Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You're not my eater

Our blood, your food

Love you,

for God

Love you,

for the Mother.”

- from Massive Attack's “Black Milk”

In the beginning, there was the Light, and the Light radiated out in all directions, passing all things by in an instant on its straight, unbending paths.

Then, the Light took form, contracting and solidifying, taking up mass and space so that it might touch the world.

…

To say from whence she came is beyond the scope of either living memory or written record, but for most intents and purposes, it matters not whether she traced her origins to the designs of some other intelligence, the gradual result of some natural process, or some altogether inexplicable, long-forgotten magic from the murky darkness of the early universe.

What is certain is that she was, eventually, washed up on the figurative shores of a virgin planet, though there might not have been any literal waters for her spirit to float over, no foaming spray to greet her arrival, and most certainly no pristine seashell to guide her along.

As the First One, she emerged unwitnessed and unnamed and beyond comparison, for there was no one to compare to her, and nothing to distinguish her from.

But rest assured that while no flowers hurried to spring forth on the tail of her footsteps, she surely let there be light –

and in the newborn radiance, she could be seen, if only by herself:

One could have spoken of a stark white silhouette upon the black basalt, or of several solid tons of clear, living diamond, and most of all, incandescent brightness just barely contained in a translucent crystalline outline.

In effect, there was now a glimmering speck of being in the vast sea of nothingness where there once was none, below her the ragged crust of a planet not long solidified, and above her the distant lights of the cosmos in all its indifferent glory.

In this primal scene, there was only sharp focus and hard contrast, a chiaroscuro of long shadows that moved only in response to her tentative movements, a silent, colorless world of unmixed basic components, and the instant the world burst into her awareness, and awareness into the world, she cowered, forward onto the arms and legs she had just given substance, frantic to hide the light that permeated into every direction from the naked rocks and the unforgiving stars.

In later ages she would come to be considered a tremendous, monumental being, as close to the stars and mountains themselves as a life could get, but here in the primordial stillness of the barren ground, she had only these very stars and mountains themselves to compare herself with, and in the face of them, she was whimpering and trembling.

Once she was nothing, and now she was something, and she knew not what to make of being.

Until then, she had been part of everything, indistinct from the world around her, until she had perhaps become detached from the bed of crystal she had grown in, or fallen from the skies leaving a glittering trail, and now she was simply herself, spindly alabaster fingers separate from the volcanic ashes below, and she felt exposed for it.

Being entailed the however remote possibility that being might cease, moreover, just by being anything, being precluded the possibility of its opposite, like the light which reveals the presence of shadows just by existing.

To an onlooker, she might have appeared titanic, but there were no such onlookers apart from the gawking of the infinite cosmos itself, and compared to it, she did not compare, and so, she trembled before it.

The first words spoken on the gem homeworld were her indistinct whimpers.

...

Even new as the day, there were things that she knew.

She knew of the sky above and the congealed waves of magma below, and she knew to expect the sun before the first embers of its presence trickled up the horizon.

If you were wondering if there was a time when she took a long walk to explore the contours of the planet that was to become her home, the answer would have been 'no', for it was one of many specks in the blackness, and she knew that there was nothing to be found.

Yet unconnected to anything, she just existed, a singular statue of herself, protruding from the ground like a monolith, enough of and for itself.

Beneath the twinkling heavens, there was nothing she could have wanted or needed; Her own light shone from within.

But where her sparkling fingers ended, the dark void awaited, and she found it again where her alabaster feet touched the ground, or where the crown on her head would go no further.

In the distance, she had known of a few spines of crystal sticking out of the ground, though she had not turned to contemplate them, at least not before. They caught the light of the day when the sun was up, but they did not shine from the inside the way she did, and it occurred to her that perhaps, it could be made into a receptacle for her light to chase the surrounding darkness just a little further.

Gently, just a little bit, she released the hold that held her light in place, her form dimming just a bit as she instead poured it out from her gaze, from the edges of her outstretched fingers and the core of her being itself.

