The Beginning of Sartova Excerpt Two
As kept by the most renowned collection of Jotun myth and culture in Evandyr, The Reliquary, located in the Watchman's Post.
-leaves his children to their Story, moving to the next of the Sixteen-and-One Chronicles of the Danse of Histories.
Avernus, after exploring Evandyr and finding it fine, but not adequte for his ambition, moved from Evandyr to Jhar'gorn to conspire with Jharia. He, however, found Jharia, working with chisel and file to build a marble house for her frolicking Giantlings. He stopped and balked, asking her, "Simon tells you to obey his Story, and you follow him as obediently as the Sun follows his trail in the sky!" Jharia smiled, working with the marble and dirt with her hands, building a better future for her new people as Giants always do, deliberately and powerfully, as she spoke "Simon is Omniscient in our Story, brother. He knows the choices we shall make before we make them, therefore we have already made them in his eye, and there is no reason to fight his story, that is simply what he knows we will do. We need not worry about the future, we should just accept whatever it holds". Avernus' face turned sour, darkening as his form grows, "If you speak this as truth, then there is no right and wrong, all choices are made for us by Him. Then we are naught but figments in his mind who perform our duties without our own wills, and we do not exist apart from him... thereby I ask--do we even exist?" Jharia sighed, pulling her hands free from the earth below her to look at Avernus, seeing not his hellish face, but her brother behind it, "Alive or not alive, it matters not to me. I feel the cold earth on my hands, I feel the warm touch of my offspring, I know the comforting embrace of my mate. I exist to me because I believe I do". Looking up and down his sister, who has fallen to obedience to their creator, Avernus believed she is not caring to understand his meaning, and prone to anger, began shouting "If we do not exist, then they do not exist, and your experiences are nonextant and purposeless!" Jharia set an example that all Giants now follow. As calm dutifully building a home as when debating metaphysics with her brother, responded in kind "Yet as I perceive that tree, in my mind I create a tree, and because of that it exists to me, even if there is no tree, let alone field, or flesh with which I am speaking now. So it is real to me, and I shall continue as such". Finally agreeing upon something, Avernus' face softened, but instead of responding, he understood something that has frustrated hundreds in just as many eras; that no one can change a Giant's mind, let alone a Giantess Queen's. Taking the words of his sister bitterly, he departed in a dark tunnel to the Fiefdoms of Tor.
Comments