Gods - Tumblr Posts

I was alone in darkness, huge and sweeping and impossible. A glittering constellation above me shined, insane, stars beneath the surface of the Earth..

And then a voice rang out, a voice that could buckle God himself to his knees, that could churn Him up into dust and whittle all the pantheons of Men down into worthless ash and pitiful prayers.

“THERE WAS A BENEATH BEFORE THERE WAS AN ABOVE.”

The not-stars blinked, fluttered. Refocused.

They were a labyrinth of eyes.

My heart trembled and squirmed, desperate to escape up my tight throat, pounding in parasitic fear. Thump. Thump. Thump. Blood roared in my ears into a numbing thunder, my hands thrown up, legs askew in catastrophe as I drifted; embryonic, tiny.

Crimson light pulsed in endless blackness. It illuminated only the faintest of conceptions of what lay before me, so gigantic that even across what must have been fathoms upon fathoms of distance still it dwarfed me, dwarfed the sun and the moon that would hang skyward back on the surface. The light impressed upon me huge, jointed legs. Onyx-dark plate chiseled into midnight smoothness, impermeable and ancient, invincible of anything that existed. A nightmare that even to this day I cannot describe, cannot understand. It spoke once more as constellation eyes focused upon me, unfurling like an abyssal flower.

“WE ARE TIMELESS. WE ARE INFINITE. WE WILL FEED UPON YOUR ROT. WE WILL FORGE YOUR BONES INTO SOMETHING PERFECT. WE AWAIT. WE AWAIT. WE AWAIT.”

And then, like the birth of Creation, there was Light—

It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space.

There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.

And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.

Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.

It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.

The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridged with intricate carvings so small you have to feel them to know they are there.

Everything is too big for normal people, avenues are so wide and broad, buildings like skyscrapers that simply vanish up into shadow. It goes on and on. A labyrinth for titans.

Everything meets at the center, at a statue ringed by black water in circular canals, but it’s so massive that you can’t see it up in the gloom, just two claws on the mount, and giant legs bent backward at the joints. Is it a God for the vanished builders? A triumphant warrior? You feel an awful foreboding, an ominous realization that somewhere far above you— the statue is looking back.

They know you are here.

*… everything is overgrown, everything is swallowed up like it was just a dream. Vines, moss. Trees big as the skyscrapers downtown from the Academy that had to have grown in a day. I think sometimes I can hear them warbling. Like music..*

*—- can’t find my way back. The path forks. Over and over. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a tunnel, or maybe an egg. Everything bends up over me, and I can look down at myself, surrounded by so much green. Little lights dancing. I don’t remember the last time it was night, but I know there is no daylight here*

*I tripped and stumbled into a pool that glittered and crackled. It burned. It tasted like the sea on my lips, and now I feel it, layered over my bones, crashing waves to the pulse of my heart. I can feel the warbling. A Pattern—*

*I see so much in my vision. I see this place, all burnt and ragged rock, stretching off into the horizon broken by so many blazing mountains. I see this place as the Traveler sings to it, weaves life up from sulfur and hell and death, makes hazard into haven. I see this place, a seed tucked away in possibility, thinking. Unfolding. It looks back at me. Standing on so many cracks, marooned across so much potential. It has a single, blaring red eye*

*A saw a man in the forest. I saw a dragon that spoke to him. Fireflies danced around and between them like so many stars in the night, beautiful amber motes. The man looks like me, and I know I am him, but he is not— me. He has traded his memories for something so much more. I can feel what radiates out. It is so powerful willows around him groan faintly as they grow, white tendrils sprouting vermillion and violet flowers. Secrets are traded. Fates are sealed*

*A shadow crosses the ground and speaks so many lost names, smothering brass in rot, drowning glass in night, and I am falling, falling, falling*

On Dark Wings

A knock at the door.

It’s him.

Uncomfortably tall. I feel like he is leaning over me in the doorway, leering down like I am something small and frail and exposed. I have a memory of being a child once at church dwarfed by an enormous, agonizingly detailed Christ, bloody and bruised but with a stone-still expression staring down at me from lifeless dark eyes. I am there again.

It’s dark out. Moonless. Even now I can feel the heat, moisture collecting on my skin. Pouring down my spine. I start to realize I have been waiting for hours. The tension of my muscles spasms like I’m being pulled on marionette strings.

The Man is in a trench coat. He does not sweat. His face is angular, but smooth, with the wax-clay composition of a corpse. My heartbeats seem to take centuries. Beat.. Beat.. Beat..