She saw her light shine back at her, filling out its target, and she came to know what there was to know about that spike of rock, scarcely more than its beginnings in a stream of molten magma, and the darkness retreated a little further back.

…

Try as she might, there were only so many vessels she could fill at once, only so far her light could reach.

Too many, and she would find herself back in the dark, wiping the sweat from her brow.

So imagine her surprise when, for the first time, she encountered a brightness that was not her own. It was much dimmed, to be sure, the little voice just slight enough to hear, a form so minuscule she would have had to squint and focus to see it if she did not already know it was there.

Once she rose up from where she had paused to rest, she was forced to conclude that they were everywhere, like moss and insects hiding beneath a stone in the woods, if she could have known of that comparison, and together, their squeaky little voices were every bit as noticeable as they weren't on their own – crude, irregular little shapes flitting about, no much different from the bits of volcanic rock that were laying about, and still, they were undeniably imbued with the smallest shreds of her light, a diminished, refracted reflection for sure, but they were skittering about without the need for her thought to guide their every move, and what's more, they knew her -

She didn't think it possible that their awareness would be quite like hers, but it was enough for them to recognize her as their creator – they had staid by her as she was resting, and now that they had gained her attention, they were flocking together in front of her as if to get a good look at her, and for all that their shapes were only approximately like hers, their little arms were still recognizable as they reached up to where she was overlooking them.

For the first time since she'd opened her eyes to the universe, the universe was looking back at her with little, expectant sparkling eyes.

Until now, she had been in darkness, but now, without even meaning to, she had lit this entire sea of tiny lights, and the dark world she had lived on was dark no more.

…

Reclining on a dais of solidified magma, the First Light observed as her creations swarmed about her.

Some were playing in a nearby crater's caldera, just one step away for their Source, but more than large enough to provide ample space for her diminutive creations. Others had busied themselves by climbing onto nearby spines of rock.

Now and then, a handful of them would draw near her and ask to bask in her radiance, and in those early days, it wasn't rare for her to oblige them and permit them to climb onto her palm.

And holding on to her long fingers, with tiny voices not much unlike her own, they spoke to her in admiration: “So sparkly!”

“So shiny!”

“Not like us, so glittery!”

“The most sparkliest!”

“Just like a star!”

The First One smiled at this in amusement – perhaps, once upon a time, there had even been something like fondness: “You silly little creatures. I'm not a star, “ though perhaps she might once have been one.

“But then how are you so sparkly?”

“Because, “ she spoke, “I'm made of Diamond, silly.”

“Diamond!” “Pretty Diamond!” “Sparkly Diamond!”

The Diamond, then, was what she was to be known as, from that moment onward, though its significance would elude her for a long, long time. Before that, when it was only herself, the sky and her white light upon the black stone, there had never been a need to distinguish herself from other beings, for she had been the only one -

Now, however, there was a small flock of little gray creatures carving out an existence between these extremes, and the Diamond was to be the piece at its center.

In each of them, she could see the glimmer of her own light, each of them refracting a different part of her being back at her, pieces and aspects of herself she'd never come to describe with words when they were still all joined inside of her indistinct radiance -

But when she saw all the facets of being playing out before her, she could recognize them in herself, and come to perceive herself in relation to them – and it was only natural that they would have been drawn to their creator, at least in the early stages of their emergence.

Their adulation became her mirror, and her reflection formed the foundations of what would become her ego, an organizing principle to sort the torrential streams of perceptions, thoughts and feelings that ran through the consciousness she had awakened to when she'd first begun to exist.

---

What had begun as a playful flight of fancy soon turned into serious endeavors to create, mainly, to craft something from the stones they had once sprung up from:

They made multitudes of little tools to extend the reach of their minuscule hands and fashioned the hollowed-out spikes into little dwellings.

As for the Diamond, she spent most of her time kneeling by their little settlement, delighting in their ever-more complex little lives and the fruits of their efforts.

