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My mother next knew that this world of flourishing life would need more than just life in order to keep stability. It needed fire, heat, memory and passion, and with that, my brother Xereus was born. Xereus, the light of my mother’s eye. Where Oihane was her wrath and her love, and Lysera was her nurturing and gracious nature, Xereus was her feelings, her emotions and her memories.

Xereus was the creator of innovation and made beautiful explosions of genius. He was forward-thinking, constantly looking to the future of my mother’s little world and finding ways to make it more beautiful. The beating heart, the chirp of insects, the sweltering, overbearing feeling of the heat. The relief of cool, glistening ocean water over inflamed skin. Fields of green turning slowly to brown as the earth became parched and cracked, taking the mud and slowly turning it back to sand. The haze of his creations growing warmer and warmer, as he created things like ‘tarmac’, ‘concrete’, ‘buildings’.

Evenings filled with ‘neon’ lights, red hues and everlasting sunlight. Creations called ‘fireworks’ filling the skies and illuminating the stars. Flushing, sweating skin caused by the warmth or by the embers of passionate new love, one could only wildly guess. My brother made romance with each stroke of inspiration, created a painter’s canvas of wonder and enjoyment.

I do not know fully why or how my brother and my mother started to foster discord and dissonance. I am told that for all of his beautiful genius, he was also a mad genius. Wild, and forever free, like the gales of tornadoes that rip across the plains. All I know was that he had a falling out with my mother and my siblings, in which he plunged the brilliant, beautiful world he had created into the abyss and shattered the world that he and his siblings had worked so hard to create. Destructive, terrible, much like the beautiful explosions he had created in the night sky. A brilliant light, cast down in a single night.

After that day, I know that I came into existence. I was meant to be his replacement; a calmer, less brilliant soul. I, Dounia, the keeper of knowledge and the ‘good child’, as it were. Adventure, discovery, the youthful soul of children playing games outside during the break from the monotony. I was also a different flavour of heat from my brother, I was made to realize. Very rarely would my sister’s rains grace my lands, making the dust kick up and the sun even more rough and coarse upon the skin. The rare oasis speckling the landscape provide a blissful relief, the cool shade of caves, the delicious juices of cacti and the soothing caress of aloe. My existence, the historian that keeps the records, and kept as a reminder that too much of a good thing can drive a man mad.

written by sifr ★ 2022