Chapter Text
She knew she ought not to pick favorites, as a god. But the Moth Tribe had always been Hers.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like the others. The Mosskin were lovely folk, and truthfully She had been part of their creation. But they were more Unn’s children then Hers. The Mantis Tribe worshipped her, but they worshipped all nature. They had no more love for Her, the Light, than they did the acid, or the fungus, or the funny round creatures that made up their home. The Hive had more of a love for Light. They admired the glow and refractions that shown through their honeyed golden home. But their love was a distant sort. They respected her, but they did not need her. They could take care of themselves.
There were also, of course, the various species of nonsentient bug that inhabited Her land. But things that could not think-could not dream-could not enter Her realm of light. So She paid them little mind.
As for the folk of Deepnest...well. She supposed she ought to be more magnanimous, but She had to admit to Herself that She didn’t particularly care for them. Too many...legs. Two legs for standing on was just about the most She thought was necessary, and many of the Deepnesters had eight. Some had thousands. Just the thought made her shiver. What did a being need with so many damn legs?
But the moths...the moths were special. Pretty things, certainly. A respectable number of legs, and wings to boot. Soft wings, too, not like those of the Hive, but feathery and gentle with a lovely ruff. She didn’t have a form, exactly, didn’t really need one, but if she did...She thought She’d like to look like a moth.
It wasn’t just their appearances, though. The moths were...spiritual. They sought a world beyond the one their physical bodies occupied, sought to understand the universe at large. They called to Her, called out for Her to shed Her light upon them. And She did. She found them beautiful in that light. The moths were artisans, creative minds and clever fingers. They tamed the steel and crystal they mined from the mountains and shaped delicate works in the images they saw in dreams. They were devout pacifists as well, something She found oddly endearing. She personally had never seen a problem She couldn’t solve with a laser beam, but watching the moths with their trade and diplomacy was inspiring, in a funny sort of way.
So She became close to them. She flew with them in dreams, gave them Light in the darkness of their mines. She even offered Her magic to them-the ability to read dreams, to walk with the dead, to create a shield of Light. She expected their relationship to end there.
But deep below the moth’s homeland trouble was brewing. At the very base of the world, below crystal and fungus and even the spiders, lay a deep lake of inky darkness called the Void. The Void was not her enemy then--far from it, it had been the source of her birth. The Void had been a creative energy at that point, the black nothingness that all living things had once sprung from.
That would come to change. There was another tribe that lived in the Radiance’s land, one She cared for even less than the people of Deepnest. The tribe had no name, and though most of them were snails there were other, less identifiable creatures mixed in as well. They did not care for the Light; they crawled around in the dark and went so far as to practice strange rituals that kept them from dreaming. They worshipped the Void, the nothingness itself.
To Her, they were the opposite of the gentle Moth tribe. While they were spiritual and cerebral like the moths their magic did not derive from the dream realm but from the creature’s own souls. Unbeknownst to the Radiance, the nameless tribe had been experimenting with that magic, with the hope of using it not for art or communication but for conquest. They sought to weaponize the Void, and eventually, they succeeded.
She didn’t understand what was happening, at first. The Void, which had so long been content to percolate at the bottom of the world, had begun to...rise. First, it consumed the nameless tribe-their magic had created the monster but was unable to control it. The Ancient Basin filled with darkness, and then the Void travelled upwards.
The Hive and the Mantis Tribe were the first to alert Her. She heard their distress echoing over the realm of dream, and she could hardly believe what they told her. A creeping monster composed of darkness so thick that it smothered all light in its path was invading their lands. Some of them fought it, and died, but the others ran, fleeing sideways into Deepnest and the lands to the west. For a brief moment, the immediate crisis seemed averted--the monster, whatever it was, seemed to have difficulty crossing the destructive acid pools that surrounded the area.
But it began to spread upward instead, seeping through cracks in the rock until it crept up upon the lowest land owned by the Moths, the hallowed Resting Grounds, where the dead slept and the moths practiced their most sacred rituals. If the monster had been too much for the warlike Hive, it completely destroyed the pacifist moths. So they fled upward into their mines, further and further, until they reached the very top of Crystal Peak and there was nowhere else to flee to. The darkness surged around them and they cried out to Her, begging for divine intervention.
She was unsure of the right way to handle the situation at first. She did not wish to make an enemy of the Void, Her progenitor. What would happen, if the Void was killed? Could it even be killed?
With the Moths as Her inspiration, She sought a different way. They were both gods, after all, surely they could bargain. So She crafted Herself a form to take--not a mortal form, of course, merely a solidification of the dream--and She called the creature into her realm.
The Void should not have been able to enter. But the nameless tribe’s magic had given it a mind, something it had never possessed before. And She saw immediately that that mind was not one that could be reasoned with. It could dream, yes, it had thoughts and hopes and desires...but those desires were all of one thing: consumption. It longed to consume all of its former creation, to spread its darkness over the land and snuff out all living things. It wanted nothing else, and could not be persuaded: whatever the snails had done to it had turned it into an impeccable force of destruction. Of hunger.
So She went on the attack. She would have liked to have said it went well; that she had fought a brilliant, impressive battle and thoroughly trounced the interloper, as would have been befitting of Her station.
It did not go well. She barely survived.
The darkness burned Her. It was everywhere and nowhere, stabbing deep into her new flesh and disappearing like smoke when she countered. Soon it filled the whole of the dream, thick black liquid dripping down through the clouds and smothering Her light. She fought, fought like She never had before, but She fell. Encircled by chains of darkness, weaker than she had ever been, She waited to die.
But something reached her through the darkness. Not a light, but a voice. The moths, still huddled on the top of Crystal Peak, were praying. Praying to her, again, but it was different from before. Before, they had prayed for their safety. Now, they prayed for Hers. They saw Her struggle, heard Her pain, and they prayed that She would survive.
She did not know where the Void drew its power from. But Her power came from the dream, and all the minds contained within it. Those minds created the dream realm--they created it with all their hopes and prayers for a better world. Now that power, all that hope, was centered on Her, Her survival.
A rush of joy cut through Her despair, and She gathered all Her remaining strength into one last, desperate attack. It was not elegant. No glowing nails or delicate golden beams. Just a burst of raw emotion that tore out of Her like the sunlight itself.
The strange, dark incarnation of the Void could not take it. Her light burned it up, and all through the land the darkness broke apart, the disparate pieces sinking back down to the Ancient Basin. Not dead, not destroyed--perhaps the Void could not be destroyed, perhaps it was too much a part of the world. But that hateful, consumptive power was broken.
The light did not stop there. It shone across the sky, lighting up the surface, and dived down into the tunnels below. It caught in the crystals of Crystal Peak, changing their color permanently: where once they had been a dark purple, they now glowed a rich, bright magenta, and each carried a piece of Her power.
And still the light kept traveling. It was a beacon against the darkness, shining out over even the lands outside of the Radiance’s control. Though She did not realize it, it carried a message: that somewhere, a great power existed, and a great battle had just been fought.
And the white Wyrm, weak and dying and in search of a new home, saw the light and turned towards it.