Tiamat's Sorrow
TIAMAT'S SORROW
King Bahamut was in self-exile, sacrificing his liberty to protect Magicalena from the black seed that had once corrupted the core of his kingdom. Dressed in rags and disguised as a human, he would guard the gate between worlds for the rest of his long life.
This left Queen Tiamat to rule over Magicalena alone, but it was too much for her broken heart. Her sorrow was so wide and expansive that her world narrowed and tightened. She was as old as chaos and her domain was the depth of the ocean and the mirror above, but she became a teardrop in a waterfall and a sigh in a tornado, pulled by the inertia of her singular grief. It haunted her like a black hole that circled her essence, feeding on her joy and memory. She had to escape it.
So, she swam to the bottom of the sea and began to dig. The work distracted her long enough to hold onto a few things that the darkness couldn’t consume, but she had buried them too. The pit she had made was so deep that no light could reach her bright scales and no warmth could relight her fires. Exhausted, she laid her head down. Whether or not she opened her eyes, she slept. Her thoughts repeated until they lost meaning, gradually becoming toneless, echoing forever towards stillness.
But Tiamat cannot die as long as Magicalena still spins in the cosmos, for her lifeline is threaded through the water and air. Instead, she forgot herself completely. Thousands of years went by in the world above and slowly her great wings shrank, folded in, and finally hardened into a shell to hide within. When she finally emerged from her pit, it was not because she had healed or found some new desire. She no longer knew anything at all, staying or leaving was the same.
Tiamat, the powerful queen, had fled from the world with the speed of grief. She returned to the world with the meekness of a snail and the last sparks of life, long buried in the silt. She was a curious thing now, and with her slow progress to the light, she had a growing sense of possibility and wonder.
Tiamat’s return to the surface spawned a new era of life as she slowly recreated herself. From snail to turtle, lizard to bird, and drake to dragon (her final form). Along the way, she gave rise to new families of critters and creatures that filled the world with different ways of being and knowing, coming and going, singing and showing, and doing and growing.
Locked in her grief was the somewhere and somehow of a million new beginnings…
Next Story...