an ignoble end | Glowfic Constellation

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Apr 28, 2024 8:30 PM

a goddess gets smuggled into an afterlife that could really use the help

Tainel doesn't remember how he died, except for that it was the kind of garbage death that would get his goddess sniping frostily at him for weeks. Tisvetaia, goddess of preservation, whose touch can immortalize mortals themselves, does not like losing things she likes. Especially people. Particularly when one of those people might, for example, be the one and only acolyte she chose to trust with her life and her power, in a very literal sense. Forever, because again, goddess of preservation. Tainel doesn't personally do a ton of the preservation poking, it's kind of inefficient, but he definitely can. In theory, any acolytes she chooses would be with her forever, until death of something other than old age, or if they betrayed and murdered her to ascend to godhood themselves. Kind of makes that sort of thing a big deal. This does starkly prove the difference between comforting theory and the hard and cold dash of messy reality, doesn't it.

Honestly, he doesn't mind much on his own account, he's of the opinion that this would have happened eventually. But he does mourn what it'll do to his goddess, who will be furious and inconsolable and might need to erupt a bit of her domain in a blaze of outraged molten grief, now that he thinks about it. Sorry, Tisvet. He was trying to make it forever, just. The world got in the way. That happens sometimes, but it sucks every time. It's what he's thinking of the most, as he navigates the dream-like state of journeying to what he thinks is his afterlife, that she'll be upset. He knows she'll miss him. He'll miss her, too. For all that he calls her his goddess, she's often more like a best friend, or maybe a sister, prodding him for his opinion and offering wry commentary on things and sighing dramatically but supporting him in whatever he does. He's had her with him for decades, now, and most of his life. Losing her will be a bit like losing a bit of himself.

If he could bring a bit of her with him to... wherever it is that he's going... then that'd be pretty nice.

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red

There's a light that he feels inexorably drawn towards, an urgent sense that he doesn't belong wherever he is but does belong wherever that light's taking him, just out of sight. The light leads him places he's been, places that were ever important to him. Places he's left a piece of himself, or places he carries a piece of in his own heart. Tisvetaia's volcano, for sure. The journey indeed has the quality of dreams, of it never being clear who he is and where he is, of it being made of feelings and images rather than time and space. It's never clear if he's seeing memories, or visions, or entirely made-up scenes his dying mind is supplying him with. The plot unfolds and slips away, not solid enough to be retained but not so ephemeral that he loses all of it.

But the light eventually starts bringing him new places, maybe made-up ones, maybe real ones, but regardless places he hasn't seen before. A place of fire, a place of ice, a place of earth, a place of air, a place of light, a place of darkness, a place of fear, a place of joy. People he's never known, creatures he's never seen, giants and fairies and stranger things still. And eventually...

...eventually...

...there's a tree. He knows it's a tree, even though it is so big he cannot fathom its roots or its canopy. The circumference of its trunk is so wide it looks flat, each of its leaves are so vast they can hold whole worlds and not bend with the weight. He sees that his world, the place he's from, was on one such leaf, that everything he's ever seen was but a sliver of that world, of that leaf. And the light leads him down, down the stem and down the branch, down the trunk and down the tree. There are other trees in and on this tree, entire forests growing like moss on its surface, and the light leads him through them, down down down. And eventually...

...eventually...

...dreams don't have time, and this journey is a dream, but eventually...

...fear. Despair. Hatred. Solitude. Misery. Other lights, so many other lights, all of them radiating horror and loss, and his light leads him past all of them and out of his dream, back to himself, awake. His vision starts refocusing, his sense of self reasserts itself, and the world starts making sense again.

And eventually, finally, he is whole.

The world isn't, though. Not quite. He's in a town, with recognisable buildings, houses, streets, but... it's wrong. He can see, but there's no sun, and no stars, and no moon, the sky in perpetual twilight. The ground is unstable, the air feels unstable, even though he is definitely in a place it doesn't really look like the place itself wants to be there.