Work Text:
The beach is calm - as it was yesterday, as it will be tomorrow.
You finish dragging a single claw through the sand in just the right way to complete the thought you'd been sculpting: a pattern stretching away down the coast, far beyond the horizon. Within tens of thousands of loops and bends that circle the planet thrice over is a story - your story. One of gnashing teeth and burning flesh, endless voids and twisted sinew - of pain, and violence, and destruction and hate and
You let the feeling pass through you - experience it in full. Breathe deep. Hold the breath for a year or two - then let it free.
This is why you are committing this to the sand. It won't be washed away by the waves; they move in regular patterns you have ensured will not disturb your work. Neither will it be taken by the wind, which flows from the north and never wavers. Even this rock that spins through the dark won't betray your efforts with annihilation.
(The raw singularity above your head had been leaking, at first - very slowly, over timespans that dwarfed anything else reality had ever seen. It would have been a problem eventually.)
(You corrected that eons ago.)
You have etched every last thought here, at your feet, where they will be preserved for all time. Not out of sentimentality, no - but so you could forget. So that these infinitesimally small shards of glass that mark the boundary between the feathers and the water could hold the memories for you.
There is no regret. (If there were, you would never have gotten this far.)
But even for you, even as you are now - there is a lingering pain. Like a gouging wound just beside your heart, an empty space that defines what you are. A last bitter memento.
You will fill it with something new.
You take a last look out at the waves. You don't need to; you could recreate them whenever you wish, in your mind or in the world (for what little difference there is between the two). But you must admit: this view is nice. Perhaps you will return someday when you feel like being small for a time.
You turn from the sea, from the land and the sky. You look outward unto an empty cosmos.
Pushing sand back and forth was calming - quaint, even - but you are bound for grander vistas.
Wings unfurl, and space unfurls with them. The vacuum sings with a latent energy, boundless and everflowing. It yearns to be molded into substance.
Whatever you deign to create will be yours, and yours alone. There are none else who can dictate your existence - not anymore. You will occupy an eternity with stories woven from your own thread and life spun from your own hands. You will never know true danger, for all that comes next will be under your command.
That's all you've ever wanted.