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GENESIS
Do you believe in a God? Even if you pick one and pray to Her, She won’t answer you.
Consider me your mouthpiece to the Gods instead.
You hated having to memorize these mantras- you found no interest in them, curling your tongue in a foreign language in your foreign accent, as your teacher hit the front of your head with a rolled up newspaper (who the hell even read those anymore?) and demanded you read the passage again. No translation was provided for you; you hadn’t the faintest idea what it was you were reading. The letters were from right to left, opposite to what you were used to, even in your own mother tongue they’d gone from left to right. It felt unnatural, almost.
“Again,” your teacher said. You kneeled in front of him on a carpet, a wooden coffee table between the both of you as a thick book was spread open. The edges were gilded in the decoration of leaves and flowers. It felt strange that the book from the Goddess of war was decorated in such a way.
From the window, you could both see and smell the ocean. The waves brushed gently against the pale sand, and you longed to escape your teacher’s wretched house to play in the water. Perhaps the fisherman would be there, and he would take you on his rowboat. He’d give you oranges to peel for the both of you as he cast his reel into the deep blue waters.
“Rishi, you are not focusing,” your teacher chided. You grit your teeth in annoyance.
“Sorry,” you mumble.
“Read it again. With the proper rules, this time.”
You did. You fisted your hands against your thighs, the ticking of the clock going ever so slowly, as you prayed your half an hour at this man’s house would speed up already. You have no idea why your mother would not just let you quit, when she herself already knows how to read these sacred words.
As you stumbled over your words yet again, the teacher opening his mouth to correct you, the ground shook. Porcelain-plates upon shelves tumbled down and shattered into sharp, white shards; the many prayer books upon the man’s shelves fell on their own pages, dented. An alarm blared.
The barrier was down.
The man ushered you off the ground. “Quickly,” he snapped, his hand at your back as he guided you out of the living room. The ground shook again, and the unnatural scream of Malice-Born pierced the air like a spear.
The safest place to be was the basement. He locked the windows and covered the cracks between the door and the ground with a towel, then hid you in the corner of the room. He sat beside you, arm around your shoulder to shield you, counting prayers along the lines of his fingers.
Althea protect this house from the demons, forgive us for our sins and bless our soldiers with strength to defend our home, forgive us, descendents of Niru the Slayer-
A crack was heard. Screams that followed, as the ocean suddenly became that much louder and aggressive. You worried for your mother; all you wanted to do was crawl into her lap and let her rock you back to calmness as the world ended around you.
As part of his sacred duty, the man deems himself responsible for putting an end to the madness that is happening outside of this sacred home’s walls. He stands up, tells you to stay, and with the symbol of Althea in his hand- a pendant shaped like a hammer -he walks away. Delusional righteousness is what you would call it. Though he is a pious man, you thought he had no reason to believe the Goddess would help him. After all, if the Goddess loved her people so much, then why would she allow the barrier to go down? You didn’t say so, though, because you knew he would give you the lecture of your lifetime once all this was over.
He went. He never came back.
You hid in that corner of the room for so long you began to lose track of time. You’re sure that you had even fallen asleep at some point, to the alluring lullaby of the destruction outside.
Eventually, you lifted your head. Peered out the window. The Malice Born were still there, the townspeople were still fighting; in the distance, you could see the body of your former teacher. You got up. As you did, the wall of the basement blasted through, and you were face to face with a Malice Born, maia oozing out of its face. Boar shaped, with hollow eyes and tusks. It was as big as your school bus.
A strange calmness overtakes you. You don’t remember what happened next.
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A stranger approaches you. He is young, perhaps just freshly out of high school. A real soldier, not those dumb boys from your small town who failed to set the barrier back up and keep the Malice Born at bay. This stranger was a real Pilot, his uniform a pale blue and white, helmet covering his head to prevent the Malice Born from infecting his skin.
