The Lizard Who Lived A Million Lives

Link to article: The Lizard Who Lived A Million Lives.

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   --header-title: "The Wanderers Library";
   --header-subtitle: "The Garden Is The Serpent's Place";
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:root{
--header-title: "The Wanderers Library";
--header-subtitle: "The Garden Is The Serpent's Place";
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[...]
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//And when the [[[book-of-dominion| Shapeless One]]] was shattered into fragments,
when his truths lay scattered like dust and blood in a dead wind,
the gods who bore his mark were all gathered.//
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//They knelt not out of reverence,
for reverence had long burned away within them,
but because their limbs remembered the weight
of the oaths they had betrayed.//
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//The sky above them was silent.
No star dared witness the reckoning.
Even The Leviathan slept,
and Ues whispered only faintly from the cracks in thought.
But WAN stood, and her shadow was a geometry of grief.//
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//The lesser traitors did tremble first:
those who had worn Khárak’s sigils of fear,
those who had believed in the Law of Blood
and become hollow through their hunger and their despair.//
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//And upon them, judgment was swift.
WAN unspoke their names,
Ues unwrote their memories,
and they became mere murmurs.
Faceless and empty echoes damned to wander the margins of creation forever.//
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//But last among the kneeling was Atanti-Ql-Paneau,
the sharpest fang of the Crimson Court,
he whose hands had broken constellations,
he whose laughter had declared annihilation as sacred.//
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//He did not bow.
He did not repent.
He simply lowered his gaze,
as though daring the remnants of the pantheon
to find meaning in his defiance.//
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//WAN addressed him first:
"You forged devastation with delight.
You reveled in the act of unmaking.
Speak, why should you be allowed to continue?"//
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//And Atanti-Ql-Paneau answered,
with a voice laced with venom and spite:
"Because I am honest.
All things rot.
All beings lie.
I only stood for what is true."//
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//At this, even the winds recoiled,
for Khárak’s shadow still clung to those words.//
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//Then Ues unfolded a thousandfold thought
and spoke:
"Honesty is not wisdom.
You have seen only endings,
you have never known the cost of a beginning."//
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//And The Leviathan, half-dreaming,
made its mind and growled its verdict,
like deafening thunder:
"Let him know."//
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//And so the gods delivered judgment:
Not death, for there had been enough of it,
but experience.//
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//And so, WAN struck the decree into the bones of reality:
"You shall walk Creation in every form it bears.
You shall hunger as the small things hunger.
You shall bleed as mortals bleed.
You shall fear as prey fears.
You shall endure as beasts endure."//
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//And Ues wove the terms of the punishment:
"And memory shall never release you.
Each life you live shall remain,
each death shall linger,
until your mind becomes a garden without end.
Filled with countless memories of all that is."//
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//And The Leviathan delivered the sentence,
sealing him in flesh:
"Grow claws. Grow rage. Grow scales.
Let instinct be your prison.
Become the lesson you never learned."//
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//And so Atanti-Ql-Paneau was unmade
and remade,
and remade,
and remade,
banished from the Expanse and cast into the long corridor of existence,
where he would live a million lives
and never rest between them.//
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//And thus the greatest tool of Khárak
became the most wretched creature beneath the heavens,
condemned to an eternity in the flesh
he had once despised.//
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— Excerpt taken from //On the Judgement and Exile of Atanti-Ql-Paneau.//
[[/div]]
[[/=]]
----
The first thing he ever experienced was a sudden, blinding, searing, and all-encompassing flash of light, an event that signaled the beginning of everything... or, more precisely, the beginning of this particular iteration of everything.

As the newborn universe stirred and reshaped itself, as it began to expand inside the endless void it was meant to occupy, he came into being as well. He was older than the fledgling cosmos, more terrible than anything yet to emerge, but above all, he was utterly confused.

His new form, if it could even be called a form at all, was little more than an amorphous speck of flesh adrift in the chaotic scenery of the newly formed existence he had been cast into. Even in this sorry state however, his brain (which was barely the size of a thumb) swelled with intense emotion and thought as his body reconstituted itself, again and again, from the relentless assault of the superheated plasma that would one day give rise to planets, stars, and galaxies.

