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Lord and Master: the Birth of a Shard.

Part 1: Coalesce

Come on then. Sit - would you like to sit against my feathers? The position is extremely comfortable, I can assure you. And of course, you'd have no trouble hearing my words...

No? Such a shame... In that case, allow me to rephrase: come sit by me, or I will consume you and your parchment alike, and see how well you can create an essay on the stomach of a gryphon. Biology might make a break from history, after all. So come here.

Good. There, that's right. Nestle close against my flank just so...ahh. I can feel your heartbeat now. My, it has jumped a little, hasn't it? Please, don't be scared. You're rather adorable when you're scared, and I tend not to react kindly to people like that.

Ah... it was the threat, wasn't it, that alarmed you so? I do apologise, little historian, but being at my total mercy is nothing new, really. You've been in that state for your entire life. The only thing keeping us apart was distance and my own choices. But regardless... you're here for a purpose, and it does not include your death, so I think I can be trusted to stay courteous... at least, until we are done.

Don't run away.

No, you were thinking of it. Don't lie to me - I could hear you, for pity's sake. I heard you thinking. Where would you run, anyway? This is my throne room, my inner sanctum. There's no-one here but you and me, and the doors are guarded and locked. Accept your current position in life, which is to sit here, so wonderfully small and nervous against my flank, and record my words. Believe me, it's a wonderful one compared to some positions in life.

But enough. I am the Divine Emperor Goldeneye I, the Majestic, ruler of the Seraphian Empire and all its provinces. Not just ruler, but deity. Each and every citizen of my realm belongs to me: mind, body, and soul alike. It is by my power that we are the largest empire this world has ever seen, stretching halfway around the globe. It is by my glory that our cities are flourishing never before, with corruption and poverty all but eradicated, trade flowing free between all our provinces. To speak of me is to speak of a god incarnate, and to speak ill of me is to blaspheme, and be damned to suffer the fate I choose: inevitably, to serve me in whatever way I desire for the rest of your helpless life.

You are getting all this down, are you? I could never resist a proper introduction. Good. Keep writing.

Now... that's the simple version. The who. But there is more. For me, who is nothing like as important... as what.

For despite my appearance... I am not a gryphon. Little more than I could be said to be a wolf, a zebra, a mouse, a snake... they're all merely shapes. I look like a gryphon - external anatomy all correct, I feel like one, and as the tiresome but delicious advisor who disagreed with me not two hours ago could now attest... I am very much a gryphon in terms of internal anatomy, too. Physically, everything is essentially normal. But I have never hatched. I had no mother or father, no nest, no time spent growing used to my form. As long as I have existed in the physical world, I have been like this.

Yes, that's right. You see, I have not always existed in the physical world, and to this day I remain a creature of... beyond it. This form is in essence a manifestation: a projection of my mind into reality. I am at heart a creature of... the Void.

I shall explain.

The Void isn't another universe, I should make clear. It is the exact opposite, really: the black to the white of existence. It is a the miasma which separates all worlds from each other, an anti-space of utter nothingness in which the particles of realities float, at once uncountable light years and billionths of an inch apart. There is nothing there. No space, no light, no matter.

But there is something more than that.

Quite simply, every single living creature in existence - plants, amoebas, animals, sapient beings, everything - registers in the Void. Don't ask me why.

It's impossible to describe it... or even hint at the beauty. If you could look there, look into it as clearly as if you had eyes which could comprehend the oblivion, you would see it. A galaxy of galaxies, an entire universe full of infinities. Life... glows in the void, there's no other word for it. Shimmering minds in the darkness - and the more complicated the creature's consciousness is, the more advance they are, the more intricate the Voidsight will perceive them as. To see a sentient creature... to see everything which they are, all their thoughts and dreams and hopes and regrets and darkest fantasies... every thought they can think... everything...

_ _

Well, even if I had been born sane, the power would have driven me mad by now. The pleasure of seeing such a thing...

