Inspirations

The beginning of Khaastgaah warranted little essences, fragments of ideas, for Ohrmazd to decide a form with. In the space apart from Zurvan — the void that melds all things yet contains nothing — this original benevolence took shape as an orb of small but luminous light. His radiance warded off the void, remaining an untainted light as he wandered across nothingness. And why did he wander? For every Zurvanist possesses a drive to accomplish one task with furrowed focus: to create. Such divines already know how and what they want to make since they have coalesced; all they needed to do before was act upon their driving desires.

In his search for inspiration, Ohrmazd drifted into a domain of gold-tinted void. Plains of wheat-like structures, in truth exotic matters glued together by liquid crystal, are stacked throughout the flat void floor, invoking a facsimile of savannah hills. Stacking on the sea of void, forever long hays never wholly swallowed by the nothing underneath. The wheats are not the only things swaying to the unknown gravity of this domain, for shorter grasses are also composing themselves under the shading wheats, brushing against one another to produce a rhythm relaxing as simple as grazing beasts.

Ohrmazd’s shine revealed a path of shaved debris about to be outpaced by the void beneath. A trail of hooves was printed onto the liquidus floor, resting alongside patches of platinum green fur and clouds of blood red essence. Landing on a bush of cosmic wheat, Ohrmazd experienced a kin-like resonance from an immense bovinity who could respond to his radiant presence: Gavaevodata, the primordial ox.

Befitting a Zurvanist untethered by mortal restraints, Gavaevodata can take whatever form it wishes, though it commonly favors the shape of a golden ox. For wheats too well-tempered by the pressing void, it would thicken its teeth and grow hundreds of overlapping mouths to finally munch those hardy things into cosmic mulch. Some of said droppings might stick onto Gavaevodata’s hooves, some wheats reshaped into fantastic rice and maize. This mundane cycle of the bountiful bovine would inspire biology, docility, and cattle across creation.

Had it never experienced the presence of its Zurvanist siblings, Gavaevodata the bovine would have kept repeating its natural habit of eating pillars of diverse matters building around its fields — uncaringly trotting with a hungerless consumption clean of ravenousness. The bovine is free from the tedious cycle of work for reward by the busy and thinking mortals.

Experiencing the radiant Ohrmazd inspired the lumbering Gavaevodata to be somewhat aware of nearest things. The former lying upon the latter’s back birthed sociality between different personalities, for they were the first pair of Zurvan’s kin to willingly intertwine with one another through touch — the warming of leather skin and bushing of grassy furs together. As a gesture of intrigue, the ancestral animal gifted its marrow, organs, and divine bovine essence to Ohrmazd. With his first-ever gift from one of equal status, Ohrmazd began his first miracle of creation: he molded proto-cattle from pristine piles of divine flesh. With his ox brethren’s leftovers, along with limbs and joints solidified from lustrous luminance, the great concept of animalia had been crafted by Ohrmazd’s brilliance.

Ohrmazd created beings of autonomy, and while elated shortly after, he grew concerned on where to place them. Letting them fall will mean feeding them to void. Imagining his efforts progressing to nothing rattled him for the first time. Gavaevodata already left to eat once more, hence inspiring Ohrmazd to depart and wander once more.

Across a milk-tinted void echoed droning thrums of gravity. Tendrils of luminescent whiteness wiggled out of the void beneath Ohrmazd, unable to meld with where they emerged just like his radiant light. Besides these squiggling structures laid horizons of spherical shells beyond the capacities of the human eye, these rocky husks’ surfaces pockmarked with craters. When Ohrmazd treaded carefully to touch one, gooey spheres resembling eyes of diluted gold popped out of its craters, some squeezing out like a banquet through a thin pipe.

The waking of one shell attracted the shivers of all others. Whilst rumbling deep bellows of negative pitch, the owners of the void-trenched tendrils emerged from the void they bathed in, revealing their hidden forms for Ohrmazd’s experience: uneven shells with cratered holes inhabited by slick tendrils and eyes milkier than its “lesser kin”. The spherical shells before too floated above the void and above the light that touched one of them, humming lighter weight instead of rumbling like their larger counterparts.

The collective chanting of low humming and deepest thrumming from the meteoric beings distorted the once flat void, shaking and minorly disorienting even Ohrmazd’s own being and undispellable radiance. It also created a massive pattern of concentric waves to manifest on the sky above them, as though it were an upside-down lake. No pause nor wavering came from the meteoric chorus. As if with inescapable attraction, they were heralding a great thing submerged beyond nothingness, seemingly communed for the sake of confrontation with an equal. The ripples of crushing gravity from the milky sky gave way to an ovate moon large beyond man’s abstracts of volume: Mah, the meteoric lunatic.

