"We don't speak of them," he added. "The ones beyond." "Not because the church forbids it... but because the words rot something in the throat."
He turned to her fully now, and for a moment—just one flicker of a second—his shadow did not match his form.
A trick of the light, surely.
But it leaned. And its hands were wrong.
Mellirion said nothing.
She simply breathed—and even that felt like sacrilege in this place.
Somewhere above, the thing in the rafters shifted again. A beam creaked. And the flame guttered low, turning the mural into a blur of reds and blacks and unknowable expression.
Outside, the wind scraped across the mansion's eaves like fingernails against hollow bone.
Inside, her mind whispered one certainty that had no name:
Some things seek worship. Others only want to be forgotten.
.....
In the time before time, when the world was formless and no mountain had yet pierced the firmament, the skies whispered with mantra and the valleys lay smooth as untouched wax, Parvat, god of wisdom and heights, walked alone. His voice shaped the canyons, and his breath carried the seed of stone.
From the sacred mist of his dreaming, he created the Divine Monkeys—first children of the hills, made not of clay nor fire but of inquisitiveness, cleverness, and unrelenting desire. They were beings of boundless spirit, their minds quick as lightning, their hands never idle, and their hearts full of both wonder and mischief.
To mankind, they became both friend and tormentor—inventors of riddles, stealers of flame, bringers of strange dreams and miraculous artifice.
Their temples dotted the earliest landscapes. Monuments of unpolished brilliance, fashioned from crystal and bone, metal and moonlight. Statues that wept oil, bells that tolled with no rope, altars that sang the names of the gods. In those golden centuries, the valley where now rests Greystone was their holiest of grounds, where sky met soil in harmony.
But among these divine beings, there arose one unlike the rest.
A monkey of tremendous intellect and charm—Moon Gnok, named for his birth beneath the white eclipse, when the moon glowed full but cast no shadow. His eyes saw deeper than most, and his hands shaped with eerie precision. He spoke in glyphs. He dreamt in mantra.
And in his dreaming, he grew proud.
For Moon Gnok, it was no longer enough to worship. He wished to be worshipped.
He fashioned things no monkey before had dared to attempt—shrines not to the gods, but to his own image, towers that pierced the clouds and statues whose mouths whispered his name unbidden. He declared before the others:
"What is Parvat to me? I too am wise. I too build. I too shape." "There is a hill within me greater than his—one made not of stone, but of knowledge."
Some followed him. Others wept.
It is written in the scrolls of black ash that his words echoed even through the mantra fields and reached Parvat himself, who stirred atop his seat beneath the world's crust.
The mountain god came down—not in rage, but in sorrow. He appeared not as a titan nor a storm, but as an old man, robed in moss and fog, leaning on a staff carved from petrified memory.
He approached Moon Gnok gently and said,
"Dearest child. Dearest builder,. If you claim such greatness, then prove it not in word, but in stone." "Build mountains taller than mine. Mightier. Prettier. Shape them not for worship, but for truth."
And Moon Gnok did.
He raised his arms and drew mantra from the hollow air. He sang syllables never meant for the mortal tongue. And from his song rose a range of unimaginable beauty—peaks of diamond and moonstone, veins of ruby like blood through white snow, cliffs that sang, and ridges shaped like spires of starlight.
The Divine Monkeys rejoiced. Some bowed. Others cried out that a new god had arrived.
Parvat smiled and spoke:
"Oh, dearest son. Indeed, you have made something wondrous. Look upon it, and dance, for you are the creator now."
And Moon Gnok danced.
He danced with joy and madness. He danced as the sun set and the stars emerged. He danced until the wind stilled.
But when he turned to gaze once more upon his creation—
He saw that the jewels had turned to ash, the gold into brittle limestone, and the moonstones into cracked, pale granite. His mountains, once radiant, now stood silent and skeletal—stripped of glamor, reduced to bare stone.
He fell to his knees.
A cry tore from his chest, not like a monkey, but like a man who had glimpsed the infinite and lost it. It was a cry that split the valley. It echoed for seven days, carving the canyons with its grief.
Parvat stood beside him, silent, and then knelt.
He touched the earth and said,
"Dearest son, your knowledge was great. Your ambition is greater still." "But your pride… your dear, tragic pride, has made your wonder hollow." "Stone must be humble. Only then may it endure."
And with that, he banished Moon Gnok.
Some say the mad monkey fled into the void between mantra echoes, that he now sculpts impossible things in silence. Others claim he sleeps beneath the valley still, dreaming new blasphemies.
But in the Greystone Valley, the mountain range he built remains.
