we meet at the appointed place

When the worlds began to drift together, we understood, implicitly, that it was not doing so because of any individual people in it. If anything, it was doing so because of those people that had left: the man who had once been Klaus as Zanza and the Architect, in the here and now, and Ontos, far in the past - as well as Logos, recently departed.

With the Conduit gone, Pneuma would also eventually fade. All artefacts that had once rendered our worlds the creations of gods, mythical with histories marked in colloquially observable time since those gods' provenance (and, of course, not even that), were disappearing. We were becoming...normal.

But I was the carrier of my sister's body and soul. Melia was the carrier of her brother's hopes and the errant destinies of all her fallen brethren, her people. We were still special. We weren't human; nor were we High Entia or Blades. The other hybrids were dead, dying, or hiding.

And so we were the figureheads. And so we began to believe, as our intercosmic communications proceeded, that it was us who were special. That there was a little bit of destiny in our drawing of the future.

That when we finally intersected, world upon world, foundation upon foundation, interknit layers of flesh and blood and ether and feather, rock and shale and Titans' Cores, that would be only the body, the mind. It would take our corporeal hands joining to meet the heart, the soul.

Why else would we be the figureheads? Why else would we be the ever-enduring symbols, granted trial in youth toward triumph in maturity? We were not hapless and incidental; we came of both age and stature.

Parted from me, she was, but never truly parted. Never and always, were we, touching and touched.

And then we arrived, and our eyes were not opened but closed to the truth of how wrong we were.

If someone was to be self-serving, it was not us.

Good of us, don't you think? That we gave up our dream of such profound acceptance so willingly.

That we told each other, we will not have to try to move forward for it is burned into our very blood, these worlds speak to each other through our very wills, the origins are within us--!

And we were taken at our word. The word of the world. The word of gods.

And thus we were puppeteered up at the altars.

Yes, never and always, but no, never truly true.