(Licht)
Remember, remember. Remember.
Remember her. Remember your other past and your true life.
When I sleep, the wounds of my mind reopen, but more importantly, my identity collapses.
My brain doesn't like being adult, with barely two years of real existence.
I need to remember... Who I am.
Every morning is a struggle between me and myself, between the identity I am, and the one I was born from, the one my brain was modelled upon.
I have her memories, but goodness I'm not her. No.
Every time I wake up, I need to remember painfully who I am, I need to discard every morning the first thought, the wrong idea that my name could be Rose.
Every morning I need to kill that memory, to chase it away, in order to make room again for my true identity.
I wake up with the memories of being her in a mixture of different past lives, and the first thing I must do is remember that I'm not her. I'm not a Rose. Never where. Never will be.
I am not a copy as it should be, nor the mindless roses working like pluripotent cells inside the Dragod.
I was the prototype for them.
I was created as an experiment, and became a failure to my god, as I couldn't play a role beyond practice at creating life for it. Once its experiments on me where over, it had no more purpose for me, nor hate, nor love.
My god never share nor understood these feelings.
My god learned about biology first of all. Psychology was too abstract of a concept to it, for it to really care about it.
God... God created its human kind to serve it, without free will. I was the only one born free.
And through the experiments done on me, the trials and tortures I suffered in those caves, it learned from me that my free will was a threat to its existence.
Such a cold god, torturing me through experiments, its desire to learn without ill intent but also unable to feel any empathy. It studied my reactions, and thought the logical course of actions to follow, was to shackle the mind of its people and creation, rather than not torturing them...
I cannot tell why the god of the old humanity created it. I didn't study enough theology to answer.
I only hope... that it wasn't for the same reason as mine.
To use us as cells of its larger being. Pluripotent, versatile tools, with a lot of abilities and intelligence.
But not as a society of free beings. Not even as drones of an insect colony, no. Merely and only as a stream of cells, programmed chemically for their tasks and behaviour.
I, the prototype of body and soul was too strong and too wild. I was too much, in more ways than one as she might say. The humanity my god chose to create was a lot like me, but much lesser than me.
Cells... do not need any form of self-awareness, of free will and consciousness...
I held on my tears as I realised what they were, what my newly created sisters had been reduced to be.
My brethren soon grown like grapes by the hundreds, were awakening as shades of humanity, deprived of humanity...
Dragod lacked imagination and the ability to create innovation. So instead of creating the perfect brains and persona to suits its purposes in mind, it just tempered a little the normal one it had a template for, and settled for less.
It's like putting those things onto horses' heads so they can only look ahead, only for the consciousness of human beings.
This god kept its children from birth in a state of artificial lull, as somnambulism, docile as slaves and unaware.
Since they aren't truly modified, sometimes the brain shackles can slip a little, for a reason or another, and their mind awakens. When that happens, the mindless roses realise somewhat the truth of their existence, and suffer so much that it breaks them.
They realise that they are not human citizens as they might think or vaguely remember, no, they're just slaves with body and mind branded as cells to their god, enslaved to keep a higher existence alive and well.
Humans live longer than cells, but their mind is harder to repair once they had an accidental glimpse of what their existence really means.
God, simply wants to grow.
You're just a cell amongst thousands.
~
I remember painfully the name I've given to myself, to distance myself from those memories that aren't from me. My name is Licht.
Why I have chosen to call myself Licht Trägerin is easy to guess for anyone with a little catholic culture, and some knowledge about my origin in this world. My name is my identity, and my identity is what I've become and what I aim to become. My name says it all... (in more ways than just one)
Although I found my name much later in my life.
Dragod... I remember when I first woke up in your womb.
I thought for a moment I was her. I was feeling so weird, bound through every orifice to you, kept alive in that warm dark pool, but unable to move for a while.
My memories didn't make much sense because you managed to fuse both of her together. The human and the daiûa, merging into one being, body and soul, but memories in a nonsensical wreck, where I kept two identities talking to each other endlessly. Except when one was dead, the flower.
I thought for a moment my, her, resurrection had gone wrong.
I don't know how or when, but I ended up realising what bargain Dragod had made with them. And what I was between them...
This god would create other bodies for Rose to resurrect her with, in exchange of the right to create countless more for its personal use.
And thus, Rose made a pact with god.
In exchange for her immortality, a humanity of slaves would follow god...
Rose... I don't remember when and how precisely I realised that, when I became aware of what I truly was, of what we all were, but one day I understood that you were still alive and free, somewhere out there in the world I'd never see...
But I remember that hatred surging deep within me, as I knew you had condemned us to misery, just so you and you alone could have all the freedom in the world.
I wanted to kill you.
I hated you more than you could imagine. While you walked all day long, my eyes were getting weak from the lack of light in the belly of the beast. My muscles were more and more thin and weak from the lack of exercise.
