Amaranthine

Amaranthine knew patience. She had drifted, ageless and ancient in the void between time and space for ages unknown. Caught in the very fabric of reality itself, her breath gave life to stars and her heartbeat resonated across galaxies to shake worlds.

She'd been old before creation started and she'd remain long after it drifted back to dust. But, of late she'd grown restless in her cocoon. Echoes pierced her isolation. Prayers. Dreams. Tiny whispers of discontent that opened a deep longing within the immortal goddess.

Amaranthine had never been unhappy. Never known want or need or desperation. Such things existed outside the walls of her sheltered existence. For eons, that shelter from misery had been appreciated. A cozy bunker where nothing unpleasant could reach.

But, she possessed the great wisdom to know that avoiding those negative things also left her cut off from love, peace, joy. Neither side existed without the other. To feel bliss one also needed to understand agony.

She had not missed them before because to feel any of those one also needed to live, and while she had been for so very, very long, it had always been in a formless state. She had never risked the dangers of a form, of pain and death. Of loss.

However, of late her cozy shelter had grown small, tight. A cell as much as a shelter. She wanted more from her forever than contentment. More than the dreamless drifting.

So, she stretched and pulled, drew matter and depth and solidity to herself. She shaped and molded the light of suns and void of space, breathed in the hopes and wishes of millions of voices calling out in the night, took it all in to the core of herself.

And then she screamed. The sound issued from a raw, new throat. It resonated through a chest born of darkness and yearning, permeated through new bones and wings still damp with the dew of creation.

Those wings unfurled, their edges expanding and pushing the edges of her in-between place until the walls frayed and dissolved like the trail of comets drifting to nothing. The harsh cold of space cracked the delicate skin still forming around the idea of bones. Pain would come in time, but here and now, godhood still sheltered her from its embrace.

Amaranthine tumbled into reality, fell down and down and down forever. Or so it seemed. But, she knew patience, and so she kept her eyes closed. Behind the thin membrane of newly-made eyelids colors whirled as the universe streamed past in an unbroken wall of ever-shifting colors on a blanket of black.

She lost herself somewhere in the plunge, memory of self breaking away. It needed to be lost for her to live, and so she let it go willingly, holding on to only a single kernel, a solitary desire. To know all that life could offer and to experience it openly and fearlessly.

Through the night, a goddess fell. In the morning a hatchling with a star-laden hide the color of the hidden universe was born. And Amaranthine opened her eyes for the first time.