Ashura, Destroyer of Worlds

Ashura the Destroyer of Worlds was not always feared among the mortals. Among the annals of the divine—those dust-laden, hallowed halls where mortals people are naught but footnotes in some endless marginalia—Ashura’s arrival was not heralded by prophecy, nor sung by any chorus of seers. Their emergence was violent in its abruptness, an ontological trespass upon the cosmic order, as if the universe itself woke to find a tumor in its mind. In the reckoning of mortal calendars, Ashura has only been among the pantheon for two and a half centuries, but the scars they have left upon the world seem older, as if each scar begets more scars, an inheritance of calamity.   Not many still living still remember a world before Ashura, and they agree that the world had been less uncertain, less prone to rupture. It is said that on the day of their revelation, an entire archipelago rose from the sea and then, with a lover’s caprice, was dashed back into the depths, dragging with it thousands of shrieking souls and an entire civilization’s worth of hubris. Survivors—those chanced upon by passing ships, gibbering and salt-choked—spoke of a presence, neither man nor woman, neither shadow nor flame, whose laughter split the sky and whose footsteps made islands tremble.   Within decades, Ashura’s name had become the punctuation mark on every tale of disaster, every anomaly of fate, every region where the old laws of nature bent and whimpered or bled out entirely. Volcanoes which had slumbered since the world’s infancy erupted to paint the morning red. Flocks of birds fell from the sky, their song replaced by impossible whispers in dead languages. In the greatest cities of the world, suffocating fear and uncertainty rolled in, and from their depths emerged new cults and cabals, each claiming a different face or doctrine for their new god, but all united in a subtext of yearning for the end of all things.   The churches, orders and abbeys of the Prime Deities, who for millennia had curated the knowledge of divine influence, found themselves debating Ashura’s categorization: Was this a god of entropy? Of transformation? Or a being whose very purpose was to unmake the notion of purpose? Sects and schools of theology flowered and then withered under Ashura’s paradoxical light, each iteration more radical than the last. Some dared to worship openly, carving vertical mouths into their own flesh to “drink the world as Ashura does.” Others staged impossible pilgrimages to sites of past devastation, seeking relics of the god’s passing: a pebble that once was a mountain, a feather that could cut glass, a song that, once sung, could not be forgotten even by the dead.