TIME STREAM

Another bit of Destiny fan fiction. Image courtesy of Bungie.


Mother tied my wrist to the pole.

Father covered my eye and put the knife between my teeth.

Together they pushed my coracle into the Time Stream.

They did not speak. It was the way.

In darkness I spun, slowly swirled by the ceaseless current. Blind I worked the oar, the feeling the occasional scrape of the smooth sandstone banks of the river against the wood. I am a desert creature. I fear water as much as I love it. My heartbeat thudded against my breast bone, a fist pounding for escape. I ignored it. Turning, pulling, pushing, lifting the oar as I'd been taught, I  gradually slowed and then stopped my spin.


And the current carried me towards my destiny.

I felt the light shift from red and gold to shadowed blue. The air cooled. Echoes closed in around me. And the voices began to whisper. She lies. She lies. She lies. She is death. She is doom. She hungers for ruin. Do not listen. No one can step without creating the paradox. You will end all things in all times.

I shivered under the assault of the cold words of those who had gone before or would go and who failed our goddess. I bit down on the blade in my jaws. I would not fail. I would not listen, not to those faithless lost forever in the past and the future. I would not be swayed. I would succeed.

The light shifted again to red and gold--deeper and darker than before, as if the light were old, weak from fighting its way down into the great canyon.

"Remove your eye covering," the voice rang in my mind from across the chasm of time itself. 

I took the knife from between my teeth. "I dare not. To look on you is to be lost."

"You are already lost. Now you must find thyself. I am thy anchor."

With trembling hands I lifted the cloth from my eye. I drifted in a vast round chamber without entrance or exit. The river still flowed, looping perpetually around a small slick island of stone. A towering dead tree reached up towards the shaft of orange light that trickled down through the curved ribbons of stone forming the ceiling. And seated beneath the tree, she sat. She looked like me, long limbed, and narrow faced, her single eye covered in a cloth of tattered red. The frill on her head stood out in a wide fan crowning her beauty. But where my skin was mottled brown and rough, hers was smooth and glowing, palest blue. Tentacles of light coming form her back wound their way up and around the tree's dead branches. With one hand she held an orb of pure white light which she caressed absently with the other.

As I drifted on the endless river's current, somehow she remained facing me though she did not move. The world moved beneath her.

"I saw your heart in the Passage. It is pure. But your mind... What a lovely mind."

I could not speak in response.

"Others have come and failed, but you do not doubt you will be worthy."

"None serve thee as faithfully as I."

"You are obedient, utterly and completely."

"Yes."

"Prove it."

"Anything!"

Her tentacles unwound from the tree and slowly she stood, moving towards me without step or stride.

"I see thy knife. Plunge it into thy belly."


Another might have faltered, might have questioned. But not I. I cut my hand free from the oar, then taking the hilt with both hands, I gazed into that lovely god-face. With all my strength, I rammed the knife into my guts. Pain, red, breathtaking and horrible filled me. My white blood gushed, filling the time stream's course with milky clouds. My savaged guts threatened to burst forth. My legs weakened, but I forced them to hold my dying body up. She had not told me to fall.

She smiled at me, amused. "You are dying, mortal thing."

"Yes. For you."

"Do you see me?"

"Only you."

"No. Do you see me?"

I shook my head not understanding. Again the smile and then the light in her flesh bled away. All she was drew inward, leached away by a roaring, hungering darkness. My eye widened at the transformation and the understanding. Here she was. Here was her true form, more beautiful and terrifying than anything I might have imagined.

"I see you! I see you!"

She became the vessel of glowing pale flesh again, close and smiling, caressing the orb of light.

"Good."

She thrust the light into my bloody wound.

Pain. Pain. Pain.

I screamed as I was remade. Screamed until my voice was torn away and replaced. And then there was nothing. No pain. No fear. No doubt. Only certainty in my creator.

I looked down on my new flesh. My body had become crystal and alloy. I could see and hear and sense things moments before I had not known existed. I could feel particles of time drifting through the air, sparking against my armored skin.

"You shall vex the universe," she said.

The Time Stream opened and I was rushing away from her.

"Go, my servant," my goddess shouted. "Time is yours to command. Remake thy people to perfection as I have remade you. Teach the universe fear! Go Aethon and do not fail me! Against you, the Light cannot prevail."

Liked this story? Check out my other Destiny themed fiction

THE FIRST WARLOCK 
LAST GUARDIAN STANDING
WHAT AM I
 
~SJA