![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alphabet challenge - k
2013-Mar-14, Thursday 10:44 am K - Creation & Destruction
“Don’t you ever get angry?”
He glanced down from where he sat on the edge of the cliff face, the red of the sunset bleeding around him and casting a bloody halo.
“Why?” he asked, plucking the apple she was holding out of her hands.
“Well, all the things that happen to you. Before, you seem pretty nice, and then after–”
“I am what I am,” he informed her, then took a bite of the apple. “What does it matter before or after?”
“You’re children, though–”
“Are what they are, and were treated as they were.” He licked scarred lips. “Good apple.”
“I think it makes sense, why you end everything,” she said after a few minutes.
“Oh?”
“I would be angry, if what was done to you had been done to me.”
She looked at him again, but he was still staring over the edge of the cliff, foot kicking and creating a low and slow drumbeat tempo.
“You misunderstand me,” he finally said. “Not to take that from you–all of you, because all of you tend towards this, when you’re young. You lack experience, and you’re angry at all the promises given to you in your youth you are learning are lies.” He took a last bite of the apple. “I’m not angry.”
“But how can you not be angry? They took your children, and killed the others, they always blame you for things–”
“Much of the blame rightly so.”
“–and then venom and the snake and… how can you not be angry? Why do you end things, then? What does it give you? What reason to end it all?”
“I am not an end,” he said, tossing the apple core in his hand a few times before throwing it out over the cliff. “I am a consequence. I am not who I was when we began, nor am I who I will be when things end.” He paused, leaf green eyes thoughtful. “You all speak of end–how I will end the world, how things will burn to ash on the wind–but it is not an end. It is a beginning. It seems, especially when you are young, that all you can remember is how I will end things, as if I am some divine recompense for the slights and pains and trials you have been put through.” He glanced side-long at her. “But you forget Baldr and Hoenir, Modi and Magni, Vidar and Vali. You forget Lif and Lifthraser. This world is a seed, and it will remain so until it has been surrounded in flame.”
“And that somehow makes it okay for all the other things that have been done?”
He laughed.
“No, but that person is long dead. Were you not listening? They killed his compassion, and what is left is me. Consequence–what happens when you remove the stones banking your fire and then keep feeding it? I am not as I was or as I will be.” He paused, then smiled–even with the scars it was kind and turned him lovely. Something unique, beautiful through that uniqueness. “I am fire–I will burn just the same, but what I burn has changed.”
Silence settled between them again, and she looked over the vista in front of them.
“I am sorry,” he said eventually, “that you were turned down for such a flimsy reason.”
“It’s okay, I think,” she said. “I’ll be stronger for it. Thank you for listening. And explaining.”
“And you for the apple.”
“You stole that,” she pointed out.
“You didn’t take it back,” he said with an impish grin, and vanished.