For a while, every simple thing they did was a grand, glamorous first that held her attention, and she smiled benevolently down on them all.

For all that she already held herself to be a special existence apart from theirs, her conception of them all as a living, interlocking whole was yet a small misunderstanding that had not much diverged from the reality – Ancient and mighty as she was even then, she had not yet seen it all.

One by one, they would present their works to her and look to her for guidance and appraisal, and she herself found meaning and purpose in dispelling their concerns, answering their questions and providing a focus for their efforts.

She was their goddess and their judge, their hive queen and their mother all at once, so different from the indistinct, naked existence she had been when she was still alone with the universe.

She existed for them just as they existed for her – She lived for them to turn to, to have all the answers, to bring light to this dark and empty place, in short: To make everything better.

Where there had been only emptiness, she alone had brought forth life and laughter and songs –

And in those faraway times, she delighted in it, and, as much as she would come to deny it in later days, or come to question if it had ever been real in her rare moments of doubt, sometimes she was certain that her cold and empty heart had been filled with satisfaction, and that this, at the time, was her reason, if only because she had yet to encounter any true challenges.

She told her creations to prepare, for more of their kind would be arriving.

….

Like all life, the Diamond and her creations could be supposed to be products of their environment – Their world circled about a dim, purple star whose mild light could not even fully banish the twinkling stars at its zenith.

During some times of the year, when the sun hit them in the right angles, the planet's rings could be glimpsed as glittering streaks across the sky, particularly near the equator, as its new inhabitants were yet to discover.

There was not much water to act as a solvent for chemical reactions, at least not enough to form large oceans and provide precipitation – the sort of messy, slimy life that emerged from the early oceans of the Earth would simply not have been possible here.

The closest equivalent the Earth would have had to offer would have been the sort of slow-growing bacteria that could be found miles underground, which would divide every thousand years and draw the energy to do so from the surroundings minerals and the radiation in the ground – but what might have been an extreme outlier on the earth, one of the furthest extensions of its grand diverse opulence, was the most viable alternative here, one that the resident lifeforms had been forced to perfect.

Not much energy was available, so the beings that would take over its surface were adept at conserving it, absorbing large quantities of its barest forms in the moment of their creation, and then continuing near-indefinitely with those initial reserves.

A creature like a hot-blooded earth mammal that needed to constantly consume considerable fractions of its own weight to continue on could never have existed here, the necessary chemicals were not abundant enough – conversely, such slow processes as those that gave rise to the Diamond and her creatures would have been swiftly out-competed where earth-like bacteria could thrive, long before they would ever have accumulated in such an advanced intelligence. If there was anything the Diamond's world could boast of back in its long-gone, untouched state was a relative abundance of dissolved salts and minerals all throughout its crust. Other than that, there had not been much to create from.

When her scouts and explorers went out to explore their home in the dark void, they stumbled across various things that were half like growing crystals and half like lichens, blurring the line between mere self-organization and life, as well as fields and basins of ordinary crystals, and salt-lakes that transitioned into crunchy moss-like tendrils halfway through – but this side of those intermediate states, it could not be denied that the predecessors of gemkind were indeed alive, and the brightest of them began the process of reconstructing the story that had eventually concluded in the Diamond's awakening.

….

Little by little, they expand the reach of her light, remaking this world in her image one flake of rock at a time, sometimes quite literally, when their labors ended in statues in her likeness.

When they shaped their cave-riddled rock towers into elegant spires, it was in imitation of her elegance;

When they worked together to provide for the needs of their little society, they acted in the same harmonious concord as her enormous form when it moved at once.

When they set out to explore their little word, it was to share their light and perfection with the parts of this world's crust that still remained barren,

all in service of their luminous hive queen, all their hard work dedicated to her glory.

As their lives and their society grew ever more complex, she became the centerpiece of their emergent culture, and very very slowly, the little patch of life crawled across the planet's surface, expanding its domain to cover more and more of their world's surface.

