He saw the world before them, when it was nothing - nothing apart from ash and cinder and wasteland, when the air stank like sulphur and iron and it scored his throat raw with every jagged-metal breath. And he saw the world change before them, when it became something - when the first hazel (one that became the last) grew aslant a river that crashed against a hungry ocean with open, waiting jaws and teeth made of stone - when the air became cool and sweet like the river water, before the magic muddied it, and the festering wounds in his throat saw their end. He watched its creation, their creation. He became their Bible, though few of them knew it and even fewer would have believed it.
He touched the sun.
He touched the stars.
And the rest of them were nothing.
He watched the lives of those he met like movies. He saw their births and deaths, counted them like loose change (casually and without delicacy - save for one). They didn’t matter to him, because they lived and died in the amount of time he took between breaths, if he wanted. There were millions more just like them, if he wanted. He saw them coming before they’d made the decision to turn.
They were numbers, not names, and so like the spoiled child he had grown to be, he used them. He showed them wonders and took them away. He showed them what life could be for them if everything was different. He gave them unattainable dreams, and unavoidable nightmares.
He showed them the worlds he had made.
They saw it all, because he let them.
Because he had seen it first.
And It was the only thing he did not see coming.
He did not see the wrath. He did not see It, the mountain, built on the bones of kingdoms destroyed, when the earth ripped itself open to show the gods its beating heart. He did not see the magic spill from his slit veins and pool like blood on a river’s shore - but he felt it. He felt it all. His body shook and rocked like the earth he left in lieu of time and space and wants. And then he was home. The stars melted around him, the beaches and the fog disintegrated, and he became devastatingly talentless. He saw his body quake with frustration, all standing veins and quivering sinew, because he had become what he had always thought inferior. He had become just like them - earthbound and mortal.
And he saw the wrath then.
Because he had seen her cheek hit stone eons ago, but had always held time fast beneath the crook of his arms. He had lifetimes to fix it (to fix her). He had forever. He had always. And he had tried to stop it, feebly, knowing eternity was at his whim and taking subtle pleasures from watching it happen on repeat the way an angry teenager might after being scolded knowing with confidence that it would never come to fruition. He had tried, feebly, a thousand times or more to stop her cheek from breaking on that stone, but in every facet of every layer of every universe it did.
But he had finally figured it out.
And he saw the wrath then.
Because he was mining the stars when it happened; combing the beaches of foreign planets - searching the oceans and chasing the fog. Because he knows what the others cannot know (what they will never know); this is not the end of her. And eternity had just run dry.
ELEKTRUM
how time twines around your neck,