u/Winter_Storm86

Still on that god bullshit

On the Birth of Ilu, Called the Ever-Mourning
Among the divine births attributed to the sundering of Uzu, few are spoken of with such tenderness as the arising of Ilu, Goddess of Love and Grief.
The oldest accounts agree that she was born late enough in the Progenitor’s mutilation that suffering had already become familiar to creation, though grief itself had not yet been given a name.
During the struggle against Oblivion, Uzu’s heart was torn from his chest and shredded by violence beyond mortal comparison. Much of that ruined organ was scattered, but one large and ragged portion fell intact enough to continue beating.
It struck the ground beneath him in a wet mass of torn flesh.
For a time, the fragment did nothing.
Then it moved.
Witness-texts describe the flesh folding inward upon itself, as if attempting to remember the shape from which it had been removed. Veins gathered. Bone emerged where no bone had existed. Limbs formed from strands of living tissue, and from the ruined heart rose a woman already marked by wounds.
This was Ilu.
She did not enter existence cleanly.
Scars covered her before she had ever been injured by another hand, for the damage suffered by the flesh from which she was born remained written into her divinity. Above her own newly formed heart lay the deepest wound, a cruel scar where the memory of Uzu’s tearing had become part of her body.
The first thing Ilu saw was her father.
Uzu hung above creation mutilated, diminished, and yet still living.
The records differ regarding whether Ilu understood immediately who he was. I suspect the distinction matters little. Love appears to have preceded knowledge.
She looked upon him and grieved.
Blood ran from her eyes.
Later theologians often poetically claim that tears had not yet learned to become water. Whether this is literal cannot be established, but every surviving tradition agrees upon the blood. It stained her cheeks, entered her hair, and dried upon the white garment that formed around her body.
Those stains have never left her.
It was in that first moment that the nature of Ilu became apparent.
She loved Uzu because he was her father.
She loved the divine beings born from his scattered body because they were her kin.
And when mortal life eventually arose, she loved them also, though they were distant from her and would never enter her realm while living.
With love came attachment.
With attachment came the possibility of loss.
Thus grief was born beside love rather than after it.
The earliest descriptions of Adoration’s Lament claim that living cords began to emerge from Ilu’s flesh almost immediately. They resembled ligaments more than chains, organic and pale, stretching outward beyond the boundaries of her realm toward the other divine places.
As new bonds formed throughout creation, more tension entered those cords.
Ilu was drawn outward.
Not toward one being, but toward all whom she loved.
Her six arms stretched instinctively after them.
Her legs were bound beneath her.
And so the paradox of Ilu became permanent: the more completely she loved creation, the less capable she became of reaching any single part of it.
The first breaking of one of those bonds is not recorded.
There have since been too many.
What is known is that whenever love is severed by death, betrayal, abandonment, or irreparable separation, Ilu feels the loss as though it were her own. The ancient wounds upon her body reopen. The scar above her heart bleeds. She mourns alongside those who remain.
For this reason, scholars reject the common description of Ilu as merely a sorrowful goddess.
She is not sorrow.
She is the reason sorrow can exist at all.
One does not grieve what one has never cherished.
Love creates the wound that grief inhabits.
And so Ilu remains within Adoration’s Lament, beautiful, scarred, and bleeding, pulled endlessly toward a creation she cannot reach and unable to sever the bonds that imprison her.
For to free herself, Ilu would first have to cease loving.
And then she would no longer be Ilu.

Do not call what Igi grants a vision. A vision is something witnessed from afar.

Her truth is lived.

When she lowered her eyes into the blood, I awoke forty years from now with an old man’s hands. I felt the winter in my joints. I heard my daughter mourning beyond a door I could not open. Then came the fire. I breathed every mouthful of smoke until my heart stopped.

When I returned to the temple, scarcely a minute had passed. My flesh was unharmed, yet I remembered dying as clearly as I remember being born.

Igi offered no explanation. She never does. She merely lifted her eyes from the pool and held them once more within her palms.

I asked how the fire might be prevented.

The blood remained still.

I understand her silence now. She had already shown me what will be. Had she shown me less, perhaps it might have changed.

There is no mercy in foresight—only time enough to dread what has already become true.

The Litany of the First Wound, 3:7–12

Before there was heaven, before there was earth, there was Uzu and there was Oblivion.
And Uzu looked upon the Nothing and desired that there should be more.

So he gave his flesh to the making. From his wounds came the gods; from his blood came life; from his torn body came the foundations of the world.

Oblivion took of him until little remained, yet still he did not yield.

And even now he hangs, bleeding and undying, while all creation flowers beneath his suffering.

Therefore we worship not because he commands it, nor because he promises reward, but because every breath drawn beneath the stars is a thing his pain purchased from the dark.

Honor the Flesh that became the Many. Honor the Wound that does not close. Honor Uzu, who suffers so that Nothing may not have us.

Big big thank you to friend and fellow shark u/KatsumiAndFriends for joining me on this new shark adventure!!

Are you ready for Shark Week?