![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
For ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
neotoma, who wanted meta on my fic First and Last, and First Again. I'm not sure how much sense this makes, as it's kind of ... unfocused, and a bit rambly, and ended up more a somewhat passionate love letter to mythology, but ... howandever. *smiles sheepishly*
neotoma, who wanted meta on my fic First and Last, and First Again. I'm not sure how much sense this makes, as it's kind of ... unfocused, and a bit rambly, and ended up more a somewhat passionate love letter to mythology, but ... howandever. *smiles sheepishly*Bright and Terrible Gods
*hums thoughtfully* This story. I don't know if it's obvious what I wanted from it. I wanted ... something to fix 5x19, Hammer of the Gods. I wanted gods, I wanted mythology, I wanted ... the deep, bright-dark echoes of it, the bellsong, the shivering, echoing sensation of myths, of magic, and gods, and bright savagery, of a thing that went down to the core of the world, and the shivers of ancient stories in the back of my head. I grew up on myths. Mostly Celtic and Norse, some Classical, some Catholic, not quite these myths, not quite Kali, but still. I remember that feeling, like when you're a child and someone's reading The Hobbit to you for the first time. The way the voices wrap around you, the way your bedroom is for a moment a dragon's cave, and your pillow for a moment a sword, and the gods are bright and terrible and immutable and fierce, and the magic is a thing untouchable, and the whole world shivers to the sound of your grandfather's voice.
That's what myths are. Not crude, tawdry things lined up to take a fall for a whining archangel. Gods are echoing things, the surface shape just a skin across the vastness, and when you touch them ... Gabriel is a bright and clarion thing, a thing of fire and air and pain, who once walked with bloody wings across a drowned earth. Kali is the rise and fall of creation, an impossible vastness of time into which creation crests to destruction, falls, and rises again. Loki is a sly, ephemeral thing, a flicker across the consciousness, a salmon, a thief, a dark god of earthquakes who had the world shake in his agony. The Baron is a low, dark, rumbling thing, rude and crude and flavoured of rum, who rests a shovel at his side, and asks Death hold, or ushers Death close. Coyote is a breath of wind and sweetgrass, lightfoot, laughing thing. They are ... Gods are echoing things.
Um. Yes. That's ... that's what I was aiming for, anway. Not sure to what extent I succeeded. But ... Language. There is a kind of language, for mythology, echoed and archaic, and filtered to English through countless other tongues. Images. Myths hold images as facts, so that Fenrir is physically bound by a ribbon formed of the sighing of cats, and Gabriel has six hundred wings, and Raktabija's blood is in truth a seed. There are ... ways and means, however clumsily I turned out to use them -_-; There was a certain joy in trying, though. Heh.
As for the story itself, the form of the story itself ... Hmm.
Why those three characters? Why that ... well, sort of erotic edge? Mostly the episode. Gabriel is Loki (except not, because Loki exists in and of himself, I accept nothing else), Gabriel flirts with Kali (does he realise, I wonder, that he is quite literally flirting with Destruction - except yes, of course he does, and that's part of it, part of where this comes from). So. Gabriel, with Kali, with Loki, with both, to the end, and beyond, for she is Destruction itself, and Death stands in the room (or at least Baron Samedi). Heh.
Kali first, because she is older. Within her own canon, I mean. Hinduism ... I hadn't met it properly before 5x19, hadn't researched it. Not one of my mythologies. When I did ... The first thing that struck me was the scale. In realtime, I mean. Most mythologies, you have the historic period, the period of the peoples associated with them, and then you have a foggy period beyond it, where the gods live. But Hinduism has eras measured in earthly years, and they are huge (look up the Kali Yuga, the age of (the demon, not goddess) Kali, which started sometime around 3000 BC, according to some measures, and might last for four hundred thousand years, and is only the fourth age). Kali is ... a scale unto herself, that is ... hard to match into other mythologies. Heh. But. As a person, as an image, Kali is much more immediate. Kali is the visceral moment of destruction, the point at which things are transformed. She is ... an immediacy, stark and raw and real. She is there.
