Reflections

There’s something to be said about being ‘God-Touched’. 

Something in how drenched you are in the very deities that make up the pantheon in its entirety.

And each one is different from the last. Each ‘God-Touched’ individual showing the very essence of what it meant to have the core of themselves hand picked and chosen by entities of unknowable, unfathomable intention.

You yourself were drenched in Ephemeral Intent, Shifting Personas and Creative Intent. The very Air that was breathed by those around you, the very concept of Self regardless of Physical Manifest, the foundations of your twisting, shifting core.

Where the Oceans would crush those of its embrace, cruel and kind in equal, boundless measures, and the Earth would welcome and nurture those that existed attuned with Fire and Hearth and Home, you were of Air and it’s free, untethered reality.

You were formless where others were solid, your own Self a puzzle pieced together from borrowed pieces to best fit the world around you at the time. You were cruel one moment, kind the next, but not in the way the Oceans were both at once, for you they were separate, two completely points in thought and reality than identities that existed within each other.

Masks, borrowed and worn only to be swapped out when they were unneeded.

You’d always been formless, shifting in the core of yourself, taking and borrowing from those around you, most prominent in the life you’d been wound so tightly around since the moments of your births.

Your Twin was like you but not. He was Air and Formless, Shifting Self, Borrowed Pieces of Puzzles, but not to your great extent.

He had parts about him that were solid and wholly himself, fragments of dense, formed fog instead of your shadows dripping from between grasping fingers. 

You’d borrowed pieces from him before, and he’d borrowed from you; the two of you trading off bits and pieces of personality like fabric that didn’t sit quite right on either of your frames.

You borrowed his kindness and he your detachment.

You stole his voice and he your silence.

He shrouded himself in your easy confidence, your security in your abilities and you shouldered his fears and doubts.

Trading had been easy with your Twin, had been as common as breathing. You were both ‘God-Touched’, though in different ways. You both knew Air and Ephemeral, Shifting Selves, you’d both added bits and pieces to yourselves without regard of how it would affect whatever base sense of self you’d had.

You’d been entwined, connected at the fringes of your consciousness. 

Until your Twin first fell and then wrenched himself so far from you as to almost taint himself with the rest of the pantheon.

His self had stopped, had ceased to exist for a long singular moment of acute agony in which you’d been stripped of all but Rage and Denial and the Night’s very refusal to accept the events transpiring around you.

It’d been a dark day, you’d half-wiped it from the minds of all that had been burdened to witness. You’d gouged yourself until you were heavy and full and then you’d hollowed yourself again with your sheer Refusal to allow fate to pass. Noone knew how your Twin had survived, and you did not speak on it more than you needed to.

You’d kept him and afterwards he’d shifted, taking on more solid parts to the core of his being and leaving behind many of the fractured puzzle pieces he’d once adorned himself with so easily. He was still a Shifting Thing, still Air and Formless Identity just where he’d been mist he now had patches of dense fog to build and spread himself outwards from.

He was still himself, still your Twin and you knew you’d continue to care for him regardless.

He was still yours and you were still his, deeply entwined together by first circumstance and then choice, he was still family in the way that counted. The family one chose to keep, to forge for themselves through trial and testing, through hardships and the pieces of yourself given freely for others to hold and shelter.

All that mattered was that your Twin was still himself, no matter the now solid piece at his core that you couldn’t begin to comprehend, couldn’t begin to put into words.

But that was fine.

You don’t need to be able to understand everything about him to love and support him, you really, truly don’t.

Even when you both find one of forest drenched in void.

Even when he found one of shifting tides tainted by denial and desperation.

Carving yourselves a new existence, a new reality, family forged in give and take.

It makes it easier to move on, or so you would like to think, to leave the past behind you both and move onwards to better and brighter things.

…

Sometimes though… you find yourself sitting with your Twin, memories and momentos usually tucked away and locked from sight allowed a moment in the light. You don’t like that he keeps the silk that tore under his weight but you think it’s cute how he wraps it around a gift of unthinkable value. You don’t know if he thinks the same of anything you’ve kept and you don’t need to ask him.

You both keep the remainders of your old lives tucked away together, safe where not even time can gnaw at them, only at the memories they held.

Replaced by new memories; new things of great importance to go with their new family.

You think he wants that. The sense of belonging he never knew before.

You want that for him.

You don’t know what you want for yourself, you don’t think you ever have. You’re not sure if you ever will.

You don’t think you mind too much.

You’ve always been a shifting thing, this isn’t too different.