Prācī - "The Mother of the East

The first sight Prācī : “The Mother of the East” remembered was her twin, stark in his new reality of black and white. He formed, and she felt herself forming as well. She could barely make out his shape through the mist of her own creation. Far away, and seemingly across a valley, on a crag of rock above a valley filled with moving, translucent shapes and forms. As colors began to create and project themselves out of the binary of their father, The Undivided: “Das Ungeteilte,” she could sense herself, nearly-formed now, as her brother was. Her raiments, settling into solidity around her were red, and starkly so. The clothing billowed around and slipped into shape around her form.

In her left hand, seemingly growing from it, she felt a rounded shield. Her eyebrows, now coming into sharp physicality, rose to see the circular form in curiosity. “Paricha” it echoed in quiet song to her. “I am a friend. I will protect.”

She took a breath. It was glorious, and filled her with a unique energy. It seemed that the color of breath was blue. Blue. She looked toward her other arm. In her right hand, which was now complete with joints, sinew, flesh and nails, was a sliver of pure light. No, not a light, she saw, as she rotated her hand, a Sword! Reflecting the starset, gleaming from far West, behind her brother’s visage, in the clouds, its gleam flashed upon it, and she felt its heft and its intention. “Val! Val!” it said. “I serve only Prācī, only the Eastern Mother!” “I repay. I divide. I deliver your thoughts as sharpness to the flesh of those who may wish you harm. I destroy your enemies.” Prācī ’s furrowed brow answered, and then her mouth did. “I have no enemies, I am newly born.”

As she considered this, humming for a moment, around her waist, she felt a flexible hardness, and heard whatever it was whisper, “Not yet. Not yet.” But the other two, seemed not to hear. The two implements in her hands became suddenly lighter, pulling toward the sentient zenith aspect of the sky, which watched, Undivided, in his place above her. They understood, somehow more than she. They observed the darkness of him, the father there, and then they sang to her, in unison, “Pūrba, beauty of the night sky, mother of death, and life. It is to you we weep. It is for you we sing. Your existence is sorrow, your loneliness, a task. We will always serve. Although all else will forsake you, we will never leave you once you have us in hand.” Having been raised to the father, the devices swept downwards in her arms, then turned, glowing attention Westward, their consistency, harder and more insistent in her grasp. They were as sentries hunched toward action at the hint of danger.

They whispered in hushed song, “He becomes! He becomes!” She faced West, joining them as they were, turned foible and umbo toward her brother, who was just coming to consciousness from the great distance between them. Across that ethereal plane, he stood, arching over the western skyline of their dimension, and her heart tugged both toward him, and away. A new thought appeared within her. Like the breath, it had color, Green. Like the weapons, it had solidity, and actuality. This was to be the fact of her existence with her brother, a dichotomy, joined forever as twin flesh, and destined to be apart. She knew life, joy, loss, and then separation in that instant. She wept. Her father, without sympathy, but with the greatest of empathy, placed another understanding in her thoughts. “You will always be firstborn. You will always be My heart. But to find peace, you must do as you were made to do. You must destroy your brother, and all whom he spawns. This is not your choice, it is Arjuna, it is your duty.” She turned her head skywards, “What a cruelty this existence is!”

He answered in her head, with music, with dance, with laughter and stages. These images were strange to her, but gave her a sense of something else. She felt hope. She turned away from the West, from the valley, and from the whispers in the misty darkness below her there, in anger at the idea that she had no options. The images turned around and around in her head. She felt the first simmering rage within her at her father at these contradictory feelings, and as the ground became solid around her footsteps, and as these weapons, these metal children of hers, sang their death songs, she descended, and ran far from the place to think, and to decide what was to be done.