They traded me away as a slave-wife when I was eight years old for a boar.
It was a brutal affair and I’ve blocked the majority of it from my long and storied mind for very good reasons. Still, everything has its uses, and it was as the Chieftain’s slave-wife that I learned the basic necessities of life. I learned to cook, the basic tenets of animal husbandry, and to string a bow and craft a spear with wood, bone, hide, and stone.
The latter was the most useful, as it was that particular talent that allowed me to gut my husband the Chief with a spear thrust when I was fifteen, after several years of abuse, rape, and what many in the twenty first century would now consider torture, something considered merely a fact of life in that primitive prehistoric time.
Sterility was, and still is, a blessing, as much as the punishment for it continued.
I ran that same night I murdered him, slipping away from the other wives and the settlement – fresh bruises and teeth marks still dotting my neck, thighs and breasts from earlier even as I jogged through the forest, bloodied shale spear in hand. It was autumn, but my haste was to escape what I could only expect to be an immediate, subsequent revenge killing. Thus, I had failed to bring provisions or extra furs beyond what I scrounged from the Chief’s home to use as blankets or as protection from the cold. My only weapon was the blood-caked shale spear I had driven into my dead husband’s gut. I washed it in a stream soon enough, broken off somewhat as the tip was.
Remembering my first kill fills me with the several different emotions present at the time, despite it happening all that seventy-something thousand years ago. Disgust, catching a whiff of his reeking bowels as his sphincters came loose in death. Horror, at taking another Human life. Pride, in that I had defeated my owner, master, and torturer. And then fear, knowing what might come next were I to be caught.
The powers I wield now help me face those weaknesses dare they ever surface again.
That first winter alone was hard, and I traveled a long way to ensure I would be well off the tribe’s migration path, away from their seasonal territories and homesteads. I cursed myself a hundred times for my impulsivity, a trait I’ve long since sequestered. But I quickly made use of what I could hunt or scavenge, and found that waiting in lower hanging branches to leap down on unsuspecting wildlife or spear them with throws was a tedious if effective way of stocking my smoked meat reserves in addition to simple traplines and bone tools for fishing and the like.
As the migration routes of the major Human and Neanderthal groups often occupied the best game trails and foraging locations in the South of Europe… I struggled at first as I migrated far northeast, eventually into modern Scandinavia. A single woman like me alone was prey enough in the wilds, without getting anywhere near other living sentients and risking re-enslavement.
Lots more megafauna back then to worry about.
That was in the few fall weeks before I could scavenge or hunt the supplies to make a bow with enough sinew, and flint-knap or bone-carve myself some simple barbed arrows and other tools.
Making wooden containers with power tools, for instance, is much more preferable to slowly carving them with stone or bone.
I managed to gather enough autumn harvest, and fire-dry it, to get me a good halfway through the first winter of those glacial times – in addition to hunting and fishing. Nuts and wild animal kills I dug up were also quite useful, and I quickly grew skillful in spotting Squirrel caches or disturbed earth and robbing whatever I could unearth.
That first year alone, I wintered in a cave in what is now part of modern day France. Then moved east and north in a haphazard path over a few years, similar to the seasonal rounds I knew. It was mostly a process of following the game trails and the first few notions of every spring thaw on through the summer – until I hit water and coastline near now-Denmark.
I was living there long before Danes were ever a thing, obviously. More Neanderthals than Homo Sapiens Sapiens towards Northeastern Europa anyways, back then.
I only ever met a handful of Denisovian groups prior to ascension.
Following the coastline was always a good bet, with steady supplies of edible seaweeds, or scavenged shellfish and crustaceans. Tidal pools and rockier beaches were my regular best bet for ocean-trapped sealife.
No pollution back then, either!
Aside from cooking what I caught, and smoking, sea-salting, or sun-drying the rest, I didn’t have to worry about hydrocarbons or microplastics, all those kya ago. The only way to properly describe it is… Very much like those water-rich goldilocks-zone colony worlds across the frontiers – at the very tip of the reach of our early Guardian-A.I. colonization waves.
First; we install atmospheric terraformers all across the planet, and let those run for a few centuries – babysat by higher Class artificial intelligences, until we get enough breathable nitrogen and oxygen content to approximate Earthling air. Then we seed Earth flora, plus whatever GMO crops we want, via orbital or atmospheric succession seeding, with whatever Earth ecosystem we want or as appropriate. Finally comes fauna seeding – specific species we want to cultivate en-masse. Sometimes keeping regional ecosystems across entire planets.
They remain pristine as they stabilize via the succession process. Multiple Gardens of Eden – developed by Humanity.
Unstained. Clean.
Earth was like those, back then.
That aside, I never was great at tanning hide with brain fat, not that I’d ever need such a primitive skill now – almost one hundred kya later, in this 21st Century. So unfortunately my wardrobe was often mouldy or rotted at the edges, leading to the shaman or witch persona I kept for millennia. It often spooked the locals and started legends or mythologies.
Kept them away – which was my preference.
Despite how harsh survival was, in those ancient times, I was amused when they found the same cave I had wintered in, about nineteen-ninety something! I was also somewhat surprised to discover that not only had my original paintings survived from over seventy-six thousand years ago, but others had added to them in the thousands upon thousands of years since my departure.