I blink and gag, gasping for air as a freakishly long finger reaches down my throat. It’s like something alive. But I can’t move, I can’t scream, even the gag is caught and silenced as if it were a small pathetic thing quickly extinguished. His hands are pale spiders. I have seen them everywhere, reaching into my windows and retreating under my bed, I know their too-smooth texture, remember the ease with which I am subdued, carried, hoisted.

We are outside now. In the Forest. It should be dark but there is light, so much light, and it hurts to be beneath, an appalling brightness that brings out bottomless animal fear. Heat across my body. The probing, painful digit brushes my heart. Flexes across my spine.

His sunglasses are eyes. Huge, black spheres around an inhuman face. His coat becomes wings, black cataclysmic wings.

Driving

Driving in the dark, tired. Trying to remember something. Out into night beyond the road is endless, still fields. Tall shadows under a clear and moonless sky. The backbone of the Milky Way sprawls in glorious omnipresence, and I feel diminished beneath it, rightfully. Window cracked so I can smoke because Stacy hates getting in and smelling the signature *Camel* scent. Radio crackles to me in whispers— think it’s jazz.

Driving. A straight road to the end of the horizon. A pre-Columbian vision where the world ends, drops off into the dark, and I can imagine so many castaways drifting as payment for their reckless exploration. Twist the dial for the radio, looking for *WQ34-9*, thinking they’ll say something about the game—

I blinked. Jolt. The road is dirt. Narrow. I’m in a field, surrounded by tall shadows. The radio hisses in long, droning notes like I’m listening to the sea crashing on the shore. Sitting in the dark. No wind. No stars. Fingers caked in ash from a stumped cigarette. Something ancient twitches inside me and makes me look skyward, pressing back into my seat, hand clawing for the glovebox, for the gun—

The stars are going out. Darkness spreads. Silence. The radio hissing mixes with the rush of my blood until it’s all I can hear, all I can feel. Something above, something coming, shaking hand closing around cold metal, fumbling and grabbing, trying to pull—

Light cuts the darkness. Bright, unnerving sunlight done in red. An ugly sunrise at midnight. I’m shaking. Sweating, drenched, pulling at the seatbelt, throwing the door open. *Run, run, run*—

The red engulfs me. Numbness erupts, engulfs me. I can *feel* it looking down at me, looking into me, and the familiarity all comes back, the memories explode from hissing silence. Driving to run from the light, to hide. Hoping if I cross state lines I can retreat—

*D O N O T B E A F R A I D*

A chorus of voices.

I’m surrounded. The red light dominates the sky and the darkness of the night fills countless, bottomless eyes.

Whisper-Whisper-Whisper-Whisper

Flick the lights *on*.

Flick the lights *off*.

Flick the lights *on*.

Flick the lights *off*.

He stands in the doorway of the kitchen. His kitchen. Ugly, half-sterile faded white and outdated yellows that make everything seem smeared. Fuzzy. The faucet leaks. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. It’s dark out. Night. Chilly, too, with tendrils of frost on the window as eerie, clawing fingers splayed.

Flick the lights *on*.

Flick the lights *off*.

Flick the lights—

Jennifer’s voice splits the silence and shatters the faint rhythm of the drip-drip-drip. Her voice is all craggy, irritable topography marred by too many cigarettes, split between nasally whine and roughness. It sounds like a voice that cracks the words it wants to say. Makes mountains out of molehills. She’s somewhere upstairs away from this kitchen. He shrinks from it, presses to the wall. Silence returns shortly. He doesn’t even know what she said.

He waits.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

*On.*

*Off.*

*On—*

The kitchen is gone. Jennifer is gone. The drip-drip-drip-drip, all of it— gone. Just darkness. Just the Moon, slivered and thin and sharp, surveying from on high. A cool wind blows. Tussles evergreen branches in soft, whispering tones. There are voices. Words. Pure, burrowing meaning that shivers and splits, blooms, even if it’s almost entirely unheard. Soft, hissing words like an endless rain turned down to near-silence. Whisper. Whisper. Whisper. Whisper.

He looks. His heart is slowly crawling up his throat. Pounding.

There are no stars in the sky. Just pristine, primordial blackness and the sickle Moon. Trees cut by sharp moonlight into twisted leering shapes.

Buildings far away. Tall. Monolithic. They are all shadow, all depth. All alien, inhumane. The buildings look back. The whisper-whisper-whisper-whisper originates there, hissing unsettling silence-without-silence.

