A day in the life of planars

He sits there, in quiet meditation, holding onto the reins of the planet's Weave, the ley lines on which history hinges.

Holding them as tightly as he can, with the thousands of others across the world, ensuring that none may break the fragile peace. Someday, he is sure, one faction will falter and myths will once again rise to devour the soft bodies which house all human souls.

Meanwhile, those ignorant of this titanic tug-of-war go about their tiny lives, a few believing that magic died long ago but most doubting that it ever was.

Alone and unloved, bereft of any memory of his pups having once given the moon and sun a run for their money, foresaken by his father, Fenris breathes his last in an animal shelter's gas chamber.

I feel relief at the aversion of Ragnarok, even as I cry for the passing of Myth.

Where my tears fall, silvery dandelions will grow but be quickly weeded from the cracks in the asphalt, their coloration all but unnoticed.

M-Theory

As the elves walked into our world, I bowed before their Queen who raised me up and then struck me hard enough to split the right corner of my upper lip.

"You've brought Magic back into this world. Our kind nearly extinguished ourselves so you could live apart from all the nightmares, all the horrors of the Spirit. Why have you done this?"

I bowed my head and answered.

"Because all Meaning is threatened, and the science you gave us makes corpses of our dreams..."

I grasp the hilt, and remember the woad stained madman who came to my farm three days ago.

Anyone, he promised me, anyone can be king if they have the heart for it.

I think of glory, and nothing happens. The blade stays within in its womb of stone. Jeers tell the pig herding, bucktoothed girl to step aside.

I think of my name echoed through the ages, and still the blade shows no sign of being unsheathed. Some rotten vegetable strikes my head and bursts against my teenage acne.

I think of my family, our land caught between two warring chieftains. I think of children staring at burned down homes, of women used as pleasure for men. I think of my own stolen virginity.

Tears run from my eyes. I hear the brutish laughter of men and the dam breaks in my memory...

Goddess, I just wish for peace, and a land where people like me don't have to hate themselves anymore.

Finally I hear the scrape of a whisper, and the sword's weight lightens as if it were a pail with water leaking out of the bottom....

The giants are the mountains, the dryads reincarnated through generations of acorns and twirling maple seeds, the sea serpents the ocean currents that wind around the world.

Dare I open the gate for the Elves? Dare I wake the Magic that slumbers in the folds of Earth's bones and veins?

I look back at the factory belching smoke, I think of the silos full of missiles and all the victims of cruelty who are told there is no such thing as salvation.

Raise the rune stone up to catch the first rays of red twilight bleeding on the fields. I feel the Veil begin to strain, but lower my hand before it tears.

I just don't know. I just don't know if I can do this, or if I should.

Why was it put on my shoulders, to play midwife to the Ending that is the Return?

A dragon's shadow passes above us. I pray.

A siren sings in a public pool, threatening to lure our youngsters away. I pray.

Teenagers in basements have become alchemists, supplying gangs with wasted healing and weapons of war. I pray.

Magic has returned to the world...but the gods?

The gods are still silent.

The Time Lost (A variation of the Feywild version here.)

Hermits and pilgrims of sundered timelines, expatriates literally bereft of their pasts, the Time Lost come to wandering demiplane of Titania in hopes of finding glimmers of their erased civilizations and histories. Some desperately seeking a way to retrieve at least a few loved ones, if not their entire societies, from the alterations in the flow of Time. Others simply come to bask in memories and ghostly recreations of what they've come to accept that can or at least should not seek to recover.

Among the Time Lost, the Le Shay are readily welcomed into the societies of the fey given their relation to both elves and fey. However, the relationship between these beings and the Seelie Court varies as many of the wizened fey are wary of those Le Shay seeking to undo the event that replaced their past with the current timeline of the Multiverse.

Similarly, other Time Lost have varied relationships with the Seelie, though non-Le Shay oftentimes end up being utilized as pawns or indentured servants strung along with promises of resurrecting loved ones lost to shifts in the temporal currents. The more powerful of these are left largely to their own devices, and end up as hermits - or if their numbers are sufficient, settlers - in areas of Fairyland watched over by minor nobility who enjoy being the center of attention and perhaps even scandalous worship

heh, what idea is that?

