Alicornutopia

She was the figurehead. She was eternal. Her job was not to rule, but to exist. She had to be perfect.

She lived in isolation. Her home was flawless and unchanging. Its appearance today was identical to its appearance ten years ago. Every plate, painting, rug carefully maintained and replaced. At her home, it was always warm, with no distinguishable seasons.

Her guards were her only companions. She was a target. Attacks came. The guards stopped them at the borders. As far as she knew, her guards had never failed.

She had to be perfect.

Sometimes the attackers did reach her. Sometimes she was hurt. Sometimes she was taken.

In preparation for this inevitable outcome, her memories were recorded. She was unaware of this. They waited until she was sleeping.

Empty bodies, perfect copies of her, lay in a room below her house.

It was easiest for the guards when the intruders killed her. They would spend a day filling an empty body with the most recent memories. They would look at their notes and restore any unpreventable changes. She would wake up in bed with what she believed to be the previous night’s memories. Any small inconsistencies were easily dismissed.

Sometimes she was not killed. When this happened, the guards did not savor their task. They would take her, gently, calm her down, assure her that she was safe. Her death was always painless.

Sometimes she could not be found. Sometimes she was taken.
She trusted them and she would wait for her inevitable rescue.They did not wait. They woke another version of her up.
They would continue to search for what had been taken, the original. Sometimes, when they found her, she was broken. She always wanted to go home. She could not. Her home was already filled. Her death was painless. Her captors’ deaths were not.

She was not a fool.
The inconsistencies began to build.
She began marking herself, biting through her cheek each night, leaving it raw and tasting of copper.
In the morning, if the bite had disappeared, she would leave a mark inside the spine of her favorite book.
As the marks built, her suspicions turned to knowledge.
One day, she confronted them.
They denied nothing. They asked when she had started to suspect.
She told them.
They never deleted any copies. She died peacefully.
The next morning, she woke up, suspecting nothing.

He does not have a name. He takes one when necessary and leaves it behind when it’s associations become too painful. Here, he will be called Shard.

It was impossible for anyone to love him.
He did not know why.
It did not start immediately. He could greet someone and ask their name and they would respond normally. But by the end of the conversation, their revulsion would grow, as would their hatred. They did not want to look at him. It was difficult to be kind to him. They knew this was illogical. This only made the revulsion worse.

Everywhere he went, he brought life and warmth. Wars around him slowly died. Cities flourished. There was more laughter.
None of this warmth could ever be directed at him.
The longer Shard remained in one universe, the more the people in that universe began to despise him, began to want to push him out. The warmth was not tied to him. They were not grateful. He was seen as a blight on a place that was becoming a paradise.

Slipping between universes was as easy and as unconscious as breathing.

He was always alone and always lonely. He loved people. He loved watching them. He loved the moments at the beginning of conversations where others would smile and say, ‘It’s nice to meet you.’

Other existed with powers. One day a man saw Shard. This man was not strong enough to overcome Shard’s curse, but he was powerful enough to see through it and see that Shard was the source of the warmth that had been spreading through this man’s world. This man will be called Scope, though this was also not his name.

Scope was not a cruel person. Originally, he saw a way for both himself and Shard to benefit. Scope was a good actor. He still felt the revulsion, but could pretend as if he didn’t. Shard’s aura of life would only increase his own power and he could offer Shard comfort and love, though it was a false love, in return.

This was the first time Shard had ever experienced kindness. His loyalty and affection were instant and absolute. He would do anything for Scope. Shard was happier than he could ever remember being.

Scope’s world flourished. He became more powerful and more beloved than he would have ever dreamed. But as his power grew, so did his revulsion. He desired Shard, though he knew this was not fair. He knew it was the result of a curse. At first he was furious at himself for being so weak, then this fury turned towards the other possible target, Shard. Scope was able to keep up the act sometimes, for short intervals he bathed Shard in kindness and love. The rest of the time, the fury, the hatred escaped and he wanted nothing more than to drive Shard away. But he couldn’t do that, if Shard left, Scope would lose everything. So he hurt Shard, then offered small fragments of fake love to keep Shard loyal. Shard didn’t leave. To him, the cruelty was a price he was willing to pay for the kindness.