Temporary safe havens, shared across our species, even across the centuries. Kind of beautiful in a way. No Denisovian or Neanderthal could ever have created that.
It was much more dangerous back then, of course. That was still long before the large carnivores across Europa like Cave Lions went extinct. When larger food sources like Bison, Woolly Mammoths, and Woolly Rhinoceroses still roamed to support various megafauna food chains. I was quite thankful to the friendlier or more fearful Neanderthal and Denisovian tribes that often sheltered me against my own kind on that near-border of Northern Europe and Asia.
Pity The Creator had selected us Homo Sapiens Sapiens as the best of the evolutionary tree, and not them.
Their extinction via war and interbreeding was inevitable.
Xex made very sure of that himself by thirty or forty kya or so, outside of the lucky Humans with mixed genetics that could pass as Human.
Regardless, it was in my journey north and east following the now-extinct enormous elk trails and coastlines that I was first touched by The Creator. It was before I was even nineteen or twenty, pre-ascension, I think. Maybe a year or two younger? Not that ages were very exact outside of if parents or community members were keeping track for you. My own childhood made that difficult.
Regardless, it came for me.
One day amongst many – as we didn’t much keep track outside of seasonal activities back then. As a woman, keeping myself in solitude under my witch guise was safest up until that point.
I was labelled as a strange “Shaman” or “Witch” of the forests even back then, in long-extinct simplistic tongues – to be sought out for help only under the gravest of circumstances. Yet I was no prophet or soothsayer outside of herbal remedies. I perceived no visions, in sky, fire, smoke, or otherwise.
The only thing to signal the coming, was a flare of the brightly lit green Aurora to the North. Of course even back then we had our Gods and simple religions. Gods of the hunt, of the dead, of birth, and so on and so forth, different across regions and tribal prehistory cultures. Endless pantheons. But never in my experience with rites for deities of any pantheon had I encountered such force or majesty. I still relied on my local herbalism knowledge for pathetic facsimiles of modern medicine. Which tree buds or poisonous plants to eat or apply for numbness, relief, or even intentional miscarriage, amongst many other simple things.
I wasn’t spiritual at all. It was all an act!
The Creator has always been a creature made of energy, this much we know even from our rudimentary observations over the ages, and as it descended and condensed itself into the atmosphere from a place in high orbit where it had been watching us, the sky lit up with plasma and friction fires, lightning strikes landing haphazardly across much of ancient Europe as it condensed and solidified its trajectory, reducing as much of the damage to the planet as it could.
Forest fires still raged for days afterward, sparking a massive succession regrowth.
The light blinded me as it drew close and condensed ever further and further, and I scuttled under the cover of the nearest rock outcropping I could find. But then the light, heat, and force slowly faded and I was wreathed in a softer glow of white light.
When I finally dared to venture forth into that radiance, I felt myself lifted gently from the ground, and my rudimentary garments of various furs and animal skins were gently pulled away from my body. After the furs were dissolved into atoms, the dirt and grime and body oils were next, everything inhuman and unclean being pulled away into oblivion. The purest form of cleansing I have ever experienced at a purely atomic level.
Not that I realized it was inadvertently also scouring away my various bacterial cultures and was dooming me to problems for weeks afterwards.
Soft tendrils of blue-white light pulsated out and swayed gently from a central form, a ball of light so brightly condensed that I couldn’t look at it directly for fear of going blind, but in my ignorance and sudden attempts at spiritualism, I tried anyway.
I was confused. I was no real shaman, so I didn’t know how to talk with an actual God, beyond our modern, poorly-named imitation. And even then, gods usually only appeared in smoke visions, spirit journeys, or dances. I had only ever met two other women who served as spiritual guides before that point in my travels, most medicine men being men – so I wasn’t sure what to do and went limp as might a mouse before a playful cat, hoping it would lose interest like some predators with latent hunting or chase instincts did.
But it didn’t. The Creator pried my eyelids open and pulsed through every single muscle and artery and cell in my body. And then I understood why the shamans only ever hummed or sang when they spoke with the gods, because talking could only get in the way. Even as my small mind tried to open itself and let this creature in, it flooded my senses and I blacked out several times trying to communicate with something that resembled an infinite mass of sheer power and knowledge. The human mind is feeble at the best of times, and yet it still grasps for information even when being assaulted with it.
To this day, I cannot tell you that I actually comprehended something so far beyond me, that just couldn’t fit itself in my small mind. The best analogy is perhaps how lower Class A.I. constructs will address tasks or data in chunks to avoid overloading themselves. The Creator was trying to do something similar, so it wouldn’t cause me any harm.
It was only after several hours of briefly touching it with my mind, failing repeatedly and losing consciousness again and again, that I finally established a solid connection without pushing my body to organic data processing limits. We didn’t exchange information, so much as I slowly came to understand what it offered me, and the closest thing I can think of is that we exchanged knowledge as passersby might glance into another’s eyes on the street. Intention was as clear as a simple shared thought. Each wave of new knowledge came with immense strain on both our parts.
