Dray was created from the right arm of Weil and was his firstborn, the second being to manifest himself into the beige void Plane. In a way, Dray was the blank slate upon which Weil would build and “craft” his future kin, but their abilities were no more improved or diminished. The right hand and arm of Weil were his dominant, thus the gift of sentience was bestowed upon him, and he would put it to good use. He was the very first sentient being.
His movement is erratic and jerky, forward movement does not occur without heavy traces of a zigzag pattern. He stops in one place, turns to observe, it evokes the image of a small child, their characteristic immature gross motor skills, of those who learn to run before they can walk well, a marionette with too few strings. He appears as a dragonfly or a hummingbird, when stopping to drink the nectar, but instead of drinking nectar, entire galaxies and superclusters are being streamed out of the hole in his two feathery antennae, faster than the speed of light.
Dray bears a thin, tubular and chitinous body that leads into a massive, segmented tail that tapers and gets thicker toward the end, which holds a large diamond shaped enclosure that shields his brain and heart. By default, he is curled into a hook like configuration, he finds it most comfortable. Perhaps his most striking physical features are his four massive and translucent wings, appearing as glass, they are etched with many parallel lines forming an “X” pattern toward the body center. There are large colorful patches on the wings lined with a thick outline, like stained glass themselves etched in a paisley pattern. Despite their fragile appearance, there may be nothing more durable than them. Beating exactly 1,969 times per second, going near them while moving is a certain death wish.
However, Dray had a problem. His problem was exactly that was the first of his kind! For he had nobody to learn from, his creations were raw and unfettered and quite often, totally broken. Unstable too, but fortunately at this young age he could hardly understand this. One day, Dray left the Eton rock and travelled in a straight line, without stopping for 242 million years. He faced forward and all the while, out of the pores on his two mothlike antennae were streamed the very first celestial bodies, stars and plants. Plane seven was being filled.
And what a concoction! In it was contained millions, billions, trillions of entities, planets with stars, stars without planets, planets without moons. Voids, walls, strings and quantum foam, regions of space full of rock fragments with aspirations of planethood they will never meet, balls of helium and balls of hydrogen accidentally divorced from each other, wrinkles in time, black holes that consume, pulsars whose light has not yet reached us, light that has arrived, intensities varying wildly. What was previously a void where next to nothing existed to differentiate, there now was a section of Eton’s sky populated. Weil saw this and poured his approval on all of the beings on all of the planets and shared with them Dray’s abilities of sentience. He took the entirety of dray;s creations and created a microcosm of it on Eton.
He wanted his planet body to be the greatest single celestial body in the plane, with the greatest biodiversity. Eton would be a microcosm of the entire universe itself.
One particular region held Dray’s attention for long. This was his craft, Hirrel, a planet torn between the orbits of two suns. Teim, the more luminous of the two with a blue shine, and Ehal, smaller but older. Hirrel was home to the oblivious Hirreen, living under a permanent purple haze. Their planet was generated with a single massively thick cloud, wrapped around the planet 168 times spiraling upwards and downwards in weekly cycles. The cloud would change thickness randomly, getting thicker, rubbing against itself and generating massive electrical storms, and as it thinned, the intense beams of light from Teim and Ehal bathed the planet in an extreme bright light. The Hirreen believed these unpredictable spurts of light to be their maker’s method of communication with them and lay prostrate on the ground, wherever they were, welcoming the huge free handouts of vitamin D. Some carried special light bottles made from the tough skins of the Cpondie (who were not native, but accidentally introduced by linen merchants from the neighboring planets when they wandered into their ships searching for food), they bottled this light and took it home to use it for whatever, whether it was to warm themselves, to pour light shows for the children, to compete with their neighbor so they would inflate their ego even more, in times when the naughty clouds would restrict most of them into their homes, built into the sides of hills.
Some decorated their bottles with dyed sand in patterns or likenesses of their children or fourth husbands, collected at uncliffed beaches and dyes using natural plant extracts, or bought from a dedicated bottle sand (™) marketplace, one of the very many new locations that opened after the market crashed tremendously, and then rapidly made an equally splendid return and quickly surpassed its former popularity among night subsets of the populace. Divorce attorneys, antennae groomers. Some took to sticking bits of mud to the bottle in the hope that it would stick. This method quickly passed into the mainstream after it’s success underground and they were quickly met with resistance by the United League of Plainbottled Purists (may plain bottles be upon them). The Meister with Two Good Hands would send out endless polite letters requesting them to immediately stop their innovations. Very soon their mailboxes and PO boxes would be stuffed with delicately worded requests of cessation. While the others were occupied with their muddy craft and enjoying what the great terra cotta deities had to offer, the League convened and noticed their message was not getting through.
Religious zealotry and bigotry was no stranger to the Hirreen as they learned, the hard way, when proponents of experimental conical and triangular bottles were quickly snuffed out, and cursed to stand upside down on the wet ground, supported only by the flat tops of their bottles. Snuffed almost as quickly, in fact, as they came waltzing in with their ridiculous containers. The fortunate part is, nobody got the idea of slitting the feathered heads of these heretics beforehand, right in between the antennae, so their blood would flow into the bottle when cursed.
One year, around 2.4 billion of them ago, there was a time when much more light than usual was being absorbed by Hirrel because of an unusual extended period of cloud skinniness. At first all the Hirreen, regardless of class age or height went out to bottle the light for their homes as they always did.
(TBC)
_________________
הייתי צוללת עכשיו למים
הכי, הכי עמוקים
לא לשמוע כלום
לא לדעת כלום
וזה הכל אהובי, זה הכל.
22 May 2016, 3:19 pm
