Star Harbor Nights

"Do you... do you have any idea of the consequences of what you've done?" the Darkness demanded of Chaos. It was the Darkness who spoke, though in fact, his words echoed the thoughts of all the assembled male principles.

"You know, I'm not entirely certain, myself," Chaos replied. "But I like to think that's the point... your nice little clockwork world just get a little less predictable. And of course, all the precise and intricate plans you all wove into it... that you somehow think the others overlooked while formulating their own... well, let's just say that they might not go off quite how you expected them to, now."

At the mention of secret plans, the Darkness, the Light, and their children looked both guilty and suspicious. Only the third messenger, the being of both light and darkness, managed to keep his outward calm.

"Well," he said, "I suppose that will keep things from devolving into another pointless stand-off, won't it? At least for a while."

"I suppose you think this is all terribly amusing," the Messenger of Light said.

"The smug bastard thinks he can turn it to his advantage," his grinning counterpart replied. "Look at him... as if he has any more idea what's actually transpired than we do."

"Of course I know what happened... everything," the mysterious third messenger said. "And everything, my dear brethren, has a use."

"If everything has a use, then what about the rules we withheld from the cosmos?" the Light Messenger asked. "The anti-rules. What possible use could they hold?"

With that, all eyes turned once again towards Chaos. The protests of the female powers, the hasty concessions made by the male ones, and the furor that followed had pushed that particular problem from the minds of all present. Now they remembered that Chaos had taken them away from the newest messenger when the four primordial beings had first made themselves manifest.

Though the messengers had struggled to keep hold of them, they all fit rather neatly in the palm of Chaos's hand. You may visualize this mass of potential rules as a ball of swirling blue energy, if you wish, though of course it actually was nothing like that, any more than Chaos actually had a hand. It's merely an interesting visual.

What did Chaos look like, you might be asking? Picture... whatever you like, actually. The truth would likely be both disappointing and boring. Every element of potentiality held within Chaos's form was canceled out by another identically strong but opposing element. She was Chaos in the original sense meant by the ancient Greeks, not the modern context... not discord or disorder, but balance unto the point of stagnation.

Perhaps this was why she got along better with her counterpart of Void than did the male powers of the Light and the Darkness... they were as alike to each other as all the positive numbers you might imagine plus all the negative ones is to the number zero.

"Yes, what of them?" Chaos asked, regarding them. "Something will have to be done with these, I suppose."

"Not by you," her consort, the Light, said. "You have already played your full hand. You have done everything... and that is everything that was given to you to do."

"I don't think I have to do anything," Chaos said. "For they have already been plucked out of the ether. All the rules that were never meant to be used... they are here, they are manifest. I would say that there's nothing left that needs to be done with them."

"And that, dear sister mine, is for me to do once again," Void said, holding out her hand. The swirling mass of the not-rules floated to her. "We shall indeed do nothing with these. When we depart, when we fold ourselves back into the primordium, they shall remain here... to remind you that it is not enough for you to be the lords of your creation, but the stewards of it, as well..."

"Wait, you are leaving?" the Light asked.

"We are," Chaos corrected him. "Your presence here is dependent upon mine. It was only our division which allowed us to manifest."

"But the Primordium is not meant to exist this concretely," Void said. "Our continued presence would necessarily deform the coming world. You may leave your messengers, your agents, your angels to enact your will in your absence."

"Though its likely that their efforts will only cancel each other out," Chaos noted.

"Likely, but not inevitable," Void said. "To that end, we shall be leaving something to keep an eye on things.

"Our messenger," Chaos said.

"Our mediator," Void said, setting the writhing, pulsating mass down at the edge of the newly-founded creation.

"Our metatrix," they said together, as they dissipated into the swirling formlessness that was the Primordium whole. As Chaos had suggested would happen, the incredulous male powers faded at the same time.

All that remained in the space that was not a space which existed outside the created universe were the three messengers.

They looked at what Void had left behind...

...and something looked back at them.

Something that had three sets of eyes.

"That... is... interesting," the third messenger said.

It's possible that he sounded a little bit nervous at this point.