One day, the revulsion grew too strong, and Scope admitted the lie. He admitted that it had all been fake, that he had never felt anything but contempt for Shard.
This was worse than all of the previous pain.

Shard fled.
The only love he had ever experienced had been a lie.
He would likely never experience love, even a false love, again.

What was the point in living?
Shard tried to die.
But he could not, the same life that he gave to others so easily kept him tied to the universe. He could not stop existing.

Death noticed. Death has many incarnations and takes many forms. This death is called Morse.
Morse could see Shard’s curse, the way she could see the life of every living creature, but Death is not affected by Life’s curses.
Death is not lonely. Death does not care, not in the way humans do. Death does not feel sympathy.
But, eternity is tedious, and Morse is not the cause of entropy, she just carries it out.
Shard would never die, no rules would be broken.
And if Morse could regret, she would regret that she could not offer Shard the escape that every other living being was so freely given.

Morse took Shard in her arms and carried him home.
When Shard woke up, he was afraid, but he saw in Morse something he had never experienced before. Indifference.
A calm that will last for eternity. A calm that will never be broken. And in that calm was a promise of safety, of peace.
And then the promise was spoken out loud, “You are safe here. You may always return.”

Shard talked to Morse, told his stories and listened to her own.
He asked for help, and it was given. He asked for truth and truth was told.
The calm never wavered.
Shard wanted love, but tried to be content with peace.

There were two brothers. A’el and Aeryn. They believed they could not die. They were not wrong.

Every living being has a spark. It is the center of their being. Memories, personality, morality, connections, all are tied to it, but the spark always remains at the core. Every spark is unique and so is every person.
The brothers sparks were tied to existence. Their sparks could not be extinguished by any force or any power. The existence of the universe includes them, so they remain and so do the brothers.

However, Sparks can be broken.

The two were not always close. A’el loved creating. He would find an empty universe and plant a seed of life, he would coax it along, watching centuries stream past in seconds, pruning and encouraging and shaping. He loved life, in all it’s forms, and often spent years in a physical shape, wandering the worlds, enjoying the sensation of water or sunlight or cool earth.

A’eryn loved destruction. Time was relative to the brothers. They could enter it, or not, at their will. The lives Aeryn saw, from his perspective, would soon vanish anyways. He hated them sometimes, for their ability to stop existing, to stop experiencing. He hated being forced to exist.

What A’eryn destroyed, A’el would restore. What A’el restored, Aeryn would destroy. They were caught in an endless cycle. In their lives, their only constant was each other.

One day, A’el showed Aeryn the beauty he found in creation.
Aeryn showed A’el the reason for his drive to destruction.
They became close, in the way only two people who have nothing but each other can be. Their hatred turned to dependence. If they had to face eternity, at least they weren’t doing it alone.

But, the two of them weren’t alone. There were other beings equal or greater in power to them.

Sparks can be broken.

A’el would have tried to compromise. Aeryn dove head first into a fight. When A’el arrived, it was too late.
Aeryn had shattered. Fragments of his spark had spread across all the universes, absorbed into the sparks of new beings.

A’el began to search for his brother, for the pieces of him. He found pieces of his spark in a great, amphorous being that roamed across universes, living off starlight and the dust of dying stars. He found a piece in a creature that lived at the bottom of an ocean, filtering small beings from the silt. He found a spark in a musician, whose songs were terribly familiar and almost brought A’el to tears.
He could not destroy these beings, not even to get his brother back. So he watched them, reveled in their lives, and waited. When their time came, when their spark faded, he would pluck the fragment of his brother from the remains.

