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By Mctoran
The sky was a vast fresco of impossible indigo, painted with clouds that curled in perfect Fibonacci spirals, gold-leafed at the edges by a sun that refused to set. At the center of the landscape stood a tree whose branches had not yet learned to wither, whose leaves still held the original green that all greens since have only approximated. Beneath, wheat bent as it would when divinity settles upon it, from the weight of meaning pressing down upon each golden stalk.
Clavis sat with his back against the tree’s trunk. His form was a corona of starmetal wards, keys orbiting his silhouette like satellites. Even at rest, his posture kept a rule: spine straight, shoulders squared, as if a doorframe had grown skin.
Gudang, his sister, sat close enough that their sleeves almost touched, close enough to share the tree’s shadow. Her essence was a bruise of refracted hues, ever-shifting as breath upon wet canvas. She wore starlight-pigment like a crime scene: chalky blues on her forearms, a smear of red-orange along her calves. In place of a human face, she wore a confluence of gentle gradients, like a sunset viewed through a glass of milk.
Together, they had woven and sung this particular meadow into existence mere moments ago. His contribution was the geometry of the hill's slope, the mathematical certainty of where earth met sky. Hers was the feeling of the golden hour, the way the light fell like honey through amber, the specific shade of contentment that wheat fields have always tried to remember ever since.
The peace of creation usually brought catharsis. But on that day, a heavy silence sat between them, like a third sibling whom neither had invited.
Gudang's colors dimmed the way a candle’s flame would in the draft of an opened door. Her form settled into something almost humanoid, as she finally broke the quiet. “I am afraid that you may have been right, brother…” Her gaze remained averted and her fingers dug slightly into the fertile soil below, as if the admission was physically painful.
Clavis turned to look at her properly—all his doors turning, all his locks aligning to face this new statement. “Whatever do you mean, sister?”
“The mortals…you warned us…warned me. When they first fell into our paradise in the bull’s wake. You said their perception would reshape us. That their worship would become a cage.”
The Keystone shifted where it hung around Clavis’ neck as he felt the cold logic of his own nature tighten in his chest. He remembered that argument in the Hoofstad courts. He remembered warning them that Access without Restriction invited ruin. He remembered how Lilith had laughed and called him overcautious, how Augustus had smiled diplomatically and spoken of “opportunity”. How Gudang herself had taken him aside afterward — “They are creators too, brother. Small ones. But their dreams are so bright.”
“I remember…” Clavis said carefully, unsure of where Gudang’s stream of thought was headed. “You believed their attention would ‘amplify’ us.”
“I did…” She stared out at the field. “I let them build their temples. I let them paint my likeness. I thought adoration was a fuel. Now…I am not certain…” She looked at him now, eyes wide and swimming with liquid nebulae.
“Nothing has been the same since the Harvest… since Y’liad’s hunger broke through his face and drank the villages. The song has changed. Do you hear it? The dissonance?” Her colors flickered—grey bleeding in at the edges like mold on fruit. “It troubles me that you continue acting as though you did not hear the screaming.” Her gaze stayed on a knot in the grass where two blades grew through each other, another symptom of the thinning veil. When Gudang continued, her voice sounded like she was reading from a mural someone else had painted on the inside of her throat. “I argued for them. For the mortals.” She scoffed, as if finding morbidly ironic humor in it. “Because I liked the way they looked at us. Like we were… clean. Like what we made meant something. I deemed them sparks to ignite our forms—worthy brushes for the divine stroke.” She flexed her fingers, and pigment dust fell. “Now, they instead look upon us as an obstacle — a problem to be solved.” Her eyes flicked toward him at last, sharp and wet-bright under the flat sky. “And you…you have been building more doors. More locks. More rules. As if you believe that by tightening the seams hard enough, none of it will spill.”
“The mortals are flawed variables,” Clavis conceded. “They do not understand the architecture of divinity. They chew on the structure to feed their bellies.” His reassurances were mechanical things—hinges, latches, protocols. His love, when it happened, came out as a granting of access.
“We built Daedos as our paradise…and now it feels as if though has become infested with ants, ungrateful little ants whose feet profane the canvas I stretched for us-” She suddenly paused, as if disturbed by her own words, before recomposing herself. “ I keep thinking… if I give them enough—enough toys, enough stories, enough color—they would remain grateful. They would remain small.” Her gaze dropped again to that impossible knot of grass. “And then I remember Y’liad’s grey-feast. I remember what it looks like when a mortal decides a god is just a big animal.” Gudang’s head snapped up. “I feel them forgetting me already, Clavis. Ever since their blades turned upward…the palette sours. My symphonies fall upon deaf ears; my murals flake unread. I tried to paint over the cracks, I tried to saturate the hues so we wouldn't see the grey bleeding through. I paint and paint but the colors… they do not hold the way they once did.” Her voice dropped to a note barely louder than wind-breeze. “My champion, Muya—when did I last feel her brush touch canvas? I cannot remember. I cannot remember if I ever knew.” She drew a deep sigh. “Do you know what terrifies me? Not that they may kill us. Not even that they may despise us. It is the possibility that they may make us ordinary…” Clavis attempted to reassure her, but he could not get any words out before Gudang continued to spiral in worry. “They will forget me…” she spoke with the fear of an artist watching their gallery burn. “My gifts… they take them and they make them small. They ritualize the brushstroke and forget the vision. They build shrines to the frame and burn the painting. They will unravel my gifts—memory to mere sentiment, art to idle scrawl. I am becoming a reference in a footnote, a source of aesthetic without a soul. I feel the fade into methodology already. They will take the colors I gave them and paint only blood. They will turn my beauty into utility. And when I am no longer useful… I will be nothing. They will hollow me out, brother. They will leave me a husk; a draft; a sketchesque of a Goddess.”