The first time Gabriel meets her ... There was blood on the Earth. It had to be a time when there was blood upon the earth, and a time far distant, when he was younger, and more robust. The Flood just seemed to fit. Especially since we're echoing that across the three of them, across Loki, who is a giant. So we slip the Flood and the fall of the Nephilim into the battle with Raktabija and the rise of a Goddess, the blood of giants into the blood of an asura. Creation from destruction, and an echoed turning point. Timeline-wise, that's ... highly questionable, depending on where you place the Flood, but ... With myths, it's more often the image, the theme, that counts, more than the time. Heh.
And it's Destruction he flirts with. This moment when the cracks of the First War start to show, where Gabriel despises what he is, what he has become. The thing that kills, brothers, and the children of brothers. The assassin, sent to destroy. He meets Destruction, as she slays monsters. And he ... loves. Knowingly. Gabriel always knew what he was flirting with. It's why he did it. And she saw that. Kali, who loves each enemy as she loves herself. She saw that.
Loki, different. Much smaller, much later. The Norse gods were ... Hm. They were avatars of man's struggle against nature, personified in the Jotnar. They were blessed mortals, capable of dying. Loki, though, was more ... a thing between. A jotun, blood-brother of an Aesir. He was ... in part, I think, a symbol that no matter how much man might tame the world around him, no matter by what oaths he bound nature to him ... Nature would win out, by whatever trick of fate necessary, and destroy those who had bound him. Loki is part of that. He is the instigator of that. Ragnarok is his to call down, and it is from pain and the fury of binding that he does so.
Echo that to the Flood. The death of giants, but also the death of man, when God sends nature to cleanse that war away. Heh. When Gabriel finds Loki, they are both ... shattered, furious, torn. Loki, bound and writhing, shaking the earth with his fury, Sigyn silent and weeping beside him. When he slips his bonds, there will be destruction. There will be reckoning.
But Gabriel happens first. Enemies, because Loki knows what Gabriel is, knows that he will be bound by him, knows what happened to the last giants to walk in the Messenger's path. With Loki, this is more ... a mutual deception, at first. A chance to whisper in the Giant-killer's ear, as Gabriel once whispered in the Nephilim's. There is ... savagery in it, much as there was with Kali. Destruction, always waiting, the point of transition, the balance-point, teetering between. Gods are bladed things, the edge of potential, and Loki more than most. This story is ... the sharp, bright, glittering thing, creation and destruction balanced to a point, held in potentia. I liked that, I wanted that, to balance the crude ending of 5x19, the flat destruction of too-complicated beings. No. More echoes. More potential. And ... something sly, seductive, challenging, broken, because it's Loki, the second Trickster I ever met, and I must have that. I must have that edge.
This story was for me, you understand. *smiles sheepishly* As biased, I said with the sequel, only in the opposite direction, yes? If we must play with mythology, we must do it right, yes? To please the writer, most of all. *laughs lightly* Selfish, me. Oh yes.
And then, then, Apocalypse. Then Lucifer. For Gabriel, that betrayal. That he should play with gods, flirt with Destruction, bind the shaking fury of nature itself, but none of that shall destroy him. No enemy, no lover, never them. The brother, instead. That which he had loved. Lucifer, who had been brightest, light to Gabriel's dark and whispering thing. An echo through Loki/Baldr, because I liked it. Heh. But the first he met of them, his gods, was in the Flood, and the deaths of his own brothers, and the darkness of what they had become. The last must echo that. The last, as the first, must be his own, and must betray him.
And he must protect his gods from it. The god he bears within him, the goddess he shields behind him. Not because they need it. They are more than that. Because he needs it. Because Gabriel must have a thing to protect, must have a thing to love, even in the midst of betrayal, and a brother's sword against his heart. Not for them. For him. Always for him. He has learned to love again, since the Flood, since he fled. He has learned to love, and trust, even some savage thing. He means to keep that safe, when all he once had is lost to him.
