The Creators Ch. 17

I had let go of my grenade seconds ago. I hugged it to my chest, and counted down the last second of my life before... before... before nothing. The bomb I held to my breast was soaked in water. I looked up. A pair of black eyes stared down at me from a girlish face maned with curly red locks. Diamond grabbed me by the hair, and yanked me to my knees. She grabbed her mother by the throat, and did the same.

"I didn't even want to be here," Diamond snarled to Julia, who was still gulping desperately for air. "I wanted to be as far away from you as I could be, but Corruption makes me love you, and we all do stupid things for love." She grabbed Julia by the cheeks, and squished them open so that her desperate gulps for air made her look like a beached fish. "Did you ever love me, Mother? Or was I ever just the guilty burden you carried? Well, you can't feel that guilt now, but I can still make you feel fear."

Diamond forced her mother into a disgusting kiss. She parted with a gasp, and stared deeply into Julia's bulging eyes. "Remember that," Diamond whispered, "that was the last bit of love you'll ever feel in your miserable life. You think Corruption loves you?" Diamond turned to me. "That love belongs to me."

She pressed her mouth to mine, and kissed me. Her tongue searched my gums and teeth, and her lips formed a grin. She breathed in. Agony. Agony like I'd never known suffused every inch of me, leaving me paralyzed in Diamond's grasp. She held me lightly, barely embracing me at all, and yet she seemed to draw me out from the inside, pulling my organs through my throat, collapsing my lungs, imploding my heart. Through the torture, I was vaguely aware of heat passing between our mouths, and the taste of something terrible being sucked right from my esophagus. The pain seemed to be interminable, but it ended a second later. In its wake was a horrific vacancy, and within that hollow, flooded my guilt. Justina. Oh god, my daughter! I'd abandoned her! I'd left her to die atop the Gratoran Wall without even looking back! I had to find her! I had to bring her back to Towerhead and hold her in my arms until she knew it wasn't me! It was... it was...

I blinked. I was staring at the black eyes of Julia Gendian. They were wide with horror. I knew what they saw. Diamond pulled her mouth away from me, and the last smoky tendrils of Corruption flowed into her nostrils. I swayed for a precarious moment, then fell to my chest, my body sapped of all energy.

"No," Julia mouthed, unable to speak the words. She whipped her head up to Diamond. "No, no, no, no! Please, Diamond! I didn't mean it! I made a mistake!"

Diamond smiled coldly at her mother. "It's far too late."

Julia dropped into a low grovel, and sobbed upon her daughter's toes. "Please, baby," she whimpered, "don't take her away from me. Don't make me go back."

Diamond watched her mother for a while, savoring the moment until she had her fill. When Julia's desperate pleas reached their crescendo, Diamond ran her fingers through Julia's red hair, and guided her gaze upward. "Who's the voice of God?" she whispered.

"You are," Julia blubbered.

"Who is God's chosen one?"

Julia looked up, her eyes streaming, her expression more woeful and despairing than one I'd ever seen. "You are," she hissed.

Diamond smiled without mirth, her sparkling teeth and girlish face so full of malice they seemed to darken the color of her eyes. "That's very good, Mom," she said gently, then stood up, and walked away. She left a puddle of footprints in her wake, then floated from the top of the outcropping, and joined the melee below. Julia and I watched her go, then Julia looked back at me. There was nothing in her face but hatred.

Postlude: Depthless Well

CORRUPTION

I was lying in a pool of my own sweat. Xaya was poking me in the side with a stick, seeming to wonder why I wasn't working right, but I was too exhausted to even lift a finger to stop her. I had used every skill of persuasion, every ounce of emotional manipulation, every power of the psyche I had at my disposal, and it had almost been too little. Diamond's love for her mother was a depthless well, but the darkness I'd put in it when I melded with her had spoiled the waters. All around me, memories had sprouted in her garden. Hateful memories. These memories were fleshed with my thorned bushes and dark flowers, and they created effigies of Passion and Lucilla.

"Murderer," the memories seemed to whisper. "She killed them, and then she abandoned me." Another memory sprouted from the soil. This one was of me. In this memory, I was staring back at Diamond from the gate of her realm. "She abandoned me for you, Corruption," the memory hissed. "I know you can see this. I want you to know that I am going to take her away from you. She belongs to me. Just. Like. You." An image of Diamond emerged from the soil; her features black with venom. The thought stared at me, and grinned. "I own you. You can't escape me. You're trapped in my head, and before this is all over, I am going to eat you alive."

Excerpt from Dr. Siam's thesis, The Broken Bridge, page four-hundred-ninety-five:

What are Creators? That question isn't very pertinent, and if you ask it, you're an idiot. There is a hierarchy of intelligence, and it is determined by what question you ask. "What?" is the last question a worm might ask of the alien shape of a descending boot. "Who?" is what owls fucking say; are you an owl? "Where?" now we're getting there, but we're not sure if we're going the right way. "How?" hello, aspiring engineer; what a fantastic question, but not the best. "Why?" perfection.

Why are Creators? Why do they exist at all? Why does the spiritual plane make them, and why do they come when they do? I've heard a theory that the spiritual plane simply fills up with dead people. That theory is a good one if you follow the conservation of energy, but it makes the assumption that the spiritual plane has a capacity limit, and must maintain equilibrium with the other two planes. There was a time when the first life appeared; was the spiritual plane's capacity limited to just one? What happens when there's a world-wide orgy and we quadruple the population in three years? If the spiritual plane is finite, then we shouldn't be able to do that, but with enough elbow grease and alcohol, we humanoids can do amazing things.

There is a reason why the Creators come back. There is a reason why they come back seemingly sporadically. The Creator cycle is not a cycle at all, for there have been times in history when generations of Creators appeared within the same lifetime. It is ancient history, but it is true. We in the present are slaves to a very small snapshot of our existence. Most people can't even name the Creators before Iona, Breyta and Ofan; that's not even twenty-thousand years ago. Humanoids have existed for millions of years. There have been civilizations far greater than what we see today. Swords and clubs; horses and carriages; we've done this before. We've done so much better.

Why do Creators come back? The answer is simple. While I cannot prove it explicitly yet, it is the only logical explanation. We've done this before. I am not the first to have discovered this. I will not be the last. These questions will be answered, and then they will be silenced. The world operates in cycles, but humanity operates on decisions. There is not a cycle. There is a decision.