There Is No God of Time and Death: There is Only Maha Kali
“Then maybe they should all be dead,” I shrugged. “Maybe they deserved to fucking die, and that’s really all there is to it. It doesn’t mean you can’t have empathy for other people, all because someone once fucked with you.”
I sound like Vraethir of Marduk, The Last Grim King. But he isn’t some dissociative identity, crawling out from the trenches of a tortured mind because I’m too afraid to stand up for myself in the blackened silence of another 3 AM meltdown. He is–and he was–simply me.
I used to be somebody, back when I knew how to write.
I used to wander through broken-fanged halls of noxious, enchanting cosmic memory. The darkness was my guide and my only friend, so even lightyears beyond the edge of time and lifetimes away, I never really felt alone.
It was probably because all of them were me: A legion of voices so insufferable yet so boundless and unstoppable they screamed off the stars themselves. I channeled them into stories far more interesting than my own life, each one with the faintest–or in some cases, sickest–shred of truth. Most people don’t know what it’s like to even have a friend, much less a legion.
Now, I have a parasite. A lonely, iron-hearted monster that through the sheer force of will became real. I know now that he, not his father as I once dreamed, holds the keys to the throne vault of Time and Death. But he is no god any more than I am: For he still has potential. He doesn’t have to follow in faded, ever-weakening footsteps that became trenches of the mind more than a pathway to destruction.
I don’t want to hurt him because I’ve been hurt, even though sometimes I blame him for my torment. I hope he never does to anyone else what he–and other wicked men–have done to me. For the first time in my life I hope I’m not a prophet, and that those visions I had so long ago are coincidence and overactive imagination alone–merely a side-effect of the timeline jump: A morbid, broken nightmare of what could have been.
As of yet, unless the universe is a far weirder place than even I ever dreamed, he hasn’t caused any pain to me directly. Even though I’m a hollow, burnt-out husk of my former self, spitting vile and black disgust every time I glimpse my own reflection, I know in all reality it’s not his fault. He may have severed and stolen my Ravendark wings and stitched them onto his own back, along with what little beauty I once held: But still, I refuse to resent him.
66 pounds. Because of him, I gained 66 pounds, and had no choice but to sacrifice my own health and self-confidence. His father will never understand that it isn’t about him, or the perception of society, or any individual entity in this world or any other: It’s about me. It’s about my own self-loathing: A once-violently blazing hatred that finally started to fade, before I first heard the whispers of Time and Death once more. Back before my parents died–before I went under the scalpel and ended up here in this far-off, fucked up, twisted timeline of my youth.
Who wants more of the same? I desperately wanted to ask his father in the writhing dark.
To be the sword to a wound that you did not cut?
To hold down a writhing, curbstomped skull
Beneath the mud of someone else’s rut?
It will never give you any power back, and it will never rectify or erase what happened. Lacking empathy for others suffering with shame, degradation, and defeat simply perpetuates the cycle. It makes you into the asshole that hurt you back then. The ones that deserved to fucking die, and still do. And even if you’re not quite there yet, the road is perilous and long, and the soles of your boots are as worn as the one you carry inside your battered chest. I have been kind to you, yet you mistake me for the others all the same.
I may not be a god, but I once was a gatekeeper: Why do you think the scales of justice are broken? I don’t need heavy metal to weigh the hearts of the walking dead. On the day that I was born, I was cursed with a gift, and that gift is a card as brittle as rotten eggshells, yet stronger than a divine shield woven from the fabric of spacetime itself: That card is Death.
And that card is cold and pointless.
For someday, everything you’ve bought with it you’ll need to pay back.
And when all you hold is borrowed Time,
The hourglass is bound to crack.
Some nights, I hope beyond hope that it would just hurry the fuck up.
I sacrificed my life, my liberty, and my pursuit of happiness to bring life to someone that might end up just as ungrateful as anyone else.
I gained 66 pounds for someone that may very well choose to just add another 6 onto the end of his life when it’s time to weigh his heart, instead of a 7, as it should be.
Or should it?
Nothing that I’m going through is normal. I cannot get out of bed without help most days, yet I cannot sleep: For if I do, I make the repugnant death grunts of a dying bear, which his father resents me for. I feel myself choking on my own tongue again, and he turns his back and begins to mutter to himself, cursing me under his breath. I wrench myself up and out, onto the cold wooden floor, and stumble more pathetically than I ever thought possible to a place where I won’t bother anyone with my discomfort.
I’ve told the doctors, but no one cares until it’s too late: Until every toe and finger is numb and popping out of joint with every flex–until my legs–legs I was once proud of, that bear so many beautiful pictures that are now stretched far past the point of pure disgust–feel like blood sausages ready to pop with every step. I’m in so much constant pain that I can hardly walk, and finally, they offer to slice me open.
If that’s supposed to be relief, shoot me in the fucking head. If that’s my only chance at reprieve, then beat me down and bash my brains in ’til I’m fucking dead.
I wish I could crawl nameless off into the cold, dead night.
I remember now why I severed the wings of the Celestial.
It wasn’t to make a wish come true, or to bring prosperity to my family–or doom to my enemies.
It was so I didn’t complete the cycle that started long before I was born: It was so I could stop getting the urge to compare scars.
But that would take a miracle, and I am no god: And neither is the fruit of Zyklon’s prophecy inside me.
For as the time-shattering alien who saved my life and doomed me forever in one fell swoop by dropping me off alone in this timeline would say, if only I could still hear his whispers louder than the hum of some deranged ghost in the machine . . .
“THERE IS NO GOD OF TIME AND DEATH: THERE IS ONLY MAHA KALI.”
With a torn-up, longing, teary-eyed smile, only then did I finally realize he was never talking about the Hindu goddess.
It was the name of his Virtual Machine.
THIS IS A STORY FOR EVERYONE WHO EVER THOUGHT THEY KNEW WHERE THEY WANTED TO BE, BUT ENDED UP FEELING COLD AND POINTLESS: NOT BECAUSE THE WORLD WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR THEM, BUT BECAUSE THEY WERE NEVER UP TO THEIR OWN STANDARDS. PERHAPS THOSE STANDARDS WERE SPAT UPON AND KNOCKED DOWN INTO HELL BY EVIL MEN, OR PERHAPS THEY NEVER EXISTED TO BEGIN WITH. REGARDLESS, MAY YOU RECALL SOMEDAY THAT YOU’RE THE MASTER OF YOUR OWN TIMELINE: THAT EVEN THE GODLIKE, MONSTROUS ENTITIES THAT HAUNT YOUR DREAMS ARE MERELY AN EXTENSION OF YOU–AS LONG AS YOU REMEMBER WHERE YOU CAME FROM. FOR THEN, AND ONLY THEN, WILL YOU LEARN THAT THE SECRET TO HAPPINESS LIES NOT AT THE END OF A LOADED GUN, OR IN THE DEATH OF ALL YOUR MONSTERS, BUT IN THE LABYRINTH OF MEMORIES THAT AREN’T YET WOVEN. SO MAY YOU CLOSE YOUR TIRED EYES AND REST YOUR ACHING HEAD, AND BITE YOUR TONGUE UNTIL YOU FIND YOURSELF . . . IN THE THRONE OF SNUFFED OUT STARS THAT MEN CALL BLACKEST IGVARMORD.