You sit in the middle of a crater. Your town is all but destroyed. The bodies are no longer bodies- they are mere pieces of charred meat, completely unidentifiable. That is, if the Malice Born did not eat them first.
The stranger cannot come seven feet from you. You are entirely unaware of the reason why. You can sense him behind you, but you don’t bother to turn your head. He will make himself known first.
He called out for you. Who are you? Are you okay?
You turn, and he takes a step closer to you, lifting his hand and resting it against something invisible to you. He looked ridiculous- just having his hand lifted like that, against nothing, but there really was something there, you supposed, because he smiled and said,
“I’m here to help you, but I can only do that if you lower your barrier, okay?”
You hadn’t even realized that it was there. Subconsciously, though you don’t understand how, the barrier is lowered and the stranger approaches you. He extends his hand out towards you.
“I’m Ren- I’m a Source Pilot. We’re going to help you, okay?”
You nod, and take his hand, and he takes you back to his mech. You hiss as your bare feet step on some sort of debris, and noticing this, Ren lifts you up on his shoulders instead. Your feet, you realize, are charred and black with soot. As Ren walks through the remnants of your home, you realize there is not a single Malice Born left.
He takes you to his Source Mech.
You expected something as beastly as the Malice Born you are sure it fought off, but it looked gentle, if anything. Ethereal, with the shapings of a rabbit, with swirling moon patterns not unlike the porcelain plates of your teacher. You had seen this mech on TV occasionally, with the unnecessary and grating commentary of the reporter as they zoomed in on battles between Pilots and Malice.
The Moon Rabbit.
Sitting on the co-pilot chair (why the mech had one, you didn’t know, since there was an obvious lack of a co-pilot), you watched the ruined remains of your town become smaller and smaller as the Moon Rabbit lifted itself from the ground. Your Pilot seemed at ease, shoulders relaxing as he lifted the Rabbit higher into the sky.
“We’re going to take you somewhere safe, okay?” he says. He seems sincere in his words, and so you believe him without a thought. You sort of liked how he used the word ‘we’, as if he and the Moon Rabbit were one being.
You don’t ask him what will happen to you. You have a vague idea of what comes next- questioning, of course, from the Source Pilot Institute, before they send you off to an orphanage. Your mother cut ties with all her family before moving to your former home. You are sure that her relatives would rather kill themselves than take in her daughter. Maybe you’ll get adopted once you’re there. Ren is going to take you to the big city of Lagash where the SPI headquarters are held; you’re positive you will never see the ocean again.
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My daughter and Champion, Niru the Slayer, had let me down, but I suppose the only mortal who truly felt my ire was Nil. I did not care for his husband, Kirav, nor did I grieve the death of his friend, Elisya. I did not care for that silly guard, Arezoo, or the hundreds of other Pilots that Nil recruited and taught, so long as they served my purpose, and the throne’s. Mother had long since fallen into Her eternal slumber, and a Champion of the Goddesses had not been chosen in hundreds of years. I only cared to eradicate the wretched Malice Born from my planet, and from the rest of the universe. The cycle had stopped unceremoniously after Hari the Bright, and I sought to restore balance to the world. The universe would sing my praises then. I thought I raised the perfect warrior. It seems I had not, and yet-
The cycle continued, Time’s arrow marching ever forward.
I have lived long enough to learn that history never repeated itself. It always echoed.
This story has long since been over. Under the permission of the Grand Archive, I, Fiadh O’Conner, am reviving old tombs, testaments, and entries regarding the Fifth Champion of the Goddesses- Rishi Chandra. I’ve heard the tales, of course- every one has. We grew up hearing how Rishi the Slayer killed a thousand Malice Born with the flick of her wrist, how she tamed even Goddesses to their knees before her. A mere teenager, rewriting the universe. A story of war, and power and deciet and death and the desperate lengths humans will go to maintain that power. However, I think that the recent societal consciousness around these tales have lost the main reason why any of these characters, fictional or otherwise, act the way they do. Right to its rotten core, this is a story about love.
Remember that.
