Makutu

> *"Life is so beautiful that even death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at it when it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud..."*
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Some are born great, others achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

I was born very shortly after the universe first formed, back when it was still young and her worlds were still new. Eris, not willing to be outdone by her sister Harmonia, had sought to cast her own avatars into the world.

So underneath a full moon, she crafted and sculpted, chiselled and moulded, until from the gnarled brambles, one by one, my siblings were loosed upon the world.

I too emerged underneath that sky. My skin was a pure, glowing white, shiny and reflective. I remember opening my eyes for the first time and seeing the wild, full disk of that moon, its glowing visage peeking out behind a wisp of cloud. It smiled down at me and marked me with the colours of the night sky.

Fervid shadow magic thrummed through my veins from the first jump-start of my pulse. At first, it was overwhelmingly intense, running ragged and seeping out through every gap of my pores, rising up from my body in a mist.

I sensed mother watching me, her deep aura of satisfaction barely permeated through this haze of darkness and crushing power. I feared I could never be able to control something so great, that mother would realise she had made a mistake and I would be deemed unworthy.

But she greeted me warmly, wrapped me in a soothing embrace, and sang a sweet lullaby in her melodic, haunting voice. She coaxed me with a gentle hand and a kind smile. In her wisdom, she taught me the secrets to my power, taught me how to hold my magic in both hands and coalesce it into something solid, something that can be weaved and fashioned into the threads of reality.

She is a legend, a goddess in her own right. Many stories are told of how she issues challenges to those deemed worthy, weaving her threads of chaos and guarding the world against passivity. *Only in the crucible of chaos can we sow the seeds of true greatness*, she would say when I inevitably flinched at the violence of it all. She tested them through trials by fire, ice and shadow. She created heroes.

Living beings are each independent, yet capable of influencing their own destinies and the destinies of those around them. A single life is so brief and lonely—a sole actor on the grand stage of eternity—and yet, each one is capable of shaping the world, even to change the rules of the universe, given the chance.

I am that chance. The pulsing beat of greatness in me wanes and waxes, following the tides of the universe and the rise and fall of eras. With it, I can turn a scrap of paper into a graceful crane, or put a thousand whispers into a single thought, murmurs of betrayal and glory and secret love.

So I sit in my corner in the shadows, obscured and unseen, weaving my silk-thin reels of twisted threads. Influencing the paths of the most ardent and most ambitious as it unravels. From a war-forged revolutionary to a gentle leader of the people, the greatest all bear my mark; the manifestation of heroic destiny. My beautiful creations, all walking the world, so full of wonder and curiosity and possibility.

In those times, I would raise my voice in that smooth timbre I use to hear, an old lullaby toned by the hum of magic in my bones and the twinkle of starlight dancing in the distance.

It is a beautiful, wonderous, eerie sound. A tune from a different time, a window to a different world. Mournful and joyous; half wail, half song. A homage to the proud traditions and history of my kind, and to the lessons instilled in me from a time before time.

But I seek not only to weave the tales of the great but also to guide with a gentle hand. To use a kind word before a cruel one, and to fill their journies with melody rather than with fire and ice and tragedy. I sing in celebration of all the rich and strange creatures that now roam under their suns, and of all their great stories, just waiting to unfurl in their one glorious moment under the sky.