The Creators Ch. 12

Postlude: Triple Knot

DIAMOND

My head felt like it was splitting, but not from fever, nor from concussion, but because there was someone in it.

Why do you preserve me? Petranumen asked from my astral realm. I am too vast for your mind, Diamond, even with the remnants of your mother's realm. It is no use.

I ignored her. Mom was slung across my shoulders, and I was racing with fiery lungs across the glassy plateau. I just needed to get to Brandon's tree, and she'd be better. I'd plug her into the roots I'd come out of, and the remnants of the tree's lifeforce would be enough to heal her. It had to be.

You will not get there in time, Petranumen sounded regretful. I am sorry.

What do you know about it?! I snapped.

Her breath rattles with death, and you are a mile away.

You don't know!

I know. Her voice was faint, and her thoughts were sluggish in my mind. My own stream of consciousness seemed to have slowed to a crawl. I had expert medical knowledge somewhere in me, but I just... couldn't... remember it... I slowed to walk, my diaphragm heaving. I felt something wet splatter on my feet, and I looked down to see crimson shining from my toes. It hadn't come from Mom. I sniffled, and my sinuses were filled with iron.

You cannot hold me, Diamond, Petranumen said. Your brain will soon burst with the effort.

I tried to ignore the astral god, and unshouldered my mother, laying her softly on the glassed earth. Her emerald eyes were glazed, her complexion was deathly pale, and her flesh was so cold. Her breaths grated from her lungs, each one a horrendous labor for her. I didn't know how many more she was willing to take. Her mind was somewhere else now, and her expression looked peaceful, but I would not let her go into that blissful oblivion. Through the molasses of my conscious, an idea began to form.

You can save her, I thought.

I cannot.

You can bind with her.

Impossible.

You're an Elemental; you have the power.

I do not love your mother.

But I do, I replied, brushing blood-plastered bangs from Mom's face. I love her, she loves me, and she love you, Holy Mother. A tether of three knots, just like you planned.

Unrequited love does not make a bond, Petranumen answered. I nodded, not responding. Mom's breaths were guttural noises, more liquid than air, bubbling pink from her red lips. A drop of blood fell from my nostril, and splashed across her apple cheek. She didn't even flinch, but just stared through me.

"Mom," I whispered, "wake up. It's me. It's Diamond."

Mom's green eyes were pale and bloodshot.

"See me," I whimpered. "I'm here, Mom. I love you. Bind with me. Heal yourself."

I don't think she can love you like that, Diamond. No matter how many times you've lain with her, you'll always be her daughter.

What do you know about it?!

Everything, Petranumen said heavily. Diamond, she's giving up. There's nothing here to hold her anymore.

"You don't need to ask me for forgiveness!" I cried into Mom's breast. "None of this is your fault! Don't go! Stay with me!"

She can see me now, Petranumen said. Her mind is carrying her away.

Does she know you? I asked, hoping through the pain that Mom would find some solace in seeing the face of her Holy Mother.

She... she is just confused, Diamond. I am sorry, Petranumen responded. Mom's breath rattled again, and the pink foam at her mouth spilled from the corners. Then, her eyes suddenly cleared, and darted right to mine. A smile breached her face, and I smiled back in turn, wiping the tears from my eyes. She mouthed something. I leaned forward. Her lips were at my ear, and from them, I heard one word sung from her dying breath with all the love she had.

"Corruption."

I eased back, the molasses of my mind turning, the horror and pain dripping within me. Then, the resolution. For I was the Untethered One, and the Holy Mother had no autonomy over my mind. She was a guest in it, but I was the master.

What are you doing?! Petranumen screamed.

I'm sorry, I replied, and I was, for tears streamed down my cheeks, and shame squeezed my chest, but I did it anyway.

Stop! Oh Diamond, Stop! STOP! Petranumen pleaded. She rushed over to my gate and tried to hold it fast, her muscles tensing against the wrought iron, her pale body poised to hold her ground forever.

My mind can't hold you, Petranumen; you said it yourself. Is has to be done, I couldn't believe I was thinking those words; I couldn't believe I could be so callous. Petranumen looked at my astral figure with equal disbelief. Her pathetic position and pleading features should have given me pause, and the fact that I loved her a little should've stayed me, but it didn't. The gates began to open, and Petranumen wrenched herself against them.

