The Second Era - Hail the Volsigne

With fresh faces and minds, Time and his family experienced as they never quite had. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, basic senses hosting a world of discovery beyond the distant and separate they had known. For ages they did nothing, and everything; they ate berries and honey and bark, embraced trees and rocks, swam in rivers and streams, and danced in the mud beneath pelting rain. They made merry noise, and called it laughter; they wondered, and built language to grant voice to question. Time spoke with them of that which they had been, and of that which they might become.

He declared their family to be Volsigne—the strong and the bound.

There were six Volsigne, six eternal concepts whose will had been made flesh, and next they gave to themselves names.

Time, the oldest of them, became Vol Cyx; him of the towering stature, bronze skin, dark hair, and eyes of molten gold.

Nature became Vol Lea; her of the pale skin, earthen hair, and eyes of widest ocean.

Day became Vol Aro; him of the tanned skin, golden hair, and eyes like eager stars.

Night became Vol Ara; her of the dark skin, dark hair, and eyes of obsidian.

Hunger became Vol Sar; him of the brown skin, dark hair, and eyes of starved amber.

Life became Vol Noa; her of the palest skin, palest hair, and eyes of palest purple.

The Volsigne remained fascinated with each other. Here were beings of comparable scope, long-dormant and unfeeling toward the granular functions of existence, all arriving at awareness in relative harmony. After due consideration, they attributed this collective awakening to Cyx. He had been first to rise, and it was decided his evolution had begun their own.

Having built bodies and language, Cyx was able to ask his family if they too shared his ambition—his need for change, for more, for something other than. His quest to understand, and develop, and bring forth the new. His family reciprocated the desire, though none felt so passionately as him.

They looked to Cyx for guidance, and he led them. Toward what end he knew not, only to move and see what came. It had been so since the moment he had first garnered awareness and experienced the forward pulling of the self.

Together they roamed their chosen and cultivated world. By Aro’s light they granted names to Lea’s features and Sar’s beasts, and within Ara’s darkness they mapped the stars and planets around their home. In lowest valleys they refined mathematics, and upon highest mountains they laid foundations of philosophy. Over the seas they studied the broader universe, speculating on concepts like themselves who had not yet, and might not ever, dawn upon awareness as they had.

During these ages of exploration more than ever, the Volsigne learned that to be immortal does not mean to be fixed in place.

Noa, ever pale and gentle, was no longer the same as she had once been. She had become fragile and withdrawn, her beaming smile instead flickering in tremors as a fell darkness gathered in her purple gaze. She came to register what Cyx had long known: while the Volsigne themselves must remain eternal, the world must not. Time must slash across all, carving a jagged will—Lea’s bounty of forests must wither and rot, while Sar’s wandering beasts of land, ocean, and sky must age and perish into nothing.

To be shown this, again and again, this cycle of undeserved suffering without end, the totality of lives as bare and countless flashes against what they experienced, glanced harmlessly off her fellow Volsigne. To them it mattered not at all. Such was the structure of things, and as such there was nothing to be done for it.

Noa found this cruel, senseless, and wrong. Always had she basked in the purity of life, in fixed moments carved into her very being. The flowers she enjoyed breathing the scent of, the mountains she loved to scale, the birds whose song she was enamored by, the thrill of a forest in the winds of morning, the bleating of sheep as they trundled up green hillocks…all were parts of her, as surely as thoughts and words.

Yet, like thoughts and words, these could be only brief and fleeting things. Brought forth absent consent or mercy, thrust into being only to be torn away from it after a splintered moment. Even when new flowers grew, and young mountains rose, and more birds hatched to bless the world with music, these would never again be the same as those things she had known.

Each day brought with it a great many endings, and Noa mourned them all—an emotion new to the Volsigne, one which reshaped her. She would be no giver of life, no radiant promise of continuance, not any longer. She would be only the final moment, the execution of that which had been living, the blessed escape beyond an existence without meaning.

Vol Noa would not be Life; Vol Noa had become Death.