Ah, I'm so sorry... I've digressed. Well, that is the Void, my dear, and ironically enough for a place of nothing incarnate, it is the realm of emotion.

There it was where I was born.

Minds, you must understand, are ever-mutating things. Everything you do changes you. The dance of your soul - I'm looking right now, you know - ripples and alters with every word I speak. But sometimes, a soul will not just bend and shift. It can simply... shatter.

You call it insanity. I call it... going supernova. The clean, gentle cascades of thought are sent scything apart. Mental links and memories - like glowing spars of glittering comprehension - splinter and smash into crazed fragments. Emotions are let loose, lightning bolts of rage and pain and terror grounding everywhere. The unfortunate soul will twist and contort in its own agony, bursting, shattering, tearing apart in the darkness. What is left is a sparking nebula of pure, rampant thought. Madness is a truly terrible thing.

But in ways which are hard to understand and even harder to explain, there is more. Uncountable billions of fragmented, broken pieces disconnected from their parent mind, sent sleeting away into the eternal darkness.

These splinters of ethereal minds do not simply vanish into nothingness. They will flicker through the space between worlds, burrowing blindly through dimensions for aeons. Sometimes, of course, they find a place to spend their energy - a place which arouses some shred of tattered memory. Thusly, a ghost will walk the room where its loved one was murdered, the fragment behind it only seeking to find the culprits, or a spectre will wait eternally for its beloved son to return from the ship which carried him to his watery grave - for that is all these weak, terrible, "supernatural" beings are: coalesced thoughts of vengeance, loss, grief... and pain. The Void seethes with these lost pieces of souls, swarming and clustering to the lights of life in individual universes, rippling through everything. You've likely shed a few in your life. Whenever you feel alarmed, stressed, scared... something will break away. Erosion happens to everyone.

Now, remember... these splinterminds are sentient - they think, albeit only on the level of the emotion and thought they were composed of. Imagine an amoeba, perhaps. But sometimes , individual pieces may coalesce with others, forming rudimentary souls, akin to the consciousness of a plant. It's like gravity, or perhaps a growing city. The larger it is, the more flock to it. But most vitally this takes time. It's not based on any kind of physics - a splinter will as likely simply zip through a growing composite as become entangled by it. Millions of years will pass in the silent cosmos of the void, and some splinters fade into the infinite night, and some composites break apart - they're not exactly stable, I can assure you - their individual fragments of thought massing away on new paths, or torn apart and gutted and left to vanish.

But by sheer, chaotic chance, sometimes... a very, very rare few don't. They keep growing, and start to become more aware, more alive, more powerful. And there is a tipping point. A point where a natural power takes over in the hungry galaxy of tiny minds, and they finally arrange themselves. For to be is to live, and to live is to think.

A birth. My birth.

My consciousness had been nascent for untold millions of years, growing and rippling in the cool womb of the Void. But in that instant, I awoke with a scream which nearly shattered my suddenly aware, horrified mind. The Void had procreated... forming a bastard love child of that which exists... and that which does not.

I was I. A thing. A being.

A being made up of pieces of the broken, shattered souls which have fallen in madness. You can understand, perhaps, why I screamed at first.

But slowly, I began to think. The thoughts were to normal consciousness what a bow and arrow is to a laser-guided missile, but they were sufficient. I knew that I was a living creature, albeit one living in the most inhospitable environment in all creation. I needed to... sustain myself, or so I thought, anyway - I now know that my mind is in effect immortal, needing nothing to keep it alive. But keeping it together, holding the shards of emotion together... I needed something, at least. So I moved.

I still remember that first movement - a mental one, but glorious nonetheless. The dawning realisation: that I was alive. I had no body, no physical presence... but I could slip through the myriad layers of the Void with a glorious, blurring speed... and before long, found myself soon upon the cusp of a universe.