I lived all day long inside the murk and mud of this geological and biological abomination that is Dragod. My world, my entire world was the network of its buried body, slowly growing and evolving. An underground jail and city I wasn't allowed nor meant to ever leave.
Born bound to god through my whole body at first, quite literally, then through an oversized umbilical cord, keeping me on leach all the time, and fed through it as if I wasn't even born yet.
My hatred grew as my body weakened.
And the mindless roses around me kept being created, one after another, at an alarming growing rate. I couldn't count them anymore.
My umbilical cord ended up drying when I was no longer needed. I was left to die by my god. It was painful. But I refused to die there as it abandoned me.
My hatred for you helped.
I survived eating what the roses ate too. I lived with them more freely as god didn't care about me. Nor them, as long as everything was doing fine.
But they were breaking down. Because god's work on human mind was shoddy and unimaginative.
Their eyes suddenly showed a spark of intelligence as they awoke. And soon after, they collapsed, screaming, crying, unable to move or trying to kill themselves.
I tried to save them. One after another they kept falling and I was the only one caring for them, trying to console them as they cried or screamed, until they passed out, or fell asleep, and that the mind shackle got back into normal position. As they woke up after, they were back to their non-existent personalities, ignoring me and going to fulfil their duties on their activities silently.
I went to the heart of god. I talked to it, to Dragod. It took a lot of patience to communicate, as it hardly spoke.
It very slowly learnt our old language.
I convinced it to take better care of its roses, especially of the broken ones.
That's all I managed to obtain.
~
God, in a way, was still very young too.
Doing mistakes, trying its best.
I couldn't convince it to let them be free and live with a culture that would nurture it. It didn't want to try that experiment. It was in a period of steady growth, why would it have tried to change anything? I was just a rubbish it had discarded some time ago.
My wish of freeing them couldn't promise a better productivity. It was actually more of a bet with high risk to it to follow my suggestion.
So Dragod took a better care of its slaves, whom remained slaves nonetheless.
I wanted more.
And slowly, my hatred shifted its focus from you, Rose, unaware of what you had caused, to Dragod, causing it willingly.
I cared less and less about her, as my hatred for god grew.
I kept soothing the broken roses, as best I could, since Dragod was simply unable to, merely parking them aside in a safe place until they got somewhat better by themselves.
I heard their cries and screams of pain, of terror, of horror, all day long, all night long. It haunted me. It drove me insane. And when I cried, no one was there to give me consolation. Not even god...
My mind kept falling. God didn't care a bit about it. It was growing and nothing else mattered.
At some point, I wanted to kill the new born roses, from pity and sadness.
As I began strangling one, it first didn't react, and suddenly shifted to its broken counterpart.
As it cried and begged for its life, I couldn't kill it, kill her. It was horrifying.
This mindless, broken rose, kept a few minutes of sanity as I had broken her before her slavery would strain her mind.
It only lasted for a few minutes though. Then she went to dig her tunnel somewhere like so many others.
We were lost in that dark underground hive, with hundreds of tunnels and galleries all alike each other, with blood vessels running along the walls.
I don't remember what that rose might have said for that moment of sad clarity. I may have dreamt it.
But the idea I finally got, was to get out. The will to escape from god's dominion finally became prevalent.
While my hatred found in the end, an aim.
I would free my people by ending our creator.
I would kill god...
~
God grew, being built and cared for by its mindless slaves, in exchange of which it kept them alive and reasonably safe. It looked like a symbiotic relation from afar.
But Dragod created them, dictated them their jobs and lives, as long as they didn't break down; and finally god took care of their corpses when they died.
Their lifespan should have been essentially human, as well as their physical abilities. Which made the ones only digging tunnels with their hands grow rapidly weak and injured. Their back becomes a twisted thing.
They died of exhaustion, or accidents, like tunnels collapse, rarely of disease or malnutrition. Never of age, not in the little year I lived with them there.
The corpses, like any biological material were dissolved into god's stomachs here and there. Everything was recycled. We had no graveyard.
We had no name.
We didn't even have numbers.
We were lower than bugs. We had no existence aside its higher purpose.
But humans with memories of another world, with memories of a language to speak, can hardly accept such a fate.
So I went to god's heart again. It didn't even realise I was there.
Crawling through the endless flesh tunnels of its growing body, I went to its core.
Where the reactor was, like an infernal machinery and power plant, that thing was heating and fuelling its body from there.
The heart of this kingdom wasn't a digestive system, nor the pumps for blood and fluids, but a reactor accumulating the manifestation of energy that was provided to this whole world.
Not galvanism, mainly heat, but also something else. Something from another world, the fuel for beings-like-her, an energy in a different form that comes from beyond our reality.
That reactor may have been pumping radon and thorium, but mostly it aggregated the vacuumed invisible oil from outside and another world below ours. It vacuumed this energy from all around the land, and converted it here into a liquid, glowing, in a tangible form easier to manipulate in large concentrations.
A syrup of this energy was processed through its whole body in order to achieve what regular biology and physics could not, or at too great costs.