Ice coats the trees in crystalline garb, the wind making every creaking branch into a tinkling chime.

It was like this every Winter, even before Magic returned. Even before I ended the world.

But now, with the accompaniment of the elves and their avian wails of mourning, it feels more fitting.

A proper dirge for passing modernity.

=-=-=

"So there are spirits...where? On the other side of the sky? We already got pipes out - take out some of your peyote or whatever and let's all have a puff. I wanna see all these genies and fey."

The words are already dusted with slurs, and the sun has yet to surrender the sky.

"I can't take you", I say as I gesture toward his glass of whiskey.

"You're already possessed by a demon."

Instead of getting angry he takes the admonishment with a semblance of graceful resignation, and that more than anything extends the jagged crack in the acre of heart I reserve for this man.

We look at the corpse of Our Maker, and wonder at the enormity of Our sin.

Patricide of not of a, but *the* Father.

The First Giant, the First living thing born from fire and poison. How long did Ymir sit in His loneliness, how long before His need for love summoned Us into being?

Odin's sigh breaks Our reverie. And when He commands We, echoes that We are, begin to carve.

First murderers, now butchers.

With Our crimes We make the World.

The centipede uncoils
Walks itself into a hang man's noose
I almost crushed it with my foot
Rushing to the temple where you were born

We roasted your placenta with rosemary and myrrh
Devoured it with the relish of parents wanting to be done with ceremony
Suppressing our impatience in hopes it might go unnoticed by the gods
But our eagerness and impiety burned bright enough to be seen from the stars
-Inscription in a Mausoleum

Gods tricked into quests with no resolution - how does the Divine murder Chaos?

Gods tricked into fighting each other - how does Fire defeat the Wave?

A graveyard of gods is his gift to Mankind.

Finally Trickster appears, holding no tablets and offering no blessing save for the knife that he plunges into his own sidereal Heart.

"Now", he says with a bitter, wry smile, "now You are Free."

There's blood under my fingernails.

I raise my hand to my lips but my second mother slaps it back down. Her fangs are bared and slow fading human instinct causes me to recoil but I draw closer when I see the hurt in her face.

After a few minutes of quiet, the vast desert trampled by wheels and hoof beats, she speaks.

"We've 500 miles to go and we can only travel by night through this wasteland. Save it for later baby."

Keeping her eyes on the road, the same hand that slapped mine away squeezes my knee with a gentleness that floats between sexual and maternal.

"Save it for later okay? The horses can only give so much."

My hands are a vice locked tightly 'round my brother's throat, my weight keeping his youthful locks below the surface of the river.

I'm wild with rage, and so at first I don't know notice the smile on the face of my wife's murderer.

He's laughing. Under the water, he's laughing as he dies.

He knows the kinslayer is damned deeper than a man who kills a woman who doesn't share his blood.

I should let go, I should save myself, but when my fingers begin to slacken I hear my lover's laughter, see the tear worn eyes of my children.

My hands are a vice, locked tightly 'round my soul....

I give you a science-fantasy novel I'll never write because I couldn't figure out how it would actually work:

The novel would be called Repentant Messiahs. It would be about a race of beings, the Saodh, who wage wars against the various pantheons of the galaxy.

This war results in the various star systems being cursed. To undo the curse, the Saodh take fragments of the different worlds and form a single world, with each fragment having different metaphysics due to their varying creation stories.

There was going to be a race that survived by inhabiting Saodh bodies, basically their own essence survived in some ambrosia but to make one of their own requires drowning any baby they have while clothed in Saodh flesh in the cosmic honey.

So you have this traumatic experiencing of conceiving and birthing a kid whose soul is of the enemy, and after some ritual that lasts for a bit you drown that kid to get a kid of your kind.

I can't remember exactly what the main conflict of the story was, I recall some kids who might be the Saodh's own saviors, basically some chosen ones who could fix their screw ups and relieve the Saodh of their guilt and burden of killing the pantheons and cursing the galaxy.