An Introduction
At the start of the New World, there was nothing but the land, sea, and skies. It was beautiful, peaceful, and the world was in balance with itself. Rarely, does such a balance remain, as Those Who Created the world began to create the animals, the plants, and drive the life force of the island to blossom. From the chaos, the honorable bloodshed of animals feasting on them, the growth and decay that cycles through every forest, a strong soul crept from the crystalline earth at the heart of the island. Eonigia had breath for the first time when the first plants grew. She found her influence on the surrounding plants was significant, as they swayed with her presence and grew with every quiet word, or lack thereof.
She flourished in this new landscape, all on her own, with nothing but water surrounding her land, and no disturbances of any modern machinations. That is what Eonigia described life, at first, was like to my mother. Bless her.
This first story, just a fleeting memory of bliss. All the time I hear people asking to just go back to that time, to just see the world from such a blissful perspective. Quiet, serene, predictable, and noble. Nowadays most Eonians speak of it as though they should simply return to the soil and rejoin the land. They want Eonigia back and deeply miss her influence across the islands. Xarin (Z-air-in), has had to take her place, though he is unsure of how to support a people we are only half-apart of truly. A living island will always be the home of Eonians, but it's disappointing to see so many scorn him.
I want to understand these stories, what they mean to our people, so I'll be chronicling them here.
My people are Eoni, beings who eat the essence of souls. Or, well, what's coded as a soul. We are not physical beings, instead programmed entities in the virtual reality people opt into to evade reality.
But this persistence, in knowing where we come from and venerating the island, keeps us up at night. We no longer live with the islands, having moved farther and farther inland. It's a touch frightening, knowing so many have chosen to move away. They say that Xarin can't provide, can't give them what they need, but he's worked so hard to ensure everything works, even with the strange diversion from tradition.
I've looked into the coding, and Eonigia's had just decayed past the point of fixing. She went peacefully, like one dying of old age, so what in this world was keeping the others from accepting this? So many insist that she'll return after her rest, but I know Yaldaboath and Sarothi both checked for her presence on the now-deadened island, and she isn't there. It's entirely possible to create new memories with Xarin, but I'm left thinking that there's something missing in all of us that won't allow us to move past Eonigia's death.
Her name, translated literally, Eoni-Gai, means Eoni-god. Mother-God is the oldest coding we've found, having gifted to the first of our species the understanding of what, who, and how we came to be. Perhaps it is that. Perhaps it is that Xarin hasn't given the species anything new as a whole, therefore, they do not feel a similar connection to him.
I'm rambling again, though, on the whole matter. I've mainly started this exercise (in futility, my father would have told me) to attempt to understand my kind's attitudes, the nature of our beliefs, and suspicions. I want to know how our past has informed us as a present being, and what it means to truly be both Eoni and somehow human in my own right. I'll do my best to provide translations, with pronunciations in brackets, but this will be my attempt to sort my thoughts, and the stories, and put some of them into writing for the first time. I took notes, so I hope these will suffice as starting points. These stories were given to me by Eonigia and my mother, Sarothi, before their passing.
Forgive me for having started with a bit of rambling about their lives. I miss them dearly, and it occasionally makes it difficult to put into words their stories as they would have wanted. I know they understand best the struggle it is to communicate something only spoken in writing, my mother having opted to only speak the bad news to her patients when she was alive, rather than writing it out in their charts and having a nurse do it.
Sarothi SeloMon, (Say-or-thee, See-lo-Moon), translated literally, was "Flower of the Eighth Moon", the Moons being a royal lineage, and their last name denoting which generation they would be born to rule over. While they ruled for much longer, the naming convention stuck or would have, if she had kept her maiden name when she married my father. He chose his name, Yaldabaoth, when he became conscious as another coded creature of this digital landscape.
Yaldabaoth wasn't Eoni, but he had his thoughts now and again on my notes and the stories I showed the most interest in. I distinctly recall him reminding me "Pick the stories that stick most with you, that make you think. You may find yourself surprised by their influence on your, and others, perspective."
He's… I don't want to say still alive? He passes freely between this world and the next as he chooses, opting to spend most of his time with Mom, or so he claims. He disappears for months at a time only to return and give us some advice or tell us how much she misses us. I don't know whether or not I believe him, but he seems to stay safe enough. Every attempt to look into his whereabouts or his coding, I'm left locked out and dizzy for a few days. Maybe I'm not meant to understand him yet.
But that's beside the point. I suppose I should start with the stories of the royal line, as one of the first Queens caught my attention when I first began to write everything down.