Its peaks are pale. Its cliffs cracked. No gold. No jewel. Only bare, haunted stone.
And from that stone was carved the Church—the greatest site of Aetherian pilgrimage. A place of humility. A place of fallen ambition and sacred regret.
The range became called 'The Greyston Mountains.'
Etched into the doorframe of its ruin:
"Kõrgem uhkus, sügavam langus." "The higher the pride, the deeper the fall."
.....
The candlelight in the hallway was dying. It sputtered with the last of its breath, casting long, shivering shadows that stretched across the cracked slate floor like withered fingers reaching toward retreat. Dust hung in the air in thick ribbons, disturbed only by the motion of old breath and the creak of settling bookshelves behind ancient stone walls.
There was a faint, metallic scent in the corridor—not blood, not exactly, but the ghost of rusted iron, like old armor left too long in a damp chapel. Beneath it, older still, lay the odor of aged vellum and dried ink, scorched in places where the lamps had flickered too close to truth.
And there, beneath the arch of the apse where the last rays of sun had died, stood a man who had rewritten sin in ink.
Gasgorin Caelyra, once bright-haired and silver-tongued, is now thick about the middle and slow in the ankles. He wore a suit of stiff black wool with pinched cuffs and tarnished brass buttons—worn smooth by repetition, not care. A burgundy cravat rested like a silk noose at his throat. His hat, a stiff-brimmed, brim-darkened affair, sat low over his flaking bald patch, an unsuccessful deception on a man too proud to surrender fully to time.
He was not handsome. He never had been. But his presence smelled of something deeply human: parchment, pipe tobacco, and softened leather worn to a sheen by the brush of countless student hands seeking knowledge.
The chill from the cracked stained-glass windows behind him did little to move him.
He did not flinch. He had stood still through riots and revolutions, through sacred trials, public condemnations, and one attempted excommunication by fire.
His voice was low. Round. Worn smooth by decades of debate and defiance.
"But now, after Lincoln's blasphemy against the Church and the Crimson Senate…"
The words lingered in the air like incense, too heavy to rise.
"...this site has become what it was always meant to be. A temple of forbidden knowledge. An academy built on heresy and full of truths they would rather you never learn."
His hand moved across the crumbling lectern beside him—a thing chiseled from the broken altar stone that had once held offerings to Aerion, now splintered down its spine by age and deliberate neglect. His fingers traced the grooves there, pausing where an old bloodstain had long ago been lacquered over.
His nails were ink-stained. His palms were coarse. This was a man who had written with purpose, translated with fury, and taught as if it were a final act of defiance.
They said he had refused widow-burning rites, even while fire priests chanted behind him. They said he had signed every page of the "Mother of Knowledge" with ink laced from his own blood. They said he had once poisoned a high bishop's wine—not to kill him, but to make him see hallucinations of the sins he'd buried beneath choirboy silks.
He never confirmed. He never denied it.
His ancestors had been war-banners in the War of Thirteen Crowns, carriers of sigils blessed and cursed alike. From them he inherited not just voice and vehemence, but the gilded gift of poisons, the instinctive eye for bloodline traits, and the kind of charm that wore a rusted smile.
Now he stood in the heart of a cathedral scrubbed of divinity—walls repurposed as lecture halls, sacristies turned into laboratories, and baptistries sealed and filled with specimen jars.
Outside, the wind rattled the old bell frame. It didn't ring anymore.
The stone beneath her boots was colder than it had any right to be.Mellirion's heel struck it with a soft scrape as she stepped forward, her figure outlined in the dying light that bled in from the corridor behind. The door creaked shut on ancient hinges, and with its closing, the warmth of the world beyond was gone—swallowed in the thick, breathing gloom of the old hall.
The air within was dense—too dense for its size, almost oily. It carried the layered scent of burnt beeswax, ink-dust, and something more pungent… stale resin or dried bile, perhaps. The kind of rot one only finds in buildings that have forgotten what it means to pray. Her breath caught slightly in her throat, coated with the astringent taste of old parchment and mildew—scripture steeped in silence too long.
At the far end of the room, nestled between two scorched bookcases and beneath a soot-blacked mural of a many-armed saint eating her own eyes, Gasgorin Caelyra turned a page. The movement was deliberate, the scratch of the vellum soft but amplified by the silence, like a whisper dragged across broken glass.
