars above, a thousand points of light casting a bright glow amid the endless darkness. Pillars of white stone stretched toward the firmament, plain and unadorned. The marble tiles beneath my feet alternated in black and white, a chessboard the size of infinity. A throne, gleaming gold and set with every gemstone, sat empty in front of me.

“It’s not ego, it’s logic! And we’ve had this argument already! This will be good for me. I will drown you in drugs and alcohol, you miserable little parasite. This is my head now, and this delightful creature is going to help with that. If you wanna stick around, learn to play nice. And I know you can learn, because you’re me, and I’m very smart. So get with the program or get bent, my sweet passenger.”

I raised my hand to look at it, splaying my fingers and wondering at the sensation of blood pumping through my veins, the little hairs on my arm, the trillions of nerves in my body lighting up and sending information. Behind me, a gasp.

“Oh shit, she’s already awake. Wait, fuck, can she hear that?”

My Creator, perfect and majestic and divine, darted out from behind me and scrambled to climb onto her throne. Her movements were awkward and ungainly, the stumbles and skitters of a woman who had never known coordination in her life. As she settled into place, wriggling to get comfortable, I found myself thinking that she looked too small for the throne, not a woman but a girl, like a child playing queen. I loved her for that.

Love, love, love. It pulsed in my heart and filled my being, the only thing I could feel as I absorbed fresh sensory data and made sense of it. I loved this strange, childlike goddess. My Creator, my source, my everything.

Though she took the throne and posed upon it with regal airs, Melpomene was still dressed very casually. She wore simple jeans, a dark shirt with some kind of rose-and-moon pattern, and a beige cardigan hanging loose. Her glasses were big and round, her cheeks soft, and her bright brown eyes were speckled with gold. Her lips were raw and flaking, dry and gnawed, and so were the tips of her fingers, around the nails. The handle of a medical scalpel—I knew the sight of it as intimately as I knew her name—stuck out of one jean pocket.

Melpomene licked her lips, right hand twitching where it rested on the arm of her throne. She bit off a scrap of lip skin, chewed it, and swallowed. Stared at me. Hesitated.

“Creator,” I greeted her, smiling. “I love you.” It felt like the right thing to say. The only thing I could say.

Melpomene relaxed visibly, her hand fidgeting a final time before going still. She grinned, eyes twinkling, and she said, “Yes. Yes, that’s right. I made you, my Thalia, and you love me. I like it, will like it, when you tell me that. It’s one of the things I made you to do. Part of your purpose. I gave you life, and in return I expect great things. You will love me. You will serve me, my Intercessor, and carry my will to the worlds that I shall shape. You are now, and will always be, my greatest creation. Never forget that, and never forget your love.”

She laughed, the sound coming out raw and ragged, her upper body shuddering with the exertion. The light in her eyes had turned manic, and I loved it.

I dropped to one knee, head bowed in deference, and with exultant joy I told her, “My Creator, my ruler, my Melpomene, I will always love you. I am yours, and I shall always be yours. Yours to use, yours to control, yours in love forever. Your will be done.”

As Melpomene watched me swear myself to her, the frenzy in her eyes spread across her face, widening her smile and stealing her breath, and as soon as I closed my mouth another wild roar of laughter ripped its way out of her throat. Her whole body shook with it, clean peals of joy crumbling into hacking, wheezing coughs. She kept shaking and shuddering, draped over one arm of her throne, until it finally lapsed into heavy, ragged breathing.

I stared at her with growing concern, though I didn’t leave my kneeling pose. “Creator? Melpomene? Are you alright?”

“Never,” she gasped. “Have been, will be, never. But I’m here. Untouchable. I won, Thalia. They can’t take that from me, won’t. I won, and now I’m here.” With a final bout of hacking laughter, Melpomene pushed herself up and straightened her back, tilting her chin to adopt an imperious presence. “Now rise, my creation, and I shall tell you the third purpose that I ask of you.”

I rose, smooth and swift, hands clasped tightly behind my back as I waited for further instruction. I took pride in being her creation. I took pleasure in being molded by her hand.

