“H-how can this be the beginning?”
She stared down at the dark, sickly red caking her shaking hands, a well of horror and fear and guilt and hate curdling in her chest. The world was changing around her, existence twisting and writhing into this new shape. A shape that had room for murder and despair and VENGEANCE. The stars had to find the strength to suffer their light glinting over a massacre. All of her making. These were forces she had smelted and birthed from the spring of her own heart, melded with her naive fingers. The first to love the first to LOATHE.
“What terrible things will happen in a tale that starts here?” She is not looking at the sky she petitions. She does not want to see beauty now, nor think of the powers she calls too, not after this. Dark creatures with the faces of lost friends clawing out of the shadows and gutting their own kin. The blood, the screaming, the panic. The way the rock had felt in her fingers as she’d shattered a foe’s skull. They had been content, just living, working, building, learning about this world that had borne them. How had it come to this? What had they done wrong?
She finally plunged her hands into Cuivienen’s icy waters, feverishly scrubbing the grime from her fingers and watching the red slowly taint the crystal sheen. The world was changed, forever, irrefutably. A scar on time itself.
Finally Hrava looked up, choking back her anguished sobs. The vision before her was gleaming, perfect, stainless and as beautiful beyond measure or comprehension as ever. The stars never changed. She wanted to gaze at it forever, never look away, let it’s rays of beauty blind her from the cruel world she now saw for the first time. But all she could do was weep.
“Please, help me understand, what did we do wrong? Who did this to us?”
