Chapter Text
Amon had always been good at remembering. It was one of the quieter advantages granted to Him by the pathway He had inherited from His predecessor. As a master of deciphering, He had been accustomed to tracing connections that others overlooked, fitting scattered details together until they formed a complete entirety. As the embodiment of deceit and mischief, He had spent thousands of years turning information into ammunitions, untruths, and illusions. Few things could escape His grasp the moment they entered His range of interest.
He remembered. And He never forget. Names. Faces. Conversations. The arrangement of rooms He had entered only once. The expressions of people who had died thousands of years ago. Even forgotten memories could usually be recovered if He searched long enough. There should have been nothing beyond His reach. Except one thing. He did not know the exact day the Ancient Sun God—The Creator—His father died. He could not recall the year with certainty, nor the month, nor even the season. What He remembered instead was everything that had continued afterward.
The birds continued to ring without end. The birds continued to cross the skies in their endless migrations. Generations came and went, each one following the last as the years quietly carried the world forward. Children still ran through the meadows, their laughter rising freely into the open air, untouched by the weight of madness. Rivers continued to wind their way through the forests, and beyond them, the sea remained beneath the fading hues of the setting sun. The world had not stopped. That was perhaps what Amon remembered most clearly.
Everyone had continued as though nothing had happened. He still vividly remembered entering the Giant King's Court. He remembered the feel of His small, bare feet against the polished marble, the vast halls stretching endlessly before Him. 'What grandeur,' He thought, even as shock and denial clouded His perception, unable to comprehend what had transpired in His absence. He remembered dropping a basket full of red, ripened apples to the floor unceremoniously, loud in the perpetual silence. He had meant to share them. He was supposed to share them.
Once, His father had lifted Him high into the heavens, carrying Him above the clouds, and showing Him the world below. "What's Mine is Yours," He had proclaimed softly with a smile. "Everything the sun touches... it is Mine. And then, it will be Yours." Amon had been small back then. Just enough to fit perfectly within The Creator's arms. He remembered looking down in awe at what He sees for the very first time since His creation. From above, the world seemed miniature. From such a height, the entire map seemed reachable. "Look," the Ancient Sun God had told Him.
"This is the light We bring. This is the sense of safety We offer. This is the Earth We are protecting." Amon might not have fully understood it then. But, He does remember those words. He remembered the warmth of that embrace. He remembered the sky. He remembered the sunlight. However, when He tried to remember the day His father died, His mind became strangely empty. There were only corridors. He possessed authority over time. He could travel the River of Fate, observe the traces left behind by history, and reach into memories that ordinary beings could never approach.
And yet, He turned away. He told Himself it was unnecessary. There was nothing to gain from reopening an old wound. Perhaps it was simply more convenient to leave the past behind. Or perhaps, He had simply spent thousands of years pretending that a memory could be denied simply because He refused to look at it. If He could not remember the exact moment His father died, then perhaps that moment had never truly existed. And if it had never truly existed, then somewhere, somehow, the Ancient Sun God might still be waiting. That was the lie He had allowed Himself to keep.
Until the stars fell.
His first instinct, before anything else, was to raise His head toward the heavens. A magnificent meteor shower streaked across the night sky, one star following another in a brilliant, endless cascade. It was breathtaking. So cruelly, tragically beautiful. It shouldn't have been this way. It truly shouldn't have. He could only stand there and watch. For a long while, He could not decide what expression He was meant to wear, nor what He was supposed to feel.
Adam—who was not quite Adam—had never been His father. Nor had He ever truly been His brother. He had known that for a long time now. Ever since He had learned the truth, He had understood that the father He had spent so many years believing He might somehow recover was never waiting to be resurrected. He had simply been biding His time until the moment was right. Such deception. And Amon was supposed to be the epitome of such things.
What irony, was it not? Perhaps He had never truly allowed Himself to absorb the truth. Perhaps knowing something and accepting it were two entirely different things. He wondered whether He was even capable of properly mourning what He had lost. Looking at the ending before Him, He could not help but wonder whether this numbness was, in its own way, a form of grief. He closed His eyes. For a moment, He was no longer standing beneath the stars.
He was barefoot again. Young. So terribly, painfully naive. Ahead of Him was His father's back. Always so tall, so distant, so utterly unreachable, even during the glorious era when He had allowed others to walk behind Him. Then, the memory vanished. It scattered like dust caught in the wind, dissolving until it was nowhere and everywhere at once. Amon opened His eyes and looked toward the heavens again. There were no meteors left. Only the night sky remained, spread before Him in its entirety.
The divine did not die. But even that which was eternal could not be preserved forever. Who could say whether the next iteration of His father would still be the same? Amon smiled. He remembered the exhaustion He had once seen buried deep within the Ancient Sun God's eyes. He remembered Adam's wry smile when He spoke of how God loved the world so dearly that He had exposed a heart already worn thin and bleeding. Perhaps, in the end, what He had felt was nothing more than relief.
How could something so selfish and yet so selfless exist within the same heart?
Since His creation, there had only been one being in whom He had ever been capable of placing His faith. His father. His creator. It had always been the Ancient Sun God. The existence that had emerged from the merging of Adam's divinity and the True Creator's humanity was neither of those things. And yet, whoever—or whatever—had emerged from that union had been the closest being left in this world to the one Amon had once called His father. Even that had not lasted. Gone. He was gone. 'Why?' He wanted to ask.
'Why had You returned, only to let Yourself be killed once again?' He did not understand. He had expected something. Perhaps not the full truth, but at least an explanation. Even that, however, had not been given to Him. Moreover, the brother who had walked beside Him through the glory and catastrophe of the Third Epoch, through the flames and turmoil of the Fourth Epoch, and through the tides of yet another climactic moment in the Fifth Epoch now seemed to be nothing more than a figment of His imagination.
It seemed Adam had vanished right before His watchful eyes. It seemed He had already been gone before He could even turn around to check whether He was still there. It seemed He had lost more than He could ever have imagined. Was this the price of being Error? Everyone else had perished to the tides of time, and yet, He remained.
And yet—
He remained.
Humanity had never meant much to Him. He did not possess that kind of grand love for it. His interference with the Outer Deities had been selfish in the end. He simply did not want to share His toy. He did not want some foreign existences destroying the place upon which He had spent so many years causing havoc. That was all there is, in terms of motivation. Or, perhaps it was merely something that had taken root within Him.
Something that had remained even after He had forgotten why it was there, buried somewhere deep within Him, beyond reason or recollection. And then, Adam had said it. Amon was supposedly the light when the end times came. Earth was what the Ancient Sun God wished to protect. All living beings were what His father wished to protect. And so, He was willing to try. Even if, in the end, He could never value that sentiment in quite the same way.
'What are We to each other?' Amon had wanted to ask then. It was back when They had been discussing the plots and conspiracies They would have to unravel before the coming apocalypse.
'What are We to each other?' He repeated internally. Adam had looked at Him, His bright eyes still carrying that strange purity and innocence. Unable to hold the question any longer—
"Do You want Me to pray to You?" He had asked. Adam paused at the question. Then, he stared into Amon's eyes curiously, before He shook His head.
"In your heart," He began softly, "I will never be the father You once knew."
It was the first time Adam had failed to answer His question directly.
It was also the last.
.
.
.
It was in Chernobyl, of all places, that Amon crossed paths with His brother once again.