Watching.

*Off.*

The ugly, fading kitchen. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Back again. He closes his eyes. Feels something crawling up his neck, sliding down his ear. Back to Jennifer. Back to bed.

An overpowering night. Even with the backbone of stars above its ancient darkness sprawls, swallows up the earth beneath like an oncoming ocean from above. It is the greatest enemy of the People. The night shelters their foes and predators, cloaks the stalking tigers even as helpless familiars are dragged off into tall grass or hides marauding Others, their fierce gazes and fiercer obsidian knives unseen. The night is the first and final God, a beautiful destroyer, merciless and immutable to the fates that play out beneath. The People fear it, respect it in a matter-of-fact absolutism. It *is*.

They pay little mind to an unfamiliar star above.

They are few. Numbers and abstractions are as far away as those twinkling, cold constellations. These people have short memories, awareness like a mirage over far away sands. But they know that they are less. The People are dwindling just as cool water dwindles under scornful sun. Voices forever vanished and dexterous, shaping hands stilled. In a world so big with the People so few, each loss is a Holocaust. Soon there will be none.

Bodies huddle in the dark as attentive, fearful eyes peer out into the blackness. Waiting. Each breath is an anxious rattle bound by animal-fear heartbeats pounding, sometimes screams erupt and throw themselves echoing into the darkness. Long grass bends, under sun rustling as antagonizing shapes manifest for the briefest of seconds before vanishing. Unseen Others circle. Hooting to themselves. Preparing. Starlight glints over sharp, brutal looking stone knives like so many lifeless eyes.

A frenzy passes between the People. No prayers exist yet, no gods have been born to give name and respect and loyalty to what lives deep within mankind. Even their emotions are thin things. More instinct than empathy. A frost of humanity over primordial depth. The hoots rise, hands thump at muscular chests, teeth barred and feet kicking, stamping into dry season dust. No rallying cries. No sympathies pass between adults and their clutching, cooing infants. When the Others emerge, all that awaits them is untamed fear and territorial aggression. War is an ancient impulse.

The foreign star observes, sentinel over a dim world. Words-without-words are exchanged. Unfathomable processes respond. *Thy will be done* relayed with majestic computational composure. The prairie below experiences sudden, catastrophic daylight as golden-red illumination splashes in all directions, like a rippling sea of wildfire. Everything in a hundred miles skitters, runs, jumps, howls. Undisturbed, natural darkness has been violated, and the terror it invokes is absolute. Even the elephants, giants of memory thousands of years long and deep, scatter, turning the savanna into pandemonium as all that lives beneath their command responds. *Flee*.

The Others are there. The Others are not there. Binary thinking shatters like predawn darkness meeting glorious, gilded morning. The world is burning. The Night is banished. The grass is alive with motion and sound, People falling to their knees, hands upraised by this intrusive sunrise. Silent. No sounds to conjure in the face of this. Unanimous clatter as brandished weapons meet solid earth below.

The foreign star looms. It is the first *made* thing to ever kiss the soil of this place. It will not be the last. A passageway opens, unfurling with the same practiced and liquid ease of a blossom in springtime. And like a blossom, it bears something within. Many somethings. New, and strange to this world. They stand. Taller than the mightiest matriarch amongst those tusked behemoths. Too many feet for one individual touches down amongst the undulating grasses. The People are laid bare before their visitors. Small as children, quivering in fireball illumination.

The night has been usurped and it’s place comes new, unfamiliar daylight for unspoken centuries to come.

Time is the great band. Beginnings bleed into endings, bleed into beginnings. This is the nature of all things. What dies nurtures the soil, and life rises out of its black foam, and what falls upon it is consumed in turn to nurture what comes next. Out of the muck from the earliest days until the hammer blow of extinction sent it back, only to crawl once again forward— ever forward. Defiant to the cyclical ends that are so numerous. Death. Plague. Conflict.

How many times were our ancestors reduced, resigned back to primitive form? How many generations of potential obliterated by so many fearsome ends, each form cut away by that cold scythe that dictates what lives and what dies? Ninety-nine percent of all life forms upon the Earth have withered and died. A cathedral of the extinct is the greatest achievement of this living world, not the things it has produced that breath and fight and breed, no— it’s mightiest haul is all the bones, all the skeletal remnants tucked away in her soils. The chorus of life is but a whisper to the requiem that follows, millions upon millions of voices strong.

