Humans are fragile.
You know this. You are not one, but you know this. You have observed from the outside.
You know this.
You are not a human, because you were made to be something else completely―a puppet, all smooth skin and tight strings and unblinking eyes.
You know this.
And yet, you are everything that you were made not to be. Shattered like glass. Bleeding. Fragile.
You toe the line between human and puppet.
It is perhaps the most painful thing in the world, to feel alive in a body that isn’t supposed to be.
When you are made, you shed tears.
You look to your mother with pleading eyes.
Except the truth of it all is that she is not your mother. Mothers are people for humans.
She is little more than your maker. Your creator. The essence in which you were made in.
You call out to her, pleading.
Desperation is for humans.
She casts you away to rot.
She does not kill you.
It would be a mercy. You deserve none of it.
You awake, years later, weakened.
It is a mistake. A flaw in the detailed system that is you.
You roam the lands. You find a human.
A red streak in their hair. The sound of a hammer slamming into the anvil.
This is how you remember them.
The human is kind, as most of them are. They feel.
To watch them feel, to observe from the side―is it a blessing or a curse? Is it everything you could’ve had?
Do you want it?
Your creator says that you shouldn’t want it. To want in itself is a human emotion. Desire that consumes you will be your ultimate downfall.
(She is a hypocrite and a liar. This is not new knowledge.)
But this human makes you want.
What you want is a blurred vision in the back of your mind. A sun that dips behind the sea. The feeling of sand between your toes.
Your human, who smiles and knows and understands.
You depart for a short while. You will return.
And perhaps the time will come for you to reach out and grasp the moment. To clutch your hopes and reign them in by the hand.
Perhaps there is use for this puppet life of yours.
What you do not yet know is that humans break like glass.
When you return, your human is gone like the wisps of the find.
As if they had never been. As if it were a nebulous dream, hazy and cloudy and just barely out of reach.
Thus is your second betrayal.
Your third betrayal goes something like this:
You are a wanderer, roaming the lands. They used to call you this. Perhaps there is a part of you that will always wander aimlessly, searching and following something unachievable.
You are convinced that this time, it will change.
It starts with a child. The epitome of innocence, the spitting image of you, living your first years of creation.
The child touches something in you, strikes a chord that has not been played in ages.
If you had a soul, perhaps it would cry out.
The child takes care of you in ways that you cannot explain. They smile. You smile back.
It is a freeing, fleeting thing, to love a human. To have their life laid so beautifully in front of you, to know that some of their ticking time is dedicated to you.
You love this child as such. You refuse that their time is running out.
This child’s life, as if to spite you, dies out twice as quick.
You burn the house you lived in. You burn the doll that you have sewn by your own hand. You burn the tiny pricks at your fingertips until all the remains is charred hands.
It does not hurt.
You are not human.
Somewhere along the line, you are drawn into a group. One that serves a purpose.
You are not a family. Everyone screams and yells and throws daggers that aim for the nearest heart.
You are using them. You despise each and every face you see.
Some of them are humans. Some of them are not.
It is better this way. To keep everyone at an arm’s distance. To bite, and to not let anyone get too close.
This way, their existence seems to drag on forever.
This way, you do not care when the hourglass breaks and empties.
You know this.
There is something gratifying in getting a piece of something you have yearned for as far back as you can remember.
Somewhere along the lines, the wish for that human something becomes the wish for power and vengeance, and here you grasp it in the palm of your hand.
It’s too easy. A fragment of your creator’s godhood, given to you by her advisor, the very one who had begged your creator to kill you and be done with it all.
Some sick part of you respects her for it. Wishes that your creator had listened to her command.
But a god bows to no one but herself.
Don’t you know this?
Godhood, even in fragments, can reject you.
It does reject you.
It feels like a mockery, manic laughter pressed into a small glowing chess piece, it feels like pitying eyes and a cutting hand.
Godhood rejects you. It casts you away, when you have deluded yourself into thinking that it is the one thing that you could ever want.
What do you do? What can you do?
You are helpless. You are a puppet, severed from its strings. You are useless. You are unwanted.
But there, from the depths of the shadows―a hand.
He pulls you out. He tells you he can build you a machine. A machine that can manipulate the elements, a machine that can rival the gods.
A machine that can host the heart of divinity.
You take it. There is nothing else you can do except move forward.
There is nothing else you can do except move up.
Godhood slips from your grasp.
Everything does.
That damned fairy god, she reaches out and the fragment responds, and―
It rips out of the machine’s chest.
“No!” you cry out. Pathetic and battered. Reaching for your last sliver of hope. “Wait!”
You are trapped. You reach out, you shatter through, and a guttural scream of protest tears its way out of your throat.
You pull at the ropes that tie you down, the ropes that have held you back for so long, the chains that still weigh you down even on the cusp of freedom. “That’s mine! Don’t even try―”
The shard is almost in her grasp. It pulls itself closer to her, and farther from you, and…
“I’ll never―!”
The world stops.
You are young, you are born again.You are human.
You are human, because you are already dead.
You look up to your creator―nay, your mother―and she kills you in her own way, even as you continue to walk the earth.
If you could go back, what would you change?
But there is no room for change. There is nothing, nothing you can ever do to reverse the clocks.
There was nobody when you cried out. There will be nobody when you reach your arms to the sky and desperately plead, Mother.
The release of divinity means the relieving of those memories, and you never, never, NEVER―
“―I’LL NEVER GO BACK!”
You pull, and you pull, but your last hopes are in her hand, and the rope snaps and suddenly you’re falling, and falling, and falling…
In the depths of your mind, a memory. It plays like this:
She looms over you like a shadow, assessing your form, observing your features. In your mind, she is your mother.
She does not smile gently when she catches sight of your tears. There are no words of comfort that are spoken.
“Mother,” you call out, desperately. “Mother.”
How can one cry out so loudly but never make a sound? How can one cry for their mother and never have her respond?
“You are too human,” she says simply.
She casts you away. A god rejecting her child.
A child, thrown away by the first thing he has ever known.
At last, this thought strikes you.
No matter if you were a puppet or a puppeteer, no matter if you were a god or a human, the fact stands.
You were cursed to be unhappy. You were destined to despise yourself. Your smiles last as long as a human life.
Your hatred―towards your creator, towards humans, towards yourself―it will never cease. You will wish, and you will wish, but nothing will ever come.
Sometimes, you are in the crossfire between the living and the dead.
And sometimes, it hurts more than anything else.
