The Story of Our Story

Picture a world of Sepia—not exactly colourless but void of creation; bleak; a place of nothing new or evolving or artistic. Otikka. That was the land between our worlds. It was dull and boring, but stable.

Our love broke that.

This is the story of our story:

Asra

It was a stony place where I stood; an untrained eye would think it to be pitch black. Maybe it was. Colour had not come into creation back then; it was not a thought we knew to have. So perhaps I was born in blackness. Even if there had been colour, it was still a world with nothing to see. Maybe no one there knew how to look. Their desires—if that’s what they were—were only to stay in their spots, to stick to their habits. To be lone vessels of the dark.

I did not know if people died in that place because no one really lived. Nothing changed. No one was taught change; how to want things or feel things.

I wish I could explain to you why I chose to walk when no one else did. I do not know. Maybe I was just the first to grow a desire. Maybe some greater creation out there decided to put change in me. But I walked. I sought out something new.

I learned the ground was hard and cold on feet I learned were bare and mine. Without the vocabulary to describe such things, I saw other creations, learned other vessels were not the same. I touched their faces, enjoying the different molds, but they were all trapped in their stagnant ways and I learned I did not want that.

So I kept going… and going, and I learned, through experience, the pain that was time. It might have been seconds or centuries, but to me, travelling through that place was a kind of forever. Not knowing what I was searching for made the journey all the more brutal. But I found it; the type of 'different' I’d desired.

And when I did, I climbed towards it.

Fos

It was a cloudy place where I stood. Everything was white and everything was there. All the world had to offer dwelled in that scratched out space. Everything: carried in our hands. Every receptacle held their part and every part was shared: the very pieces of the world. We carried them in our arms like babies. Forests, canyons, fire, snow, oceans, and emotions. We held them in clear spheres like crystal balls, whilst diamonds of light revolved around their frames, blinking from one set of arms to the next. The world’s belongings were ours to hold, ours to bask in. We saw everything there was to see without realizing how blind that made us.

Sensibly speaking, we should have been happy, but happiness was merely something we held not something we felt. We had everything and knew nothing.

I think what I was meant to do was not what I did. In this place of light and shine and all the things that were, I was not supposed to strive for anything more, because, in theory, there should have been nothing more to gain. All I had were things to lose.

And I lost it all. Willingly.

I made the choice to let go. I couldn’t tell you why.

Why drop all that you could ever have? Maybe some weaker part, of whatever I was, had finally felt their weight. Maybe I’d sensed that something out there needed the things I held so much more than I could ever understand. I simply did what no one else did, and took on the consequences.

It was when everything fell—when I had nothing left to hold—that long tendrils of black light had reached up from the clouds to hold me. They slid across my silhouette and tugged me down through what once was my only ground. And I accepted it.

Asra

After falling and falling and falling again, I finally sat at the peak of my climb, and placed a palm above me, on what had felt like a brittle border of the world. The moment my claws grazed the surface, the blackness gave way, dots of it sprinkling down my arm and drawing hair on my scalp. Then, for the first time in history, I had witnessed something that was not covered in shadow. The ‘new’ of which I’d searched for; bright things like white-golden shawls draped down from the cracks in the world. I clutched onto one, feeling warm emptiness in my palm, and with a huff and a shudder, the entire border showered over my people.

Otikka—the world of sepia—opened up to us. ‘Change’ in its rawest form. It was there I discovered air and took my first breath of it. I drank the stuff like water and never stopped drinking. I saw the sky and its bronze-like beauty, felt the wind and watched the many bubbles of things raining down from far above.

I felt hope. As strange as it may sound, I realized I was alive and felt gratitude to life itself. There was an abundant overload of beautiful feelings and I couldn’t get enough. I pulled myself out of the Dark and took my first step on the new world. With my step came a—

Boom!

Fos

I landed hard upon Otikka’s grounds. The shadowy things had dragged me through clouds, pierced me through skies, choked me the whole way down. I felt pain for the first time in history, too much of it—as if pain itself had found its first target. I felt sorrow, I felt rage, I felt regret, and hate to all that surrounded me, and all that I was. It felt so easy— so necessary to slip into these feelings. And when I had finally hit the ground, it was like I was still falling. I realized: I was a being that could die. I should have died. If the land and its magic had not been trying to figure out what I was, I would be dead—and all because of a foolish choice.

I abandoned the one task the world had given me and for what? This copper-coloured place?

I cried out—roared my everything out—and struggled against the agony of the fall, pushing myself away from the ground. My mistakes raining down around me: Trees and their leaves, mountains with their ice, volcanoes, lakes and lava, and lightning fields; Otikka’s power had warped their sizes to its liking.

Old magic had filled that place. It was potent in air that was as new to magic as it was to being breathed. Mixed together, no one knew what these equations could do.

This was the stuff fate was made of; reality; physics; the art of creation. And we were the intruders.

