It was dark on the day of my birth. Dark with small specks of light bursting through every now and then. I was barely a child, a few minutes old, and already I was tossed into a world with nobody in it. I was alone the first hour of my life.The next, I found my mother, or at least the creature that I counted as such. She was a shapeshifter, a dragon most of the time.
The only way I knew her was by her voice and by her magic, creating stars in the universe, and though she never told me her name, I knew that she wanted to be my mother. And so I called her such. Perhaps she was unable to be near me as much as I had hoped, but she was the only other person around in the dark abyss.
The only thing she created before me was time. And I was glad of that.
I would constantly watch my mum work, bunching her magic up in ever more concentrated lumps until it became a star and then moving on to another pile, as if in bales of hay. I would occasionally decide that I would try to make a star and instead make a comet, a shooting star because I didn’t have enough magic.
Once in a while I would make a planet.
It was lonely back then. There was no life, nothing except for the darkness and my mother who flitted around the stars like a clucking hen, keeping them in order and properly dressed. But occasionally a star would age and become a white dwarf, and that was hardest for me to watch because for a single second, the star was something living, something truly fascinating that I could talk to and listen to and understand. Other than my mother.
After a few billion years I created my own star. As soon as I did, one of it’s beams shot out toward me, entrapping itself with me, spinning endlessly around me as if in search for something. I retrieved the glass jar I was born with and caught it inside.
“I’m glad to see you found the soul-jar useful, Seraphina.”
“Mum? What is a soul-jar?”
She laughs, her voice a sparkling beauty, and answers my curious question. “It is who you are. It is you. You,” she says, plucking the jar from my comparatively tiny hands, “are a star. Crazy, strange, wonderful and inspiring. You make something from nothing. It is you.” She smiles again. “Or you would have chosen wrong.”
I smiled at her, clutching my soul-jar between my still-chubby hands, “I don’t think I did.”
Years passed by, and over time, my mother grew ever more distant from me, finally leaving me on my own to explore as I please. She stayed at the fringes of the universe, ever expanding and growing out.
I travelled from planet to planet, and, on one of my visits, couldn’t resist the temptation to try and make something more complex than stone and gas.I touched the surface of one of those planets and made a speck of life, a living creature that lived off of the gas that I had made and the earth that I placed it on.
I smiled, and then left for other planets, occasionally leaving a speck behind. I returned to the original planet at one point, laughing at the world and what was going on, my blank white star-like eyes glowing like the star-beam caught in my soul-jar. I neared the planet and found that it was covered in creatures, big and small.
They also had soul-jars, but they weren’t on strings like necklaces. They were within them, providing them with the instinct to fight, eat, feed, protect and nurture. I could see the carnivores and the herbivores and all in between. That, that was such a long time ago.
A few billion years later and I found that there were some more intelligent creatures on the surface. I decided to join them, to see what was going on. That was when I found that my white eyes lead only to trouble in the normal society. Thus, I found a red cloak, like a star and yellow patterns dancing across it’s surface.
I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I do remember one thing. On one planet, I heard that there were people who were trying to insult my work, wishing to destroy the planet that I had created, making it into a black hole in a place where it shouldn’t be. They kept going on plans to destroy the solar system if it didn’t bow down to their rule.
And they had everything to do it. They could do it if they wanted, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I flared, angry that these impudent creatures would even think to destroy what wasn’t theirs!
I had lost it, burning up, commanding the star nearby, their sun, to flare fiercer and their moon to fly away, no longer pulling at the ground. I tugged on the strings of life and prevented children from being born, being so mad at a few of these creatures. My only defense was that this solar system housed my very first planet and was too close to my first star.
I couldn’t let anything happen to the people.
After I was done with my work, I looked around. I saw pain and panic, fear and death. I cried. I could have prevented this. But I didn’t I had to make these people suffer only because a few people wanted to do something selfish. I was just as selfish as them, just as bad. I couldn’t let myself go anywhere for a long time. By the time my tears dried and I was ready to face the world again, the planet became a barren desert, filled with salt.
I waved goodbye to the star and took off to another planet. As I flew, I vowed that I would never lose myself again. I couldn’t.
I landed on a planet of blue and green, I didn’t know the name until much later. By then, I had learned shape-shifting, just like my mother. I had joined the people I had technically created into the most mundane routine things. But I had decided that more creatures would protect the places I made. I used sparks of light and the sky to form into demigods, made to protect the planets and the stars when I could not.
I now write stories about the two creatures that I had not created, for they are interesting in my point of view, the man of the stars, which was my mothers attempt at life, and the man from the void, the first demigod, Ridge’s, attempt at creating a human from what seemed like a monster.
Life was good. My soul-jar is now forever intertwined with my thoughts, the happiness, the craziness and occasional breakage of laws because I know my mum wouldn’t mind and nobody else can really do anything.
But this story doesn’t end there.
Oh, not at all.
It carries on past the blink of infinity.
And even further than that.