There were so many pieces. His collection grew but it seemed so insignificant, such a small part of what his brother was. Each new piece seemed to add almost nothing.

Then he found the revolutionary. So familiar and yet so foreign. His brother made up almost half of this man’s Spark. This man had almost half of what A’el had been trying to find.
A’el felt hope, for the first time since his brother had vanished. He watched the revolutionary and waited.

The man had Aeryn’s fire, Aeryn’s rage, but he had something Aeryn did not. A fierce joy. Passion. He fought relentlessly. He wept for fallen comrades. He raged against his oppressors, and he celebrated every breath he took. He was delighted to live. Delighted to be able to fight for those he loved and the strangers who experienced his same pain.
He was complete, in a way Aeryn had never been.
He was victorious. He laughed and then he mourned for those he could not save. He did not try to rule. He discovered other universes and decided to fight for them instead.
Watching him, A’el rooted for every victory and mourned for his every loss. He put success in his way, did what he could from a distance. This was a piece of his brother after all, he owed this man something.

But, the revolutionary did not die. He should have, but his survival was only partly due to A’el’s intervention.
It took time for A’el to understand. Aeryn’s shard, which must remain in the universe, was no longer just a piece of this man’s Spark, it had integrated with it. This man was as eternal as Aeryn had been.
If A’el wanted his brother back, he would have to kill the revolutionary. No, not just kill him, destroy him and cut out the piece of his Spark that used to belong to his brother.

A’el could not.
He looked at the shards of his brother. Not enough, not nearly enough, and even if he found every other shard, Aeryn would never be complete, not while the revolutionary lived. (How many worlds had the revolutionary saved? Not as many as Aeryn had destroyed, not yet)

A’el released the shards into the universe, to become part of new sparks, new lives. As A’el wished his brother a final farewell, he felt himself break.

A young man found a strange creature in his city. He taught it to speak and helped it grow. It lived in the ground, tunneled through the earth without breaking it. Below his city, it began to spread. It had long tendrils, vines that could be stronger than any human or do work too delicate for human hands. Eventually it knew enough to communicate that it was not an it, or even an I. It was a we, a plural being.

His family was not kind and he had few other human connections. Sometimes when his father would yell, when he would stand stoic taking the abuse so the other swouldn’t have to, the vines would reach up and wrap around his ankle through the sole of his shoe, offering silent comfort.
One day, his father hurt him badly. He ran and the vines opened up and sheltered him inside them, in a cave of living green.
When he woke up, everyone was dead, a vine through their heart, strange flowers sprouting from their tips.
The vines had spread through the world.
They saw that the humans were hurting him, so the humans had to go. He was the most important thing to them. The center of their world and their morality.
They did not understand his pain or his grief.
They began to fill the world with strange new life.
Then they broke through to other worlds, parallel worlds. They filled those worlds with new life and killed everything that used to exist.
He begged them to stop.
They thought his pain was because he was horrified by the gore
So they showed him death after death, made him watch. They hoped to desensitize him. They weren’t cruel. They just didn’t understand.

Eventually, other humans, a brother and a sister, managed to talk to the vines. They had the words and the stability to communicate what he couldn’t. They explained empathy. They explained guilt and morality.
Finally, the vines understood what exactly they had done. They didn’t think it was inherently wrong, but they understood that they had caused him pain, and that was the last thing they wanted to do

They compromised. They understood cause and effect. They now believed the deaths themselves caused the pain, but they didn’t’ actually care. They decided to hide future deaths from him. The deaths weren’t wrong unless he experienced pain, and he wouldn’t’ experience pain if the didn’t know.

He was healing, but then he found out. This broke him again. Again they compromised. They promised not to kill except in self-defense or defense of him. Now he wanders the multiverse, finding empty worlds for the vines. He goes to human worlds sometimes, but he never stays long. He knows if he does, and someone hurts him, he might not be able to stop the vines from killing everyone.