Freewrite #3. This short story segment was written as one of a series of quick exercises designed to be both an outlet for refining vague ideas and an opportunity to improve the flow and dynamics of my writing. This particular freewrite was motivated by a longer story that has been in the back of my mind for a long time. I don't know if the full 'novel-length' version will ever become a reality...
____

Welcome, Child of Morning, to the halls of my mind. Here is the essence that defines me and supports you. Here is my soul, laid bare for you. Look upon all that I am, all that you were created from, and find the answers you seek.

The voice was a tickling whisper in the back of my mind, a presence that I could feel both within me and around me as I stood in the crystalline cavern. Within it was the wisdom of inconceivable age, the comfort of a loving mother, and a strange, mourning regret that I didn't understand. This was my world, the place that had created and sustained the nine races for all of time, a place of rippling mountains and raging waters, sun-bleached deserts and decaying swamps. This was Ii-tanai at the core of Her being, and yet it was nothing more than a cavern of amethyst deep within the ground.

Dreams and longings winged through the stale air in visions of soft-glowing mist and ghostly reflection. Half-formed thoughts and musings reverberated through the massive chamber in soundless waves, whispering to me as they passed through my mind. Fear assaulted me while warmth comforted me. Anger ravaged me while tears fought free from the back of my eyes. I stood, surrounded by the ghosts of an immutable memory, and endured all that a sentient world had ever felt.

It was beautiful. It was impossible. It was beyond anything that our wisest scholars could ever have hypothesized, and yet it was undeniably true. For all of time, we had been the denizens of a sentient world, the creations of a living being instead of the glad accidents of nature. Our very world was the Goddess that we had dreamed of and searched for, the Mother that every race had incorporated into their religions. I had stumbled upon the answers to our most ancient questions.

That which is before you is often the hardest to see, Child. The world's amusement danced about me like fireflies of mirth, and I laughed in Her stead. I will never know if the elation I felt in that moment was mine or my creator's, but the purity of the feeling left its mark on my soul.

I could have floated forever in the bliss of revelation, if not for the touch of a cold finger of grief against my mind. It lit up around me in a cold, purple nimbus, and as I looked around at the glittering expanse of the cavern, I could see that it permeated the space like stormclouds scattered within the mist. I could feel the storm gathering to break, and I feared to see what a world's grief could do. Still, I thought I understood it, with the wasting disease rampant on the surface far above me. I thought it clear that our Mother would be mourning for her lost children.

In retrospect, I knew nothing. I stood before my maker with blinders of foolishness shielding my eyes from the wisdom and the truth around me, and thus I spent my time there searching for a cure instead of seeing the real problem. In the end, I had nothing but the great weight of a world's grief and a sense of immense failure.

As I took my leave of that holy place, my world whispered to me in the weary voice of ages, Only one enemy in all of existence is invincible, Morning Star. When you know that enemy, you shall know the course you must take.

Over the long, horrible months that followed, I would replay those words in my mind a thousand, thousand times, and yet it would be longer still before I could see the answers they gave me.