Elysian Etude

[Wanderlost]

Fickle are the gods and goddesses of the various dimensions of The Creator's craft. Though may it be known that The Creator is not The Only Creator, for His faces are as many and as separate as there are tellers of stories, but while such was often subject to the wonderings of a divine such as we shall see here, they belong to another story. Ever still, Elurilia was once a mortal. She had laughed, sang, and cried, and had often been under the influence of a substance called Clairvoidance. It was a powder that dissolved on the tongue and allowed her to see then as she did now. Beyond typical comprehension, into other worlds and minds and existences, and sometimes accurately into the future. Though, likely there was less truth to such claims in mortality as there was in immortality.

The pleasure of clairvoyance, strangely, was not in the benefit of knowledge beyond typical knowledge. Nor did Elurilia delight in seeing what others, even gods and goddesses like her could not see. She shared what insights she might have shared when it came time to do so, but the true magic of it was in a state of mind where she did not know. She was smart. She understood the world around her. None of it surprised her. But beyond that world, there was so much she could hardly grasp, and she could swim in that void and let it drag her with its disembodied arms hooked in her elbows and her feet dragging in the grass.

She was the goddess of Perception and Philosophy, and she was addicted to a lack of control, feeling choked and claustrophobic when everything she could ever want was in her grasp.

For some time, she had been in the company of one Omule, the Chosen One, a quasi-immortal who dabbled in many domains beyond their mortal allowance. This Omule had found play in controlling the gods, and all the strange materials that they had created. It was his vile concoction, and his words sickly still that had led her through some process of supposed rehabilitation. Powder of DeathStone, caps of Aratoskr's favorite mushrooms, sprigs of the Life Tree, and some of the Hallowed Earth of Creation had made a mixture potent enough to make her forget her aversion to lucidity. The Seer did not see for some time, with her eyes the zenith of the latest eclipse, and all the feelings she had known a singular shade of grey. She took on a new title then. Some few who resent her still call her the Sightless Eye.

It was later, and recently no less, that she relapsed at the hands of a drug not unlike the Clairvoidance she had once known, given to her through a bit of fortunate trickery. Lichtennung was the Convoluted god. His domains were as complex as anything else associated with him, and mostly dealt in the most pedantic of margins and grey areas left out of the domains of other deities. His worshipers and prophets had left behind nearly indecipherable legends of him and his, which were best understood as an example of the importance of clarity. Perhaps then, it wasn't a coincidence that Elurilia was married to Silun, whose domains were Truth and Understanding. Lichtennung resented Silun, and found amusement toying with Omule, who had found little power over the Convoluted god. All of that brought a certain level of irony into play, as it was clear why he had chosen to lead Elurilia back to her typical state of extreme existentialism, which Silun was known to have hated, especially after learning of her capacity as a partner and not a somewhat distant spouse ever challenging his ability to understand. Their relationship was a complicated one, understood best only by the aforementioned gods and goddesses. Nevertheless, in the vein of the light shone on his intentions, we explore that Lichtennung bore a double impetus to defy the subjects of his ire and crafted a drug and a plan to administer it, the latter of which wove together such a web of stories and lies that it took years to actualize, and again, it was only recently that Elurilia came to ingest it and find herself in this state.

This state where she fell from the sky into the sky and separated from the complexities of body and even mind. Lichtennung described her as beautiful in that moment, but not beautiful in any way a thing is typically beautiful--being that she was there before, and wasn't after; he called her beauty an impressive event that brought absolute absolution to his many years of work, which would have otherwise been fleeting and uncertain.

Defining perception across time, space, and the many existences is dubious at best. She saw, smelled, heard, learned, and already knew things she might have never known, though that doesn't tell us much, but among those many things was a little place called The Edian Realms, and one god looked back at her.

Siwal's complicated history laid out behind him like a nearly endless scroll, stretching from his divine domicile to its stalk. This stalk was the tree in the Lone Plane, one of the Edian Realm's many dead realms, where not even he had set foot since the Death of the Oververse. The Oververse being an incident of the past, and even vast as she the Seer could see, it was not a thing she could ever truly look at in any informative way.

Elurilia did not know Siwal, but he knew of her. Granted, she was learning, but he was a curious wanderer, and had little to do residing over the worlds he had designed to mostly run themselves. This made him knowledgeable of many of the other dimensions and all that went on within them.

All of his domain laid about her, and she took them in. Beauty, if mostly in sadness. So much loss and pain and suffering. Everything seemed to grasp to hope and desperation, screaming to be heard as they lived and died. Trapped in a lonely existence just as he was, albeit fleeting next to one of the oldest gods in The Creator's existence, short of He Himself.

The primary plane of the Edian Realms was a mess of mortal folly. One secluded desert island, which was scarred by their mistakes bore a little city where angels of a sort were born, and everything else arond belonged to the Countless Kingdoms.

And that was all she saw of that place. From there, she was swept into a reeling kaleidoscopic myriad that led her to an understanding that began her time as the Suffering Seer, for that crazy drug trip gifted to her by the Convoluted god let her see, for the only instant that mattered, the strands of Time and Existence. She saw how everything ever tied together, and was never again able to bask in blissful un-understanding.

So was the tragedy, lengthy and meandering as she would have once loved, of our beloved goddess.