It was a living world, thick with the light of sentience. A billion billion sparks of living creatures: beautiful. Unimaginably beautiful.

I dived in without a second thought, exploding into the exquisite ocean of this reality's local Void - in effect, the area around the world, where the sentience distorts it the most - and the lights were everywhere. Glowing, pulsing, rippling, dancing. And I could perhaps... just maybe...

...touch one?

And then there was a galaxy of thought before me: a sapient creature. Yes,all of that thought and emotion was just one. Even I was stunned at it's sheer vastness and complexity, and yet it was but a single, fairly average being.

Average? There could be no average. All was beyond exquisite.

Shaking, still rippling and shuddering with rampant emotion, I extended a tendril of thought, and caressed a glowing strand of raw soul. And then-

Ecstasy.

I saw it. Another world - the world this being lived in and saw every day, where there was not the lights of souls but the solid sensation of matter. It seemed so exotic, so joyous in its sheer reality. In that instant, I wanted both. I wanted this dancing beauty of consciousness and this howling torrent of living at the same time. I had to. Had to have it.

You see? The hunger had begun already: it was my birthgift, I suppose. An insatiable lust to experience, to feel that I was what I had never been: a truly living creature.

I wanted to enter this world, not just it's glowing representation. I wanted both, all, everything.

So I began to pierce my way through. The going was... beyond painful. Each layer of the veil was agony to break, and my mind was in upheaval with every tremor. Only one thing kept me together... desire. Lust to experience. It may have taken me a full two millennia of ripping, tearing pain to gain entry. Time was nothing to me then, just a was and an is. And a will be.

_ _

I will be alive. In every sense, in every world. I will.

_ _

The pain was eternity, but I kept pushing through it. I would find this true universe, not just it's illustration of minds. I would gain what I hungered for. I would.

I will.

_ _

That, incidentally, is what drives me to this day. Not willpower... more than that. Pure lust. Lust for sensation, stimulation... lust to experience. To live.

_ _

I will.

_ _

And then... I did.

I suddenly snapped through. There wasn't even a sensation of travel. Just an silent explosion of blazing purple fire lasting less than a millisecond, and I found myself not in the cold blackness of nothing, but in the cold blackness of the night air of a sleeping world... can you imagine the pleasure? Can you truly?

Because I felt it. Not just sensed, not just received... felt. I felt cool wind upon my form, and it screamed. I felt the light of a moon shine down on me, and it howled with delight. Sensation was a drug, and I had just hit... the high of the universe.

Joy.

_ _

It took a long moment - yes! I had time now! hours, weeks, years... so blissfully real... - for me to return to consciousness.

But as I began to regain some semblance of consciousness, as the joy faded, I realised that I was not complete - not in the slightest. I had no body.

Now, you may think that's wrong. After all, didn't I have experience the sinuous wind on myself? The kiss of the moonlight? This new, shining world? And you'd be right: I had a form. But it was merely an amorphous shell of ectoplasmic nothingness, a shapeless thing of... little biology. There needed to be more, much, much more...I wanted, desired, needed a real body. But how? How could I change this?

It came as soon a I opened my eyes again - tried to sense as I had done through the aeons of my slow Void-spawned birth . For then I learned something glorious: I could still see the Void. I could sense its beauty and this beauty - of the wonderful world of the physical - at the same time.

And I saw myself. My own mind. The horrified fascination of it... a madman's shattered mirror, an amalgamation of emotion, a thing which was as unlike a normal mind as could be imagined. A trillion splinters of thought, forming one composite brain... a Shard.

There have been others, my dear, but that's what I am. The first, the greatest and most powerful of them all. Shard. Voidchild. Growing god of power.

And that power could be put to use. My form needed a shape to fill... but what? What could I choose? What could represent a creature who hitherto had not even had one atom of physical form?

The choice was, shall we say, made for me.

You see, Shards absorb new consciousness every second: the splinters of minds flood to us like moths to flames. But this one... it was barely a pulse of emotion.