And they ... *laughs* They protect him in his turn. They withhold the violence they promised him, all those years ago. Or not quite. Rather, they use it, in ways he had not intended. Loki is a Trickster, and so sly. And Kali, she is the point on which Destruction turns, and becomes Creation.
The images of them, in that last moment. Holding him between them. The god within, the earthy thing woven into his soul, the world he chose over Heaven, in the end. And the goddess without, all that lies beyond, the point of Destruction who will hand him across to He who made him, in the end. Kali, shining like blue stones. Loki, laughing wickedly within him. They hold him between them. They promised him remaking, unmasking. No whispering thing, killing from the shadows. A bright, more deadly, more glorious thing, standing beside them, if he will but agree, if he will but say yes. *grins fiercely* Oh, I loved that.
And there's blood in it, because they three were found in it, and there is pain, because they three were made in it, and there is joy and love, because they three are that despite it. She kisses him, and he holds Loki up into her embrace, and it's just ... the layering of potential, all the myriad histories, balanced on the sharp and deadly point of transition.
Cresting, then, into the other gods, into the whispers of other myths, and crystalisation of intent, the move to act, and show a love betrayed the meaning of vengeance, and the enmity of gods, the Destruction held in quivering check within them. He chose Kali. He chose Loki. Of all of them. Lucifer made a mistake. Lucifer ... was a fool.
I wanted myths, you understand. Pain and joy intermingled. The love of gods. I wanted that edged point, the moment, the story, the here and now. And I wanted, beneath it, those echoing things, the shivering of the world. I wanted that. Destruction and creation, action and potential. I wanted the echoing things that myths are made of, destruction and delight, trickery and danger, love and savagery, endings and beginnings.
All those things my granddad read to me, all those years ago, in his rich, low voice, in my bedroom where my pillow was a sword. *grins, shakes head* I don't know how well I succeeded for other people, how well I succeeded even for myself, but that was what the story meant to me. That was where it came from, and what it was meant to show.
Gods are echoing things, in myths where the world shivers around them. That, at least, should never have been forgotten. Heh. That, I cannot forgive SPN for.
*shrugs* However much sense that makes. Heh.
*hums thoughtfully* This story. I don't know if it's obvious what I wanted from it. I wanted ... something to fix 5x19, Hammer of the Gods. I wanted gods, I wanted mythology, I wanted ... the deep, bright-dark echoes of it, the bellsong, the shivering, echoing sensation of myths, of magic, and gods, and bright savagery, of a thing that went down to the core of the world, and the shivers of ancient stories in the back of my head. I grew up on myths. Mostly Celtic and Norse, some Classical, some Catholic, not quite these myths, not quite Kali, but still. I remember that feeling, like when you're a child and someone's reading The Hobbit to you for the first time. The way the voices wrap around you, the way your bedroom is for a moment a dragon's cave, and your pillow for a moment a sword, and the gods are bright and terrible and immutable and fierce, and the magic is a thing untouchable, and the whole world shivers to the sound of your grandfather's voice.
That's what myths are. Not crude, tawdry things lined up to take a fall for a whining archangel. Gods are echoing things, the surface shape just a skin across the vastness, and when you touch them ... Gabriel is a bright and clarion thing, a thing of fire and air and pain, who once walked with bloody wings across a drowned earth. Kali is the rise and fall of creation, an impossible vastness of time into which creation crests to destruction, falls, and rises again. Loki is a sly, ephemeral thing, a flicker across the consciousness, a salmon, a thief, a dark god of earthquakes who had the world shake in his agony. The Baron is a low, dark, rumbling thing, rude and crude and flavoured of rum, who rests a shovel at his side, and asks Death hold, or ushers Death close. Coyote is a breath of wind and sweetgrass, lightfoot, laughing thing. They are ... Gods are echoing things.