A series of screams tore from him, brief and pathetic, cut short by the weakness of his newly formed lungs. His previous voice would have shaken countless realities. Now? It was nothing more than a whisper in the void, one only he could hear. And yet, despite this impotence, despite this humiliation, he kept screaming and screaming in futility... until, for reasons he could not understand, he no longer needed to. The pain, though still very much there, had abruptly subsided, replaced with a dull, if persistent, ache. Unbeknownst to him, his flesh (his prison forevermore) had been rendered durable and resilient by his tormentors. More importantly however, it was malleable and adaptable. Death, or the solace of oblivion, would not come for him. Not now. Not ever.

And so, he drifted. For eons, he drifted. He drifted across the boundless ocean of the cosmos, observing what little there was to observe and learning what little there was to learn.

He watched stars ignite like newborns gasping for breath, their light a beacon of warmth in the otherwise cold emptiness that surrounded him. He witnessed galaxies form, stretch, and collide in a slow and graceful dance, their iridescent glow painting the void in brilliant swathes of color. A beautiful distraction from his own gnawing loneliness. He often did wonder if there was any meaning to it all, but of course, no answer ever came his way.

And on occasion he even saw her passing by, though she never acknowledged him in return.

He could not discern what she was or what purpose she served, but whenever his many eyes settled on her vast, unmistakably mechanical form covered in a smooth and silvery surface, he could feel a fervent sensation stir from the deepest confines of his being. It felt instinctive, like a reaction born of an ancient transgression he could no longer recall. The essence she carried along was familiar, he was certain of that, but the reasons for his certainty were lost somewhere in the immense graveyard of lives he had been forced to endure and forget and remember and forget again, over and over, forever and ever.

Still, he drifted. On and on.

Eventually even she ceased to appear. He had never paused to ponder where she had gone, or what had happened to her; he would never receive an answer to that question, or to the many others that had once troubled his mind. So why bother asking at all?

Not long after, he stopped thinking clearly as well. His thoughts largely ceased to be, becoming loops: memories of memories, or sometimes nothing at all, collapsing into the depths of his psyche, crushed by the unbearable weight of his eternal existence.

Sometimes he forgot he had ever existed.

Sometimes he recalled things he had never experienced: a strange claustrophobic space, a vast darkness that wasn't empty, many impossible creatures, and an immense hatred aimed at nothing in particular.

And so he continued drifting. And drifting. And drifting.

Until, in one unremarkable moment, in a universe that did not care for him in the slightest, he felt something tug at him. It was a gentle pull at first, but it rapidly grew firmer and insistent.

The drifting was over.

His body, having adapted to the vacuum eons ago, responded instinctively to the nascent gravity well. He resisted the unseen force with limbs (or tendrils, or wings, whatever he currently possessed) that stretched and thrashed through reflex more than intent. Below him lay an agonizing mass of molten rock that glowed angrily in shades of oranges and reds and blacks, no different from the billion others he had seen in his unwilling travels. It pulled him in without consideration or care, causing him to twitch in irritation. A faint scowl settled on the shape of his now fully formed and consistent snout.

He held no interest in this world, or in any other for that matter. He had no interest in anything at all, but the universe was not in the mood for negotiation. The planet's gravity seized him completely despite his best efforts, and he suddenly plunged.

The cold grasp of space left him, giving way to an atmosphere not filled with air or oxygen (not yet at least), but with a hellish mixture of vaporized minerals and toxic gases. This miasma enveloped him, boiling the outer layers of his flesh, tearing at the form he had unconsciously grown. Pain made itself present within him once more, but he did not scream this time. The sensation was utterly minuscule in comparison to what he had been forced to endure already.

He struck the planet with force to rival a missile's impact before he even realized it, and his form was utterly shattered. What little remained of him was an unrecognizable heap of burnt scales, splintered bone, and spilled viscera that was swiftly consumed by the raging inferno of the planet’s crust. As the molten rock gnawed at its most recent meal, he felt... strangely at peace, if only for a single moment. Alas, it was a false nothingness. A little trick projected by the mangled, almost nonexistent remains of his brain.

Then, inevitably, he began to reassert himself.

Cells that had no right to exist sprouted into being, knitting together to forge a new tapestry designed to endure in this new and hostile environment. This was how his body learned: it was harmed repeatedly, and then it pulled itself back together stronger than before, refusing to remain broken.

Truth be told, this process had always been an enigma to him: It wasn’t a conscious effort. It wasn’t a reflex. It wasn’t even an instinct. It was something far more primal and far more fundamental than any of those, though the what eluded him, as did most things.

In the end, it hardly mattered. Whatever it was, it functioned, and that was enough for him.

