musefic | Kingdom Hearts fic: When It Began

Day 2 of AU-gust. Today's AU prompt was "Immortals".

Eventually it was clear there was something extraordinary about it, when aging slowed, then stopped for the three of them, even as it marched on for everyone else. They had to face the twin elation and horror of their “condition.” Nothing brought them lasting harm… yet they would begin to lose everyone else around them.

It’s difficult to remember the beginning. Difficult enough over an ordinary lifetime, made more so when multiplied by a hundred lifetimes. More.

There was a beginning, and no one had any reason to believe it was extraordinary at the start. Just some extra luck, that the ailments of childhood were always shaken off. That recovery always followed misadventure.

Eventually it was clear there was something extraordinary about it, when aging slowed, then stopped for the three of them, even as it marched on for everyone else. They had to face the twin elation and horror of their “condition.” Nothing brought them lasting harm… yet they would begin to lose everyone else around them.

There was comfort, at least, that they faced it together.

For a long time, there was peace. The people of their island home revered them as something special. Perhaps a miracle, perhaps to be feared in some mild way, but not a cause for terror. They were not monsters, no: they clearly had some connection to the divine, to forces beyond the mundane world. Perhaps the impression was strengthened by their names—whether given by coincidence or inspired as some small hint of what they’d become—the three named for the three worlds of land, sky, and sea.

They became the island’s helpers, conveyers of wisdom gleaned from longer-than-natural life, always ready with advice and memories and stories passed on of when this happened before, in your grandmother’s time and yes, many generations ago we saw this same type of storm, here is how we recovered.

“Wise guardians with connections to the divine” became “earthly emissaries of the divine” became “embodiments of the divine.” If the three never believed in their own divinity, well, what could they say? It wasn’t as if their immortality had been granted with an alternative explanation.

The three’s modest home together slowly turned to temples built in their honor, built as acts of devotion by neighbors turned to devotees.

Still, the three did their best to protect their islands, and their people, seeing them through one generation into another, and peace continued.

On a long enough timeline, everything changes.

Strangers came, seeing instead of peace the opportunity for conquest.

“Incarnation of the divine” all too quickly was twisted into “incarnation of evil, fit only to be eradicated.”

War had never come to the island before, not at this scale. They found themselves unprepared.

The deaths of the three did not take, even as the temples to the land, sea, and sky burned.

The deaths of too many other islanders did.

Three so-called incarnations of the divine, but unable to protect their home. Even so, the remaining islanders fled with them onto and across the sea.

They mourned.

When they found a new shore to take them, they traveled the world for a time, seeing what more there was beyond the islands that had been their home forever. Most of the world was beautiful, not the darkness the conquerors had brought.

Still, there were too many places in the world that darkness prevailed and took hold.

The three chose to fight it, to use their immortality as a shield, to continue protecting the last remnants of their island tribe, to help others who would be hurt the way their island had been.

As time went on, the memory of the islands was something only passed down from parents, then grandparents, and finally only as stories kept alive by the three. The remaining descendants from the island chose to split, to follow different paths.

The three had never been apart, never straying farther from each other than to each go to their own temples, so long ago, on their island. The thought now was a difficult one to bear, but so was the thought of abandoning any of the last islanders. True too was the thought that they could do more, protect more people, if they were in three places instead of one.

So the three had no choice but to part, promising always to return, no matter how long it took to find each other again.