It felt like another phase of eternity would have to pass before change would strike again. I was convinced I would have to sit there in my agony and face the punishment of setting a definition to ruin. But it was during this vulnerable time of doubt and hurt that I saw her: a being so different from me or my people or anything I’d known to be, that it was incomprehensible just to look her way. I thought our people held everything, but her presence negated this. Blackness clung to her in sheets of soot and ash, as if the very same tendrils of black light that had dragged me down had formed her dress—thinner tendrils made her hair which cascaded around her in waves. Then her eyes: black abysses—like staring into nothing.

She walked towards me—with little bits of things I’d dropped snuggled in her arms—and it felt like my pain had lessened by more than half its weight. All my woes seemed small. All my mistakes were no longer mistakes, for seeing her stand there at the edge of the crater I’d created: it felt like this was what the world truly meant for me to do. My entire being was made for meeting her.

Asra

When I’d heard the boom, I’d wanted to catch the sound in my hands, to feel its dance in my eardrums again. Sound was a magnificent concept to me. How could something so far away be so suddenly and wonderfully inside you? I hugged my ears, traced its pointed frame with my fingertips as I journeyed towards the sound’s source. The journey itself was ethereal. Otikka was swimming with magic and grand creations falling from the sky. The sky was a wonderful creation all on its own. I tried to put my handprint on its strange shade.

A bubble with stringy somethings inside descended slowly towards my hand and I followed it down with the backs of my fingers. It popped, releasing uncoloured grass in a patch that grew from under my feet. I picked some strands, some similarly fallen twigs, fragrant-less flowers, rocks, and leaves. I heard his cries of pain all the while, without understanding what the sound meant. Until I found him.

The same white-gold shawls I’d tried to grab before seemed to be gathered around his body in a tight, majestic formation. His hair was a long scatter of star-white constellations funneled together through a bubble at his back. It gave the impression that his strands of starlight may have been perfectly aligned once, but streamed wildly across his back now. Disorder, franticness, unrest; those were the impressions he gave me. His eyes shone too bright and seemed too lost, as though he were blinded from staring at too much.

He did not look like something that could exist. How could anything so bright resist fading itself away? Watching him struggle there gave me fear, and worry, and sadness, all of which I felt for him. Instinctively, I knew he needed me, and I needed him. And that was all it took.

I tucked my collection of things into my dress, letting its shadows eat them up, and then I crept down the crater and approached him. He stumbled to a stand and did the same.

Fos

We were both too curious for our own good; too new and naïve.

She stood before me feeding off all the emotions I hadn’t yet acknowledged, pulling some from me as she gifted some in return: hope, joy, gratitude, something else…

I reached out towards her, half-expecting her to disappear, but she only mirrored the act. We were two beings that could act, when no one else knew how. That, in and of itself, was an unprecedented occurrence that not even Otikka was prepared for.

There was a mixture of too many unknowns coalescing between our fingers: freshly fallen air atop ancient magic, the chemical makeup of two creatures the land had never once had to deal with. There was nothing in that space that knew how to react to our interaction. Her fingers intersected with mine, the gaps—my unknowns—were covered by what she understood and the opposite was true as well. We were two parts of a dangerous whole dripping our first drops of chaos.

Thus, [Secret Title] was born.

Asra

The world staggered, as if everything hiccupped for a moment. Time flinched. Reality tripped. Unspoken rules that had been set in place had flopped on its side, and colour, life, and everything in between, exploded into existence.

The ground covering my people cracked open, the sky shed its tint of tan and blossomed a purplish-blue. The clouds holding his people dispersed and, on the ground, greenery bloomed.

As my people rose from the ashes, his fell from the skies.

What had once been vessels of the dark grew smiles on their faces. They climbed and climbed to see the things I’d seen, they walked the paths I walked. They learned to love, and loved me for what I’d done. His people, the vessels of light, hated him for what he’d done. And it broke my heart.

I wanted to change the world that hated him…

Fos

But we quickly learned that the things we wanted, the things we tried to change, brought about chaos in the world and we learned much quicker….

that we didn’t want that.

Together

And now it’s yours: the story of our story—two entities bathed in a blunder of the oldest of magicks; two curious existences who’d been diseased with a gift of immortality. The fate-crafting pair who’d quickly been appointed the gods of this realm. Our forbidden love gave birth to a hell of annoyances—and wonders. Our choices had ricocheting effects on entire civilizations and land formations and it felt like the world’s catastrophes—and its blessings rested on our shoulders.

Nevertheless, the approaching tales is not of our own. That would be boring. Our story is only the stepping stones to an entanglement of adventures that had rippling effects on one another. Our appearances throughout their history shaped them into what they are today. To understand their struggles, you must understand our backstory. Not that hearing this will prepare you. We suppose it is up to you to know whether or not you’re ready…