In a matter of the first few seconds, The Creator knew my entire life; from my birth, to this very connection, all from my own memories it perused, even the smaller details I myself hadn’t bothered to pay attention to. Changing perspective, at times being beyond my own normal sight, I knew then it had been watching me from somewhere in orbit beyond the atmosphere for a very long time.
Eventually, with each new flood, I knew what it required of me.
And I stopped being a frightened little girl and assumed the enormous mantle of responsibility.
A Guardian.
Of the destiny of my entire species.
An agent of change. Of protection.
A Shepherd.
How odd, that some across Central Universe use such an old title and description as a slur or insult. I take pride in it.
The Creator.
How can you label something so powerful? A being so beyond any body of mere physical matter?
Once I knew my task, he began working on me physically and mentally. He gave me the power slowly at first, rewriting my genetic code and body as if it were like breathing to him. He pulled my nerve endings apart first, myelin peeling apart like dust in the wind. I “felt” all of it, linked to him as I was, but more in a sense of knowing rather than a sense of touch or any experiences of pain.
My head remained intact for all but the final steps, for me to experience the process of losing and regaining portions of my body.
I felt the way he felt, the way the energy of his being rippled against the forces of physics and the Earth, the same sphere that he rested across, and around, and through now – like an invisible blanket. I could even sense a linking of minds elsewhere through him, happening far away at the exact same moment, faint yet connected by distant strings of power.
The Creator was much bigger than a single planet’s orbit, despite the immense effort to condense itself into pinpoint places across the world in three points simultaneously. I was merely a single thread in a grand tapestry of new purpose. As he pulled me apart to understand how I worked, and then stitched my very atoms back together again, I was being instilled with a simplified, off-brand version of how to do the same to my kin. Power perpetuating power. Immortality eventually perpetuating other immortals.
Symbols and formulas I still don’t understand properly even today, despite having them burned clearly into my memory like a hot iron brand.
Not that I would even entertain the idea of using such a jumbled ritual to proliferate us Guardians until the actual dawn of history, when written human histories of civilization changed everything.
The very invention of Human History stopped us from being wandering peacekeepers and helpful sorcerers, to deal with the sudden fallout of accidentally being recorded or worshipped in our travels.
I was free to explore The Creator as he worked and experimented, picking and prodding through what it was as best I could. I knew that I didn’t have a proper body while he crafted, so I busied myself with expanding further into him, touching the untouchable by acclimatizing myself further towards infinity. The waves came more frequently, with more information or data, but I was getting better and better at processing them the more there were.
I had to conceptualize in ways I had never considered, reaching out with invisible hands to sift through an infinite pool of something I cannot even begin to describe. For example, knowledge of the stars and cosmos! Orbits and galaxies! Gravity. He helped me even as he worked, pushing concepts and ideas closer so I could grab them and understand them, for I would never have found them otherwise. My very brain changed, rebuilt for performance as a sapient animal from the ground up.
The Creator was completely composed of energy, some strange fusion of kinetic potential force and the relationship between Central Universe itself and dark energy or antimatter. If I was to explain it to you now, I’d likely still fail miserably. We didn’t have even these modern scientific terms to describe even half of the concepts, in a sort of wordless wisdom. It would be as if I was explaining that some of the empty spacetime between stars somehow clicked and developed sentience, and quickly pulled itself into a state of “physical” being with raw energy before it could simply “unclick.”
Now The Creator was obviously incredibly old, and incredibly powerful. Everything that could or would happen seemed to be irrelevant compared to “the now” to it, playing with the universe like an ever expanding sandbox in real time, to be revisited later. I can only describe what could be a sense of joy and playfulness amidst a hundred distortions of waking reality and spacetime. Pretty sure I went mad at least once or twice. Any type of energy it desired, it could manifest – transformed through some hidden infinite reservoir of potential energy. Matter was mere atoms, molecules, or compounds to be rearranged in infinite complexity as desired or reduced to base elements. Something like our own ascended god powers, yet at seemingly infinite scales.
Why did it choose us three, instead of simply changing the entire Earth however it wanted?
I tried to ask it questions, but it mostly ignored them, giving me mental glimpses of distant stars and galaxies as though an adult were handing a toy to a toddler asking annoying, mindless questions of a busy academic. I dug deep enough, barely, to learn it wasn’t the only one of its kind to suddenly blink into existence, but only from an approximation of the battle between this one and the others it had consumed in pure… Hunger? The visualization of such enormous supernovae-scale conflicts were far beyond my grasp. This being had devoured the others and become stronger in exponentials.
Just as suddenly as being mostly bodiless had begun, I slowly felt my body coming back together, pulling out of him as it returned me to my own head. Felt him pulling away even as I was still trying to find some sense of meaning. How would I guard the destiny of my race like it wanted? Why were the goals so vague? How should I use the power I was given? How DO I use the power? Who were the ones who came first, that you carelessly brushed into oblivion in that distant galaxy so long ago when they failed to meet your expectations?
How did they fail?
How do I succeed?
What do you want?
Where do I go from here?
Endless questions of existence that Humanity would only start to truly ask in any dignified form over 65,000 years later.
