The Incarnation ポケモン
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Trembling beneath the harsh, sempiternal light of the full moon—naked light, as naked as his own body—lashed by a fierce night wind and the ceaseless battery of wave upon frigid wave against his pathetically small, unresisting form, the boy wept silently. The sea swallowed his tears as quickly as they came; nature’s way of rendering his private suffering insignificant. At first he couldn’t understand why it was that every few weeks he felt compelled to wander clothed only in his own skin to the edge of the midnight sea and then into its foreboding black waters while his bare body pulsed with that forbidden, foreign energy.
The moon. Its pull bid the sea rise and devour land, then forced the waters to retreat without a trace as if land had triumphed, only to impel those waters to return with new vengeance to be driven back yet again, in a neverending cycle that was only too familiar to the boy whom that moonlight drew out from the safety of manmade shelter and brought right to the frontlines of the war that had raged since the beginning of time. This war was familiar to the boy not because he had been alive since it began but because he, in the span of a life that was no more than a blink in the war’s timeline, had entered into a physical and spiritual contract that had told him the story older than the earth itself.
And in that story was the knowledge of an imminent Armageddon, an inevitable Second Coming of the prehistoric clash of Sea and Land in which powers that raised mountains and filled oceans unleashed themselves in one final cataclysmic contest; irrefutable knowledge from the Ancients themselves, but it did not reveal the battle’s resolution—who would be victorious and who would be defeated, whether there would even be such a delineation or would they destroy each other and the whole world with them?—for the resolution of the conflict was not known to those who waged it. And so the knowledge, or lack thereof, was ultimately what tortured the boy, tortured him more than the unrelenting icy sea that assaulted his naked form, more than the unfeeling moon that staged mockeries of the struggle between sea and land, even more than the agonizing Legendary energy that branded him with those primordial marks and tied him to the Guardian’s duty, the Guardian’s curse. It spread disease-like in a suffocating miasma that blinded his sight and deafened his ears and numbed his touch and strangled his voice, sending him into a world of darkness and silence where he was lost even to his own crashing heartbeat and sobbing gasps.
And he would stumble further into the sea, driven to the knife-edge of madness by what he knew and did not know and could not change, nor forget, nor abandon, nor erase.
Floundering and writhing and drowning and breaking.
Until finally, finally…
He remembered.
The companions whom he had raised and who had raised him, the partners who trusted his every judgment without question or condition and expected and received as much trust in return, the friends to whom he felt a mutual devotion so deep that it was instinct for each to protect and support the others no matter the personal cost—they shared every aspect of life, every aspect of existence, including the moment that had bound him and therefore all of them as well to the destiny of Guardian of the Cave of Origin. And so they would share his pain, his destiny, his knowledge. Even as he choked and fought and began to succumb under a burden too ancient and vast to be borne by someone barely a dozen years in existence, even as the images of primeval desecration tore him away from his reality and replaced it with an apocalyptic nightmare—something came and drew him out of it. Literally drew him back and anchored him to a real, solid world still whole and unmarred by destruction. In his half-conscious state he could feel the smooth skin with its soft pulse of life beneath, guiding him to safety. Away from the nightmares and the cold, cold sea. Away from the pale, austere visage of the moon. To somewhere with just a moment’s security, a second’s comfort.
So that he would find himself still alive when the sun rose once more.
Alive, and not alone.
----
More or less a boredom post. No cookies for guessing who this fic is about. It all started with seeing the word "sempiternal" while reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Yeah. My bunnies are weird like that.
Constructive crit appreciated before I subject this thing to The Pit of Voles (i.e. Fanfiction.net).
The moon. Its pull bid the sea rise and devour land, then forced the waters to retreat without a trace as if land had triumphed, only to impel those waters to return with new vengeance to be driven back yet again, in a neverending cycle that was only too familiar to the boy whom that moonlight drew out from the safety of manmade shelter and brought right to the frontlines of the war that had raged since the beginning of time. This war was familiar to the boy not because he had been alive since it began but because he, in the span of a life that was no more than a blink in the war’s timeline, had entered into a physical and spiritual contract that had told him the story older than the earth itself.
And in that story was the knowledge of an imminent Armageddon, an inevitable Second Coming of the prehistoric clash of Sea and Land in which powers that raised mountains and filled oceans unleashed themselves in one final cataclysmic contest; irrefutable knowledge from the Ancients themselves, but it did not reveal the battle’s resolution—who would be victorious and who would be defeated, whether there would even be such a delineation or would they destroy each other and the whole world with them?—for the resolution of the conflict was not known to those who waged it. And so the knowledge, or lack thereof, was ultimately what tortured the boy, tortured him more than the unrelenting icy sea that assaulted his naked form, more than the unfeeling moon that staged mockeries of the struggle between sea and land, even more than the agonizing Legendary energy that branded him with those primordial marks and tied him to the Guardian’s duty, the Guardian’s curse. It spread disease-like in a suffocating miasma that blinded his sight and deafened his ears and numbed his touch and strangled his voice, sending him into a world of darkness and silence where he was lost even to his own crashing heartbeat and sobbing gasps.
And he would stumble further into the sea, driven to the knife-edge of madness by what he knew and did not know and could not change, nor forget, nor abandon, nor erase.
Floundering and writhing and drowning and breaking.
Until finally, finally…
He remembered.
The companions whom he had raised and who had raised him, the partners who trusted his every judgment without question or condition and expected and received as much trust in return, the friends to whom he felt a mutual devotion so deep that it was instinct for each to protect and support the others no matter the personal cost—they shared every aspect of life, every aspect of existence, including the moment that had bound him and therefore all of them as well to the destiny of Guardian of the Cave of Origin. And so they would share his pain, his destiny, his knowledge. Even as he choked and fought and began to succumb under a burden too ancient and vast to be borne by someone barely a dozen years in existence, even as the images of primeval desecration tore him away from his reality and replaced it with an apocalyptic nightmare—something came and drew him out of it. Literally drew him back and anchored him to a real, solid world still whole and unmarred by destruction. In his half-conscious state he could feel the smooth skin with its soft pulse of life beneath, guiding him to safety. Away from the nightmares and the cold, cold sea. Away from the pale, austere visage of the moon. To somewhere with just a moment’s security, a second’s comfort.
So that he would find himself still alive when the sun rose once more.
Alive, and not alone.
----
More or less a boredom post. No cookies for guessing who this fic is about. It all started with seeing the word "sempiternal" while reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Yeah. My bunnies are weird like that.
Constructive crit appreciated before I subject this thing to The Pit of Voles (i.e. Fanfiction.net).
