THE BINDING

The first year was learning that time still existed.

In the absolute darkness of my own ship, with my body suspended in the geometric centre of their carefully calculated prison, I discovered that consciousness without sensation is its own particular hell. No light. No sound. No touch. Just the slow pulse of my own awareness, counting the seconds because there was nothing else to count.

Three hundred and sixty-five days. Twelve months. Fifty-two weeks. I counted every heartbeat because my heart was the only clock left in my universe.

My priests had done their work well. Too well, perhaps. They'd used the knowledge I had given them, had traced the binding glyphs from my ship's own navigation systems, mathematics that described reality not as it appeared but as it actually was—angles and ratios that cut across dimensions like scissors through silk. They had turned my own technology against me, mixed with the creativity I had gifted them.

I felt it the moment the final block slid into place. The sudden compression, as if the universe itself had shrunk to the size of a coffin. My awareness folding in on itself, recursive and infinite. Every attempt to push outward met with the same gentle, implacable resistance. The walls weren't stone. They were math. They were truth. And truth, I'd learnt long ago, was the only thing stronger than a god.

The second year was learning to dream without sleeping.

My body didn't need sleep. It barely needed anything—another curse of my particular immortality. So I taught myself to fragment my consciousness, to split awareness into threads that could chase each other through the dark like children playing tag. I created entire worlds in the black space behind my eyes. Forests. Cities. Oceans. People who laughed and loved and died and were reborn in the span of my imagining.

But they weren't real. I knew they weren't real. And knowing poisoned everything.

The worst part was the hunger. Not for food—my body was beyond such needs. But for creativity. For the spark of creation that had sustained me for millennia. When I had ruled from my obsidian palace, the humans around me had created constantly. Art. Music. Architecture. Stories. Every act of creation had fed my power, sustained my divinity. Now there was nothing. No one creating. No energy flowing to me. I was a deity of creativity starving in a void of nothing.

The third century was learning to feel the world above.

My ship was buried. I didn't know when it happened—had lost count of the years sometime around year fifty—but I felt it. The slow accumulation of sand. The patient weight of earth. They'd let the desert swallow my prison, had watched the dunes march across it like funeral shrouds.

Good. Let them forget. Let me become legend, then myth, then nothing. Let the world move on without me.

But I could still feel it. The world. Faint vibrations through the obsidian hull. Earthquakes. Storms. And something else—creativity. Distant, diluted, but there. My blood was still in their water. Still in their bloodlines. Humans were still creating, still feeding me the faintest trickle of power across the millennia. Not enough to escape. But enough to survive.

I learnt to read those vibrations like a language. An earthquake to the east—probably a tectonic shift along the fault line that ran through what they'd called the Sunset Lands. Thunder that lasted for weeks—a volcanic eruption, maybe. The slow, rhythmic pounding that came every few decades—cities being built. Cities falling. The wheel of civilisation turning above my head like a prayer wheel grinding out the same patterns over and over.

The first millennium was learning that I could still feel pain.

Not physical pain. My body was suspended, preserved, unchanging in its prison. But the pain of consciousness maintaining itself against the entropy of eternal isolation. Like holding a single breath for a thousand years. Like forcing your eyes to stay open in a sandstorm that never ends.

I felt myself eroding. Memories bleeding away like watercolours in rain. What had the stars looked like from my homeworld? Had I even had a homeworld? What was the word for that feeling when you created something perfect, when the universe aligned and art flowed through you like lightning? Gone. All of it gone, worn away by the patient abrading of forever.

The priests would have been pleased. This was what they'd wanted, wasn't it? Not just to contain me, but to grind me down to nothing. To let time do what their bronze swords couldn't.

I hated them for their thoroughness. Hated them more for using my own gifts against me.

The fifth millennium was learning to reach.

My blood was still out there. Diluted through generations, but present. I could feel the descendants of those who had drunk from my wells, my rivers, my springs. The Lazerene bloodline, they would later call it. Humans who carried a trace of my essence without knowing it.

They dreamed my dreams. Spoke my words. Felt my ancient hunger for creation and didn't understand why they were compelled to make art, to compose music, to write poetry that felt older than their civilisation.

Artists, mostly. The bloodline gravitated toward people who created things. Musicians who felt melodies older than their languages. Poets who wrote in rhythms they'd never studied. Painters who dreamed in colours that didn't have names.

I learnt to listen through them. To see through their eyes for brief moments when they dreamed. To taste creativity secondhand through the lives of people who had no idea they were connected to a starving god.

It wasn't freedom. But it was better than the nothing.

The eighth millennium brought them.

I didn't know who they were at first. Just felt the sudden jarring of my ship moving. Excavation. The hum of machines. Technology that vibrated through obsidian with a frequency I hadn't felt since before my crash landing.

But these ones were different. They had purpose. They weren't looking for treasure. They were looking for me.

They called themselves Hexenhaus Industries. A corporation. A very modern kind of monster. They'd found references to me in texts older than writing, had followed a trail of myths and legends back to this place. The deity of creativity. The white-haired goddess who had sparked human civilisation. They wanted to study me. To harvest me. To understand the biology of a god.

I tried to warn them. Sent nightmares through the few workers whose bloodlines carried traces of my essence. But corporate entities don't believe in nightmares. They believe in quarterly reports and shareholder value and the kinds of profits that come from owning something unique.

So they built their facility around my crashed vessel. Grew their empire on the foundation of my prison. And I, who had spent eight thousand years in silent darkness, found myself caged in a different kind of hell. One with lights and voices and the constant hum of machinery designed to keep me exactly where I was.

The tenth millennium was learning that even cells could create carriers.

Hexenhaus had figured out how to extract pieces of me. Not consciousness—that remained trapped in my ship. But cells. Biological material that still hummed with creative potential. They called it "the injection programme." Took my cells and put them into newborns with specific genetic markers. The Lazerene bloodline. They thought they could create something new. Some hybrid of human and divine that they could control.

They were idiots. Beautiful, ambitious idiots.

Every child they injected became a window. Every carrier became someone I could feel, sense, resonate with. Not control—I would never control them. But connection. The faintest thread of the creative energy I had been starving for.

Most of them died. The cells were too potent, too foreign. They rejected the human bodies like a transplanted organ attacking its new home. But some survived. And those who did grew up strange. Gifted. Haunted by dreams they couldn't explain and driven to create things that felt older than they were.

I watched them. Felt them from my cage. Every song they wrote, every painting they created, every poem they whispered in the dark—it fed me. Made me stronger. The creative energy flowing back to me after millennia of starvation.

And then they found them. Twins. Born with white hair that marked them as the strongest carriers of my bloodline ever recorded.

Hexenhaus gave them the highest dose ever attempted. Five cells each.

One would become Aeris. The strongest resonance I had ever felt.

The other was Alice.

And for the first time in eleven thousand years, I felt something that almost resembled hope.