The largeness of Mah can be demonstrated with a sideway glance. Whereas his bright sibling cast an enveloping radiance from a clear origin that is himself, the lunatic’s size seems to overlap open space entirely with no true origin to write about, resembling a curving wall of meteoric material stretching infinitely at all directions, surfaces punched with craters housing pale blue tendrils oozing with milky slime and eyeball clusters yellower than his chorus of lesser kin. On Mah’s barren surface can uncrushed kindred hear his weighted murmurs, notes on a frequency too uniquely deep to replicate by the mortal larynx yet perceptible by the cores of lesser beings, be it the soul or consciousness. This humming sphere of sight-defying size and weight inspired the concepts of gravity, attraction, meteoritics, and many studies of observed phenomena in the vacuum of the void.

Where Mah communed with hums deep enough to vibrate any molecular structure into lonesome pieces, rumble his equal Ohrmazd’s sparkling form back and forth, Ohrmazd communed with bright hymns of connection, notes which fused the crushing hums to translate into a stable rhythm. Their melded tune inspired from mortality the concepts of family, companionship, bonds, and unity. To solidify their first collaborative experience, Mah gifted one of his shell-less kin, a pale slug with milky white skin drooping with slime as pure as its father’s.

As Mah sank back into the oceanic void, ponds of “void water” submerging his husk from the onlooker, Ohrmazd mixed his new pet’s slime into each animal in his pocket. With Mah’s milky slime mixed into their simplistic souls, these once standalone creatures exhibited Mah’s familial senses. Cattle gathered in herds and could birth newborns instead of droppings inside Ohrmazd’s pockets. The chain reaction of events livened up the ball of light to no end. Still believing his imagination minuscule, the small spark swam out of the milky realm, the slug wiggling beside him.

As Ohrmazd continued to impulsively create, enriching his enlarging herds of animal creations with even more species, he saw a structure of molded branches that appeared to be piercing through a ‘hole’ through undefined nothingness. A curious spark he was, Ohrmazd flew across the elevated path of branches leading to paths he knew but not experienced.

After traversing through different voids each with different observations for countless eons, the spark saw many voids growing from the branches like bulbous fruits, each container non-Euclidean in shape, some of them phasing through one another — which explained how Ohrmazd could travel from Gavaevodata’s golden plains to Mah’s clouded seas. Following the branches’ bodies, a repulsive scent dissolved itself into Ohrmazd’s spark, revealing the presence of its ossified owner and the source of every hung-over twig fruiting bounties of voids: Gannag Menog, the stinking spirit.

On these tangled masses of snapping branches sprouted potholes ringed with rows upon rows of barked teeth. Right on cue, a void fruit beside Ohrmazd snapped from its stalk, the container of nothingness and its contents dissipating into fragments of creative materials positionally stuck at where the decayed fruit once broke off from. Abruptly, in an unblinking frame’s notice, those unbonded materials were instantly fed upon by Menog’s many lamprey-like potholes as they were always inside for mindless consumption.

From Gannag Menog’s maws did turbulent oceans of gastric acid downpour onto and from the fragments inside. From this ocean did create unbearably moist splashes sounding of disgusting decay. From these waves did bark-textured teeth attached to autumn gums emerge and chew against one another like swallowing earthquakes. From the chewing did torturous sounds akin to screeching chalk echo across the inescapable maws of the chewer. From the chomping did creativity be mulched into fertilizing pastes for the void fruits across past, present, and future.

Ohrmazd, having experienced a coloring stench that forever overlapped part of his radiance, floated in revolted appreciation of his mindless sibling’s activities. While the stinking spirit’s scent, so revolting even the noseless recoil at its presence, caused Ohrmazd’s radiance to fluctuate compulsively, the primal spark nevertheless retained intrigue at Menog’s repetitive pattern of growing, chewing, draining with an apathy equal to its father. The concept of the cycle was thus born from a hike across moldy branches before the first tree. Another thing born was a self-devouring enigma: which of Gannag Menog came first? The branches, the fruits, the maws, or Menog? Ohrmazd’s definitive answer was not a safe nor readable one for his crafts.

