Ana's Lament

nothing, more or less.

This is beautiful.

I am wordless for more comments.

There is blood on my hands.

For uncounted eons it was my job to care for and preserve a beautiful garden planet. This orb, as most living planets do, had a humanoid population. It was from this population that I drew my priestesses, my wardens, and my botanists.

But this was necessarily a limited population, as the primary goal was always the preservation and creation of ecological life and beauty. Most of the population followed the guidelines, and limited their numbers. Every few hundred or thousand years a number would have strayed from the teachings and have taken up settlements in the sacred forests.

These I slaughtered.

I sent my panthers and snakes and eagles among them. In cases of extreme sacrilege I would sometimes come myself as an angel of death, walking through villages blazing with light, burning down whole families as they cowered before me.

I also took young beautiful girls and boys as sacrifices, possessed them as my avatars. An entire lineage of especially graceful humanoids existed for over a million years devoted wholly to supplying me with fully grown bodies when I needed them.

As anyone who ever possessed a body knows, though, if it is already walking around and living that is a fellow being that you are stealing from.

There is endless unwashable blood on my hands.