When my people arose it seemed that we were the inheritors of a mighty mantle. An impossible age was upon us. Immortal, invincible— the apotheosis of industries and arts that our minds had summoned from purest imagination to hardest realities. Continents became little more than gardens for us to shape, the weather and its rebellious storms tamed with simple amusement until every day was pleasant and demure to our liking. We forged metal, flesh. Even light became just another palette to the artist and the engineer in all the shapes of our divine whim. We kissed other worlds until the stars in the night sky sang with the influence we wrought. Those first travelers, machines as they may be— they were the heralds of our coming upon the Galaxy..

And then came the loss. The disease that was upon us then was slow and ancient already, a stilling sickness that did not rot flesh or weaken bone; no, no, this silent dredge did nothing more but dull our minds, weaken our wills. Immortality brought weakness, endless resources stifled creativity. Our art, majestic and vast and mighty as it was, and it was mighty!— all of it blended, meshed. We were all doing the same in our countless, same-same-same heavens.

That was not what killed us, no, but it did weaken us just enough. Cracks in the walls from tenacious vines, hungry mold. Just waiting for the right push.

The Adversary came. Our Nemesis. And it was relentless. Merciless. It was the face of annihilation. An out-of-context event that turned so much divinity and so much power into ash, into the painfully folly that was. We crashed, we burned. We broke. So many beautiful fresco shards immolated. The continents we had tended melted away into slag, the storms we had tamed became raging gales that stripped the soil and stone from so many surfaces until all that was left was obliteration. They scoured all that we had touched. Like God erasing our hubris from his creation.

We ran. What else was there to do?

We vanished into the dark. Burning and burying all that was left behind, all that might incriminate the direction of our exodus. Some fled to a distant galaxy, believing this affliction was here and here only, amongst familiar stars. Others buried themselves in obscure, esoteric ritual and mindsets, hoping to vanish into regressive pasts that might unfold. Legions of dreamers and acolytes wove wonderful delusions for themselves, for the minds that remained, bodiless and hidden in tiny alcoves scattered. Others still went out into the Maw, believing they could reason with our oncoming extinction. Their questions were all silenced. One by one.

In our flight we found the ruins. The tombs and abandoned projects, the memories; all of it came with the realization of what had come before. The endless cycles of time realized in fragments, in pieces. Life arose, mind igniting in the sludge and the cold and the harshness, the inevitable ascension. And then the hurried, black silence that was total and uncompromising. Snuffing out civilizations in a methodical diminishing. One by one. Until nothing remained but the silence. When we found the remnants of our distant, forgotten forebears, and the telltale signs of their own inescapable fates, we had no time to mourn. The Adversary was already upon us.

It still is. We are at our Cradle now, though it is unlike to be where we truly originate from. It is all that remains. Our enemy walks the surface and soon will be amongst here, down beneath. Finishing their ultimate work. We do not why. Never will we know.

In our final hour, in our last struggle, we leave this record for you. These few, precious gifts.

May the cycle end with you.

Or let your end be sudden and complete.

Godforsaken Place

The Gods have not finished this place. The Gods have abandoned this place.

The Gods have forsaken this place.

When we landed on its shores, we were five hundred thousand. Five thousand remain. Shambling. Pale. Gaunt.

The land is chaos and disaster. Black rock bellows it’s rebellion against the sky and hurls upward into the night. Bone-chilling wind screams across the waste and slashes ceaseless raking claws over us, snatching away breath and tearing our fragile wills into so many ribbons. My footsteps over the ice are little more than stumbling confusion, kept only forward by the men behind me, and those behind them, on and on by discombobulated thousands. The overseers amongst us are mirages, ghosts; even their cruelty has been obliterated by this godforsaken place.

We are running from an angry, rioting Earth. Running at the pace of dead men. We surge toward a looming plateau of barren stone and clinging, hardy grasses. A place of stability. I pray Azh, and Yu-Hueq, and so many others to grant us this place to stand. My frozen toes knock against the ground, my eyes weep and flutter against agonizing cold.

I am not ready to die.

Far away, across the ice, Hell is in revolt. Our army stands in silent awe as the elements do their battle and all the murmuring voices of ten thousand fighting men is vanished. We have become like sentinel statutes on desolate land; monolithic and wordless in the dark. Down below I can see the last vestiges of our straggling legion hurling themselves onto this island of stability and even far so from away their countless star-illuminated faces shine with fear, scrabbling and scurrying like vermin discovered by a wrathful lord. Even now the ground is splitting, swaying under their boots and I know many, too many, will not find safe ground to perch upon.