More a raw, howling, cry of... utter ecstasy.

A rampant howl of stunned, awed joy which overwhelmed me, slamming into my ever-evolving mind like a thunderbolt. The thing overwhelmed my senses, my tenuous control, my understanding and weak grip on reality. (And with it, a few flickers of the cause of such pleasure: a young creature which I have since learned is called fox, white-furred, innocent of this dark observer as he ran, late for class again - class? What was that? - who provoked such sudden and unparalleled joy that the emotion hit me, stunned me into helplessness through sheer pleasure... and proceeded to morph me.

I have since learned of the plight of that fox, and of the creature who hungered after him. But at the time, all I knew was that my form was decided in an instant. The... thing that lusting observer was. The monster which he desired to be, to torment his young plaything. I joined him, joined his species... began my life.

Of course, that was not all. My mind added it's own touches.

I felt a strong skeleton forming - a hexapod, with four limbs and two mighty pinions, growing, pulling me up, towering: wonderful. The reformation added it's own touches to the great template as it went, sleek musculature wrapping around the bone, flesh wrapping around it, forming a living being. I was sleeker, less powerfully built than my "original", my crest shorter, my ears longer and more sleek... my power at least equal. I felt thick feathers sheathing me, the softness morphing to black, white, passing through a zany rainbow of colour, and finally settling on a silver of the shining night moon above: accented upon my wings, my belly, my ears and the growing fluff on my new sinuous tailwith the blue I remembered from that stolen memory of the day's sky: for I was, I would be forever, in both. Day and night. The Void and the reality. Shard.

More... it was with pleasure that I felt talons forming, the tips harder than stone - why settle for second best? - and sharper than knives. The ones upon my thick, powerful hindquarters were retractable, the ones upon my scaled forelegs were not. Both were obsidian black - the black of the darkness I had been born into, and all were ready to serve me. The ecstasy burned softly within my mind. As they sprang forth, oh, what i could do... what I could with these...

The eyes came last, and I could feel the deep, blazing purple which seemed to be our motif... the sign of the Void... trying to take dominance... but no. I would accept my heritage, but be master alone to my own body. For I had the moon of the night, the sky of the day... but both bowed before the gold of the sun.

The hunger, the lust for sensation, the raw red beast within me... it purred at that.

Even as I opened the new orbs: violet and gold, gold and violet, I knew that no matter how I might alter my form, this would be my true self forever.

And I loved it.

It was complete. I stood as I stand now: well over twelve feet in height and over fifteen in length, vast feathered wings and powerful legs proud upon my toned form. I'd ended up with an average density: over five and a half thousand pounds of solid, sleek form, tail lashing behind me as I tested new eager muscles. I was a gryphon, a Mathraxian gryphon. But I had Voidsight, being a creature of the Void itself, and I had the strength of a creature who cares not for physical limitations. I was complete.

Nearly. If I was to live, I would need a motif, label, name. Hmmm...

It was an idle choice, really, brought on by simply feeling my new eyes flex inside their sockets as I blinked once, testing: resettling and becoming sharp enough to glimpse the first drop of nightly dew as it condensed, upon a blade of grass all the way across the rocky hill. They were keen enough to cut through darkness like a knife.

Yes... I could see in the darkness and the light, see it all. It seemed appropriate. And I had words now, a new language: I felt them seeping in, minds all around sieving their thoughts into my receptive, greedy consciousness. I could choose my name now.

For the violet eye was the Void, but the golden eye was the sun of the physical realm. And the sun would glow brighter now.

"Golden... eye."

The first word I ever spoke. The most empowering, most enlightening, most glorious words. My own name.

"Goldeneye."

You see, I had a whole universe of universes to explore now. The world awaited. And my hunger, my lust to experience, to discover, to sate the burning need for stimulation... it purred within me.

I would begin with this world. Let us see what delights it could offer... I would take them all.