The Death of Time

...the shortest distance between was and will be

The past increases and the future recedes…

Ananke expected to be dead. She’d fallen a considerable distance and even though she hadn’t impacted into the solid structure of ice, but instead the slightly more yielding water, her awareness of physics had highlighted her impending death by surface tension. If by some miracle she survived that, it would have only been for moments before her broken body succumbed to drowning or was gnashed in the maw of the serpent beast she had just unleashed. And yet none of these things had come to pass. Despite the incredible, nay impossible odds, Ananke opened her eyes.

It was still so cold. The winds of the Nordic Vale sunk into her sodden flesh and bypassed water logged clothes to nearly finish what her fall had started. She was alive but her body hurt beyond her ability to fully comprehend it. She could feel no specific wound and yet the awareness of pain merely intensified its severity.

Her vision hazed in and out of focus, seeing the oddly twisted features of Herald’s face as he tore the ruined garments off of Ananke, careless of her embarrassment at being bared. Heat was chafed into her limbs, the sensations of warmth a strange counterpoint to the electrical thrill of agony dancing along her nerves.

“Don’t you ever do something like that to me again!” Herald shouted at her, but although it was the Ambassador’s voice she heard, she’d become intimately familiar with the personality shaping the words.

“Chronos?” her voice was cracked and weak, not even audible and yet somehow he heard her.

“You impossible mortal!” his words sounded angry and it was strange for Ananke to not feel the corresponding burn of his emotions inside her, they had become so entwined. She wanted to ask what had happened, how she had survived, why he was carried by Herald, where the Pillar was, and a dozen more questions hummed in her mind. And yet no query emerged as pain overrode her awareness again.

~You are impossible~ a sibilant voice susurrates from her memory. In her disorientation ‘nake cannot tell if it is a true memory or a response to Chronos’ accusation but she tried to chase the voice down regardless. It allows her to flee the pain of her immediate reality to hide in the recesses of her own mind.

How am I impossible?  Ananke wondered, chasing down the fragment of voice.

~You did what no god, godling, giant or monster could properly do. And you did it without training or thought. Impossible~ the voice taunted again.

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Ananke quoted from a childhood story, having no other counter for the voice that teased in her memory.

~And that’s why you live little fleshling. Not just the hope for the impossible, but the absolute, undying belief in it to prevail. Inevitability with or without possibility. Oh you are a treasure~

Ananke followed the trail that the hissing, whispering voice led her on until she walked into a room of her own memory, to be confronted with the reality of it. For some people, the term seeing their lives flash before their eyes is simply a figure of speech. For Ananke, it was video reel revealing the moments of her most recent near death experience.

She witnessed her own fall, emotionally detached from it as if it were happening simply in a movie film. The child that was the embodiment of the Pillar simply ceased to exist, evaporating away before Ananke had even crashed into the waves of icy water.  ‘nake got a sense that the Pillar wasn’t destroyed, but had instead achieved whatever state it needed to be renewed. Much like the last one had only needed to be set free, this one simply needed to be saved from Fenrir. It was senseless or maybe just beyond Ananke’s mortal ability to comprehend.