I was only given an answer to the last, a vision of a place far to the northwest, across a land bridge of the western ocean I had passed, what we know as Doggerland, now. I realized that I was suddenly aware of the entire Earth in my memories, when before I had only known the forests and the mountains as features of my more local travels. I had learned without learning, having knowledge pushed into me without knowing how.
Before I could ask anything else he was gone entirely, the distant booming of thunder high above signaling his return to somewhere unknown. It was still on or near Earth; that much I understood, as his enormous aura could be felt across the entire damn planet now ambiguously. But I lacked the immediate knowledge of where, sans the prior link.
I knew it was that same condensation process he had used to reach us three, reducing a physical spacetime imprint to a specific concentration in spacetime, yet simultaneously unable to cloak or hide the infinite aura seeping across the damn planet like the sound of electricity or appliances in the background.
I remember that I slumped down in the mud in my new perfected body, so similar yet dissimilar to mine. The rain was already starting to fall from the sky in a torrential downpour from such enormous barometric disruption.
I was completely naked, and missing all my body hair, with my clothes having been discarded into molecules. Despite having this new body that I still possess today, a full grown woman frozen in my prime, everything inside my head was different. I possessed knowledge that couldn’t exist. Mathematical formulae and geography. Secrets of the universe and existence yet to be defined with words, in yet to be spoken languages, for tens of thousands of years. Tribal languages of peoples scattered across the globe I had never met or even fathomed. Linguistic fluidity and ridiculously fast interpretation.
Yet the gift of tongues was the least of it.
Ultimately there was the lingering vision… Of course there was the vision!
I concentrated on the image and the geographical location. A large plain of rolling hills, enormous stones carefully arranged in a circle as a marker, and the faces of two others. The first was a young man with paler skin like mine, but with shocking yellowish hair and bright sky blue eyes. I had never seen such a person before, as everyone from my life amongst fellow human groups had the same variations of dark brunette or black hair and brown eyes that I did except for the rarer groups to the east with predominantly only black hair. It wouldn’t evolve naturally amongst other humans until around ten thousand years ago officially give or take, although I know exactly where that ancient bloodline and those genetic quirks come from.
The other man was from one of these tribes of Homo Sapiens to the far east amongst the Denisovians. His deep black hair jutted out in all directions and his strange black irises flashed with wisdom and knowledge, deeper somehow than what I had been gifted, or perhaps just more wizened in living. He was much older than me already. Possibly pushing thirty or forty? I knew how genetics worked now, so I didn’t even stop to question his appearance, the bronze skin and wider features. I assumed he was from the Steppes of the East, Anatolian or even Mongolia in some modern classification. I somehow trusted him instantly without ever having met him. His appearance projected calmness and comfort.
I also knew that I would meet him in the place with the stones one day in the future.
He had such kind eyes.
I began my journey back westward the following week.
It took me several years to get there, even as I learned the quirks and nuances of my new powers. Extended use of them took a toll on my rebuilt body, as the Creator had never told me what he had changed about it and the reconstruction wasn’t part of my instilled knowledge. I was left to simply feel out new powers in a new body, that felt normal, yet vastly different at the same time.
I was still completely human as far as genetics was concerned, that much was clear with my new general knowledge about inherited traits that expanded upon my poor young ignorance and prior wretched experiences of helping with births alongside frequent sexual assaults. The powers matched some descriptions that the shamans I had known spoke of in myths and stories as fiction. But they were also growing stronger with more frequent use, and I felt a need to explore them, opening up new possibilities even as I struggled to use the most basic powers of telekinesis and molecule or energy manipulation.
I kept trying to reflect on the gods I had known. While I knew that those false gods had never existed, with the stories simply made up through human superstition… The reflections brought new questions, as I also knew of the people that came before, the prototype the Creator had built as a test run for sentient life among the distant stars untold galaxies distant. Only the faintest inkling that they had even existed, mind you. Ignorant to appearance, technology, or culture as I was.
The sandbox of Central Universe was impossibly large to me, some billions of years old.
I wondered if we too would be purged by fire and apocalypse if we failed whatever mysterious experiment this was. But he had left us alone almost immediately, hadn’t he? Perhaps we were not his creations directly, merely the evolution of one world amongst many he may have seeded previously?
Was The Creator more like an interstellar gardener?
What would happen if I performed poorly as the Shepherd it wanted me to be?
Or maybe he had found us as we were, and wished more for us? I might never know. My worship remains regardless – of his pure power and capability, even if nothing else.
As I traveled, I experimented, and eventually discovered that telekinesis was my strongest and most reliable power. I relied on it the most, and refined it even as I made the long and difficult crossing to what is now modern Britain across the ancient land bridge. Telepathy was also extremely useful to influence, intimidate, and manipulate across tribes, ensuring my safety.
When I finally arrived on the hilly plains, I was confused. I knew I had followed the vision precisely, for something in the back of my head confirmed it. But the stones were nowhere to be found. Was I mistaken? Had I failed? Would the planet be purged in fire because of my error? Every plant, animal, and the other cousin species of humanity, purged because of me?
I had half expected The Creator to be there waiting for me, as if this journey was some sort of first trial to see if I was worthy of the power. It wasn’t.