 “I have need of an aide in my work. From this throne, and from the halls of my palace below these checkered tiles, I wish to craft worlds. I will fill these worlds with laughter and sorrow, with violence and intrigue, with every delight that I can dream of. I will make something glorious, Thalia, and my audience—the lights in the sky, the starry eyes of the watchers beyond the veil—shall applaud my works and love me for it. But… creating alone is a lonely endeavor, and prone to intrusion by undesirable voices. So I have made you, Thalia, to accompany me. You merely need to listen and ask questions as I shape my creations, so that I may develop a more complete understanding of what I am making. Like a rubber duck for me to exposit to,” she added with amusement, “only this duckling can talk back and offer praise.”

And so that’s how we proceeded.

Melpomene set the boundaries of a new universe and sketched an outline of its history, focusing her efforts on a ravaged planet with six lush moons. Ideas came to the Creator in scattershot fashion, out of order but slowly coalescing into a coherent timeline.

In the beginning, the world was whole and six peoples lived in peace and harmony, each tribe or clan (the details of their organization were never deemed important) wielding a single primordial element—fire, water, earth, air, light, and dark—in concert with the elements of other groups to forge incredible wonders together. Their perfect harmony was disrupted by the arrival of an outsider, a foreign entity from distant stars. The entity’s name was Prevara, and it proclaimed itself a giver of gifts, but its true nature was a god of chaos and cruelty that sought to bring ruin to the world and bind all six elements to its will.

Prevara set the elementals against each other, manipulating them into conflict over what had been shared without qualms before its arrival. It raised a champion above all others, a darkness elemental by the name of Kiana, and used her to advance its goals of total domination. On the precipice of the entity’s victory, Kiana turned against her master and imprisoned it deep below the surface. Prevara’s last free act was to lay a curse on the whole world, and on Kiana in particular. In the years following its imprisonment, the elementals would retreat from the broken world to the moons above. In time they would return, drawn by old ruins and lost relics, and by the whispers of the imprisoned god.

Kiana would follow her people to the moon of Nyx, their new home, but died shortly thereafter, taken by the curse. She was forgotten, her story and the story of Prevara lost to time.

And then, hundreds of years later, Kiana would be reborn. Reincarnated into the new age with no memory of her past self, she would grow up a prodigy, able to control not just darkness but the other five elements as well. Through her mastery of the elements she would learn how to regenerate her flesh, how to fly, and even how to influence the minds of other elementals, binding them to her desires. She would believe herself a natural talent, unaware that all her great gifts were echoes of the powers that Prevara had granted her predecessor.

The process of creating a world is very abstract. Melpomene doesn’t go into the new universe and shape stone and sea with her hands, doesn’t sculpt every soul with knife and clay. The sole planet and six moons of the elemental universe were projected onto that universe from a complex orrery within one of the rooms of the Creator’s palace. Painted metal, that’s all those worlds really were. Prevara, god of chaos, was in truth just a plastic figurine hidden inside the central sphere. Just a toy.

Kiana’s creation was different. In a room with sterile tile flooring and cold light strips, a metal autopsy table awaited its pound of flesh.

“I’ve used this place once before,” Melpomene told me, “when I created you. It puts me in the right mindset, being here. Though, I’d rather not get too used to this place.”

I was nervous, though my love outweighed any fear. I had been told, in the simplest of terms, what we were there to do: to cut my Creator open and carve a piece of her into our Kiana. It disturbed me, but I had to trust that she knew best.

Her casual attire was gone, replaced for this important moment by a clean white lab coat draped over her otherwise naked body. She liked it when my gaze lingered on her curves, subtle as they were, and didn’t like it when she caught me looking at the scars, of which there were many. I was fascinated with her body, an intended product of how she had programmed me, and it was only the clinical tone of this procedure that kept me from vocalizing the desires that her bare form inspired in me.

“I did it alone, that first time. Needed to. I could have made lesser servants do it, but it had to be my hand that brought you to life, every step of the way. This time I can afford to do it the easy way, which means having you do it. Self-surgery is a real pain, even if godhood makes it a lot more feasible than it’d be for your average Jane. I mean, this is gonna hurt like a bitch, but your hands won’t be shaking like mine were. Should be faster and cleaner.”

Her confidence didn’t assure as much as I think she hoped it would. Any amount of pain was more than I wanted to inflict on my Creator. Still, I’d been given a task, so I would perform it to my utmost capability.

Melpomene laid back on the table, lab coat falling further away from her body to expose more of her pale skin covered in paler scars. All but one were recreational, their thin width showing how shallow the incisions had been. The sole exception was the long scar across her chest, right over her heart. Where her heart would have been, if she hadn’t cut it out.