A single candle guttered beside him—its flame dancing in irregular spasms, casting fractured shadows across his crumpled frame. His coat, charcoal wool trimmed in a threadbare crimson, clung to his thick torso like it remembered a better fit. Beneath his broad shoulders, his belly curved outward—a barrel of ink and ideas, dulled but not diminished. His hat—tilted low—hid the hollow crown of his scalp, but not the red flush that always seemed to linger in his cheeks, as though wine lived in his blood.
He looked up.
The flame shivered.
"Mellirion Greystone…" He coughed—once, then again, a dry rattle in the chest that seemed to echo up from his ribs rather than down from his throat."Dear Mellirion, you're late to the lessons."
His voice still carried that particular timbre of ink-stained intellect—half-gentleman, half-rebel. The kind that could just as easily quote theology as burn it. His words didn't echo in the room. They sank, as if the air itself swallowed them in deference.
Mellirion—rigid in poise, but not unamused—folded her hands before her and gave a shallow bow.
"Sorry… sorry, Uncle."
The air seemed to pause.
A shuffling sound came from the back, where Veliranya sat perched like a sin-bird in the rafters of civility, a wineglass poised in her fingers. Her legs dangled over the arm of the stone bench, boots kicking lazily at nothing in particular. She didn't speak—just sipped. The sound of her swallowing was uncomfortably loud in the quiet. Her smirk, however, said everything.
Gasgorin rose from his chair with a grunt—a noise half-man, half-tome. He crossed the room with the soft, dragging rhythm of old carpet slippers against stone. He stopped before Mellirion, peering up into her eyes from beneath the brim of his hat.
Then—with a motion both familial and faintly ceremonial—he raised his hand and brought it down in a gentle rap upon her forehead.
Bonk.
"It's Teacher to you," he said, narrowing his eyes."Try it. T–E–A–C–H–E–R. Come now, darling. Mouth it like a vow."
Mellirion blinked once, feigning chastisement. Then, a spark of her mother's mischief touched her lips.
"Tea—cher," she murmured, syllables elongated, her tone almost mocking, almost affectionate.
Gasgorin chuckled—a warm, gravelly noise that filled the space with strange comfort. He reached up, rubbing the crown of her head like she was five again and had just mispronounced "mantra."
"You sound like your mother when she was about to get us both exiled."
Mellirion's smile faltered—just slightly—at the mention. But she didn't look away.
The candle died with a faint pop, as though it had exhaled its final breath.
Darkness crept into the library—not sudden, but gradual, like ink spreading in water. The cold followed, slow and quiet, sinking into the cracks between floor tiles and settling around the ankles like a fog grown weary from travel. The silence, once contemplative, now pressed down with a different weight—more watching than listening.
A rustle of fabric.
The soft clack of a boot heel against stone.
And then, Veliranya moved.
She approached like a shadow stretched too far, her silhouette limned in the faint halo of moonlight seeping through the warped glass behind her. Her footsteps made no echo—only the subtle swish of silk over dust as she drew close.
Mellirion did not look up.
Not at first.
But then the whisper came, warm and too near.
"Why are you late?"
The words ghosted along her ear like a breath not entirely her sister's.
Veliranya leaned in—close, too close—the wine still on her breath, though it smelled more like bitten cherries left out in the heat. Her tone was playful, but beneath it, always, always, was the knife edge of mockery and memory.
"Were you...""Lingering in the training courtyard again?""Watching those oiled wrestlers grapple in the dusk light—your hands twitching behind a hedge, like a scholar caught in prayer?"
Her voice was silk soaked in ink. Dangerous, theatrical, and fond.
Mellirion didn't answer.She didn't flinch.
But the faintest shimmer of blue-white energy formed around her wrist—a coil of mantra cold as mountain marrow.
Without ceremony, she flung her hand skyward, and a boulder of frost formed above Veliranya's head—not heavy enough to crush, but certainly enough to humble.
The ice cracked the floor when it fell beside her, sending shards across the room like frozen regret.
"I'm not like you," Mellirion said, her voice low, eyes fixed on the candle's dead wick.
Veliranya smiled, brushing powdered frost from her sleeve as though swatting away memory.
"I know that," she said, and for a moment her tone softened, like a song remembered from childhood."That's why I love you so damn much."
Somewhere behind them, Gasgorin cleared his throat—a sound like a wooden chair dragged across a chapel's stone floor, dry and deliberate. It echoed longer than it should have, swallowed and returned by the tall shelves lining the old lecture hall, which seemed more mausoleum than schoolroom tonight.
"What was that?" he said, not turning from the warped pages of the tome before him."Did I just see sibling affection—disguised as attempted fratricide?"
