Welcome to Gaia! ::

The first thing that they'd said was that they wanted to make more of themselves.

He had never, not once, stopped to consider that he might be one of them. Even before the memories began to return he had felt small and unfairly weak: a subpar, broken tool for others to use despite his hatred of that role and his instinctive rejection of it. Not even when Aima had asked for her help in her goal and he had turned her down did he think that perhaps he might pursue the same one. There were enough Goddesses in the world, he'd said. But maybe the problem wasn't with the existence of Goddesses, but the natures of them. The implication was clear: maybe his nature was better.

Amity crouched on the Edge of the World and stared into the fog and tried to hear it speak to him, and he thought about fallen fighters dissipating at the Spire, and for the first time, his hunger for understanding (that aching need to satisfy his curiosity so that his curiosity would stop gnawing at him, and for no other reason than to end that ceaseless pulling) felt more like a hunger for power.

Maybe that was the only way to know. Maybe that was the only way the questions ended.

The Goddesses were not infallible. This he felt certain of, now. Justifications, some flimsy and contradictory, stole into his head and made homes there.

He ran his fingers absently over the ground, carefully memorizing the feeling as he'd been carefully memorizing so much for the past three days. Accompanied by the snippets of some time before--fleeting words and phrases in a jumble of unfamiliar voices, and the nagging sensation of familiarity when he stood next to Coyote in the Temple--he felt certain that he was getting closer to being filled up. Every new sensation he snatched greedily to his core, possessively. His now. No one else's.

Amity had no conception of just how huge a person's memory, full and total, really was. If he had known--if he had known the crushing vastness of one person's consciousness and the implications of it, and all the complications and the pain it brought--he might have shied away awestruck and terrified and been even more sure that he didn't want to know.

But it wouldn't have been his choice, either. He didn't want to want to know. There would still have been that curiosity.

And more than that, that hunger.

Amity stared sightlessly into the fog at the end of the world, and he thought about the empty pedestals, and for the first time, he entertained the idea of himself occupying one. Maybe he would have the strength to break the chains he saw around nearly everyone he met, once he had seen the great plans of the Goddesses unfold and had identified all their cruelties and weaknesses. Maybe he could reach into those great vaults of stolen memory and put them back where they belonged and they would worship him for it, true worship, deserved worship. Not the hollow subservient lip-service he saw around him with such disgust.

The idea felt like blasphemy.

Blasphemy felt good.