The end is the beginning. A Father rests amongst his Sons.
———
My offspring are riotous, villainous.
It is difficult, near impossible, to tame the wilding nature of my ruffian and raging sons. My brood is infinite. Their blood is satisfied only when harassing a hapless horizon, wickedly mischievous, barreling through rock and sod and tree, as seething adolescents do. Root cellars offer false salvation, and the pitch-black digests all but the eyes, illuminated, flickering pitiful wicks, weeping, weak backs pasted to brick. Hold on, they plead to one another and no one. Their murmurs are slag and soot before the collapse.
It is time to call my children home, an origin story, their reward, truth.
I roll a great rock from the mouth of my hermit cave and spy flashing swords, an undulating blanket of gnashing ferocious teeth, puncturing, and gray roiling thunderheads lashing, hordes of them riding ice-caked steeds, cracking, snapping whips. The stampede is endless, the forests empty, and I waved and screamed.
Enter here if you want to know. This way, here now, is home. One by one, the line of fuming, snarling clouds sweep in and pound me with hail, rain, and spit. I am lifted from my feet, my cynical smile smashed. Wall to wall, we are my crypt.
I summoned you here to listen to a tale, to make you finished, men. Sit or kill me now. What will it be? They assemble schoolhouse style. The limestone dome cracks above my head and stalactites let loose. The heavy and heaving exhaling and inhaling command it, and I begin.
I always embraced in my bones the sweet ache and taste of burning melancholia, a palliative salve that I would apply, and hide, in a forlorn pantry. I hid my hidden self on the top shelf next to the cornmeal, behind the pickled peppers and apple vinegar. Why there, you may ask, and I will tell you I do not know—that is where I found myself again and again. As a lad, my toes were curled so grievously I wore the nails off, and the blood let Them know I had been there and where I had gone. So, they always found me on my small wooden footstool reaching in the dark, the pantry my safe cist, a fantastic place to deposit myself, my demons, my angels, I am sediment.
I grew to be a brackish young man, the insatiable sea on my tongue, my hair wild, and my hands constantly anxious. I remember one particularly dark and fateful day—it was Noon. I know that with certainty because the grand old clock in the repetitious hallway said so, and it beckoned me. "Come back; it is not your time for that. The Unseen has a quest for you." I stopped, transfixed and the wanting left my breath. Suddenly a great wave of golden water flooded the room and thrashed me, and I fought it, and I lost, and I fought it again, and I lost again. Then, finally, I tired, found a round corner, and slept like I had never slept—under rapturous tides, I was enrobed, content. I conjured there a translucent whale, platinum with gold eyes, a phalanx of shimmering, pirouetting mermaids attending to her every substantial whim.
"This is Panacea. Enter." I hear a voice, but I am alone. Panacea opens her cavernous mouth. “You have been chosen. You must stay with her for twenty-one days. Sleep is your only chore. When you wake, you will be King, and Panacea will gift you strong, merciful sons whose names will stretch to the end of time. But you must never taste the honey—even a drop—that flows through her veins. This eternal sap is her essence; from it, I give life. All I ask is that you sleep; after the sun rises and falls twenty-one times, you will be Forever. You and Panacea—this is my purpose for you both.”
Greedy and foolish I was. The Unseen had not witnessed my severe tantrums and ravenous nature and did not understand that I, an unaccomplished man, had no map nor stamina for this journey. That may be why I was chosen. A broken vessel, leaking, must empty eventually. I slept for nineteen suns, but on the twentieth, I stirred, awakened by a voice, mine. "One drop does not matter to a whale. It is a whale. See how fat it is. It has more than it needs. It will always have enough, and you are hungry. You deserve to eat."
I pricked a tiny vein and drank. I did it belligerently, gluttonously.
“What have you done?” Again, a voice but now not mine.
Panacea began uncontrollably shrieking. Her sound, I cannot explain what I heard—the sheer agony. It was as if every living thing—plant, animal, and man—was aflame, and I covered my ears and cowered, and the flesh fell from Panacea. I was showered with blubber, lungs, sinew, and golden blood. Then, fearing for my life, I snapped a rib from her disintegrating body and sliced my way out. I emerged on a jagged shore, and beside me was a flaxen-haired goddess, ingots as eyes, and her swollen belly begat you. You and thousands more, your brothers, and then a savage wind whipped and ripped all from my arms, a sucking gale dragging the bones and gravestones of each of Them—those that made me—to a ravenous blank sky, your dark nest.
Each of you, from Panacea, fallen, was birthed.
On that day, I fashioned you, bent and brutal.
And I murdered your Mother.
I am your Maker, your Father, and I ask forgiveness now for what I must do.
———
And with that, the great stone was rolled, and the cave was sealed forever.