And it wasn't just the size of their domain which was growing – their carvings, their power, their technology – all of that continued to advance before her eyes.

Once, there had been a time when the Diamond had personally known every single of her creations and crafted each one herself, but as the circles of their cities spread out far and wide and extended further and further, they became too numerous, too complicated for her to maintain, to make all their decisions and settle each of their disputes - So she had gathered the brightest minds and thought of a means to expedite the process.

They did not quite perfect it right away – at first, she simply took to soaking in a pool of liquid solution that some of her scouts had found in a secluded cave, and had some sturdier creatures ferry the results out to the various settlement, in iron barrels and rickety carts.

It was not until they had nearly covered all the planet's surface that something like the injectors came about, and with them, methods of creation that were more refined and sophisticated, but also more taxing – By the time that the beings being produced became to resemble modern-day gems, all other forms of life on the planet had disappeared, and perhaps a few individual gems mourned them, but their society at large did not.

In particular, the Diamond did not – They served no purpose, and they were nothing of hers.

But the possibilities offered by this new technology intrigued her – for once, they allowed much greater control over the finished product, much more than she'd been able to achieve with cruder methods. There had always been some among her flock of creations that excelled at particular tasks more than others, those that seemed to embody particular aspects of her being more than others, but now, she could make that happen deliberately, have her creations bring forth gems that were of particular beauty, strength or brilliance.

Unlike the rough, unpolished rocks and pebbles that had populated her world with their muddied browns and grays, these clear, refined creatures were shot through with her light, their beaming smooth facets so much more like her own, their forms so distinct, so beautiful, so firm, their colors so vibrant, their gems brimming with mystical power -

Rather than just blocks of earth touched with a spark of her radiance, these new beings were distillations of all her essence was capable of being, pristine prisms that truly allowed the entire spectrum of her light to shine -

Indeed, so enamored was she with her new creations, that she could not see her previous ones as anything other than limited and flawed. Compared to the newer generations, they were such poor replications of herself! Hard to believe that such flawed beings had been born from her own being. When she looked upon them now, she just felt reminded that she could do better, and they could no longer much hold her interest, not even when they squeaked to be in her presence – and those voices, so much like hers, from the mouths of such creatures as them!

It just made her sad.

She decided that most tasks were better accomplished by her newer, more sophisticated creations and that many more of them should be made.

It was, as one might say, the end of the stone age.

Even so, it was not like she had completely forgotten the pebbles, for they were still of hers and it had been them who had built the foundations of this world up to the point where their beautiful sisters could come into it – So she did leave a place for them in the new order of her world, precisely as builders and maintenance workers that were to be seen, not heard.

….

What followed was a period in history which the Diamond would remember as quiet and beautiful, a time of exploration, advancement and intellectual achievement, when both she and her creations were focused on exploring just how far their potential could go.

Some may have objected that it was not quite so pleasant for those who increasingly found themselves relegated to the shadows, but the system was not quite what it would be later, the strata at the bottom not yet subject to capricious rule and the upper classes still broadly defined – extraordinary achievements of the individual could still propel a gem forward, and the upper class was still fairly large and host to an increasingly sophisticated, elaborate culture.

While not all nostalgia may have been warranted, it was a time when many of gemkinds' great classical achievements came to be, the repertoire of songs, the written epics, the great temples, and the most astounding artifacts.

Just as the injectors burrowed ever-deeper into the planet's surface in search for the necessary minerals to further expand their society, the spires above them grew toward the skies, providing a home for their foremost artisans and thinkers.

The statues from this time period still littered the lower levels long after they had long become overgrown with the towers of later ages, and not just there, because, while their colleagues had been working on ways to improve gem production and create marvelous technology, others had been unlocking the secrets of spaceflight and gone out to scatter the first outposts among the stars: The great matriarch's offspring had finally transcended the world from whose crust they had been birthed, and they brought back wild tales of the bountiful worlds beyond their own, stories of the opulence, abundance and splendor that seemed to exist everywhere across the void, life so much unlike their own.