The vindication that Clavis may have usually felt was instead weighed down by sorrow. Gudang, weaver of uplift, now frayed? It was not victory to watch a star forget how to shine. He reached for her hand, his fingers briefly becoming keys that briefly became fingers again. The touch was cold, as it always was between beings of their nature—the chill of two infinities grazing against each other’s edges. “We endure,” he said softly. “We have always endured. Mortals cannot unmake what we have dreamed into being.”
“Can they not?” Gudang pressed her palm to her thigh, leaving a print of smudged color on the fabric. “We have already lost Lilith. Nunca died protecting Philia from the very mortals who once worshipped us. The Allseer has gone quiet in a way I do not like — she hides behind ten thousand eyes, because fewer would make her vulnerable.” The colors cycling through her slowed further. “And Claudius…something is wrong with him. Have you seen how he looks at Augustus now? As if measuring him for a grave. There is a tension between them…” The wheat rustled, though there was no wind. “Do you know what it is like, brother? To love one so dearly, that you are afraid of losing them?”
Clavis briefly looked up at the sky — at the stars — before shaking his head. “I cannot say…” he answered, which was not necessarily a lie.
“Well, that is how I feel about my husband,” Gudang replied. “And our son. And the rest of our siblings, including you. But also…the mortals too.”
The silence that followed was longer than any wheat field.
“Sister-”
“I am afraid,” Gudang said again, and this time the fear was more tangible, “That I will be corrupted. That their forgetting will become my forgetting. That someday I will look upon a canvas and not remember what beauty means.”
Clavis tightened his grip on her hand. His keys turned, searching for the right one; the one that could unlock despair, that could open a door back to the sister he remembered, the one whose colors had once made even the Void ache to be seen. “You will not fade,” he proclaimed. “I will not allow it. If I must forge a key to memory itself, if I must lock the doors of-”
“You cannot lock everything, brother.” Her voice was gentler now. “Some doors open from within.”
Then, Gudang did something she had never done before: she leaned against him. Her form settled into something smaller, something that needed comfort rather than worship. The Muse who had painted the first sunset, who had taught color how to weep, who had given the gods themselves the ability to feel the beauty they created—she leaned against her brother like a tired child, and her colors were so dim now that she was almost grey. “Promise me something,” she whispered.
“Anything.”
“If I break…if I become something that forgets what I was-”
“-You won't.”
“If I do…” Her hand gripped his with sudden strength. “Do not let me hurt anyone. Not my family…not even the mortals. Even if they have taken everything from us, even if their forgetting hollows me out…they are still creators. Small and bright. I do not want to become the thing that devours their dreams.”
Clavis did not speak, for he could not find an answer that would fit the lock of her words.
“Promise me,” Gudang repeated, this time with greater urgency, as her grip tightened.
Clavis reached out and placed a hand on Gudang’s shoulder—solid, heavy, promising security. He was the Gatekeeper. It was his function, after all, to keep the bad things out.“I…” The words briefly caught in his throat. “…I promise.”
Gudang’s colors flickered. For a moment, something like her old warmth returned, rose-gold bleeding through the grey, the specific shade of gratitude that no mortal artist would ever quite capture.
There was a subtle shift in the air, and Clavis suddenly felt uneasy. The wind ceased abruptly, submerging the environment in a vacuum of deafening silence and stillness. Even the flora froze mid-sway, as if time itself had been paused. A low, buzzing hum arose from the earth, like the sound of a hard drive struggling to read a damaged sector. Wheat stalks inverted, roots clawing skyward. The indigo sky began to fragment, <s h r e d d i n g> into tesserae of bruised firmament falling upward — turning a dull, blinding #FFFFFF white. The golden edges of the clouds glitched into jagged, pixelated staircases. The tree became a wireframe model. The field dissolved into raw data streams.
Clavis pulled his hand back, but his fingers felt numb, disconnected.
Gudang’s head slowly turned, the movement jagged like a stop-motion character. Her neck creaked and cracked like a rusted hinge — click click click click, each sound like a bone snapping. It was like stone grinding against stone, the unsealing of an ancient tomb. When she fully turned, it revealed a face not of flesh but of lifeless marble — permanently plastered in a melancholy frown. The polished blanks of her empty eyes reflected the collapsing nowhere around them. Her words emanated like a caption on the underside of the world, a synthesis of a thousand crying children and a modem screaming. They formed in the silent, geometric center of Clavis’ perception, etched directly onto the surface of his being.
“y o u l i e d.”
Offsets
Offset 0
Name: one day
Offset 1
Name: miss you
Offset 2
Name: lost and lost
Offset 3
Name: fine, you
Offset 4
Name: rest
