Before that which is written, there is what is unwritten.

Book of the Gods 27:45

"Welcome, daughter of mine." Lifting his weary head, The Great Dragon caught the scent of her divine presence within his nostrils the exact moment the Fate clad in her gray robes entered the tranquil loneliness of his domain. "To what do I owe the honor of this, your first visit to my plane?" Diur's head lowered once again to the massive slab upon which he rested wearily, his gray scales ebbed between long and drawn out breaths.

Sarina stood there, her face hidden in shadows of her hood. She sensed the pull of the cosmos as it struggled against her desire to remain here with her father. This wasn't her place. At least, not yet. And forces more ancient than even the gods worked against her, seeking to pull her back from this realm where light and dark existed in the same time and place. "I cannot stay long, but I wanted to speak to you. You have not come to visit in so long. And we have much to discuss."

"Of course, my child." His eyes blinked a few times in slow succession, slitted pupils fluctuating in size with each open and close of his eyelids. "I am well aware of the forces fighting against you at this very moment. But that you have found the strength to reach this higher level of existence? Even if for only a brief time? It pleases me greatly."

The Keeper of Neutrality's posture stiffened, mirroring an increased rigidity to her voice. "Because I am your daughter? Or because of what is eventually to happen to you and what my role is to become once you have ceased to exist?"

Diur raised his head once more, but not quite so high as before. "Can it not be both?" he asked. "You have discovered a great many things, I see."

Sarina's head dropped and then swiped gently side to side, her hard demeanor softening with slumping shoulders. "I have discovered the truth, if that is what you mean. I know you are dying. I know the reality of everything that once was. What you once were."

"Truth?" Diur's scaly mouth curled into the sort of snarly grin only a dragon's long snout could manage. "What is truth but the perception we each put on the events we ourselves bear witness to?"

Her father's flippant and evasive reply renewed the stiffness to Sarina's disposition. "I am not here for philosophical diversions, Father."

"I would be curious to learn if you discover all this by yourself?" her father asked, ignoring her desire for a different conversation to take place. "Or was it your sister, Octeava, who pried into the past? And then she told you?"

"Does it matter?"

The tilt to the Great Dragon's head, cocked to one side in the ever so slightest of manner, mirrored the indifferent disposition behind his forthcoming words. "I suppose not." If a dragon could have shrugged, that's what he did. "Octeava though has always been a bit of a troublemaker, sticking her nose where it shouldn't go. But that is to be expected because of her nature, I guess. I always figured her fascination with your library would lead to things being divulged before their proper time. And before you chose to take up your own search for the past. A search I had hoped would not come until I had left my role to you."

"Because you did not want to answer the difficult questions you knew I would pose?"

"If you want an honest and direct answer? Yes."

"Octeava might have pointed me towards the knowledge, but I have gone deeper into the archives than even Octeava and read what the volumes contain for myself." A reluctant sigh broke up her explanation. "As deep as I could go. All the way to the Vault of Golden Doors."

A nod from the Great Dragon. "And until you ascend, you will go no further."

"No more secrets," Sarina demanded. "All I want, Father, is to hear from you what the truth actually is."

Diur folded his forearms before him and under his chin, his claws clicking on the stone beneath his body. "You've read the words of the Lilwandi for yourself. They are impartial, without emotional judgement upon even the acts performed by we, the gods. Everything is as you have discovered, and you know this. So your insistence on asking for confirmation puzzles me."

"It is true there were others before us?" The neutral fate asked boldly, not prepared to let her father evade any further.

"There were," Diur confirmed, humoring his daughter. "My brothers and sisters, the elder gods—children of the Ancient Ones; a masculine known as Aa, and a feminine known as Ba. The story of these Ancient Ones is what lies behind the golden doors."

"Why did you never tell us of them? These Ancient Ones or the elder gods?" Sarina folded her arms, mirroring her father, as though perhaps her stance could contain this sensation akin to anger growing inside her and at being deceived for so long.

"Their existence was irrelevant to the now," The Great Dragon answered. In the gleam of his eyes, there was a sense he believed those words were the utmost form of honesty. "The reality is that none of them exist in the here and now."

"Because you killed them?" The question from Sarina was as direct as a knife to the heart.

"The Ancient Ones," Sarina's father explained, "held us, my brothers, sisters and I, as slaves. I was the best treated, their first child, but still bound as a servant myself. My task was to ensure the other children never disobeyed our masters."

"And if they did?" Sarina took a step forward, but only one.

"I would punish them."

"How?"

"By consuming them." Diur said. There was no hint of emotion. "I would take them inside me and make them part of my own being. Every time I would consume one of my brothers or sisters, their power added to mine. In time I rivaled Aa and Ba combined, and they knew this. So, they tried to destroy me, fearing that allowing me to continue to exist would threaten their own survival. When they decided to act against me, our battle was an essential stalemate, neither myself nor Aa and Ba able to defeat the other. It was at this time my brothers and sisters came to my aid, and together we began, slowly, to overpower the Ancient Ones. But, try as I might, even weakened and defeated, I could not consume them as I had their children. Instead, I took each Ancient Ones into my maw in turn and shattered them into primal fragments that became imbedded in the fabric of the cosmos."

"What we call the Lilwandi?"

"Indeed. Aa and Ba were meticulous in their record keeping. Fascinated by the minutiae of everything. I suppose you could say they are cursed to a continued existence, but one as slaves themselves, the pieces of their consciousnesses continuing to observe all that transpires, but unable to act." Diur focused on his daughter, adding emphasis to his next words. "Many of my brothers and sisters did not survive the battle with the Ancient Ones. But, those of us that did, ascended to take our place as rulers of the heavens. And I, as the most powerful, was the unquestioned king of all the gods."