Many of her gems found the thought quite exciting, but for her part, their creator didn't pay them much mind. Sure, they sounded somewhat amusing, but most if not all of the beings out there seemed so wasteful, so inefficient, so flat-out-imperfect compared to her gems.

She could not even sustain a distant curiosity for long – why concern herself with other modes of life when they had already proven to lead to nothing but weakness?

If anything, she felt a more pressing necessity to continue her work on perfecting her own creations – when she wasn't doing the work of leadership or partaking in the wonders of the world she had made, it was mostly this which occupied her time – at first, she had been excited with – well, not so much the possibilities, but the chance to bring her gems closer to perfection, but with time, though she would never have admitted the thought, let alone voiced it to her attendants who were, after all, looking to her as their example, she found herself coming up against a roadblock.

In those days, she had given rise to all kinds of gems, with almost any kind of useful traits that one could possibly imagine: Some of them were large and others were minuscule, some were mighty in their physical strength while others again possessed impressive elemental magic, and where some were swift and dexterous, others were elegant and delicate-

But not a single one of them was all of these at once.

Put together all the attributes that you wish, and some of them would cancel out.

Consider the soil carefully and do the most meticulous work with the process, the raw material itself would set a limit to how many impurities one could avoid.

There was no viable result that she could not find fault with – for every part of her spectrum that she could see them reflect with dazzling, pristine intensity, another would be missing, and even when she tried to infuse the full radiance of her light directly, it would last only as long as she would carefully maintain her control.

The more she tried, the more she saw how each of her creatures was flawed – she couldn't stop seeing it whenever she would go among them, in all their works, in near to everything that had once delighted her, tints literal and figurative that stood apart from her shining outlines, but were still unmistakably part of her.

There was a thought she was not quite allowing, about what these imperfect creations might mean about herself, but somewhere along the road, the aims she had been striving before had turned to bitterest need, and that need became an axiom she could not afford to question, because it would have toppled the point of all she had been doing and leave her as lost as on the first of her days.

So with no other road open to her, she redoubled her efforts until something outside herself forced her to stop.

….

While later technological advances would allow them to get quite some more mileage out of that same old bedrock, the truth at the time was that they were reaching the end of the line.

All the splendor, all the extravagant excesses of their days had come at a cost.

By then, the surface had been completely covered in crystalline spires and structures – the world that was once jet black now looked shining and even almost glossy from the outside, but are careful eye might have noticed that it had also ceased to be an exact sphere.

The very planet was on the verges of coming apart, its gravitational equilibrium unbalanced by the many large hollows they had made beneath its shell.

Generations of gems had sucked the lifeblood from their word, absorbed every speck of precious mineral and cooled its molten core with every jolt of energy extracted -
There was only so much left.

They still had some options left of course, means afforded to them by their advanced technology: Their planet could probably be stabilized by artificial means and left to crumble in a largely controlled fashion. New means of processing might eventually allow them to squeeze a little more mileage from the brittle infertile rocks beneath them, and with their ships, they could reach their star system's other planets – None of them had conditions that were nearly as favorable for production as their sister world, but for now, it would do.

There was no immediate concern, but for an existence that had continued as long as the Diamond's, this cloud on the horizon was almost an appealingly dire issue:

With the remainder of resources left to them and their long, long lives, they would likely be able to continue on for a long, long time, but if they lacked the means to replenish their numbers, they must inevitably decline, and little by little, entropy would chip away at them....

The very survival of their kind was at stake.

…

The Diamond lived in an ornate spire by then, and its heavy doors were often shut, much like the hatches of the palace ship she would later acquire.

Even so, she knew what the voices on the other side must be speaking:

“Help us!”

“Save us!”

“Tell us what to do!”