There's another way, I know there is! she screamed.

You can't lie to me. Not here, I said sadly. The gates parted with a screech of metal, and Petranumen was forced backward, her heels digging into the soil.

She's dead, Diamond! You can't help her!

I have to try. The gates opened more. Petranumen's entire body trembled, her arms barely staying locked at the elbows.

DON'T DO IT! Petranumen shrieked, and I could hear the desperation in it, high and terrified. A mortal fear, the kind that takes over the mind until there is nothing left of the person it occupies. Only the hope of my compassion kept it from owning Petranumen. I stripped her of that hope. The gate flung open, Petranumen's arms shot from her side, and she was thrown to her back. A horrible sound infiltrated my realm. The sound of miserable groans, tortured screams and discordant wails, all forming a crescendo that grew louder and louder until its manic tones infected the wind of my realm. Petranumen scrambled on her hands and knees, crawling away like a crazed animal. They came. Her guilt infiltrated my realm, the ghosts of her conscious bursting through my gate like a horde of the damned; faces of Joy and Vitanimus, of Willowbud and Aunt Lucilla, of thousands and thousands more, all wearing that horrible accusation on their grey faces. They flooded into my mind, steady and inevitable. They cut off Petranumen at every turn, but still she fled, screaming and begging me. She was surrounded. She turned to me then, and I could see true horror in her eyes, the realization that her greatest fear had come to fruition, and it was worse than even her darkest musings could prepare her for.

Diamond? she asked, her voice high and small, a drip of water in a dark well. I never got to answer her final plea. The horde converged on her, and she screeched, a sound like an animal dying in the night, the sound my mother had made when the Heat Bringer cooked her alive. Now, I was the Heat Bringer. Petranumen's white hair flailed in the middle of it all, her hands clawing upward to breach the wave, the fingers clenched in horrible agony. They tore her limb from limb. All the memories she cherished, all the moments that defined her, all the emotions that she expressed, all were ripped away and blackened before her disbelieving eyes. Her horrible shrieks reached a shrill crescendo, then dwindled to anguished wails, then died to nothing. I was relieved. The great and beautiful Petranumen, Elemental of Earth, God of the astral plane, Holy Mother of the Maternal Path, was gone. Not dead, for death would've been a mercy. Distantly, I heard a great boom, and I felt the tremors beneath my astral soles. The final spire had collapsed. The grey mass of Guilt filtered away, leaving a shape where Petranumen had once been. The shape stretched languidly, black limbs reaching for the heavens, black hair trailing behind a face that brimmed with amusement. The realm of Corruption was gone, but the Sentient herself still existed, worn as armor by Petranumen when I dragged her weak body through the abyss of guilt. But this was not just the mask and armor; this was the living corpse of the Holy Mother, the Elemental soul without the sentient person. Every memory and thought had been stripped away, save for the one part my Mom truly loved; not as an abstract concept of God, but an intimate, desperate love of the evil that could take her pain away.

Hello, she said in her even drawl. She didn't know who I was, nor did she seem to care. She regarded her surroundings with disinterest, then turned back to me. You are not someone that I can meld with. You have no darkness.

But I do, I whispered, for I killed something beautiful.

Your confession brings it to light, and your guilt burns it away.

To you, I confess, but the one I love the most will never know of it, for the truth would break her.

That is not enough. I need more.

I closed my eyes, and let tears fall down my cheeks. I killed her for my jealousy. I killed her because the person who is supposed to love me the most loved her instead.

Corruption tilted her head, eyeing the astral sky as she pondered that. Then she smiled broadly, and stepped toward me. I did not back away, nor cringe from her. I looked her into my arms, slid my hand into her hair, and accepted her kiss.

My physical lips pressed to Mom's, and I stared into her fading emeralds. They dwindled before the greater light of the moon, faded to a dull shade, then closed. Her breath died in my mouth, and her heart faded beneath my resting palm. I breathed into her. Her eyes flashed open, her lungs gasped, her heart thundered alive. The world ignited. Mom's flame blasted from her flesh, shot into an orb around us, then tunneled into a great vortex. I felt the heat on my flesh, but it did not burn me. She shot upright and took me in her arms, her eyes wide above our kiss. They were black eyes. So were mine. The fire around us blazed black, and though it did not scorch me, no patterns formed on my flesh. I was not my mother's Bound One, but the one who was now a part of me. And as I breathed that sweet poison into my mother's lungs, I tasted the love on her kiss that I would never know from her. Her back stitched together beneath my palms, and her flesh became patterned with black markings. The soul of a god had been bound with another, so they marked each other as Petranumen and Vitanimus had done millions of years ago, and from their joining, they created another. Me.