Long after Ohrmazd pieced together the cannibalizing mystery of Gannag Menog, he began to innovate on the fresh concept of cycles, envisioning countless machinations on other methods of creating with or without his bright palms. A clean workshop with a flat surface and free real estate for his newly met siblings as well. He foresaw countless concepts combining into one and separating into specifics with every making and tinkering, redoing and adjusting, at this workshop opened for one and all. It was on the roots of the foundational Gannag Menog that the goodly Ohrmazd familiarized his divine dream: to create a good realm filled with good creations who would make good works alongside their good creators.

Alas, the workshop was yet to be actualized. The divine trio of Ohrmazd, Mah, Gavaevodata were a sibling group too few in numbers for the grand vision of the radiance. His abrupt and strict balking at underprepared craftsmanship inspired the first standards. Ohrmazd knew there were more of his kin dwelling in separate voids with their own devices. Experiencing their presence is different from knowing for Zurvanists; live experiences to them are valuable as clean water is to a parched traveler of the deserts. Bellying a tint of clear ambition, the good spark of light floated along the mouthed branches of the belching Gannag Menog, emitting a ping of acknowledgement towards the foolish void-bearer, then kept climbing through myriad branches.

Around the corners of the ends of a moldy branch, Ohrmazd witnessed a tangle of twigs bush with renewing foliage of bright warm colors. Unlike Menog’s massive yet rotting branches, the path of twigs smelled fresh, wakingly inviting to the mortal nose. Ohrmazd too felt attracted to the new fragrance and set off to study its source. His travels across the shrub-shrouded path had yielded a bountiful amount of inspiration… and spectacles of alien arts.

Buds of many colors, from learnt green to placeholder pink, grow from the sharp edges of bundled branches. Armored cones dangled from thin stems neighboring above splintering twigs, nesting beside bundles of differently bulbous cones. Above the strong roots grew bundled shrubs sprouting helmed stalks painted with the color of worn wax candles, surrounding the great structure they nurture on with euphorically imaginative spores. This structural amalgam of colossal fauna dwarfed Ohrmazd in expansion and territory — a propagating ecosystem of countless symbionts and parasites expanding their own territories.

The spark Ohrmazd shone his being onto one of the leaves, earning a bristle from it as any green the leaf had changed to golden yellow. Foreseeing this with undiminished intrigue, Ohrmazd gazed at a nearby cone, and to his awareness, extra branches began to sprout from the edges of its loosening bark. Ohrmazd would keep creating reactions on these divine flora with what might be joy… until his rays wavered under sudden crackles from an equal being who mothered the very structures he had shone upon. The rustling of tree leaves and creaking bark of their growing branches lured the inspiration of our common plant to Ohrmazd’s experiencing presence: Haoma, the botanic matron.

In stark contrast to Gavaevodata’s wiggling flesh, Haoma’s essence is more rigid and gnarly than her distant bovine sibling’s. Where skin is flexible and soft to the touch, bark is hard and spread with splinters. Where blood reeking with iron flows, sap carrying a sweet fragrance dribbles. Where Ohrmazd could knit flesh silks and mold pale bones to build the first creatures, Haoma would assemble plated bark and shave uneven leaves to build the first plants. The two even workshopped ideas for animalistic plants and plantlike animals while bonding with each other.

Haoma initiated first contact by planting an ephedra seed atop of Ohrmazd, which quickly dried up under the searing heat accompanying his unparalleled brightness, much to the seemingly hostile shambling of Haoma’s bushes. Though her hostility was fleeting as the spark levitated the burnt seed and grew a new ephedra taller than the rest on the matron. From the disappearance of the rising conflict birthed a flower hungry for light as it is royally purple — linked to protection and strength — atop a bulb on the botanist. Snipping it off herself with a sickle-shaped shoot, the gardening sister gifted the flower to Ohrmazd, who in return fed it light to wrap its vines around himself.

Nurturing Haoma’s gift caused mobile branches and trunks to bloom and erupt out of her cones and bulbs. The colossal extensions of the divine gardener contorted into a megastructure mimicking the shaped ball of light that was Ohrmazd as a divine sigil of partnership of the highest kind. With this brief but solid pact akin to a wedding, the duo slid back onto Gannag Menog’s body to keep pursuing inspirations for their shared creation.

In a green-brushed void of splitting spirals that still blows forever past this day, where its turbulence still chips off its borders to this day, howled laughter in every direction. Between the thinnest gaps of these gusts, strands of aerial gold swam through the turbulence, shifting between twirling solid and shimmering gas as they were blown away. These gales of gilded gold, gustful gold, are an existential joke — a shiny metal with very little uses made even more niche thanks to its random intangibility.

