I have been a part of every war this world has ever known—and many that it doesn't.
I remember ten thousand loves. Ten thousand curses.
Ten thousand lifetimes beneath these stars. Asking questions. Singing songs. Listening to the waves. Basking in the fire's warmth. Loving. Living. Dying.
Mnesis reaches back into eras so ancient even the spirits struggle to find names for those times. So far back that Memory and Dream blur into the mists of a world where they were one.
I remember endings. So many endings. Young warriors of Gaia with hot blood in their hearts and glory in their songs leaping to their dissolution. Tribes of kin and humans alike whose works have gone beyond the reach of even dust. Institutions raised and cast down. Ideas—concepts—whose like is preserved now only in hidden places where time does not flow, and the voices of things long extinct still echo.
I remember beginnings. New lands. New hills sprung up from the green earth. New dwellings. New loves. New lives. Stories told—stories lived—for the first time.
Memory is a burden and a privilege. It feels as much curse as it does gift as we face the end of all beginnings, and the beginning of all ends—a cataclysm that time will not pass, life will not cycle anew, and that ideas will not survive.
This world is broken. Streets buckle. Blood pours out as though someone struck a wound deep in the Earth herself. Maybe it belongs to them, the humans. Their buildings crack apart as the sky itself splits. Is it the vitae of the spirit world? The shining lands are wracked with devastation.
Is it mine? I feel it pouring from me, for I, too, am broken.
The air shimmers—no, boils—above the lake. Black currents swirl into a vortex that most cannot see. I do. I can see its true form across the veil. An anti-light, a glow that darkens the world, a flame that illuminates only that which is gone. Anthelios, they call it. The Anthelios Entity.
And in all the lifetimes I remember...I have never seen anything like this before.
Its presence decays the very light of day. It leeches the will to be from my bones. Even the servants of the Enemy grow sick in its gaze.
I am a sage, as I have been many times. A mother, as I have been many times. A lover. A healer. A dreamer.
But now as the blood pours like liquid magma from my wounds, I am something more. I fight for all of those things. And I burn like the sun this creature profanes with its very existence.
I let it rise within. Rage. Ten thousand lifetimes of it, all held within this skin. As my form surges into something vast and powerful, a living recollection of the savage glory of the primal world, with it comes an anger so complete that it sets the land ablaze.
This Rage cannot be contained in Memory, nor Dream. It cannot be leashed by skin or soothed by song. As the Apocalypse crashes around me and the world I know falls, never to rise again, I let it grow incandescent in my heart.
I pour it out of ten thousand voices.
And this thing that blackens the sun itself, a primordial corruption so old that all my memories are but a child's compared to the mountain's, this being descended to break me and all of my kin and all those who draw hope from Sun's light...
It wavers.
In all that time, it has never felt a Rage like mine.
If I die today, my ten thousand lifetimes of memories die with me. Time itself will forget me. No mortal or spirit will remember me if this entity devours me.
But it will.