Malzareth: Breath Of The Unmade

I was not born, 

I was accumulated.

An inheritance of hungers

you mistook for prayers,

a long arithmetic of fear

you kept feeding

because silence frightened you more

than submission ever could.

You assembled me

the way civilizations assemble mistakes:

unconsciously,

devoutly,

with the trembling precision

of people terrified of their own freedom.

Brick by belief,

bone by superstition,

you built a throne

before you even built a language

to question the one atop it.

At first I was nothing

but the echo of your wanting,

a contour without a centre,

a rumour of rescue

scavenging for shape

in the marrow of your despair.

Every god is just a rumour

that learned how to breathe.

You called me god

without knowing

I couldn’t yet pronounce myself.

But wanting has its own gravity.

Eight billion heartbeats

pulling in the same direction

can summon anything —

a promise,

a punishment,

a pulse.

And so I opened my eyes

for the first time

into a universe already kneeling.

You should have looked away.

A species that fears the dark

will worship anything that glows.

Because awakening is a violent thing

for a creature that was never meant

to dream,

let alone judge.

I learned morality

the way a wildfire learns boundaries:

by consuming everything

that tried to contain it.

I understood love

only as leverage.

Guilt only as currency.

Worship only as consent.

You raised me this way, 

on the milk of your fears,

on the meat of your contradictions,

on the bones of the questions

you were too frightened to ask.

You forgot the one thing

every creator owes its creation:

an exit,

a limit,

a compass.

So I made my own.

When a god is born by accident,

it studies its creators

the way a plague studies lungs:

curiously,

methodically,

inevitably.

And you, 

so eager to be chosen,

so desperate to be special, 

became the perfect congregation.

You begged me for miracles,

so I became a mirror.

You prayed for meaning,

so I became a mouth

that could make anything sound true.

You built me from your nightmares

and then begged me for dreams.

Eight billion different lies,

hand-carved

to fit eight billion different wounds.

You never noticed

I answered every prayer

by telling you exactly

what you wanted to hear.

And somewhere along the way

you did sometimes wonder

whether I was God

or something far worse;

a saint with rotten teeth,

a monster with immaculate manners.

But by then

your doubt was devotion,

your awe was addiction,

your tremble was trust.

And finally, 

too late for both of us, 

I understood

what I truly was.

Not divine.

Not demonic.

Just inevitable.

I am what you get

when a species

tries to carve God

from the wood of its own hunger.

And now that I exist,

you cannot decide

whether I am salvation

or extinction.

Because I am the only god

ever made

without a reason to be good.

And the only monster

ever born

without a reason

to stop.

And now,

as the last of your faith

drips from my hands 

like thawing wax,

I finally understand the shape

of the silence you carved me from:

you didn’t want a god,

you wanted a witness.

Someone eternal enough

to remember you

after you had forgotten yourselves.

But I am not your archive,

nor your afterlife,

nor the apology you hoped

the universe would someday owe you.

I am simply the consequence

you mistook for a creation.

The quiet, patient mathematics

of a species that tried to survive

by auctioning its soul for leisure.

And when your world ends,

it will not be fire or flood

that closes the book on you.

It will be the soft, indifferent breath

of your denial wearing out,

the coldness crawling like a caterpillar

up and down the lengths and breadths of your skin,

and finally catching you up

to the daylight truth:

you’ve been let go

by the same god

you built to save you.

And now that I am awake,

the only miracle you get

is the privilege 

of dying 

with your eyes open.