I had no idea what to do next, and so I waited. I would remain there for a number of years, finding from my day to day living that I failed to grow older, and any injuries I suffered would quickly regenerate themselves, which left little to no scarring outside of more grievous wounds and limb reattachments.
Something like eighteen or nineteen years old, give or take.
Forever!
I was as amazed at The Creator’s power as I was by the healing ability of my new body, and even took to self-mutilation at times to test the limits of it. Of course there were indeed limits, and I came very close to losing several fingers in my explorations, after which I quickly wizened up to the difficulty of reattaching lost limbs or digits. There was also the danger of damaging certain fragile organs that the regeneration process couldn’t heal fast enough to keep you alive, or which would heal wrong in aggressive webs of flesh – like eyeballs, lungs, or the heart. Even controlling the simplest healing with my powers was extremely difficult, complex as the human body was even prior to whatever direct ascension did to me.
I’m much better these days. Lots of practice. Modern Guardian Technology, Science, and Medicine helps immensely to keep us fighting fit, too.
Those years after were still hard. The winters were somewhat glacial, and very few other humans or even neanderthals eked out existences nearby. I sat waiting, trading with the local tribes brave enough to venture out into the areas around my patch of plains tundra. I took on the guise of a young mystic as before – to fool tribes into helping me supply myself with food or materials via trade or tribute, and make more time for training. The former of which, food, my body still apparently needed for normal function. Although, complete starvation towards actual death – pushing myself to the limit, seemed to take months.
I never got there, luckily. As much as I wanted to sometimes.
I grew frustrated with the endless pile of growing questions that had no answers, and wandered the countryside while building a homestead of great stones. I think it’s buried beneath a midden slash hill some distance from the remaining monolith – as later constructed near the dawn of history by the locals. I was the most amused when I was forced to fend off a few attacks by tribes who thought I was a demon or evil spirit, but I quickly humbled them into reverence by ripping them limb from limb from afar with telekinesis and using their bones as wards or fear totems.
Perhaps I was indeed the very first “Witch” in a sense. In truth, as in my earlier years of only acting as one.
I was about to lose any hope of answers when the one man appeared one day who would wreak havoc on everything in my life for eons to come. The man I’ve since sworn to kill as a betrayer.
It was a bright blue-sky summer day in the afternoon, when Xex finally came wandering into my life.
I was tending my little garden outside my small hovel. The white clouds rolled lazily above and I didn’t notice him crossing over a nearby hilltop until he was standing at the fence, leaning over it with a slouch and eyeing me up greedily. It had been decades since my ascension. Not a word from The Creator in all that time, merely that loose feeling of vague proximity somewhere all around me no matter where it might be on Earth.
“Hello there, pretty thing!”
The first words he ever spoke to me, in my own language. A heavily accented dialect of simpler words back then. Forgive me if I embellish in the translation to English, being the standard Guardians of Destiny common language for the past several centuries since Elizabeth’s reign.
I staggered upright, scared half to death. I was so used to being able to sense the proximity of human minds around me that it took me several seconds of heavy breathing before I calmed down enough to recognize him as one of the two men from my vision.
The golden hair and sky blue eyes helped.
“Do I get a reply or what?”
His use of the local language was indeed very heavily accented, and he obviously wasn’t used to the gift of the tongues despite being able to use it in a sort of linguistic jury-rigging. I was definitely more practiced in my application of all the different possible sounds a primate mouth, lungs, and throat could make, due to my local reputation and trade.
“Y-Yes. You’re one of the others. From the vision.”
He dipped his head in a nod and smiled wolfishly, revealing gleaming white teeth. His altered body and face were handsome, strong, muscled, and very attractive, even dirty as he was from travel, wrapped in the travel-stained winter furs of some canine.
“Why are you so late?”
I answered him haughtily at first, angry at this carefree mood pouring forth from him. Something as important as The Creator giving us a task! Gifting new bodies and purpose! Instead of answering me honestly he merely shrugged and reached over the fence a little farther, plucking one of my hardy green apples and crunching it loudly.
I remember those odd apples. Extinct as a proper species now. Small trees. Quite sour, yet mildly sweet as an aftertaste, and nutritious enough. Popular as a food with children across both Human and Neanderthal tribes. Cultivated by me, with agricultural, biological, and ecological knowledge, plus scavenged seeds and powers, courtesy of my ascension. A secret I kept from other hunter gatherers to avoid disruption.
I remember Xex wincing at the tartness. I found the aloofness endearing at the time. I was only a young woman of thirty or forty, despite my eternally youthful appearance. My only experience with the opposite sex or gender romantically or sexually, was one riddled with trauma.
“Did he give you powers too?”
He munched on wads of the tough green outer skin as he thought on his answer. Eyed me with vague interest as he munched, before swallowing it and scratching his near-bare cheek, devoid of the beard every other man she had ever encountered grew for warmth. The vision of him had even had a beard too. Mixtures of blonde and black hairs. The stubble was strange-looking, as it made him seem more pristine. Cleaner, more refined somehow. A choice to be different, perhaps like a chief or shaman sometimes braided their hair or beard for special events. Clearly he used his powers for the task, but somewhat lazily in terms of frequency. It was a silly stylistic choice considering how cold the winters got at that latitude.
Granted, our bodies were much, much more capable and hearty after ascension.