Um. Yes. That's ... that's what I was aiming for, anway. Not sure to what extent I succeeded. But ... Language. There is a kind of language, for mythology, echoed and archaic, and filtered to English through countless other tongues. Images. Myths hold images as facts, so that Fenrir is physically bound by a ribbon formed of the sighing of cats, and Gabriel has six hundred wings, and Raktabija's blood is in truth a seed. There are ... ways and means, however clumsily I turned out to use them -_-; There was a certain joy in trying, though. Heh.
As for the story itself, the form of the story itself ... Hmm.
Why those three characters? Why that ... well, sort of erotic edge? Mostly the episode. Gabriel is Loki (except not, because Loki exists in and of himself, I accept nothing else), Gabriel flirts with Kali (does he realise, I wonder, that he is quite literally flirting with Destruction - except yes, of course he does, and that's part of it, part of where this comes from). So. Gabriel, with Kali, with Loki, with both, to the end, and beyond, for she is Destruction itself, and Death stands in the room (or at least Baron Samedi). Heh.
Kali first, because she is older. Within her own canon, I mean. Hinduism ... I hadn't met it properly before 5x19, hadn't researched it. Not one of my mythologies. When I did ... The first thing that struck me was the scale. In realtime, I mean. Most mythologies, you have the historic period, the period of the peoples associated with them, and then you have a foggy period beyond it, where the gods live. But Hinduism has eras measured in earthly years, and they are huge (look up the Kali Yuga, the age of (the demon, not goddess) Kali, which started sometime around 3000 BC, according to some measures, and might last for four hundred thousand years, and is only the fourth age). Kali is ... a scale unto herself, that is ... hard to match into other mythologies. Heh. But. As a person, as an image, Kali is much more immediate. Kali is the visceral moment of destruction, the point at which things are transformed. She is ... an immediacy, stark and raw and real. She is there.
The first time Gabriel meets her ... There was blood on the Earth. It had to be a time when there was blood upon the earth, and a time far distant, when he was younger, and more robust. The Flood just seemed to fit. Especially since we're echoing that across the three of them, across Loki, who is a giant. So we slip the Flood and the fall of the Nephilim into the battle with Raktabija and the rise of a Goddess, the blood of giants into the blood of an asura. Creation from destruction, and an echoed turning point. Timeline-wise, that's ... highly questionable, depending on where you place the Flood, but ... With myths, it's more often the image, the theme, that counts, more than the time. Heh.
And it's Destruction he flirts with. This moment when the cracks of the First War start to show, where Gabriel despises what he is, what he has become. The thing that kills, brothers, and the children of brothers. The assassin, sent to destroy. He meets Destruction, as she slays monsters. And he ... loves. Knowingly. Gabriel always knew what he was flirting with. It's why he did it. And she saw that. Kali, who loves each enemy as she loves herself. She saw that.
Loki, different. Much smaller, much later. The Norse gods were ... Hm. They were avatars of man's struggle against nature, personified in the Jotnar. They were blessed mortals, capable of dying. Loki, though, was more ... a thing between. A jotun, blood-brother of an Aesir. He was ... in part, I think, a symbol that no matter how much man might tame the world around him, no matter by what oaths he bound nature to him ... Nature would win out, by whatever trick of fate necessary, and destroy those who had bound him. Loki is part of that. He is the instigator of that. Ragnarok is his to call down, and it is from pain and the fury of binding that he does so.
Echo that to the Flood. The death of giants, but also the death of man, when God sends nature to cleanse that war away. Heh. When Gabriel finds Loki, they are both ... shattered, furious, torn. Loki, bound and writhing, shaking the earth with his fury, Sigyn silent and weeping beside him. When he slips his bonds, there will be destruction. There will be reckoning.