Veliranya twirled her fingertip along the rim of her empty glass, its once-clear bowl now smudged with the imprint of wine-dark lips. She looked over her shoulder with a slow, lazy grin—the smile of a girl who made mischief her altar long ago.
Mellirion, arms crossed and jaw set like granite, stood silent by the ruined pillar near the old window, where the frost had not yet melted from her last outburst. A few flecks of ice still clung to the edge of her boot like accusations.
"The most normal thing when you have a sibling like this," she muttered, voice clipped, but not cruel—more like a page being turned too quickly. As if sealing something shut.
A silence followed, but it was not the kind of quiet born from peace.It pressed. It listened.As though the very bones of the hall expected more—demanded it.
Somewhere far above, hidden among the black beams and peeling frescoes, a weight shifted—dust falling in faint spirals through a beam of pale light like ashes falling back into history.
Gasgorin exhaled slowly and placed his palm across the open book before him. The leather of the binding creaked—a whisper of old skin and older truth. His fingers, swollen at the joints and ink-stained beneath the nails, traced the curling edge of the page before he straightened his back with a pop of vertebrae.
"These two…" he muttered, almost to himself, "so different, yet so... so inseparable."
He turned then, lumbering toward the old lecture slate with the kind of weariness not just of age, but of bearing witness too long. The chalk in his hand left a powdery shriek as it scrawled rough letters across the soot-black board.
THE GOD WHO BOTHERED
"All right," he said, voice adjusting into the practiced cadence of a man who had spoken dangerous truths in safer times. "Let me tell you a tale."
He paused—eyes twitching for a moment as if something behind the board had moved, something just beneath the stone, wriggling like roots in unseen soil.
Then he chuckled—an uneven sound, part laugh, part cough.
"A tale no Jedi will ever tell you...."
A blink.
"Wait. No. Wrong world."
His face twitched once with amusement—or maybe confusion—as he turned back to the room. His shoulders rose and fell beneath his musty black wool, and the brass buttons of his coat gleamed dully, catching what little remained of the oil-lamp's flame.
Mellirion frowned faintly. There it was again—that strange crawling at the edge of perception. A sensation not of remembering, but of anticipating the memory. Like a story she hadn't heard yet but already knew she'd forgotten once before.
"Huh...?"
Gasgorin's eyes caught hers for a fleeting second, and for a moment—just a flicker—she swore they weren't his at all. Just holes. Deep. Reflective. Like ink too dark to read.
"Sorry," he said, too quickly. "Don't mind me."
"It's a tale no Crow of senate or the church will every tell you this tell, I can tell that..even I was quite facinated" He said
"There was once a garden.....it had Gods...many...many Gods"
"Gods of all kind, Gods who created, Gods who destroyed, Gods who just existed, Gods who tried to conqueror, but Gods indeed"
"Gods were indifferent, Gods didn't cared, They created whatever they wanted, Destroyed whatever they can"
"Amongst the garden, lied Bugs, Bugs of all kinds, little Bugs, Big Bugs, Bugs that ate only leaves, Bugs that ate other bugs up, Bugs that killed, Bugs that devoured, Bugs that stole, Bugs that protected smaller bugs, Bugs that took advantage of others, Bugs that let others take advantage of them, Selfless Bugs, selfish bugs"
"Unlike The Gods, The bugs were'nt indiferrent, they were weak, they were tiny, but they can feel, they were better than them, cause they were'nt eternal, that's how they could have lived way better life than them"
"Soon enough, the bugs created an eternal flame, flame as eternal as the Gods"
"The Flame spread, The Flame burned the Bugs, The Bugs cried, The Bugs prayed to the Gods who were so above of them yet they beilived in them"
"But the Gods didn't even listened, they were so above, the prayers never..never....reached them"
"Some reached but were diluted within the prayers of other bugs"
"& the prayers that were heard...were ignored"
"The Gods couldn't care less, Not cause they were evil, they were just eternal & by extension, indifferent".
"Those all prayers reached a point..where they were heard"
"Heard by one of the Gods"
"This God....he was different"
"Cursed...that God was cursed"
"...By love"
"By Empathy"
"By Compassion"
"By kindness"
"That God was indeed, the most cursed thing in that infinitely big garden"
Gasgorin's voice softened now—not from fatigue, but from reverence.
As if the tale no longer belonged to him.
As if he were merely remembering it on behalf of someone else.
"He heard the bugs."
"He understood the bugs."
The words came slow, like dust falling from rafters in a cathedral left to rot.
"He knew how filthy they could be. He knew how good they could be. He saw them at their most depraved—greedy, cruel, indulgent. And he saw them at their rarest—noble, trembling with kindness, defying death to save a smaller life."