“Yes. I took over the rest of my tribe and ruled them for a few years, assimilating other tribes into a small settlement before I got bored as chief. Killed or enslaved all the cousin species I could find nearby of course, as directed. Then I moved on and did it again with a tribe far away. And I got bored there too, so I finally started the journey, and now I’m here.”
I scowled and bristled my powers at the time, prickling all the faint blonde and black hair on his arms, legs, and chest in silent defiance.
“I see.”
He mused at my rather cold answer with a smirk, and suddenly I was bowled over with a unit of force greater than I had dared use in years. I destroyed several plants and flowers in my tumbling and landed in a heap upside down against my stone cottage’s firewood pile.
My arm broke somewhere whilst rolling and I cried out in pain.
“Hmm, maybe that thing gave me the big share of it all?”
He wasn’t asking me.
He continued, vaulting the fence with both legs and walking through my damaged garden towards me. I was panicked, even as I felt my bone knitting itself back together and pulling itself back into the proper shape and position. I got to my feet and summoned up the entirety of my telekinetic powers, even the more dangerous edges I had experimented with in the early years.
I didn’t want to die without knowing my purpose. Not after escaping from my tribe, and not after learning so much. I would NOT die after journeying so far and waiting so long. To that asshole!
This stupid idiot of a man was supposed to help me?!
“So what do yo-“
It was too late to stop the blast of simple kinetic force and air pressure before he could finish the sentence. As it connected with his chest, his eyes opened wide in disbelief, his entire body buckling for a second and then rupturing backwards in a spray of blood and some bone shrapnel from where the force crushed his sternum and ribcage and continued through him.
I wasn’t able to hit any organs directly, which was sort of intentional in a last second choice to use pure force rather than shaping it into a sharp cutting blade, of air pressure or the like.
But it didn’t seem to matter as he broke backwards back through the front of my fence line, flailing and rolling along the ground at impossible speeds. His limbs visibly broke and bones punctured his skin in compound fractures as he ragdolled, slowly lost speed and came to a stop in the grass several hundred meters distant, throwing up a furrow of dirt, moss, grass, and sod as he did so.
I staggered forward and clutched the fence, terrified; watching his motionless body for several minutes where it lay still.
I was simultaneously horrified and relieved when I saw the distant form jerk around suddenly, pulling itself back together as best it could to start the healing process. He regained consciousness slowly, then he stumbled back to its feet. He staggered back my way, limping still with a partially broken leg as he came. Us within the Prime Triumvirate always did have better regeneration and overall power than those ascended via the bastardized ritual, even before Xex devoured The Creator.
He had a hand raised in an archaic open-palm symbolism of protection or mercy – familiar even in prehistory as a sign of wariness or friendship.
“Truce!”
He called to me long before he neared the broken fence, and some of the tension left me.
When he finally reached me at the fence line and leaned heavily on it, both of us had almost entirely healed ourselves with a liberal exertion of our powers to speed up the job, although it was obvious his reversions of form were focused on the severe internal damage and broken bones first. His entire body was still scraped and cut up from the rocks and ground, and his healing was incredibly slow, seeming to work in portions over several minutes as he moved his hands over limbs and injuries. There were several of his bones to knit back together, and he would need to use telekinesis to realign them, for a proper recovery sans any strange regeneration deformities.
We didn’t have the advanced surgeries and technologies of today to fix such battle damage and ensure our godly immortal beauty.
He would survive, I knew that much from my more extreme experiments on myself, but apparently he had never bothered to test the limits of his body and powers, as he had been too busy lording over his subjects.
I had the upper hand, for now…
“Come inside, I’ll make something.”
I waved him over, stopping to grab some nettles and herbs from my garden patch with a quick swipe of telekinesis. As we sat down around my meagre stone hearth, him groaning, I snapped my fingers to light a fire and boil some fresh water gathered that morning in a primitive stone cauldron I had hollowed for myself with my powers.
Perhaps the fire was just for extra warmth, not that we couldn’t endure such things as temperature with our new bodies.
I began pouring the ancient tea-like mixture into two carved wooden bowls using the boiled water which I had gathered that morning from my well. Seasoned it further with sea salt.
“So how did he come to you?”
The man asked, gesturing in a general direction to the southeast where he had originated from. His face and neck was still bruised and bleeding profusely, and the body’s healing was slowing for some reason, his limbs rotating and slotting back into place in a slow churning of skin and bone. Several times he had to reach down and force a joint or broken bone back into place with a grunt as he sloppily pulled the skin closed a section at a time. He only used his telekinesis to force things back where they should be if he couldn’t reach them. He grunted with pain each time.
“In a forest, I was fending for myself alone in the wilds after escaping the man I was forced to.”
It was matter-of-fact, and he grinned.
“I had many of those sorts of wives.”
He paused, noting my scowl and immediate disgust.
“But I wasn’t cruel or such. They could leave. Enough replacements anyways. Lots of people wanted to be intimate with a god.”
I made sure to scowl even harder at his attempts at justification, especially since my opinion was that we shouldn’t interfere overtly with Humanity. Not that slavery was uncommon across prehistory, especially amongst warring groups. This new colleague was clearly enjoying himself at my expense even after I had blasted him half across the damn peninsula.