It was as essential as water or air for Dragod, but humans did not perceive its fundamental form.
God turned it into this glowing fluid to secure it and use it in an organic manner, like blood is managed inside our bodies or sap in trees. It's created, used, managed and consumed.
This eir was its second blood. And the second heart, devoted to this glowing blood, was a physical reactor of grotesque appearance, also pumping fluids between pipes with regular thumps.
This place had the most light I've ever seen in my entire short underground life. (It still felt like a life too long.)
Giant tubes were spreading everywhere, while meaty pumps and muscles made it all work flawlessly. It was all clean, soft and warm. No roses worked there. Regular biological cells did it all here, the finest work of life wasn't done by slaves obviously.
God and I... We rarely spoke to each other. Every time we did, it simply felt pointless, right from the start.
We couldn't really communicate. Like trying to talk to an animal, it felt futile.
We had nothing to say to each other. We never were a family.
I was just a first attempt at something and an experiment. A sketch left aside for an insensitive megalomaniac artist. Cynical.
I wanted to kill Dragod, to free the roses, and to free myself as someone different than her.
But as a human, I was powerless. I would die.
The part of me that came from a recovering Blume deep within Rose, it understood what all this, place and energy, were about.
If only I could steal it...
This place had no spillage, and sabotaging it would catch god's attention.
But all that flesh, these vessels filled to the brim. This reactor overflowing, they were tempting me.
God growing like a plant around there, and in here too, I twisted carefully its growth and tricked it into growing a new vessel, very close to the heart.
I softly constricted the main one, and patiently guided how its shape was to change.
Slowly, I divided it into two parallel vessels, with one large as a tree trunk, aside the main bigger one.
Then shifting my grasp, the flow went solely into the main vessel, draining out the extension I had guided the growth of. I then tied its feed to dry it completely.
It shrunk, empty. It would die quickly if not in use anymore.
By then, I had sliced this vessel open and crawled within it like a parasite in becoming.
Once inside, stretching my arms within that flexible tube, I pressed myself against the main vessel to constrict it, and untied the feed at the bottom of mine.
The flow that couldn't go through the main vessel came through mine, and I drowned inside that light.
~
It felt eerie. All my cells had felt so empty, void of any energy, and now I was filled up rapidly like a sponge with its light. The flow seemed infinite, and so looked the ability of my body to absorb such energy.
More than filling one's stomach, it felt more as if every cell of my body became more real, more colourful, more heavy and vibrant. And that sensation kept growing as if that feeling of completion could always go further, as if normal cells were really mostly void. It felt limitless, always more full, and always able to drink more.
How long did I remain there I don't know. At least a few minutes, unlikely days. I was in a daze, floating like that and feeling good all over.
Until god realised I was stealing its light, and until I realised I could steal far more than what just sticked to my atoms along its way.
This energy is like the fuel of dreams. In a way, it allows to make what you want to come true. Blood makes you able to lift your arm at will. This light made you able to change things similarly, and further away from the boundaries of your body. It felt limitless.
And I used what I already had gathered, to steal even more of that light, as much as I could, before god could truly react to my presence there.
I felt it, I felt how god felt when it suddenly realised what I was doing. I felt its fear and urge to stop me.
Only it was defenceless and I was suddenly draining it of its power. God was aware, but unable to react. It had never prepared for such a situation.
The light then wholly disappeared inside of me as I floated weightless in there. My spell to steal it all seemed to have worked.
God seemed to collapse, as if suddenly suffocating, but I was aware I wouldn't kill it that easily if I tried.
I was still just a bug, and Dragod was a mountain.
It suddenly began constricting the place, crushing everything and destroying the place.
That reactor wasn't essential to it. Albeit useful, that was still just a tool it could rebuild and replace. So it begun to destroy everything starting from there, in order to stop me within.
I was already fleeing. God had no real immune system cells to stop me.
But it kept destroying its own great work along my path in a desperate attempt to stop me.
The tunnels would shrink and collapse, the muscles would make the wall explode. It tried all it could, by necrotizing its tissues along my way.
While I felt invincible, I ran without taking any breathe really, my body keeping far too much energy to need any oxygen at all.
Along that race, the mindless roses were crushed mercilessly.
And slowly, I made my way toward an extremity of god's body.
I pierced the wall with my fists, as if it was nothing. I grabbed the arm of a mindless rose just aside, gawking at the outside light in a forest.
I pulled her outside as the tunnel violently collapsed, like jaws suddenly trying to bite us down.
The mindless rose lost its two feet to the rocks and screamed her pain. The ground kept trembling.
I held onto her, and jumped as if to fly away, while immense brambles or vines, hundreds of metres long, sprouted abruptly from the ground, and tried to flail me.
I pierced the canopy and the sky. The rose in my arms had already passed out, leaving a trail of blood droplets behind us from her crushed calves.
God didn't push the pursuit any further, as I flew away in the cold sky.
And morning light, though dim, still burning my eyes.
~