The Quiet God

I remember us.

There were two of us once. Brothers. Not in any way a mortal would understand kinship, but close enough that the word still fits in my mouth when I try to speak of him. We were the first light and the first silence. We shaped each other before we shaped anything else. He was the brighter one. I was the one who lingered.

In the beginning there was nothing that wanted a name. We made names anyway.

We made the dark first, because light needs something to push against. Then we poured the light into it and watched it scatter into stars. We laughed. I still remember the sound of that laughter—if a god can be said to laugh—the way it rolled through the nothing and left little glowing places behind.

And then we made you.

That part still hurts in the good way.

We did not make you out of loneliness. That came later. We made you because the world we had built was beautiful and unfinished, and beauty that cannot be witnessed starts to feel like a private joke told to an empty room. We wanted someone who could stand on a hill at evening and feel the same ache we felt when the first suns cooled. We wanted someone who could be surprised. We wanted someone who could suffer and still choose to stay.

So we made you small on purpose. Fragile on purpose. We gave you bodies that would wear out, hearts that would break, minds that would forget the beginning of a sentence by the time they reached the end. We gave you the capacity to love things that would not last. That was the risk. That was the entire point.

When the first of you opened your eyes I was the one who stayed to watch. My brother had already turned toward the next thing—he was always turning toward the next thing—but I stayed. I watched a creature made of water and dust and borrowed fire take its first uneven breath and decide, without being told, that the breath was worth repeating.

I loved you immediately and without strategy. That was my first real mistake, or my only real success. I still cannot decide which.

Then the difference stopped being harmony. There came a day when my brother looked at what we had made and decided it was finished, or failed, or both. He wanted to clear the board. I would not let him.

What followed was not a war in any way a mortal army would recognize. It was two wills that had once been one will, tearing the seam between them. His will was destruction. Mine was love. I lost everything. The old reach. The old voice. The ability to rearrange the structure of things with a thought.

I do not know which of us broke first. I cannot feel him anymore. I only know that I am still here in some diminished way, and that I feel lost, and that I feel little.

Then, for the first time in what felt like an eternity, I heard a prayer.