GhostOfHeraclitus fan club archive

toafan asked:

Can I just, like, be you when I grow up?  Or even after that, reincarnation works too.  HOW ARE YOU SO AWESOME?

How am I so awesome? Well now. Thereby hangs a tale. You see, it all started a long, long time ago, near the beginning of the universe. There was heat in those days and, oh, the light, now, there was real light in those days too: searing, screaming light, the kind of light that makes a blazing sun today look downright dim. The sort of light, in short, that shines right through you, paying no never mind to whether you intended to be transparent that day or not.  The glory days, those.

Anyway.

This patch of atoms--we just recently got around to having some atoms, see, and we were quite proud of 'em--was just swirling around and I remember that the Second Presence spoke to me--well not spoke, not with sounds, this was before sounds--it spoke to me and said, "this will be a world."

"A world--what manner of thing is that" asked I. Well it was a new word to me. We hadn't yet gotten around stars at this point, but that's the Second Presence for you. Always with the clever plans.

"Yes. First we shall take these atoms and from a great multitude of them we shall fashion furnaces across the interstices of space. And in their bellies these furnaces shall meld atoms one into another until we have ever new ones. In time the furnaces will die, and spill their rich innards across the winds of space. And this will happen again and again until the dust of these eruptions mixes into vast disks."

"And these will be worlds then? These disc-worlds, if you will?"

"No. That's but a link in the chain. After we have disks, it shall be in the nature of matter to clump together. That which clumps in the centre shall be another furnace, that which clumps around shall either perish or be stable. If it is stable it shall gather more unto itself until it is a vast sphere. Some of these will be icy. Some will be gaseous. Some barren rock. But some, now, some will be worlds with wave and sky and things that grow."

"That grow? Like us?"

"No. We are first. We shall be last. But these things will pass. They will be brief."

"That's terrible!"

"It must be so. So it is written in the Records. So has the First Presence spoken. There is no recourse."

"Still..."

"Still. Those who grow and who speak and who shall live on the world that shall come from these atoms, still young and new, they will require help. Guidance. They'll need... awesome."

"Then it is settled. I will abide here for a while yet, and then as aeons flit by I shall shepherd this patch of atoms until it is a world, until it has wave and sky and things that grow and until those things tell tales and then I shall join them and become as them and bring them the gift of awesome so that they may know of it, and in time join us, beyond the rim."

And so it was. And so, I am here.

Let the awesome commence.