"He saw their lowest pits. He saw their highest peaks."
Gasgorin's hand rested lightly on the edge of the pulpit. His fingers had stopped trembling, but something in his shoulders sagged—like a man remembering a burden so vast it could only be carried by myth.
"And he knew…""He knew it was not his place to care.""It was not his task to save.""They were below him—so far below—barely embers in the wind beneath his gaze."
"But still, he cared."
"Because he was cursed."
The fireless hearth let out a small crack, though there were no flames to speak of.
"The worst part of his curse… was that it was self-inflicted."
Gasgorin straightened slowly, the candlelight—or what little filtered moonlight remained—carving hollows beneath his eyes.
"He chose it. He chose the curse. He chose to hear the prayers—every single one. The prayers of liars, of fools, of the innocent and the monstrous alike."
"He took it into himself, and he walked. Toward the flame."
"And when he reached it—when he saw the inferno consuming the garden he did not own—he did not turn away."
"He walked to his well.""He drew water from it—his water.""And he flung it upon the flames."
Gasgorin's hand rose, fingers splaying as if scattering unseen droplets.
"The fire hissed. Recoiled. Dimmed."
"And then it rose again."
"For as long as the bugs existed, so too would their flame—the flame of suffering, of ignorance, of endless conflict."
"It was all meaningless. He knew it."
The silence that followed was not empty. It was thick with ash.
"He knew how absurd it was.To carry water to a fire that never ends."
"But he did it anyway."
"Over and over.""Drawing. Dousing. Watching it return. Drawing again."
"Each time the fire laughed. Each time the gods looked away."
"And still, he did it."
"Because he saw how the bugs looked at him when he did."
A long breath left him, not heavy, but clear.
"And that look…""That fragile, fleeting look in their eyes…"
Gasgorin closed his own eyes then, as though tasting the weight of it behind his lids.
"It made his eternal damnation—the absurdity, the futility, the loneliness—worth it."
"Because in that moment, they believed someone saw them."
"And for him… that was enough."
"He would happily keep doing that meaningless job"
Gasgorin did not raise his voice. He didn't need to.
The weight of the tale had shifted. From myth to confession. From parable to prophecy.
And the room—its silence now stained with a kind of reverence—listened.
The shadows along the rafters no longer moved with the wind. They leaned in.
"The worst part of his tragedy…" Gasgorin said, eyes narrowed not in judgment, but mourning,"…was that he did it by choice."
"No divine decree compelled him.""No curse from another hand. No oath. No chain."
"He could have stopped at any moment.Any hour, any eon."
His fingers hovered briefly in the air, gesturing toward an imaginary gate never walked through.
"He could have let the fire swallow the bugs.Let the garden rot and wither.He could have let it end, and it would not have mattered."
"Because the garden needed him.""He did not need the garden."
The words echoed faintly. A truth too enormous to kneel before.
"But he continued."
"Because he couldn't be like the other gods.Because something in him cracked—and instead of sealing it shut, he let it remain open."
A pause. Gasgorin closed his eyes.
And the next words came not from his throat, but his marrow.
"No matter how the garden changed…No matter how the bugs evolved or decayed…He would not change."
"Nor would his struggle."
"It would remain absurd.And he would bear it willingly."
The last word held a finality that tasted like iron in the mouth.
"He smiles," Gasgorin said."And he keeps walking.Water drawn. Flames doused.Knowing they will rise again."
"Because he was cursed by himself."
The syllables fell heavy, slow—like drops of black ink in a glass of clear water.
"Because he gave a damn.""Because he damned himself."
"To an eternity of absurd struggle."
"Not out of glory.Not for praise.But out of kindness."
"Because he was cursed with compassion."
"Because he was cursed with empathy.""With love.""With kindness."
Gasgorin's breath hitched—a flicker of something deeply buried.
"And the worst wound he ever gave himself…"
His voice grew quieter.
"…was perseverance."
"The choice to move forward."
"To keep walking when he knew no one would truly see him."
"When he knew the bugs—fragile, finite—could never understand the shape of his burden."
"When he knew they would forget him."
Gasgorin looked down at his open hand—weathered, calloused, still ink-stained. And then closed it.
"But in his heart… he was more of a bug than any of them."
"And that—that—was enough."
The final words came, soft and final as ash settling after the fire.
"He kept moving forward.""Because he chose to.""Because he acted.""Because—"
He looked up, and for the briefest moment, his eyes did not belong to this world.
"He was the God who Bothered."