"And, in time, you became as bad as Aa and Ba. When the other elder gods stood up to you and defied your will, you killed them? Every last one of them? Without hesitation?" The gray-robed fate asked, "Because they would not allow your own wicked ways to prevail?"

"I did, yes. All those things." A sigh from the Great Dragon rippled the ether. "I killed them because I could, not because I should. Because I was unable to control my rage. None of the others could rival me. And, without me, they could never have defeated the Ancient Ones. I was prideful, coming to see my brothers and sisters as meant to serve me as Aa and Ba saw us as servants them. They rose up against me, just as we had to those before us. But, for my brothers and sisters, the outcome was vastly different." Then, before the Keeper of Neutrality, his own daughter, could pose another question, The Great Dragon asked one of his own. "Does it disturb you to know your father was once so vile and cruel?"

"It does," the goddess replied without reluctance.

"Why is that?" The scales along his neck pulsed with the rolling breath he used for the question.

His daughter answered with the blunt force of her feelings. "Because I feel like my entire existence has been a lie, Father. I feel like I do not even know you anymore."

The conversation stimulated him, Diur found his weariness subsided for the moment. "Child, I am not what I once was. I have found a means to right the wrongs I have committed in eons past."

"By tearing yourself apart and killing yourself in the process?"

"By creating a new generation of gods." Another heavy sigh from the gray-scaled god followed. "Should my fate be any different from those I have destroyed without justice or mercy? This is what is best for the cosmos. Things will be better once I, the last remnant of the elder gods, have passed. My end shall be the same as that of my brothers and sisters I have destroyed. Although my suffering has endured for much longer. My loneliness, and the pain I have carried with me over what I have done has been unbearable."

"Maybe I don't want you to go?" Sarina admitted her deepest wish.

"Daughter?" The curious ring to Diur's voice genuinely sought the answer to his child's sudden pronouncement. "Why? Because you don't want to fulfill your role?"

"Because you're my father." There was a quake in the ether. A deep, foreboding shiver connected with direct intent to her words and her doubts.

Diur shook his head. "I have warned you before. These petty attachments you have will result in an end to the cosmos if you do not overcome these things. For when I am gone, if the void I leave behind is not filled by your ascension, then all will cease. Mortals and gods alike. Both the terrestrial and the ethereal will terminate."

"I was never asked if this is what I wanted." Sarina turned away from him. "Perhaps I desire the same free will as the mortals retain for themselves?"

"Free will?" Diur asked.

His daughter nodded, twisting back to face him. "Octeava has performed an experiment. It has shown me, while we can plant seeds within the mortals, attempting to sway them down one path or another, ultimately those we oversee still retain the right to their own choices. Is everything you have told me a lie?"

The Great Dragon nodded once more. "You and your sisters' roles were always about preparing you to balance the universe. Controlling the lives of mortals was, I admit, a ruse. You are correct. It was not the truth. Only something to prepare you for your ultimate role."

"And if I refuse to accept this status you have assigned to me?"

If he had been the way he was before, in the times of Aa and Ba and the elder gods, filled with unbridled rage, Diur would have harbored a great animus towards The Keeper of Neutrality—his daughter or not. He would never have suffered her questioning him. But now he found a more measured tone, his once unbridled nature tempered and severely quenched.

"We are often given roles in life we do not want, Daughter," he said. "I was once given a station I did not ask for and was unable to understand what it meant to sacrifice of myself for others. Even those I claimed to love. I was too powerful, and with that strength came great foolishness."

Another step towards where the Great Dragon laid came from Sarina's legs. "You became as bad as Aa and Ba."

"I did," her father agreed. "This is true. But I found that by separating parts of myself from my being, I could control the more volatile parts of my nature more easily.

"Your plan was for Descist to be the fulcrum of which you speak?"

"Yes. But, when he instead took the darkest parts of me, he became like I once was, because he did not understand the extent of what he was doing. And that is why he needed to be thrown into the bowels of the world and contained in the prison Earoni and I created for him. Even held in his prison, however, his evil is so great that it still seeped out and infected all things. Our cage around him is imperfect. But it must be, for the universe needs darkness as it needs light. I was supposed to be that darkness, but in control of it. My son upended that plan. Know this, Daughter, You are much stronger and wiser than I ever was or ever will be. For I gave birth to you solely so that you might understand the need for balance to be kept from the very start of your existence. Your sisters have been excellent training for you in this matter."

"That, Father, brings me to my final question. You speak of my sisters as though they were nothing more than tools. If the light and the dark already exist, when you are gone, and I ascend to your place, what is to become of Sashna and Octeava?"

"They are redundancies in the cosmos," Diur said. "But ones that have served their purpose nearly flawlessly."

"And what happens to them once you leave them and I take your place, if I so choose to?"

A scaly eyebrow raised at that comment. "There is no choice in the matter. If you do not, as I said, all will discontinue. The universe will be without a fulcrum. You sisters who you care so much for? They will also cease to exist."

"You did not answer my question, Father." Sarina challenged the Great Dragon, a sense that her importance in the grand scheme of the cosmos granted her the right to be so bold.

"About your sisters?" Diur asked.

"Yes."

"I do not control their fates, Daughter. They are gods, but they are not necessary to the functioning of reality." The Great Dragon yawned. "Unnecessary things are often discarded."

"No." There was a cracking within the fibers of the universe. "My sisters are not things to be merely cast off. I will not destroy them as you have destroyed those before us."

Head down on his crossed arms, Diur smiled. "As I would hope not. Such would make you no better than I was. And that would be my greatest failure." Eyes shut, weariness finally overcoming him, The Great Dragon drifted fast to sleep.

Sarina approached, placing her hand on his slowly rising and falling sides. Her head drooped, feeling the motion of his slumbering form. "I wish we had more time, Father. I don't think you realize how loved you are."