Everything and Nothing

Everything and Nothing

By: Hailey Aubrey Reign Merrick

Today I flew through the forest on the back of the wind. Nothing more than a ghost. A shadow. A whisper of wind. I was the thoughts people had and then forgot. Constantly trying to remember the pieces of them they lost.

Today I was infinite. I was day and night. The sun and the moon and all of the stars in the sky. Today was a melancholy day, the weather dreary. Great rains fell from the sky like a god crying in mourning.

Lightning crashed to the forest floor in a thunderous roar, ripping every thought in half, shattering the world and recreating it. That was okay, though; the thunder could not hurt me, the rain could not soak me to the bones. I was beyond being affected by such mortal things as storms.

So even as the gods raged and mourned around me, soaking the world with their tears and crumpling it in their rage, I did not fear. Instead I flowed through the lightning like the heat that created it. I crashed to the earth with it and shattered myself along the tree line. Trees went ablaze around me, and I became the licking flames fighting against the roaring rain.

These were the sorts of nights that humans would hide from, locking themselves in their rooms and shielding themselves from the weather, from the effects of war waged by the gods in the worlds above them. I remember when I used to do the same. A time when my mother's laugh was a song in my ear. I remember that laugh sometimes, and hear that song again. Long ago her face disappeared in my memories. Nothing but a reminder that I no longer was human, no longer held memories of things so long past.

No. I was everything, and I was nothing. I was the joy of a child and the scream of its death. The first kiss between lovers and the beginning of new love, the pit in your stomach when it ends; I was all of those. I was the voice of travelers singing around a night's fire, but so too was I the unfallen tears of a widow. So I did not hide from the warring weather and instead became it. Worshiped it. Destroyed it. I was infinite.

The sea loomed in the distance, my true freedom so close yet so far. I could hear them now, a cloud of death behind me. Even as I became the world around me, even as the gods shuddered at what I had become, I felt fear. Even gods fear death. Especially the ones who have forgotten what it feels like to live.

I remember a time when I was a girl, a time when I had no fear, no worries. I remember the first time I shifted, when I was a dog, and my fear was that I would get stuck as one. Then I remember the day I became what I am now. When I changed. No longer was I like the other shifters. No longer could I be any creature under the sun. Now I could be the sun itself. I could be an idea or a thought, a whisper in the ear of a king. The sword held by a warrior. The paintbrush in the hands of an artist.

No longer was I restrained by the tangible world. That's when the real, true fear came. That's when the Hunters came.

The gods do not fear you when you are a dog or a squirrel or even a dragon. When you can become the world and everything that walks its lands, when there is no limit. That is when the gods fear you. When the gods fear something, they kill it.

Long ago, the god of chaos granted me these powers, in thanks for helping win a long-forgotten war, but the other gods raged, horrified by the monster he had created. So they held a meeting, and the Hunters were sent after us. Angels of death who flew on dark wings. In that time long ago, there were four of us. My sisters. Only two remained, myself and my youngest sister, who is in hiding with the very God who created us.

The Hunters have chased me across the world for millennia, and at last have begun to close in.

They were close now.

Their voices were a jumble behind me, shouted commands from the winged men. Even as fire, I could see, think, understand. The rain slicked down their hair and rolled off their bodies in great sheets as they raced towards me.

I could hear their words. Their plans. The weakness in their voices that comes with age.

Did they know I was the fire? Did they know I was now becoming the very rain that drenched them? Did they know I was also hunting them?

The Hunters came and went; generations of them were spent in the futile attempt to kill me. These ones were old, not frail or weak, but old enough to know me now. My tactics, my patterns- that's how they found me this time. I did not mind; in truth, it gave me a fun way to spend my day. Running from them, hunting them, playing cat and mouse. They always seemed to forget that I could choose to become whichever I wished, the cat or the mouse. Lightning struck nearby. I jumped to it, once again becoming the flash of Light, the boom and strike of thunder. The Hunters broke formation from the strike I sent right through their ranks. They scattered in the clouds like a flock of giant birds.

I did not strike again; instead, I became the wind again, soaring through the trees as rain rushed around me, luring them into my trap.

They were close now.

Ahead, the sea was so near I could taste the thick salt in the wind. It stood there consuming the skyline with its great expanse. The angels of death did not think twice as they followed me into the storm. Sometimes I pitied them, forced to waste their lives finding me. But how do you find something that is everything? How do you find something that is nothing? They can sense me. I know that, in the way that one can feel the heat of a flame, even if they cannot see it or smell the smoke, you can feel it is near; you can feel its presence, feel the warmth.

And so they followed the heat of the flame, chasing and hunting, right into their doom. The sea was before me now, the Hunters close behind. As they neared the shore, I became the waves, the rolling sea, the very moon that controlled the tide.

Great waves leaped from the earth and reached their hands to the sky. The Hunters were not fast enough. The waves were my hands, giant blue things that grabbed their legs. For nothing but a second I saw the faces beyond the armor they wore. The faces of men who had spent their lives chasing something they would never catch. I wonder if they too remembered their mothers' voices.

My hands broke their bones effortlessly. Plucking the feathers from their wings and pulling them deeper and deeper into the dark waters below. Their screams faded into nothing as water flooded their lungs. The sea again became still. A calm and gentle creature, full and ready to sleep after being fed. The roaring waves tamed to a slight rolling that kissed the shore in gentle caresses, as if nothing had happened.

The storm calmed, no longer a raging, angry thing but now a gentle patter against the ocean.

The water held no memory of what had happened. No trace of the horrors just moments ago. Not even a stain of blood remained in the water.

Amid the rain, I gathered myself from the sea, feather by feather, bone by bone, until I was no longer the water, no longer the storm, no longer the roaring winds. I gathered myself into the very form I had spent millennia running from. Great wings unfurled from my back.

I was the Hunter.

The Hunter took to the skies slowly, like it had time. It did not mourn the dead below it. It did not even know their names. It did not have a name itself. It was something old, something new, something infinite. A creature of the old fables, and the stories parents would tell their children at bedtime.

The angel of death flapped its great feathered wings and shot to the tree line and into the forest, flying once again on the back of the wind.