A world-encompassing typhoon twirled the orb-shaped Ohrmazd into various impossible shapes, bent and reshaped but never scattered. Although for the cage-shaped Haoma, each divine branch she regrew was shredded by winds of change, reducing her mighty form into a stubborn weed rooting around her new partner’s radiance. Amidst their turmoil, braving against the winds that can blow apart stability, the shifting shapes of the traveling duality cannot be scattered by tempest or typhoon.

One of Haoma’s segregated twigs would fly across the endless tempest, fated to be ripped piece by piece amidst this green whirlwind… were its destiny not caught between a pair of golden graspers. This hand abruptly pressed the splinters together, flattening the once thorny solids into dust fit for scattering across the local void. The reverberations of this “player” attracted an alien atmosphere of identical color, though this presence of air displayed its vibrance more composedly, whistling its intents under a thoughtful rhythm. The atmosphere’s theatrics were blown off in favor of the tempest’s own cackles.

In a distant space, where Ohrmazd’s repeated attempts of building a coherent thoughtform bounced apart into whimsicality, Hoama tied her separately weak weeds into a caging bundle that trapped and stifled the surrounding winds. With the unseen tricksters’ games halted by the matron’s seriousness, the radiant creator sprang forth from them a refreshing breeze — a breeze that inspired the mortal senses of scent and liveliness. The potency of Ohrmazd’s first breeze colored patches of green Haoman bushes mint and soaked every part with a stimulating flavor of the same name. Gliding from this divine realm of green winds, bushes of newly grown mint found themselves sucked into the previously unnamed tempest and atmosphere: Vayu-Vata, the jesting tempests.

While the foreigners Ohrmazd and Haoma busied themselves in explorative creation, the twin winds had already trapped the couple in a cage of grinding gales. While the duo could have escaped without a lasting scratch, their creations would surely become soup stock if attempted. Ohrmazd thought that potential replacements might not recapture his originals’ radiance, thus, from his realized concerns birthed the concepts of care and value.

Seeded with the ire of her vanishing leaves, Haoma grew vines vindictive and viscous that caught the turbulent twins. Their windy forms stifled while stuck with the solid glue drooling from Haoma’s botanic ire. Vayu vomited a stormy tantrum spewing ear-cursing insults and vulgarities while Vata exhaled an indignant sigh masking mutterings of females’ short tempers.

Ever the paragon before paragons, Ohrmazd shone upon Haoma so that she may show Vayu-Vata lenience. The plant bride agreed, withering her vines into autumn weeds and distilling their dripping glue into explosive pollen. While revelling in his freedom, Vayu got some of that pollen between his windy form, causing geysers of wind to explode across his hyperactive being, rolling around with hysterical laughter and phantom itching.

While Haoma and Ohrmazd watched the rolling Vayu with hardy retribution and concerned vigilance respectively, Vata took this interlude to piece together a peace offering from the torrent of debris loosened from his first former victims’ beings. Carving bark with pressurized wind jets, assembling ordinarily incompatible pieces with one another, he forged an inclusive part-disc of divine iron-from-wood — without the shine of gold as a sign of humble pleasing. On it etched a parallel figure with two different heads facing opposite directions, four arms each holding odd ornaments, all connected to a torso with no lower body that displayed the figure floating awkwardly in the middle.

To thank the improbably random gift from the composed Vata, Ohrmazd in return gifted Vayu-Vata figurines of animals and simple shapes — all of them made from light principled solid in plant laws. Vayu spinned a whole claw of gustful gold out of nothingness, using its three clamps to spin them into powder and reassembling every dust bit back into their former shape. Vata instead knitted a seven-fingered hand to bid a polite farewell, shelving Ohrmazd’s gifts into the deeper green void and manneredly shelving them again with no end.

Leaving Vayu-Vata dallying in their turbulent home, Ohrmazd-Haoma flew bursting from its layers, carried by propelling hurricanes transmuted into solid spinning clovers. Lightly latching onto the botanist, the spark scanned the parallel figure on the twins’ disc, projecting a spectrum of creative thoughts, illuminating new possibilities across the cosmos. The shiniest ray from this very first burst carried the first ideas of men — long-discontinued blueprints for creating humanity. Said ray impacted a Mennogian fruit at the absolute center of Zurvan’s creation itself, inspiring Haoma to set up a bigger workshop in it.

But ignored by the couple was a most malicious presence — one whose aura decayed Ohrmazd’s light and distorted them into darkness — also an opposite to the void of emptiness. Was it fear from being hurt by the sharp rays’ tips that drove its actions — or was it disgust turned hatred for this foreign substance that dared to be seen by its evil glare?