FINAL CORE - Chapter 142 (Patreon)

The world transforms before our very eyes as the seasons pass in a never-ending cycle of change. The air grows colder, the leaves turn gold and fall to the ground, and the earth is blanketed in white. Spring arrives, and the world awakens once again, reborn in a wash of green and the bloom of flowers.

Summer arrives in a blaze of heat, and the sun beats down upon the land, drying up the earth and turning the grass into golden strands. The world is alive with the buzzing of insects, the rustle of leaves, and the chirping of birds. The scent of flowers fills the air, and the world is vibrant and pulsing with life.

As autumn draws near, the world begins to change once more. The air grows cooler, and the leaves turn a fiery orange, then deep shades of red and purple, before finally falling to the ground in a cascade of color. The earth is carpeted in a tapestry of leaves, and the world is a wonderland of color and sound.

Winter arrives with a blast of icy wind and snow, turning the world into a frozen wasteland. The air is crisp and clean, and the world is a vision of white, with snowdrifts piled high and icicles hanging from every branch. The world is quiet and still, as if waiting for the first sign of spring.

And so the seasons pass, each one more beautiful than the last, each one a reminder of the endless cycle of life and death, of birth and rebirth. The world is a living, breathing entity, forever changing and forever renewing itself. And as the seasons come and go, the world remains a thing of wonder and beauty, a testament to the power and glory of nature.

~ A druid’s observations during a morning walk

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Isaiah

“It’s hard,” explains the man, as the two of them walk through what looks like a garden of sorts. It’s well kept in the sense that everything is orderly, but not so much as if guided by a gardener’s hand. Rather, everything is orderly in the sense that it is growing exactly where it should be growing, as it should be growing — flush and full of life. “When you have so many great ideas, isn’t it?”

“You just had to turn me back into a bird,” says Isaiah. “That’s all that I wanted,” argues the entity, stopping where it stands in the middle of the garden.

The god stops too, turning back to look at Isaiah. “That’s all you wanted at first,” he corrects, placing a hand on Isaiah’s shoulder that the entity quickly swipes away in anger. But the god doesn’t seem offended. “Life changes when we live it, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t pretend that this was some intentional plan of yours,” remarks Isaiah. “All of this was because of a mistake you made!” it argues, growing angry at the man, who simply does not seem to become angry, offended, or even attacked by any insinuation that it hopes to make.

Instead, he just smiles with pursed lips and nods once. “It wasn’t. We, I, messed up,” explains the god. He nods his head, gesturing for Isaiah to follow, as they move through the garden. “But then, from that mistake, I did my best to make something new,” he explains. “Isn’t that familiar?” he asks, looking back over his shoulder at Isaiah. “That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it?” The man stops next to a construction in the middle of the garden, made of a ring of neatly stacked stones that he rests his hands on. “When you broke the witch’s house, when you broke the land, when you made a religion, haven’t you just been winging it from one mistake to the other?”

Isaiah points at itself. “I was doing my best to look out for the people I cared about!” it argues. “Sometimes that means making stuff up on the fly.”

“— And sometimes, that stuff we make up goes wrong, doesn’t it?” asks the god.

“Stop preaching to me!” barks Isaiah. “You’re nothing. You ignored me for a year while I tried to reach you!” it accuses. “You can’t just stand here now and pretend that you’re interested in me!” Isaiah narrows its eyes.

“I never stopped being interested in you,” says the god, kneeling down and looking at Isaiah. “When you broke the island free from the land below, your dungeon was unreachable for quite some time,” he explains. Isaiah thinks about it for a while. It’s true. “It should have failed and been destroyed then and there, by the laws of the universe,” says the man, shaking his head. “But I stuck my neck out for you,” he says.

— Something makes a strange sound to their side, like fabric dropping from the sky, and the two of them turn to look as someone appears from nowhere, a man. A humming fills the air as the robed man with a large hat goes about his business, carrying beneath his arm an object that Isaiah recognizes as the magical sun-dial, that Rorate had bargained with Witch Perchta for so long ago.

It had thought that Red took it.

The Humming Man stops where he stands, freezing for a moment before turning to look at them.

“Good work,” says the god, Isaiah’s god, being the entity that had hired this man to perform a service.

The humming man nods his head, tips his hat, and then walks on, his hum carrying off like the buzzing of a bee.

“Just because I was not there myself, does not mean that I was not there for you,” explains the god, rising back to his feet and then stepping over to the well. “I did everything I could to take you on this journey and to teach you what I could teach you.”

“’Teach’…?” asks Isaiah, incredulously, staring at the mostly indifferent being. It turns its head to look around the perfect garden — true paradise — before looking back at the man who stands by the stone ring. “There was so much death and horror,” it explains. “How can you call this teaching?!” asks Isaiah, swiping a hand through the air, forgetting that it has no talons, nor wings. “If all this was to teach me a lesson, then you didn’t need to involve everyone else! The world!”

“Oh, I did,” replies the god, nodding his head toward the circle that Isaiah now turns to look at too. It’s a well. The entity walks toward it, looking down at the contents. Water.

But it isn’t just water to drink. It is of a spiritual nature. Inside of it swim thousands and thousands and thousands of lights, with just as many more drifting beyond them.

— Souls, in an endless reservoir of metaphysical life.

“Just like you make life up as you go along to best fit what you need to do, I make life up to best fit what I need to do,” explains the god. He shakes his head. “But I’m not the only one. There are others, and all of them too, make up life as they go along,” explains the man, reaching into the water and swirling it around with his finger, watching as many lights drift up toward his touch and the ripple and then fade away again as he pulls his digit free. “Because I messed up and let you become a bird, you messed up and made your mess, which in turn made a lot of other gods mess up and make messes of their own.” He sighs. “One event connects to another event and before we know it, the plans of yesterday changed entirely.”

Isaiah watches the water, staring at the many lights. “Are they all there?” it asks, referring to its family of, well… any life.

“There, and here, and everywhere,” replies the god. “Time is… a funny thing,” he explains. “It’s not my area. I have people for that,” he says.

“Can you bring them back?!” asks Isaiah, turning to him. “Please!”

“No,” replies the god. “They’re dead. Those lives are over,” he says, placing a hand on Isaiah’s, which has grabbed his robe. “But you should know that death isn’t the end, Isaiah.”

Isaiah looks at him. “It is if I don’t recognize them anymore!” yells the entity. “What good is rebirth if I don’t remember the people I cared about?!”

He smiles. “Because you get to meet them all over again next time,” he replies, looking back at the water. “Souls have a way of… reconnecting with one another.” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter where we put them or what circumstances we give anyone.” He puts two hands in the water, pushing apart two souls that are orbiting each other and pushing them to separate walls of the well. They drift for a moment and then begin slowly moving toward one another, even at such a distance where they could have no hope of even knowing where the other is — as if a current were moving them. “They have a way of finding themselves.”

“This isn’t enough,” says Isaiah. “The world. There’s so much horror down there you could stop!”

The god pulls his hands out of the water, shaking his fingers off, and looks back at Isaiah. “Is there?” he asks. “Haven’t you learned yet that every time a being with true power intervenes, it causes more problems than it helps?”

Isaiah stops, this having been exactly the lesson it had learned, actually with so many of its own mistakes in this life.

“…I just wanted it to be better,” explains Isaiah.

“We all do,” remarks the god, clapping it on the shoulder. “Let’s talk about what happens now.”