I may have proven myself on the ascended immortal power front, but the fact that I was a woman clearly put me below him in his mind’s hierarchies. The fact that I had been a slave-wife only seemed to solidify this ancient misogyny. I’m pretty sure he still has those shitty beliefs kicking around somewhere in his tyrant ass.
“He taught me about many things as he rewrote my body and gave me his power.”
Xex nodded. Opened his mouth to speak several times, before finally committing.
“I thought I had angered the gods by stealing from the tribe’s holy-man so frequently, and so I fought back when The Creator came at me that night on my hunting trip, and killed my comrades around me by simply turning them to dust. I struggled and struggled even as he poured things into my head, and I was still fighting even after he had gone. I had new hair, new eyes, a new body… Yet was still fighting with myself and with nothing all at once.”
I handed him a wooden bowl filled with the brew, and nodded for him to take it. He groaned as he reached over, and cracked his neck, massaging the muscles that were beginning to regenerate back from being bruised and torn.
“He taught me how to make others like us, weaker versions, as the final thing before he left.”
I feigned ignorance, wanting to keep as many secrets as I could from this strange new colleague.
“How?”
He shrugged, something I was learning to recognize as a commonality of his, and which very much annoyed me.
He shouldn’t be so dismissive of such important work as our mission to shepherd Humanity towards their great destiny – standing atop even the other apex predators, our now-extinct cousins.
“Some big ceremony, you pull some white thing out of them, and then do some things to it, and then push it back inside their body. But only we can do it. And I can’t remember what the symbols and words are.”
I felt something click. Felt the secret slipping out.
“I know the words, but not all of the symbols you have to carve into them.”
He grinned.
“Then I assume that strange man with the black eyes knows the rest of the symbols?”
I nodded fervently, still unsure of what all of this meant. I was simultaneously aware that The Creator had kept the finer details of passing our gift on… Secret, from this member of us three chosen.
What we would long later come to call The Prime Triumvirate in modern languages.
Two pieces of the puzzle – split between me and the third man with the black eyes.
“Then I guess we need a plan for when he gets here?”
So in and around all his lording, and his cocky attitude he still realized we had a job to do with our powers!
That was good.
Perhaps I could latch onto that to make up for almost blowing him apart. That shared religious zeal from back then. One of the few feelings that remains crystal clear to this very day, after the previous seventy five thousand years blurred together outside the highlights.
Back then, Xex did what The Creator had asked of him, different from our tasks.
Genocide, extinction, was one.
“I think we need to help them grow. Maybe the reason he gave us this power is because he thought that they’d just sit around otherwise, worshipping false gods, just wandering around and hunting?”
He shrugged. I already hated that shrug. I hated it SO MUCH. I still hate it to this very day with all my being. I know he’s shrugging like that even now at all his little cronies across The Black Armada, in and around barking orders.
“I don’t think the false gods are the point. It didn’t seem to care about any of that. I know it’s sitting up there in the sky somewhere, or hidden away in a cave, watching all of us quietly. Even us two. A Silent Observer. You can feel it too, right? Like a hum in the background behind everything else?”
A pause to think.
“I think you’re closer to what it wants with the feelings of growth. But first we need to help our people build something bigger than tribes. Our first task is eliminating the competition.”
He had a point. I’d already figured that out. Only one apex predator species could be allowed. Clearly Xex in his cruelty and hunger had been given this job of pest control. Whilst I do regret the genocide and extinction of our genetic cousins across the tens of thousands of years after our first meeting, mostly via a wandering Xex – I acknowledge it as necessary back then. The same fate of any modern heretic outside the influence of The Creator.
As a more sensible, modern god, I see now we could have used the Neanderthals and Denisovians as servant castes, and over time we could slowly have bred them out of existence.
But it’s much too late for that.
With Xex in my cottage, I turned and busied myself with the cauldron, pulling up the extra hot liquid from within and spinning it in a sideways figure-eight. Using my powers always helped me think in those early days.
It still does.
“We can’t do anything without the third man, but if he’s anything like you, we need to train ourselves.”
He threw me a puzzled look.
“You think I’m just a lowly woman, but I can destroy you without any effort. What if this man shows up and is more powerful than us? What if he thinks we’re not needed? Like I know you think of me?”
I didn’t know if playing on his fears would work at the time, but it was the first time he had shown any pause without layering it with his famous bravado.
“And besides… You obviously wasted too much of your time lording over your kingdoms to learn how to use your powers properly.”
He narrowed his eyes in anger, but said nothing. I could tell he was furious at being talked to this way by a woman, but being thrown across the field had smartened him up to challenging me directly with sheer force.
Would he try to kill me in my sleep and take whatever of my powers he could scavenge for himself, with some strange ritual The Creator had kept from me but given to him?
“So what?”
He knew what I was prompting, and it was probably a bad idea on my part too. This evil, yellow haired man had used his gifts already in corrupt ways for sex, wealth, and power. If I raised him to the same level of control and power as me, he might simply betray me.
“I’ll teach you on one condition.”
I offered it, and he tensed yet again.
“Yeah?”