She had made herself their goddess as well as their queen – that role alone had made up her entire concept of who she was, her fragile, undifferentiated sense of self, and below the thin, frayed layer of her queenly mask, she found that there was little more than a gaping void, and before it, she was as helpless as she'd been when the world was new.

Her gems were looking to her to solve their crisis, to lead them forward as she had always done.

What good was all her power if she couldn't even do that?

What good was she as their matriarch?

What good was she at all, the way she was now?

She was sitting with her back to the closed doors, her long limbs drawn close to where the rest of her was curled up, her long, glittering cape hanging all around her.

Everyone was expecting her to have all the answers – and there was no one else but her who could do it, nobody else to share her toils lighten her burdens -

And it was then when a kind of impotent rage started growing within her, a curse of shadow inside her luminous form, a speck of darkness in paradise.

Arms wrapped around her legs, her long dark nails dug ever so slightly into the fabric of her dress, and her pristine face that was so often graced by serene if distant smiles contorted into an ugly expression.

Her silver gaze fell past the window frame, to the stars that dotted the evening sky, to every pointless, disorderly existence that was not yet one of hers.

Within the enormous jewel that held her mind, a calculation took place and a thought bubbled to the surface.

Consequently, her once tense shoulders softened up in relief, and her face split open into the coldest of smiles.

There was never any need for these untenable doubts, nor even for worries:

After all, there were more than enough resources to be found out there.

---

At last, the outlying planets were used up, but not as a carefully guarded last reserve, but as a deliberate, systematic, concerted effort towards a singular goal.

It was the figurative blowing of the horns, the beating of the war drums and the soon very literal marching of the boots.

Most remaining skeptics could be convinced with the reasoning that it was “us” or “them” - these were desperate times after all.

But with time, they might find it easier to be callous, and the reasoning would come to them naturally, like they had sucked it in from the ground they were grown in.

But the figurative drums beat not only for the soldiers:

If disarray and lack of prioritizing had driven them to the brink,

then there must be no more of it, not ever gain, no matter the circumstance.

To ensure that their great undertaking would be going off according to plan, and to ensure that they should prosper ever after, all of her creation must come together like the dancers in a stageplay, or indeed, much more appropriately, like her left hand and her right.

Though she would convince both herself and the populace that this new course represented simply a logical conclusion of all they had done before, there was certainly a change in her approach:

She had always seen it as her mission to bring order into a world of chaos, but no longer did she think it enough to simply bring forth the order of life from the primal chaos of non-life.

In other words: Not all life was good enough for her.

Blinded by hindsight in this moment of need, she looked back in bitterness at her previous efforts: She might have created splendor, but when she beheld her works, she saw that all of them were different and none of them were perfect.

The creator looked upon her works in the light she had brought, and she saw that it was not good.

Even so, some of them certainly had their specialties, that which made them beautiful, that which made them useful and added to her endeavor as a whole, and this was how they somewhere, sometimes, came the closest to perfection – only in these brief ephemeral grains of time did she her light shine through.

So that is what her new order sought after: Every member of it would be perfect, at least in one aspect of their being. Perfect as soldiers, perfect as servants, perfect as builders –

Each of them made to smoothly fit the whole, each of them geared towards their task in strength, abilities and temperaments, each of their colors chosen in the right proportion so that the whole could shine as she did, each embodying an aspect of her perfection above all others. They would each emerge ready to begin their allotted tasks, pre-designed to easily interface with advanced technology, prepared for the demands of a spacefaring life, and never knowing the confusion she'd felt when she first burst into being.

Their shapes would be sacred idols, for they would each be images of her: Let a Quartz image of her strength, let a Ruby be the likeness of her dedication, a Pearl, a glimmer of her elegance, a Sapphire, a receptacle for her all-knowing nature.

As one, they would move as surely and purposefully as if she were pulling their strings herself.