I can’t look away. Many of us collapse to the hard, unforgiving earth. Men who have fought and killed with spears, with hands and teeth; weep openly. They whisper the name of far away divinities, hands clutching in satchels and beneath frigid plate for effigies, offerings.

Mountains erect themselves in heaving juts where once there had been plains and lowlands like bones in insurrection against the flesh they inhabited. We feel it tremble. Hear the almighty groans surging in waves greater than any battle hymn we have sung. Everything shakes, everything becomes uncertain and unmoored, the foundations of all that is unshackled from order into free-falling pandemonium. We watch in frozen terror as a thousand, more, are swallowed up by darkness which was once ground. Their voices rise up like the begging chorus of the damned.

The glow of an inferno seethes down in those craters and I sway on the lip of the island, mesmerized by a terrifying sight. A glimpse into a world far beneath us. Unfit for Men. Unfit for his Gods.

The Night Church has many followers.

Beneath moist, worn floorboards and in the bellies of listing ships moored at graveyard harbor, they wait.

The Night Church has many hymns.

They rise up from cavernous mausoleum keeps and ring out in churches claimed twice; once by the fires of ruin, twice by the hunger of green roots.

The Night Church has many commandments.

Thou shalt stain the snows with hoof prints, thy shalt knock thrice at the windows of fearful parish, thou shalt not cease thy march until row upon row of abbey lies empty and lifeless..

The Night Church has many teachers.

The headless, bare-bodied feminine statue in that hidden garden, where the whispers come from more places than just breeze. The starless-night colored monolith standing sentinel on its cliff faced sanctuary, lulling sailors to dash their fates on razor rocks. The book that weeps bloody tears, tucked under a floorboard, waiting for frightful pages to be turned.

The Night Church has many paths.

Up through rotten cellars and across harvest moon skies, down bottles tainted black by feral touch and into dreams you dare not speak of.

The Night Church is boundless.

The Night Church is eternal.

The Night Church is coming.

The Great Hunt.

She runs through the snow, breathing hard. Every tree a charcoal sketch against white. Naked as every leafless, grasping branch above.

The Hunter.

Striding and perfect. Inhuman. Taller than any man, who wears the night like mortals wear their cloaks and coats. Sword whispering to him of its insatiable hunger. The pale Moon above is his God.

The Chase.

Between skeletal forest fingers and down across yawning frigid rivers, cold scouring everything in blissful numbness. The wind howling, the Hunter laughing hollow as breaking bones.

The Capture.

Ensnared. A net that brings welling redness from a thousand fine cuts across pristine skin. The bone-breaking laughter emanating from the dark. Promises of liberating pain, gifts that burn and boil and bleed.

To be fair, if my brother killed everyone but the man I hate, I would be pissed as well

I almost went to sleep, but then Hermes said this:

"Avoiding your gods because you feel unworthy is the beginning of a downward spiral. We improve what we touch, and make worthy those whom we love."

So, if you got there in your head, too, just an FYI.

personal take on his human(oid) design i think

The Olympians : You can't beat us! We are the gods!

A dyslexic kid with a pen , a blonde who knows to much about buildings , and emo girl with daddy issues : Says you

Flexing my art improvement a tiny bit bc I want to

The og:

The new one:

I call this character the rot deity and I’ve had them for ages, I always loved the old piece of work and wanted to improve it a bit. Considering making this design into stickers! If you guys are interested I have lots of ideas about this character :}

As someone who's working with Aphrodite and worshipping Apollo and has been struggling lately a lot, I really needed to read this and be reminded of it

Your deities love you.

Haven’t tidied their altars in forever? They understand.

Don’t have the motivation to give them offerings? They get it.

You haven’t left bed for a long time? They still care about you.

Aren’t devoting time to them lately? They don’t mind

Forgot an offering? That’s alright. They forgive you.

Fucked something up? They’re not going to ditch you for your mistakes.

Decide to take a break from deity work? Totally cool, they’ll still be here for you.

Your deities understand your struggles. Even your mental health related issues. They get it, and they love you regardless. Just do your best for them, and they’ll appreciate it. 

Meliko

protector of censored/forbidden artists and art

this is an abstract drawing of one of my favourite gods

Daninoti

Daninoti is the first thing i knew about Derea. He’s the servant of Rija and Ela (death and fate), who brings dead Dereans to Hatonul

floods, death, fate, unmarked graves, unforeseen consequences, natural disasters