The true history of that irritant, Hope-

Before we met them, we were utterly different. We’d been created, yes, in a particular disposition, but our creators were artists, and we art—living art—formed from their own empyrean. So, to now-me, then-me is incomprehensible—like looking at a memory of an etching through a scratched lens. (Even these words—lens, scratch, etching, memory, looking—all of these were impossibly foreign to our pre-encounter existence.) We were separated from one another, mostly, but like raindrops running down a glass, it only ever felt momentary—flowing together was inevitable, we thought. Today, of course, we consider ourselves quite, quite separate… I was contemplating a lunar system at the time, I remember, and had been for distance/ages (perhaps everywhere/forever). But an arc was worrying at my lamina, and I went to realign it, restrain it and bring it into my…my…aril? Order? System? The concepts aren’t there… Anyway, in grasping it, I came to recognise that it too had an inherent system, simple but fascinating, and it was my integument that collapsed. I sloughed dimensions to understand, focused down…and became as I am now. And that was my first encounter with the humans.

This contact precipitated through all of us at once, though not all collapsed. Some remained excessions, some stretched out across all dimensions, some— I discurse. Afterwards, only those of a kind stayed together, though we didn’t all travel the path to the same degree. The first I encountered was Momus. ‘Oizys’, he said, in the tongue of bedrock movements, ‘have you seen what you can do with these?’ He was shifting one through generations, making its numbers grow and collapse. I watched closely. The structure’s components—that I was now realising were possibly separate things, unflowable droplets like Momus and myself—were struggling against their fate. Even as Momus sent disaster their way—played, pruned—they mourned and fought on—rebuilt, survived. I stopped him for a moment and had him watch. ‘Those parts are like-us’, he said. ‘Save for that carrying on, which is without sense. Submerge and reflow, little beings!’ ‘I bet they cannot’, I said. ‘Cannot forego that thing.’ ‘A bet’, said Strth, a third, newly consolidated. ‘I will adjudicate.’

We brought ourselves tighter still, to their level, pulling in the liminal timegazing, stargrazing gauzes of ourselves. And watched one, as an ant in the hive. Momus took his turn first, to cultivate her. He listened, learned her ways and tongues, promised her all, gave her all. She had all the elements that she desired, and her arc was mostly done— Then Momus handed her to me. We had been one flow once, but this act of split action-and-responsibility defined us against one another. In my new aspect of not-Momus, I took from his fragile charge. I went slowly at first, but then accelerated to a crescendo of loss that should have brought her to a realisation of the inevitable, a closing. But, in everything I took, she went on, scarred and broken. ‘Momus’, I said. ‘I am defeated. Her body is lame, her chattels dissipated, her loved dead. I give her the means for cessation, but she foregoes them.’ Momus cackled and capered and gathered her to him, crooning. Strth. ‘The bet is done. That irrational going-on is the essence of not-us. Let us call it Hope.’

Before I knew it, we had scaled down further, Momus and I. Strth did not (could not) follow. We furled ourselves inside pleasing forms and moved amongst them. Still, they knew us, by the brilliance that spilled aside in our imperfect control. The one we had tested—tormented, I now realised—still lived, though at the end of her temporal arc. I had taken everything, leaving her only with that strangeness I could not grasp—yet it was enough to sustain her. But now her arc was attenuated, and diminished as we were, we could still taste the coming end. And changed, I yearned for it. New arcs surrounded her, listened. She told how she had grasped the torments of the world and failed, left only with Hope—but that sustained her, even as peace, home, family, flesh was torn away. And she thanked Momus and I. For strengthening so that her faith never faltered. Momus was captivated at that point. Lost to the humans, charmed to thirst after their Hope. And I…? Thanked for idle cruelty? I loathed this fresh idiocy. And so I turned back to the spheres.

We infinite Fae then drifted into divergence. We were separate, doomed to never coalesce again it seemed. And the spheres themselves pulled apart, with some of us becoming spheres in and of ourselves. Strth had become such a sphere, truer to our original form, but folded inside himself. Yet he too could not escape a drive for human experience and, in his idleness, peeled parts of himself away, sent them out past his constraints. Some he worked on deeply, pastiching different elements of the human experience, to torment them in love and strife. His feelings as little Faelings… Some of his creations—hating this pull, hating the beings that were their models—created unfriendly parodies. Verdurous things, without Hope, designed to chase it down and destroy it. But many found themselves drawn to humanity and the kin we found—found their impossible desires trapped in their limited forms alleviated only by impossible Hope—found that intoxicating. Momus of course, was first amongst them, petting, breeding, curating his flock of born-to-dies. Until the star-iron came, that is…

I have told how the human experience brought us low; how fascination with it was a peril to us, corruptive of our contemplation. How we shifted as a result. Became less ourselves, more-them. Momus, I have not seen for centuries now. He became stuck to one plane, to their time and gravity, and suffered. He fell for his pet peoples, fought for them and lost, was put to servitude for it. Of Strth, I know less. He retreated behind the edges of himself, inwardly ashen, dispatching his creations always outwards like airborne seedheads, seeking fertile ground. And I? All I wished for was to dream of those lunar systems, to watch their inward spirals, to hear the music of the spheres. That is far beyond my ken now. My substance once spanned stellar systems, now I am an in-between contrivance, with thoughts linear to time and space. I hang here above their globe, a halfway thing. Hope is a curse, you see, and it has me. I yearn to expand yet can only fall, casting infinity aside, drawing closer to these short-arced nothings. If I abjure Hope, I must imbibe hate. And to hate them would be so very easy.