But Gabriel happens first. Enemies, because Loki knows what Gabriel is, knows that he will be bound by him, knows what happened to the last giants to walk in the Messenger's path. With Loki, this is more ... a mutual deception, at first. A chance to whisper in the Giant-killer's ear, as Gabriel once whispered in the Nephilim's. There is ... savagery in it, much as there was with Kali. Destruction, always waiting, the point of transition, the balance-point, teetering between. Gods are bladed things, the edge of potential, and Loki more than most. This story is ... the sharp, bright, glittering thing, creation and destruction balanced to a point, held in potentia. I liked that, I wanted that, to balance the crude ending of 5x19, the flat destruction of too-complicated beings. No. More echoes. More potential. And ... something sly, seductive, challenging, broken, because it's Loki, the second Trickster I ever met, and I must have that. I must have that edge.
This story was for me, you understand. *smiles sheepishly* As biased, I said with the sequel, only in the opposite direction, yes? If we must play with mythology, we must do it right, yes? To please the writer, most of all. *laughs lightly* Selfish, me. Oh yes.
And then, then, Apocalypse. Then Lucifer. For Gabriel, that betrayal. That he should play with gods, flirt with Destruction, bind the shaking fury of nature itself, but none of that shall destroy him. No enemy, no lover, never them. The brother, instead. That which he had loved. Lucifer, who had been brightest, light to Gabriel's dark and whispering thing. An echo through Loki/Baldr, because I liked it. Heh. But the first he met of them, his gods, was in the Flood, and the deaths of his own brothers, and the darkness of what they had become. The last must echo that. The last, as the first, must be his own, and must betray him.
And he must protect his gods from it. The god he bears within him, the goddess he shields behind him. Not because they need it. They are more than that. Because he needs it. Because Gabriel must have a thing to protect, must have a thing to love, even in the midst of betrayal, and a brother's sword against his heart. Not for them. For him. Always for him. He has learned to love again, since the Flood, since he fled. He has learned to love, and trust, even some savage thing. He means to keep that safe, when all he once had is lost to him.
And they ... *laughs* They protect him in his turn. They withhold the violence they promised him, all those years ago. Or not quite. Rather, they use it, in ways he had not intended. Loki is a Trickster, and so sly. And Kali, she is the point on which Destruction turns, and becomes Creation.
The images of them, in that last moment. Holding him between them. The god within, the earthy thing woven into his soul, the world he chose over Heaven, in the end. And the goddess without, all that lies beyond, the point of Destruction who will hand him across to He who made him, in the end. Kali, shining like blue stones. Loki, laughing wickedly within him. They hold him between them. They promised him remaking, unmasking. No whispering thing, killing from the shadows. A bright, more deadly, more glorious thing, standing beside them, if he will but agree, if he will but say yes. *grins fiercely* Oh, I loved that.
And there's blood in it, because they three were found in it, and there is pain, because they three were made in it, and there is joy and love, because they three are that despite it. She kisses him, and he holds Loki up into her embrace, and it's just ... the layering of potential, all the myriad histories, balanced on the sharp and deadly point of transition.
Cresting, then, into the other gods, into the whispers of other myths, and crystalisation of intent, the move to act, and show a love betrayed the meaning of vengeance, and the enmity of gods, the Destruction held in quivering check within them. He chose Kali. He chose Loki. Of all of them. Lucifer made a mistake. Lucifer ... was a fool.
I wanted myths, you understand. Pain and joy intermingled. The love of gods. I wanted that edged point, the moment, the story, the here and now. And I wanted, beneath it, those echoing things, the shivering of the world. I wanted that. Destruction and creation, action and potential. I wanted the echoing things that myths are made of, destruction and delight, trickery and danger, love and savagery, endings and beginnings.
All those things my granddad read to me, all those years ago, in his rich, low voice, in my bedroom where my pillow was a sword. *grins, shakes head* I don't know how well I succeeded for other people, how well I succeeded even for myself, but that was what the story meant to me. That was where it came from, and what it was meant to show.
Gods are echoing things, in myths where the world shivers around them. That, at least, should never have been forgotten. Heh. That, I cannot forgive SPN for.
*shrugs* However much sense that makes. Heh.
Tags: