Chapter Text
The very existence of this place should be absurd.
There had been no temples to the Father, not while he lived. It would be no worship, to stand before the foot of an idol, to let the comforting dusk of its shadow fall upon you in the haven of your shelter. None who had ever set eyes on him would be fooled so. The Serpent’s veneration is one of body and blood - alone amongst all the gods - one bleached by sun and scorched by sand.
It is the terror of wasting your life beneath the ceaseless twisting of his body, the blistering of your lungs at even the scent of his blood on the air, the desperate flight of your mind and eyes before the spiral impossibility of coils seven and numberless. It is the locked muscles of your frozen legs as you wait for the predator’s strike. The moment of final surrender before the fathomless dread of his gaze. Few even of his dedicates will mourn his absence. The world entire will forget what it is to witness a god.
It was that very flesh, in the end, that was to be his weakness. The awful exultation of his collision with the mortal world rendered waste in a moment of cold, banal plotting. Mankind is now safe from the monster. For this, you understand, you are meant to be grateful.
The tiny piece of that body you hold is at the same time the infinite whole of it - coil springing forth from coil until you forget where he begins or where you do. Already it hardens to the likeness of stone, where once it would have seared the skin from your palms. You had traveled halfway to Nowhere to retrieve it, from the place baked by no sun where the monstrosity of his corpse ever continues to fall. A part of you, of course, is still there. Nobody leaves Nowhere alive.
But you too had tasted the blood of the Father, which leaves nothing it touches whole. Not in the twice-fatal greed of your eldest sister, and you do not claim yourself a god nor will you ever. But always his acolytes have taken it drop by searing drop, and those who recover are vouchsafed their slightest fraction of his unconditional existence. So a part of you still falls with him; but only a part. You will scarcely miss not being dead.
Life teems within the lifeless cracks of his scales. The Worms do not wait to feast.
While the Father had lived, the world had needed no Histories. He had been everywhere the same, everywhere both one and infinite, and the world had followed on his example made flesh. Now though lifeless, his remnant will be the same. This place - or what it holds - will spread throughout histories, and in each one beckon to those who - like the gods his killers - seek to take for themselves a power of an age yet unmarred by man. There is no stopping such, you know. So whoever it might be will brave the sands. They will throw open the barred gate in eager hunting for a shrine to defile. They will seize the gifts within, and nor they nor a world which has not known hallowed terror will be ready for the poison they bear.
You place the remnant atop its stone plinth, where in its inertness it almost seems to belong. You tidy the little room you have readied. You seal the door against the ruthless precision of the sun’s revolutions. All the duties a priestess might have, you suppose, in this anodyne world that Light rules. Fortunate, then, that you are one no longer.
He is gone, without recovery. Let what he meant to the world pervade creation.
And let mortal men extemporize on what lament might linger of the Father’s youngest daughter. Medusa has made her last remembrance.