But of course, if such was their significance, if their allotted forms were holy, then all deviation from it was to be frowned upon, not just as a sacrilegious affront to the perfection of their goddess, but as a threat to the order that sustained them through the leaner years.

- Later thinkers would spend centuries wondering how beings with the incredible power to take any desired shape, or even blend their shapes together in a state of harmony and bliss, might have ended up discarding those natural gifts on the altar an obsession with their forms of all things, much like human philosophers would eventually be left to wonder how creatures with the ability to determine their own fate could be lost to banality and conformism, or indeed, how any lifeform capable of love and knowledge must be wondering why so many of them still made war on each other on behalf of their ignorance. .

But stuck in the moment itself, there were no thoughts about the lost goodness in their nature or any worlds that would exist long beyond their time: If they were to live through scarcity, it was only natural to place their focus on those playing more important, more impressive roles, and in theory, each gem would have their role and importance to be proud of – at least, each one for which the system would admit a place. The processes of life were not so smooth and mechanical as to be governed completely with no inexactness or variability, and neither were the heart and mind. Where there was authority, there was the potential for its abuse, where there were rules, there were the consequences of enforcing these -

The fledgling empire was able to expand beyond its star system and take hold of plentiful bounty – they had survived, and they would continue onward.

But in the process, something was lost, something that was almost imperceptible at first, something that compounded the longer the iron-bound order remained in place, the more it began to clash with the realities that many of its constituent gems had to live through-

But such concerns were far from the mind of their Queen – Necessary sacrifices she called them, at best, with her smile of shallow warmth. Selfish deviants and disturbing aberrations, when her smile faded and her wrath reigned instead -

They were the furthest thing from her that could exist while still being sustained by her light, and to see such mockery of it, well, she could do without that.

What could she have known of their plight?

She no longer felt the pressure of having to sustain this world by herself. The rules she had laid out did it for her, as did her enforcers – the great machinery must be running smoothly enough if it kept delivering more and more worlds into her grasp.

So what need was there anymore for her to mingle with her creations?

The more the empire expanded outward under her distant guidance, the more the great matriarch remained secluded in her tower, admitting only the foremost of her gems, Morganites and Hessonites unlikely to question the foundation of the very order that put them in their places, and even if they had had their doubts, it was well known that Her Radiance wished to hear only good news -

And so, even those meetings began to lose their purpose.

---

Of course she wanted what was best for her creations, like any mother would.

That was precisely why she had no choice but to keep them on the straight and narrow by whatever means that might require.

There could no choice, not for anyone, and most certainly not for her, for choice implied limitation, and who was she to be limited?

---

The statues in the temples remained, as did the legends of the golden age where their gods once walked among them.

That was the dilemma inherent to myths and the different functions they filled – their usefulness as moral cautionary tales underpinning a society's values had to be balanced with the elements that would make them exciting tales that would speak to the archetypal components to the psyche – even on earth, many ancient tales were considered foundations of morality though they were filled with things now considered outdated or depraved:

Let the thunder-god take his sister as his wife, let the temples depict towering fusions.

In any case, it was only an increasingly small segment of the populace that had any business concerning themselves with songs or stories.

The queen became an empress, her spire, a glittering flagship in her likeness, as befitting one who rules over dozens of worlds. Her luminous arms reached out ever further to skewer the skies with her sharp black nails.

On the rare occasions when her subjects were honored with her presence, they would find her smiling upon her, sweetly, affectionately, almost benevolently -

But there was an unspoken agreement, a diffuse, whispered knowledge, that she was not to be displeased. The elder gems would (harshly, frantically) keep the younger ones in line.

Rarely, if ever, did any of her wayward children get a word in edgewise, and rarer still was it for her smiles to reach her eyes – as centuries and millennia passed before them, they remained cold, gray and lost in the distance.

Beyond her walls, generations lived, worked and sometimes died. She already knew of them, so she never saw them. They had learned to fall in line without her remainders a long, long time ago.

Her gleaming palace-ship stood out among the spires of the capital as a warning to all.