His flesh thickened, not by design, but by necessity. It layered itself as the world did, building scale upon scale, until what had once been hide became something closer to living stone: dense, insulating, capable of withstanding the infernal heat that surrounded him.

The evolution was effective, if devoid of elegance. His body had sacrificed motion for endurance, a trade that meant very little to him. He had long since abandoned the need to move, being content to simply exist in stillness, to be carried (when he was carried at all) by the unseen forces that kept the universe in balance. Here, however, there was no drifting. He was anchored, immovable. A boulder untouched by the currents that swept everything else away.

For a long while, he did nothing. Time continued its relentless march, letting the planet above him mature. And though continents rose and oceans spread, he remained unchanging, inert, dreamless. His body worked in silence, a patient refusal to engage with the world around itself.

Eventually, something akin to irritation flared within him.

The sensation was faint but distinctly unpleasant: a pressure that enveloped his entire body, a weight that was absent the last time he had bothered to take notice. While he slept, the magma had cooled and hardened into stone. Miles of it, above him and around him.

For the first time in a hundred thousand years he made a deliberate attempt to move, immediately discovering that he could not. Panic never came however. He'd been through worse, and had come to learn that nothing he experienced truly mattered in the long term. So he was patient.

He tried to move again, this time more insistently. The surrounding stone resisted at first, then failed, cracking with a surprising fragility as though it had never anticipated resistance. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. He pressed on, performing rough, violent motions in deliberate bursts, intentionally triggering his adaptive response through strain. His bones thickened, his joints reformed themselves with blunt and purely utilitarian purpose, and his claws dulled, trading their sharpness for immense strength.

And so he dug.

...

He managed to tear himself free from the planet's crust after an indeterminate span of effort (years? Centuries? Moments? The distinction was meaningless), collapsing onto the hardened surface. Light had finally returned to his eyes, but it was no longer the blinding white of his first awakening. It was instead a vivid yellow that spilled downwards from the sky, illuminating even the deepest corners of the strange world he'd grow to call home.

The light hurt him in a way he had almost forgotten. It wasn’t pain, not exactly, but unbound stimulation. There were far too many signals hitting him at once, trying to force meaning into senses that had gone dormant a long time ago.

He squinted, his multiple eyes sliding shut in perfect unison, and he waited for his vision to adjust. Once that was finished, he opened them again and...

The world was green.

This was new.

It was something else entirely in fact, as he would come to realize.

All around him were vast fields of tangled, unruly vegetation that stretched towards the horizon, overflowing the land without any understanding of restraint. Trees, misshapen columns of bark and leaves, pointed directly at the sky, their canopies trembling in the wind. Small creatures skittered through the undergrowth, their bodies soft, vulnerable, and offensively finite in comparison to his own. Some fled at the mere vibration of his emergence, while others froze, their instincts caught in a deadlock between curiosity and terror. He watched them with a distant, almost clinical interest. He catalogued their shapes and motions as though //they// were the strangest thing in the world.

A gentle breeze passed over him, carrying with it loads of unfamiliar scents that lodged themselves firmly into his nostrils. He took his moment, letting his mind process the things he was experiencing, coming to terms with the strangeness of the situation. He exhaled, letting out a slow, rumbling sound that sent ripples through the grass around him in the process.

Then, in a burst of something he couldn't quite name, he rose to his full height. His joints protested briefly before adjusting and locking themselves in a steady configuration that felt just stable enough to keep him from collapsing once more.

For a moment, he considered remaining still. Letting the world grow over him again. Letting the stone reclaim him... but something tugged at him. It was a subtle feeling, yet it was also unmistakable: curiosity.

He took a step forward. The ground compressed beneath his weight, soil and leaves and grass giving way with wet, brittle sounds and strangely pleasant textures that were now stored at the forefront of his memories. Another step followed, then another. Each movement triggered a minor adaptation: his muscles became more fit for locomotion, his tail grew to recalibrate his balance, and his senses sharpened just enough to take in the full scope of all the new experiences he had yet to discover.

He did not know what he was meant to do here.

He did not know what anything was meant to do.

But this existence, filled with these crawling, breathing, reproducing messes of matter, was new. And until it bored him, or broke him, or forced him to adapt yet again... he would endure it.

And so, with nothing better to do, and nowhere else to go, the creature that had once been Atanti-Ql-Paneau began to walk onward across the face of a young world, dragging the weight of uncountable eternities behind him with every step.

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The Lizard Who Lived A Million Lives

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