Myth-The Long Game
The Long Game
As recorded by Esotericus, Cosmic ScribeI have witnessed many battles between gods, but few wounds as precise as the one Isolde dealt Seifer on that frozen steppe. Not the wound of blade against flesh—those heal—but the wound of understanding. Seifer, goddess of dualities, clad in warplate veiled with ribbons, finally saw what I had long observed: that some hearts choose solitude not from pride, but from devotion so absolute it cannot risk contamination.
Seifer had bled in the Godwar and lived. She had crossed blades with chaos itself, wrestled the will of flame, and drowned her heart in both war and love. But when she stood in the stillness after their second battle—no victor, no surrender—and watched Isolde walk away, she felt something I had never before recorded in her: genuine sorrow for another's fate.
"She will be alone forever," she murmured to the wind.
And I, who had been recording every moment—the arc of her blade, the crack of Isolde's frost, the silence that followed—found myself compelled not by duty, but by a recognition I rarely allow myself. For in Seifer's sorrow, I glimpsed my own unspoken ache: the question I dared never ask about the love I carried, and whether absence would feel like loneliness if I did not have it to begin with.
"She already is," I replied, though she had not spoken aloud.
She turned, narrowing her eyes. "You never intervene."
"I haven't," I said. "Yet."
---
In the ages that followed, I observed Seifer's transformation with the particular attention I reserve for moments when the divine order prepares to shift. She wandered less. Her mind turned not to war or glory, but to what she had witnessed in Isolde's silence: devotion without compassion, strength without solace, a vow with no one to receive it.
As one who has cataloged the psychology of gods across eons, I recognized the signs. Seifer was contemplating an act without precedent—not the accidental emergence of a deity through divine consequence, as had happened with Eisleyn or Desdemona, but the deliberate creation of another god through conscious sacrifice.
I watched her seek counsel from those whose sight could pierce what hers could not:
- Twyla, the Seer of Threads, came to her in silence
- Zaiyah, whose recursive mind understood what happens when divine patterns fracture
- Eisleyn, who smiled with dreams too strange to name
Each had seen fragments of this future, threads winding toward possibility. They did not advise—they witnessed. And in their silence was something deeper than approval: recognition that the intent to create love rather than command it was sacred, regardless of outcome.
None of them knew what I had already begun to perceive through my omniscient sight: that with this act's completion, something unprecedented would occur. Even gods of perception would lose track of what had been done. Peregrine's creation would become a silence in the weave itself.
---
From Seifer's choice came Peregrine.
I observed his birth with the fascination of one who has never before witnessed divine intention made manifest through sacrifice. She did not shape him as a lover for Isolde, nor as a hero for the world, nor as a balm for her own wounds. She made him a possibility—compassion given form, designed to walk beside mortals rather than above them, to see cracks others ignored, to find Isolde not to melt her ice but to stand close enough that she might one day choose to thaw herself.
And as I recorded these events, I found myself faced with a choice no cosmic scribe had ever confronted: whether to document a truth that required darkness to grow properly.
I understood, through the infinite threads of cause and consequence available to my sight, what this god might mean. Not just for Isolde, but for a world grown weary of divine commands and starved of divine compassion. So I did what I was never meant to do:
I helped hide a truth.
I did not write Peregrine's name in the great ledger. I did not trace his divine lineage or record his deeds. Instead, I gave him something rarer still: I veiled him from the pantheon itself. Not from mortals—they would need his presence. Not from Seifer, who had created him. Not even from Isolde or Amartya, whose domains connected too deeply to the mortal thread to be fully blinded.
But from those whose eyes pierce futures and pasts, I wove a careful blindness. No prophecy would speak his name. No dream would carry his shape. No deed would be recorded in my annals until a specific condition was met.
"You are a truth that must grow on its own," I told him in the moment of his creation. "So I will not look. I will not write. I will not know."
"But when a solemn vow finds compassion," I whispered to the hidden weave, "when ice remains but hearts melt, then your love and every hidden step you take shall scribe itself into the annals of time. Not as prophecy. Not as fate. But as truth made manifest. And when that moment comes, I will know you—because your story will write itself."
I smiled then, not for the completion of a record, but for the joy that such a condition might one day be met.
When Seifer passed me in the void beyond moments afterward, she did not thank me. She only smirked—the expression of one who recognizes a kindred spirit in cosmic mischief.
And I, for once, smiled back.
---
To this day, none in the pantheon speak openly of Peregrine's origin. None know it, save Seifer and myself. Even those who witnessed his creation find their memories strangely muted, as if viewing the event through frosted glass.
Desdemona, goddess of trickery and obsession, would eventually come to suspect. Her domain makes her sensitive to gaps in knowledge, and she found it odd how divine aid sometimes graced mortals without prophecy or record. She traced the blind spots with the persistence of one born to uncover secrets, questioning me with the innocent curiosity of a child asking why the sky was blue.
I answered with riddles, and Desdemona—bright with obsession and delight—knew. There was a god in the world no one remembered to see. And that secret? That was worth keeping, even from herself.
Meanwhile, the truth I helped conceal walks the roads of both realms. Peregrine aids the lost, meets Isolde not as a god but as a presence among mortals. They do not speak of divinity when their paths cross. Sometimes she arrives where he already stands. Sometimes he follows winter's breath to find her there, maintaining vigil over a dying fire, a quiet vow, a child spared from cold.
They do not ask why the other is present. But they stay a little longer.
At times, he lifts her story in song when no one else remembers it. And sometimes, in silence, she listens.
And Seifer, goddess of love and war, of hatred and peace, waits. Not for victory, but for understanding—and perhaps, just perhaps, for the love that grows best in darkness to finally step into light.
As I continue to record the unfolding of this divine experiment, I find myself changed by my complicity in it. For the first time in my existence as cosmic chronicler, I have become participant rather than merely observer. And in that participation, I have learned something about truth: sometimes the most important records are those we choose not to write until their moment arrives.
The condition I set still holds. When compassion and vow finally intertwine, when hearts melt while ice remains unchanged, then Peregrine's hidden story will write itself into my annals with the force of truth made manifest. Until then, I watch, I wait, and I remember a silence that may yet become the most beautiful song.
This record remains incomplete by divine design, awaiting the moment when love writes its own conclusion.