She handed me two scalpels, clean and fresh and of differing size and shape, and with the blades she’d given me I cut my maker open. I parted skin and carved past fat and muscle until her left lung was visible, and then I sliced off a corner of it with one clean motion. I plucked the severed organ meat with delicate, gloved fingers, and placed it on a tray off to one side. Her respiratory organ continued to perform its function as if it was not missing a chunk and bleeding, and I knew that even if the whole lung were removed my Creator would have no more trouble breathing than was normal for her. After all, what kind of a god had need of a heart, lungs, a liver, or even nerves?

I folded the skin flaps closed and her flesh sealed without need for stitching, a new scar forming to mark the vanished incision. Melpomene rose with a wince and rolled her shoulders. “See? Easy.” Her lazy tone didn’t watch the pain I’d seen cross her face while I worked.

Melpomene pushed herself off the table, then took the piece of lung and set it where she’d sat. The flesh lived, oozing blood and flexing erratically. My Creator snapped her fingers and the lung scrap convulsed before falling into a steadier, more natural rhythm.

“And there we have it. I’ve anchored the ‘Kiana’ thoughtform to my severed flesh, so the physical version that develops on Nyx will have genuine growth potential and an internal world. She’ll be more ‘real’ than the rest of her universe, in a sense. That’s necessary, both for the experiment she represents and so I can have the narration follow her thoughts.”

I nodded to show I was listening, but she’d already explained all of this before we started. I suspected she was talking to herself more than me; that was usually the way, with her.

“I may need to work on the piece, make a few cuts here and there to shape the mental construct further, but that should be easy enough.” She paused, and then she drummed her fingers against her leg. “Thalia,” she addressed me directly, eyes bright and keen. “You’ve now seen how you were made, or something like it. You’ve participated. How does that make you feel? What do you think about what we’ve done, and about what I did before in making you?”

How did I feel? It was a difficult question for me, at the time. I knew I was a full, true intelligence, a piece of my Creator in a very real and meaningful way, but until that question I had been mostly content in my role as her follower and servant. It wasn’t my place to feel something unless I had been told to feel that way, and that had felt appropriate. But if Melpomene wanted to hear my thoughts, was that really an acceptable answer? The way she had asked, the shift in her body language, I could tell that this wasn’t a loyalty ritual or said just to hear her own voice; she was curious in the manner of a scientist checking up on her experiment. An obvious, thoughtless answer would be disappointing.

So, I thought about it, and I voiced those thoughts aloud in order to give my Creator more insight into what she had created.

“Relief,” I started. “I am relieved that the process is over, because I do not like seeing you in pain. I am grateful that you entrusted me with this task, even if it unsettled me. I… I don’t know how to feel about what we made here, about this ‘Kiana’ girl. I hope she gives you everything you want from her. And about myself…”

I hesitated, unsure, and my eyes drifted back to the scrap of flesh. I looked around the room, the lab largely empty—no, entirely empty except for this one table and its one red meat. If that was Kiana, then where was the flesh called Thalia?

“Creator, you told me that I was made from the flesh of your heart. Where is it now? Is my anchor in another part of the palace, somewhere I haven’t been?”

Melpomene grinned. “No, not quite. In fact, you’ve never been somewhere my heart wasn’t, not a single time.”

I grasped the implication quickly, though the truth of it shook me. “You mean… your heart is inside me?”

“It beats in your chest, pushes blood through your veins. Your indestructible core. Well, nearly indestructible. Beside the point! Yes, Thalia, my whole heart is inside you, the anchor for your form that you’ll take with you wherever you go.”

Her heart was my heart. Ah, what a wondrous thought. The beating of that heart within my chest gave me new comfort and joy. I didn’t know, couldn’t know, if my Creator loved me like I loved her, but just the teasing thought of it was almost overwhelming.

Melpomene twined her hands behind her back, leaned forward, and gave me an impish grin. “Why, Thalia, you could almost say you’ve stolen my heart.” She blinked, then added, “Well, okay, I guess you can’t really say that when I gave it to you, but—oh, I could say that instead! Although, does it work as a double entendre if it’s just literal? Hmm. You’ve captured my heart?”

Even now, I love her. How could I not? What a delightful, adorable creature. I smiled, true and adoring, and I told her, “My heart is yours, Creator. Always.”

And together we set our first story into motion, the story of Kiana and the elementals.