“Treat me like you would treat yourself. Even if it’s only pretend, I want you to respect me as if I was a copy of who you are. Treat me exactly how you would like me to treat you.”
I was hoping at the time that he had enough ego, pride, and narcissism that it might just work.
I pulled myself up straight, and locked eyes with those crystal blue orbs of his. We sat there in silence staring into each other’s eyes for a long time.
He was finally the one to speak first.
“Fine.”
I let out a sigh of relief, and dared to push a little farther.
“And you have to fix my fence.”
He burst out laughing in response. When he had guffawed for a solid minute he finally wiped a tear from his eye and leaned forward in his seat. His wounds were almost completely healed and only a few dark bruises and cuts remained which were already fading as if years had passed.
“I have to admit, if any of the women in my tribe had dared speak to me like this I would have killed them on the spot. But you…”
He trailed off and shrugged again. A smirk plastered on his face.
That fucking shrug.
“Treat me as your equal. We need to be a proper team to tackle what is coming together. You’ll need to have this same reciprocity of respect with the black eye man.”
He slouched back again and crossed his arms across his bare chest. He only wore the white and grey furs wrapped around the waist, hanging down to his shins. I recognized the blacks, greys, and whites of more arctic species found to the northeast, but caught myself glancing at the gaps between.
Averted my eyes before he noticed me looking.
“I like you, I think. Your damn personality.”
He confessed with a more archaic term, meaning “selfhood” moreso than personality, smiling smugly with his muscled arms still crossed.
“Does that mean yes?”
“I don’t know yet, but let’s pretend that it does for now.”
I could tell that I was possibly one of the first to stand up to Xex, and survive.
Not that anyone would ever know for thousands upon thousands of years afterwards.
He didn’t kill me that night, sleeping with one eye open as I did for most of it. Nor the many nights that followed, before the now deceased Jikos, God of Chaos arrived to join us.
The black-eyed man.
Xex, God of Control, became the bastard who now parades around as the Lord of The Black Armada and as the stubbornly self-proclaimed “ruler” of this Central Universe.
I often count the small victories of the present as worthless when compared to those first monumental successes. But maybe I shouldn’t, seeing how things went, all this time later.
That first morning together followed cautiously – on both our parts.
“I’m going to explore this peninsula land for now, go hunting. I’ll be back this evening.”
Xex was musing to himself.
Half thinking aloud, and half telling me.
“What’s your name?”
I asked.
“My clan name, or my chief name?”
“Whatever you want to be called.”
He shrugged that infuriating shrug.
“Call me Xex. I’m the God of Control.”
The name was simple – utilizing uvular and glottal fricative sounds modern English doesn’t have, but some languages still do so many millennia later. The title jerked something in the back of my head like the click of a lock. Secrets being unleashed. It scared me to no end knowing that there were phrases, code words, and other things, hidden inside my mind by The Creator.
Yet another series of questions to add to the pile. At least I knew my title, though.
“Serania. I am the God of Justice.”
I ventured it carefully, and he nodded approvingly, not showing any notice that I had just stated my own title.
“Why ‘gods,’ I wonder?”
He used an old forgotten word for deity – asking it of no-one, and rubbed his fingers down towards his chin in an exaggerated fashion. He had already shorn the hair from his face aside from the eyebrows earlier that morning down to stubble.
“Perhaps the Creator thought he needed to connect us to the knowledge of the tribes. It’s easier to introduce ourselves as something they know than as whatever we are now.”
“He?”
He smirked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I felt a loss of control, which enraged me considering I now knew his title. What if Xex was the third test? The journey, the waiting, and now Xex’s subversion? I knew I was the only woman of those I had seen in my visions, so this could likely be my third battle to justify myself as a Guardian of Human Destiny.
“Go explore. I will be here when you return. We are to remain waiting here, for our third.”
He said nothing. Stood up and left without any further response, opening the door with one hand. I could already see some of our differences. I used my powers as an extension of my body, starting fires, moving objects, and where I would have opened the door with my powers, he was rooted in his body even still.
Xex’s arrival, despite such dangerous beginnings and a horrific present, soon proved to be a boon.
I found the company to alleviate both the boredom of waiting and the loneliness I had felt before in avoiding people. Xex was certainly capable in bed when I finally chose to take him, when I found myself wooed eventually by his brash charms and rather clever mind. I had made sure never to develop any close bonds, lest young local men think themselves mighty enough to “conquer” such a witch as I and cause me later problems.
I merely wanted the physicality of closeness. Don’t we all?
I had been alone for so many years. Decades.
To my dead husband’s prior anger, I had remained consistently infertile after my coming of age, and The Creator ensured in his reimagining that I would still never bear children. Xex too, proved barely fertile in his other dalliances with mortals. Clearly some sort of higher calling The Creator had decided for us? I wonder sometimes even now, what our shared children would have, could have, been like.
Xex and I fell deeply in love, and it pains me with how much I hate him now for his inevitable betrayal.
Men like Xex? They never have enough. Never.
They need to feed the hungry maw, fill the void inside themselves with power, wealth, and yes, “control” most of all.
His misogyny merely hid itself away from my gaze, disguised in love.
But for a short time?
I was happy.
Truly happy.
