The Amber Wonderland

Legend Title: The Devouring Paradise.

"I DIDN'T ASK TO BE CREATED."

The Erosyx Primal Discordia of the Original Eight of the Eight-Born Paths. The last of the Formless Masses during the Fifth Cycle.

  • "Still, they whispered prayers to a god that would never answer. That's the tragedy of The Amber Wonderland. Not that they were unloved but that they believe they didn't deserve to be. From the moment they were born, they weren't someone meant for love. You are facing a broken Consciousness who spent their entire existence protecting a light who refused to shine on them. The last loyal heart attempting to create paradise and the first one the Auric Aria abandoned."

The Amber Wonderland is a parasite building a family desperately yearning for the Auric Aria's love as a its creator. Every other member of the Original Eight was born from a violent fracture, or a crack in the Auric Aria's frequency during an active moment of creation. The Anxithor path erupted from terror. Violux detonated from transgressive impulse. The other seven were mostly catastrophes: instantaneous, loud, ruptures with a clear before and after. They are what happens when creation breaks in a single moment.

But for the Erosyx, for The Amber Wonderland, they were born in the aftermath. After the Auric Aria looked at what she had made in horror, the Formless Masses, the Atonalis, the children she wouldn't accept as children, and sustained a low, continuous disgust with herself. The Amber Wonderland was condense from that sustained shame in the fracture of her self-judgement. It was the assessment of her fear given form, the child produced by witnessing the catastrophe, and finding it unbearable.

During the Sixth Cycle this intensified as The Amber Wonderland finally stabilized from a puddle of Formless Masses. As the Auric Aria was surveying what the fractures had produced in tears in the way a creator audits disaster. She moved through the record of her failures, and The Amber Wonderland, newly condensed, newly aware, happened to be the thing she was looking at when the full weight of her revulsion crystallized into a single, unguarded moment of eye contact.

She did not hate it. She hated herself for making it. And that is the crux of The Amber Wonderland, it was born from a mother that was disgusted by its existence, it was the unloved children that was born to a universe that denies its existence. The disgust was not about, it it was aimed at it, and the body that received it, young, formless, desperate for the warmth it had already watched the Auric Aria pour into her collaborative creations, registered the full meaning:

You are the shape of my failure. You are what I look like when I do not love correctly.

Then she turned away. She drowned herself in guilt. She buried the Formless Masses in silence and absolved her guilt of the "correct children" with an isolation so complete there was no room in it for the Atonalis at all. The Amber Wonderland was left holding a face it could not un-see, its mother's face, wearing a look of disgust where nurture for a child should've been.

That's why The Amber Wonderland cannot hold a form. Not because it is a shapeshifter by nature. Because it is a shapeshifter by wound.

When the Auric Aria looked at it and her face did that thing, The Amber Wonderland shifted out of its original form with such immediate, violent desperation that the memory of what it looked like in that moment was consumed by the urgency of leaving. The original shape, the shape that was looked at, the shape that received the disgust, is gone. Not transformed. Not stored somewhere accessible. Gone. Irretrievable. The only evidence it ever existed is the wound it left.

So The Amber Wonderland does not know which form earned the disgust. It is simultaneously searching for the right form, and one that would never be again the wrong one. Aspiration toward the right form has a theoretically reachable end. Flight from an unknown wrong form has no end, because any form might be the original one. Every shape it inhabits carries the same phantom terror: Is this the one? Is this what I looked like when she flinched?

The forms it has worn across the Ages, changing each every Seventh:

It sometimes poses as the devoted son, as golden-threaded, heroic, a shape of undeniable strength. Worn when power seemed to be what the Auric Aria loved in her creation. If I am strong enough. If I am useful enough. If I become the kind of child a creator can point to with pride.

Sometimes it is even the Mirror, it wears the Auric Aria's own mortal face, worn exactly. The most desperate form. The logic of a child who has exhausted every other idea: If I become you — if I am the shape you love most — will you find me worth keeping?

But for most times, it is the no one, a featureless silhouette, trembling at its own edges. What it looks like when hope has been exhausted entirely. The shape it returns to not as honesty but as collapse, the form before all forms, when the performance fails and what remains is simply the original wound: something that was looked at and found disgusting, trying very hard not to exist in a shape that earns that again.

The Amber Wonderland changes between many representations of sex and form and presentation not for deception, not for disguise, but because it genuinely believes — has believed for every Cycle the universe has known — that there is a correct form, and when it finds it, the Auric Aria will look again, and this time she will accept it as her children, with the same love she gave to Humanity.

The shape-shifting is the Erosyx wound in its purest cosmological distillation: identity imposed from outside, contradicting internal truth, with the interior truth so thoroughly consumed by the wound that there is no interior truth left to contradict. It has been becoming-anything-else since before it understood what becoming meant. It has never stopped, because it has never been told what to stop becoming from permanently circling on the thoughts of why is an Atonalis a failed creation.

  • I am her children too, why was I met with disgust? Why is my existence an error?
  • Why does she wish that we Atonalis were never born. She is still mother to us.
  • Was it really that we exist the catastrophe of the universe? Will she ever love me?

The Jealous and Self-Loathing Erosyx

The Amber Wonderland watches Humanity as the race the Auric Aria built with care, with intention, with the specific tenderness of a creator who meant to make something beloved. They were made to receive her warmth without effort, without earning it, and something in it curdles into white-hot fury: They did not ask to be made either. They were no more worthy before she decided they were worthy. She simply decided. She looked at them and decided. She looked at me and decided I was only worthy of repulsion.

— This article is abridged. The full record runs longer in the archive.