A short story by Harleen. B
The blackness smothered her. it snuffed out the fire in her veins, as surely as if the flames had been doused.
Sometimes, she could hear the flames. It was roaring, like the endless rushing of water over stone. It filled the gaps between her memories.
A sliver of a mortal shell in the heart of the universe, little more than a slab of rock amid rapids and oceans. That was where she put herself. Stored herself. And became a forgotten goddess.
When existence itself called out to her, humming in the ancient tongue, she must answer. When she weaved the Pattern of the True Source–ashes on the wind, fire in the air–there were many possible draws, but only one outcome.
And sacrifice had brought her to this.
The cards had been drawn, and she had been reborn.
As the girl who would be made queen. A girl who fought with all her strength to not be released in the world, though of course she was–true nature cannot be denied.
She was born as a girl with the ways of reality in her spirit and power in her heart and chaos in her mind.
For her world. For all worlds.
When existence itself called out to her, she must answer. Whatever the cost.
The darkness rippled, billowed out, muttered in slurred tongues as it dissipated against the cosmic star-bright. Iridescent patterns of the intergalactic constructs–raw subatomic particles, flashes of plasma and electromagnetic radiation–trailed fire and heat through the superstrings of hyperspace. Crackling with heat and catching brilliant light, the ta’lien erupted into a blast that illuminated through reality, igniting the beginning from the end, rebirth from destruction. Everything.
Grandmaster flared bright, a star of flesh and deviation. She closed her eyes, willingly wiped her memories away, so she became an ordinary yet extraordinary deviant. Harjit Kaur, her deviant avatar. Her consciousness expanded at the speed of light, racing from one side of reality to another. A million worlds, a billion stars, and it was only until the last proton of the universe decayed that she realized that she was meant to be pure ecstasy, pure joy, and live forever.
It was both the next moment and an endless number of eternities later that she became bored. She brought reality back into existence. Time, which stood still for so long, began once more. Harleen closed her eyes and opened them after a trillion eons, where she was pulled from cold darkness into warm light.
…
If time is a circle, then everything happens at once. Now. Then. Forever. Grandmaster would forget, but she would remember again.
They were blurring. The lies and truths and the memories. Sleep and the blackness. The days bound in a mortal shell all blurred together, like ink in water. So she told herself the story. The darkness and the flame within her whispered it too, and she sang it back to them. The queen of the universe, locked within that body, in the depths of the mind, recited the story, over and over again, and let them unleash an eternity of pain upon her body. The story that she told the man she loved so long ago.
Once upon a time, in a land long since burned by flames, there lived a young princess who loved her kingdom…very, very much…
Harleen B will also be posting this story on Royal Road.
