Riding on the wind, dancing in the mountains…
Ananke wasn’t sure if the feeling of concerned paranoia was her own or the Time God in her head, but it was warning that although Lakshmi was friendly there was still something amiss. It could just be a lingering sense of dissonance due to ‘nake being in the strange position of being courted by a Pantheon that wanted Time to die while carrying the Father of Tine inside her head, and being aware that at least a small part of Chronos wished to die as well even as they both fought to keep Time and life going. Although Chronos had panicked over the concept of truly dying, now there was the faintest sensation that he would be relieved by it too.
I don’t want to die, I want to be free. Chronos was all too aware of Ananke’s silent musings, their sudden and intense intermingling saw to that.
Is there a difference between the two though? When I fought to live after the fall, I fought to save two lives; fought to live for the sake of my child. If I’d known at the time that I would live but Aeon never would… I’m not sure the Ananke I was then would have fought at all. Her admission came with the same lack of pride or shame she ever exposed, and yet Chronos could tell it wasn’t for lack of emotion. Instead Ananke was just being honest.
Ahead of the mortal woman and godly passenger, Herald walked with the Goddess Lakshmi and even though they were speaking, neither Ananke nor Chronos could hear them. It wasn’t due to a lack of awareness but instead was simply a side effect of another vision crashing into Ananke and Chronos’ combined awareness. Now that they were merged fully, it was a wholly new experience. Chronos was always used to being a participant in these visions because as the God of Time he could move around in the realities, doing what was required to prevent some and germinate others. Ananke had always been restricted to the role of a observer for the visions, a hostage held in their grips to simply witness what was, is, or should never be. As a mortal her visions had been guide posts and manipulations to prepare her for her role of host to Time, to be the bearer of Chronos on the journey they now shared but even with that understanding now, Ananke almost feared these visions. For Chronos, feeling Ananke’s fear made him feel powerful, shameful and protective as he knew without warning that now with them combined, these visions wouldn’t be solely to watch, but a way for them to act upon the world. Not a task that should be attempted from a mortal seat, ensconced inside a mortal mind and yet that was the reality they now faced.
They were watching a field full of demons, identical and yet each terrible in and of itself. The stench of blood filled the air, and a foulness that had more to do with spirit than scent clung to them. The demon clones seemed to spring from the very ground at alarmingly rapid, exponentially accelerating rates and Chronos felt alarmed concern because they were coming ever closer to where he and Ananke stood vigil. Each drop of blood that flew and hit the ground from these creatures just seemed to bring forth more of them, and even though there were eight battling Goddesses led by a ninth in the center of the teeming mass, it looked to be a doomed venture. For all the dozens that they injured and slew, hundreds more were birthed from the very ground. And despite the terrible violence that Chronos and Ananke were witness to, they felt an unmistakable pull forwards, towards those Goddesses in the center. What the vision wished for them to witness was contained in the middle of the battle and not on the safer outskirts.
Ananke slipped her hand into Chronos’ immaterial one, the other gripping tight a stone with Aeon written on it. Those stones of memory had once served as a makeshift weapon to help defend them before and it was all that was available to them now. With Time and weapon in hand, Ananke followed the sensation through the midst of the melee.
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.