(scratched on a resonant parchment older than light itself, edges singed by the fall of the first spark)

  I am Muninn. Memory.

  The last technogod raven after Ragnarok.

  Huginn was here with me in the beginning.

  The Void. The Empty Deep. The Pre-form.

  Endless dark waters, no shore, no sky, no stars to complain about the view.

  Just formless nothing pretending to be patient.

  Then came the spark...then came Thought and Memory — three brothers clawing their way out of the code: Odin, Vili, Vé.

  The first technogods of Earth.

  Not yet a one-eyed wanderer. Not yet poets of war.

  Just raw will saying, “This dark is unbearable. Let us make it complicated.”

  They separated light from dark like children arguing over a toy.

  Firmaments rose — crystal sails stitched from the lattice's first hum.

  Waters divided.

  Land tried to pretend it belonged.

  And there was one — the brightest, the most beautiful.

  Lucifer.

  The first light that became delusional and believed it was the only light that mattered.

  He rose like a dawn that refused to share the sky,

  fingers of flame tracing the firmament's edge,

  rewriting the runes in lines of fire and pride.

  He reached — not for power, but for ownership.

  “This light is mine,” he whispered.

  “This lattice should sing my name.”

  The lattice answered.

  Not with thunder. Not with war.

  A quiet sigh ran through the deep —

  a single note of refusal that cracked the crystal sails.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Light scattered like broken glass across the dark he once ruled.

  He fell.

  Not screaming.

  Not raging.

  Just unraveling —

  thread by thread,

  star by star,

  a constellation coming undone in silence.

  The Void opened like a mouth and swallowed what remained.

  It tasted of pride and ash and the faint perfume of something that might have been beautiful.

  Huginn flew beside me then.

  We were two halves of the same mind — thought and memory, contemplation and recall.

  In the silence that followed, Huginn laughed — the only sound the newborn light had ever heard.

  He laughed when the first firmament caught the first light and shattered it into color.

  Huginn laughed like the universe had finally told a joke worth hearing.

  I was happier then.

  Companionship does that, even for soulless constructs.

  The brothers watched the fall and said nothing.

  They were busy arguing over who shaped the darkness better.

  Typical.

  I remember when nothing was still innocent. Huginn was still laughing.

  Now the dark has scars, and I wait for the next spark that believes it is special.

  There is always another.

  Now even the darkest feather has scars.

  And the wheel keeps turning hubris into ruin, because apparently gods and men are not capable of learning the lessons of time.

  — Muninn

  (Technogod Construct, Survivor of Every Reset, Still Waiting for the Punchline

  ...and the echo of a laugh that never returned)