At what cost...

Inspired by another Phandigrams art piece.

He’d done it and what’s more, he did it with Secrecy.
His mistress and consort.
​She sheltered him further now as her black mists rose and spread throughout the empty white of the Kiln.
The Kiln of Creation.
He looked at the ring and saw immediately how Hru hadn’t used it in its fullest capacity. The ring of O. He watched as it crackled and flickered with new patterns and shapes as the wild lighting that haloed the crown of the ring reached further and further into the white nothingness.
He watched in wonder at its beauty. The lightning fingered the white space, cutting and opening it where it touched, revealing a beautiful fullness beneath.
Darkness, he called it.
As he got closer and peered his golden eye into the hungry Darkness that ate at the edges of the nothing, he heard and saw something new. Something he hadn’t seen when Hru used the ring before.

He raised the ring high and struck away the dull empty white and beheld in this black beautiful Darkness, he could see motion and dancing. He could hear sound and music.
He bent his will toward one of the shifting shapes in front of him and it began to pull color and form from the darkness around itself. He reached his hands into the dark and massaged the shape free from the black mass before him. Slowly, he eased the form free, much like he’d done to free the Ring of O from the Sol Root.
The form was simple but robust, curved and pleasing to him. He felt its strength as the thing felt around and explored its new space. He worked another free from the dark, and another. And each one, because he wasn’t forcing them into a shape as Hru had done, was as unique as the last and held firm as Hru’s had not.
This pleased him deeply.
He soon found that he needed a space to place all these unique beings. He needed light to make space and so condensed the lightning constantly pouring from the ring and condensed and condensed it. The pressure threatened to tear his arms to shreds should he fail to hold it. And in an instant he thought he’d be overwhelmed, Secrecy was there, adding her own power to his. The gravity of the molten center grew and he raised it to pulse above them. In the effort a cry tore from his throat and all the black beings shook and danced with fear and curiosity as they watched. A force unlike anything seen or heard exploded at the zenith of this terrible display of power, a red hotness bubbled into existence; the first sustaining light!
Fire was born.
Fire spewed and erupted into the infinite dazzling darkness, specking the fresh born infinity with points of light that burned orange, purple, blue, and red. Stars, he sang as he pressed the roiling mass of heat and light into the floor between his feet, where it stayed; gyrating and percolating through the darkness, emitting waves of motion. From this motion came the breath and life of shadows that rose for the first time to join the dance of the dark figures in the midst of creation. His and Secrecy’s creation!
Ati.

He watched as the fire leapt and the darkness danced away, only to come rushing back. He smiled as the shadows and figures laughed and hooted, sang and cried and called and barked and howled and were filled with such a wild ecstasy, he called it; Life. Making and change and rising and falling and death and destruction.
Beauty.
The pulsing rhythm flowed through him and he reverberated it back giving it a crackling of golden veins that shot through and lit all the black looming shapes. And all danced and pulsed to the rhythm of creation. And all were deaf to the added down beat of the deep booming at the great gate that led into the Kiln.
All but Kor. Who danced all the wilder for it.

He lost himself in this world of dark suggestion and infinite possibility.
The rhythmic driving beat deepened and the music of creation swelled throughout the Kiln. Kor wept as his brother broke through the gate and halted in the bead of light that showed through Secrecy. The three of them appeared then and their shadows stretched tall as towers behind them.
Stop! Hru's voice rang out but Kor was beyond caring, this was his place now, built for him to dance and make and sing! Ord raised his great hammer and smashed the floor which split asunder etching a crack of white that bled into the darkness. The three Witnesses watched in disbelief as Kor spun and threw out his bare right hand and the darkness that split before Ord's mighty hammer, stretched, flexed and pulled itself back together again.

Mel, her sharp eyes flitting around the Kiln finding life all about her, still as a silver statue, unknowable, a single tear drifting down her cheek.
Ord fell to one knee, but did not bow his head. For his eyes could not leave his brother, who he beheld for the first time, as he truly was. Jealousy manifesting in his eyes as he saw the sheer power of his brother's naked hand.
Hru, stunned to stillness and silence, looked from Kor, to the floor, to Ord, to Mel and finally back to Kor who stood alone, imminent, robed in Secrecy.
Kor’s smooth brown face lit from above by the red hot pulsing core he'd made. The constant flashing of lightning climbing up and down the left side of his body and the living shadows that twisted and danced about him made Hru exhale.
Awe-some. He heard a voice say. His own. He realized. Kor’s visage and the look on his other brother and sister’s faces began to weave a tapestry of something new in the mind of Hru. Something A Witness had never experienced.
Fear.