The clockwork of the universe was forced into synchronization, and the hands aligned to deliver the fourth Creator to this world. I felt the moisture in the air, the rivulets of sweat that rolled down my flesh, the whisper of the sea from the distant bay. A great rush of water shot from the aquifers below, and married itself to the vortex of flame, creating a roiling cloud of black steam that hissed and popped around us. The patterns that formed across my mother were not of waves and rivers, but of nonsensical images that almost looked like contorted faces, all of them blacker than coal.

The vortex of elements dwindled, and left Mom and me staring at each other, black steam rising from our renewed flesh, black eyes staring intently, lovingly. I giggled, and a gout of black Corruption shot from my lungs, and into the air. Mom laughed with me, her joy singing high, sweet and sonorous, but tinged with something terrible. Just like mine. Our hands trailed over each other, and the caresses we delivered were affectionate and possessive, loving and cruel. Our red lips did not smile at each other with kindness, but with predation, with a desire to ruin. To corrupt. When I looked at her, I saw the scars of her past plain as day, etched across her psyche like a defaced painting. It was beautiful. I wanted the world to be beautiful like that.

"Aunt Lucilla is being raped in hell, Mommy," I sniggered on her lips.

"Are you jealous of her?" Mom grinned back, sinking her fingers into the fat of my ass, and parting my cheeks. Our cocks squished against each other, oozing and throbbing, aching with the terrible perversions our eyes whispered to each other.

"Yes!" I hissed, and she did what she does best. Our bodies writhed in the moonlight, moving with beautiful grace and terrible purpose. We made love as torturers, and delighted in the pain we endured and inflicted upon each other. Our hands strangled, our teeth bit, and our voices carried from our devouring mouths, echoed across the glass remnants of Drastin, and died in the still night air. If anyone heard it, they would be wise to fear it. Run, hide, and cower. Find a hole within the earth to burrow, and wait out the coming storm. Drastin was just the beginning.

End of Book Two

Author's Note:

Thanks for reading this far into the story. I finished these first two books back in 2018 elsewhere, and put the project on hiatus until I could summon the energy to finish it. Much like Queen Yavara, this is a labor of love, and since I don't get paid for this, I don't write unless I want to. If writing feels like an obligation, then the writing ends up being half-assed, and I've put too much of my precious time into this filthy smut to give you something half-assed. So I've made it a new personal policy of mine to not publish stories until I'm nearly finished with them, as it is unfair to you, the reader, to commit hours and hours of your time to something only to find out the next chapter will be out in three years. Book Three is mostly done, and there will be chapters out every week. Fair warning, Book Three is going to be really dark. I didn't initially intend for this story to become a psychoanalysis of demigods, but that's where it ended up going. I actually started this whole thing as just a nice sexy adventure story, but I guess I can't just write a nice sexy adventure story without taking a self-indulgent dive into the deep end of the pool.

I write from the perspectives of my characters, so in a weird way, I don't really choose what they do. If you've ever read Greek or Norse mythology, you'll find that demigods behave very badly, and that is because they're people just like us, only now they are removed from the constraints of law and ethics that bind us all to society. I guess that was my literary exploration in this debauched tale; to take average people, give them immeasurable power, and then throw them into situations that would challenge them. Since nothing can really challenge a god, then the god's worst enemy must be his/herself. That idea is made quite literally here in the form of astral beings who manifest themselves as pillars of cognizance, but of course, even the Holy Mother herself doesn't know what the fuck she's doing. As Freydis said back in Chapter Five, the ethos of mankind cannot be applied to the ethos of gods. Every echelon of power comes with its own set of rules; all you have to do is look at the world today and see that the rules you follow to not apply to billionaires. The tradeoff, however, is that there is always a power above you no matter how far you rise, and if you're at the very top, you still feel the universe working you like a puppet, only now you don't know who your master is.

So yeah, that's what this story is about. Fifty-percent pretentious character philosophy, fifty-percent transgendered anal sex. I guess I've found my niche.