The Death of Time

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Up close the demons were even more identical than they had been at a distance. The skin was a horrid, boiled red, gouged and bleeding steaming gore or smooth and terrible for its unmarred perfection. Their faces were a disorienting overlay of human visage married to horrific nightmare given flesh. Tusks welded to unhinged jaws, slathering tongues drooled venom down hairy chin and insanity glimmered in the darkly glowing eyes. Ananke could not properly count the limbs that crested across chest and bound around hips as they were always moving, a disjointed but deceptively quick frenzy of movement, yet somehow not a single demon ever lay a hand, claw or weapon against Ananke’s flesh. Chronos followed along behind his mortal in silence, awed and astonished by the simply path left open to her, as he knew that if it were him alone he’d have been barred passage. This woman truly was Inevitability and nothing stood in her way, not even nightmares given flesh.

 

The first Goddess that they came across did not see them any more clearly than the demons had. She was the yellow colour of the daffodil and had four heads that saw all foes around her and yet not them passing by her and the swan at her feet. The second Goddess was heavily bejewelled, each of her six arms weighted down with bangles and even her odd eagle-man mount was bejewelled. The third Goddess was careering around the demons on a bull, her white as snow skin painted with blood and her three eyes still remained blind to Ananke and Chronos. It was clear by now that these Goddesses were mighty, but not the reason this vision was occurring. The fourth Goddess stormed around the field on the back of an elephant, her dark skinned outlined in flashing lightning while the fifth Goddess chased the demons with a bloodied peacock at her side, each of her twelve arms wielding an axe, spear or bow. The sixth Goddess had the head of a boar and yet came the closest to seeing them thus far, as she stopped close by to them and peering in their direction before charging on past. The seventh Goddess was nearly at the center of the mass of murder, her black skin showing only the faintest splatters of blood as she stood on the corpses of demons, her jackal watching her back and the eighth Goddess shook the ground as her lion’s body thundered about. They were all mighty and laying waste to any and all demons in reach, but their actions simply drew forward more demons, increasing their foes even as they laid them down.

 

The lead Goddess simply watched them, frowning. Chronos wanted to snarl at that expression, seeing disappointment and judgement in her gaze, and yet Ananke simply accepted that this Goddess had seen them and summoned them here to witness this moment. What purpose this vision offered was not clear yet, as though they could move about in it; neither demon nor Goddess had yet been able to affect them or be affected by them. The Great Goddess in front of them broke her gaze from the two witnesses to peer over the field and Chronos knew that she was aware that the tide was turned against her, these demons were too many and to multiple, and yet she refused to give ground to them. Her frown grew deeper and impossibly something started to sprout from it. At first it appeared to be almost a boil, maybe an auxiliary eye appearing but the size grew past all practical considerations until a massive tumor pressed from the Great Goddess’ face.

 

“It’s not a tumor or a boil. It’s a womb.” Ananke’s mind voice was soft but it stilled almost all movement except that of the growing womb itself. Suddenly demon and Goddess alike could see them and were aware of them, and Chronos knew that now, now they could be hurt. Before his greatest fear could materialize in the form of watching Ananke be torn asunder though, his human simply let fly the harmless stone in her hand.

 

Except that it wasn’t so harmless here in the vision. As before when she had wielded memory stone against Goddess, it impacted and left a mark; this time her pebble split open the skin of the wound and a terrible Goddess spilled forth from its embrace. This newest warrior was blackest of colours, so dark it was almost impossible to see her as more than an absence of light. Around her neck was a garland of heads and her only clothes was a skirt of severed arms wrapping around her hips. Her red eyes flamed with blood lust and the roar she let loose deafened even the God of Time. The other Goddesses had been attacking foe with blade and bow, axe and spear, tooth and claw, but this final Goddess stretched her jaws wide, wider than reality could allow and swallowed the demons into her eternally hungry gut. No matter how many fell to her teeth and tongue, the sunken belly never grew and the blood lust in her eyes was never appeased.

When the vision broke and Ananke returned to her body, Chronos was cold with shock. He had never wished to witness the greater forces of creation, happy to simply exist as he had as guardian to Time for eternity. And yet he knew what they had witnessed, though his understanding of this Pantheon was weak, had been primal and necessary. They had been shown the birth of Kali from Devi Durga, had participated in that birth, for a reason.

Herald held onto Ananke’s shoulders carefully, as if she were a spider web about to vanish into strands in the wind. Consider that was exactly how she felt, it was a good thing for his caution as even this light tough left the ghosts of his history cavorting around behind him. Lakshmi was nowhere to be seen and they were on the sides of a mountain, overlooking the very same plain that Ananke and Chronos has just witnessed the demonic bloodbath on.

I am so tired. The sentiment floating through their shared consciousness but neither Ananke nor Chronos could tell whom it had originated from.

“Then rest. Let us all rest. Let this be the end and we all go to the great sleep, to be reborn in the next cycle. Simply let this Time die Kalki.” The voice that begged to them was sweetly seductive even if the speaker was not.  Mahakali stood before them in all of her terrible glory, the Hindu Goddess of Time and Death an embodiment of the primal force of the universe. Her image should burn the sanity out of Ananke, and Chronos could feel her mind quiver but with him as much a part of her as she was of him now, they held under the onslaught of that unreality. To Ananke’s human eyes, Mahakali was either a blue so dark she was black, or a black so rich she had blue tint. Her shoulders were massive with four distinct arms visible, but there was a spectre image of ten arms that Chronos couldn’t concentrate on. In the four hands that they could see, she held a sword and a trident, and a bowl collecting blood from a severed head. There were ten heads that spoke as one that could be clearly seen, and that one head had dishevelled hair, maddened red eyes and a tongue that spilled out; and like with the arms there was the sense of ten legs, though not all could be seen. What was clear was that she stood with a foot upon the chest of a God that wasn’t dead. Chronos feared what the Goddess had begged Ananke to do, and wondered if it would soon be his own body laid at Mahakali’s feet.