---

She had never considered calling their world anything other than 'the homeworld'.

She had never considered herself anything more than simply 'the' Diamond – for the longest time, the thought of another such as herself was inconceivable even to her.

She had not the means to create one, or so she had thought for the longest time.

However, now that she had several star system's worth of resources at her disposal and billions of gems at her beck and call, things had changed.

But she had changed as well. Perhaps once she would have gladly welcomed a companion to share her delights and relieve her burdens, overjoyed that she no longer needed to provide for her gems all on her own – but she did have to do it on her own.

She did not, could not have limits.

As the empress they all admired, as the linchpin that held their order together, she could not afford to have limits.

And yet it was glaringly obvious. Her palace ship had been designed to ferry her out to the furthest reaches of her dominion to dispense the powers and duties of her office, but she could hardly afford to leave the capital unattended -

And while she might have been one of the most powerful beings on this side of the universe, she could only be in so many places at once, and there were only so many hours in a day for her to spend working through reports, making proclamations or soaking in extraction chambers. If she had no limit to her power in the first place, she would have been personally controlling every vessel of her light to begin with instead of taking such roundabout ways to ensure her order.

It was only natural – the universe was enormous and her empire had grown so large that it almost defied comprehension, moreover, both of those were still expanding. An uninvolved outside observer might even have commended her for doing very well considering that there was only one of her -

But it would not do for her empire to be run “reasonably well”

Any degree of inefficiency was unacceptable -

The events at the founding of their empire had mostly passed into myth by this point. What few venerable gems still remembered the early stages of their expansion into the stars were vastly outnumbered by those who did not – Yet the Diamond still remembered. The memories weren't fresh or recent, but until that point, they had probably been her most unpleasant ones.

Even now, when she was so much more powerful than she had ever been in those distant early days, she could feel their echoes ringing within her gem –

But what an awful choice to be given.

If she did not admit to her limits, her weakness might come to be exposed over time, and while the latter was surely the least tenable alternative, neither path was much to her liking.

The realization felt so awful, she almost wished to hide herself forever and never show her face to any other living thing ever again.

No recourse was left to her apart from blind, searing rage.

---

The Bismuths, Pebbles and Pearls who were called into the control room for the next scheduled routine maintenance found it in complete disarray – its elegant pillars were cracked, its tapestries in tatters and the tiles of the floor littered with craters.

They hurried up to put everything back as it once had been and knew not to tell a living soul, nor even let themselves wonder what it might mean.

After all, it was impossible for a perfect flawless being to trash their rooms in a tantrum.

- and it was of utmost importance that everything in the palace, or indeed homeworld as a whole, should be the best it could be, for it was a time of great celebration and rejoicing:

Just moments ago, it had been announced that for the first time since its inception, gemkind was set to welcome a new Diamond into their midst.

With a bitter taste in her mouth, yet spurned on by somber awareness, the grand matriarch set out to accomplish what she knew she must do.

She was smiling when she had to address her technicians, but wore a malcontent grimace whenever she could afford to be out of their sights.

Never had the Empress' heart and the moods of her subjects been in more discordant states.

The new Diamond had songs and epics written in her honor before she even existed as more than a concept, she had barely begun incubating when entire wars were being fought in her name, and when she at last emerged, she was greeted with thundering parades on every world of the empire –

But as soon as the First Light laid eyes on what should have been her worthiest and proudest creation, she knew she had failed.

___________________

A/N: The idea was that she should come off as having had the same basic personality all along while being somewhat younger and purer in the beginning, while still showing how she got onto the trajectory that lead her to end up as the fearsome tyrannical light bulb we all know and love. like perhaps you could draw a parallel to how Pink/Rose never actually had this big ideological plan but was instead kinda figuring out as she went along and actually got many of her ideas from the other CGs.

I pretty much started with the visual of a younger WD ruling a stone-age settlement of pebble-like proto-gems.