Song of Nihilim

Teen And Up Audiences | No Archive Warnings Apply | Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Video Game), Xenosaga (Video Games)

Gen | for minorthirds | 333 words | 2022-06-22 | Xeno Series | AO3

Speculative, Apocalypses, Nihilism

Always, it comes. Not inevitable, no, but uninhibitable.

This story, this epic, this epoch, this age...

It is not about life, nor death. Instead, it concerns the certitude with which the universe can expect sentient creatures to act in a manner most...human, when confronted with loss.

Not about life or death, but about the bridge between the two, and how it is maintained - shakily, across millennia.

If enough soldiers should happen to die in a massive, ongoing, eternal conflict, then their brethren would and indeed will mourn them.

Loudly. Ceaselessly. And, most important of all, beautifully. This fate is assured.

What makes it haunting, do you think? Is it the singularity, or the unison? Is it those whom it is being played for, or those who are playing it?

Is it, perhaps, the fact that each soul, in isolation, can only carry the weight of their own experience, their own memories? Can only be brought to accept that singular extent, and none further?

And but that those souls should, together, carry weights which have been building, burning, bellowing for release and righteous retribution, in will's attenuation, for centuries?

This sound. This song. This void, endless and terrifying.

Who is to say that it does not lurk at the hilt of the sword which drives us, marching ever onward, against each other, watching and waiting and, most importantly of all, listening?

Rather, what?

Enough flutes playing together, the same song as it is the only song, as it is the rent outcry inset of the human soul, their guilt which they disguise as grief and their regrets which they disguise as respect, shall identify it, and bring it into real space.

As we hear, we observe physical phenomena. As we think, we only process what we assume to be what is.

What is?

This song. This song which shall bring all suffering to an end.

Its only purpose. Devoid worth. Affecting all.

It is a place. It is a time. It is an endless axis.

And so shall we all spin.