The Neglected Children of Tiamat
You were probably betting on hearing more about Kara, but I want to go over a few things with you first.
Once, there was a formless white void. And there was a pool of water sitting in the middle of that void.
The water was dark, and stagnant, and constantly frothing and bubbling, boiling over with all the elements of all the world, until one day this acrid elemental soup split itself into two beings.
They stood on the formless white floor of the formless white void, and stared at each other.
One was a woman, and one was a man.
One was made out of saltwater, and writhing tentacles, and beaks ripping apart flesh, and desperately flapping wings, and the smell of forgotten fish. This was the woman. She called herself Tiamat.
The man called himself Apsu, and was made of freshwater, and roofs of houses, and wisdom, and the kind of water you get out of the water cooler at the dentist's office, and other sensible, practical things. (Apsu was also made of the thoughts of the men who decided to come up with this myth to begin with. That's probably why he ended up getting the better end of the deal.)
They immediately began to do what heteronormative men and women do. They had many children. Too many. And they didn't seem to see any point in ever stopping this child-having business, either.
Eventually it began to dawn on them that it might have been a good idea to invent some form of primordial birth control, but by then it was too late, because the once peaceful white void was filled with the incessant chattering of children that they had no clue how to take care of. These young gods were boisterous and obnoxious, and ran all over the void, and shrieked, and clawed each other's eyes out, and cried, and laughed.
They were in desperate need of CPS, in other words. But there was no one besides Apsu or Tiamat to come up with anything like CPS or parenting standards yet; and they weren't about to report themselves.
I suppose you might say that it's hard to blame either of them. After all, they were both products of neglect themselves. They grew up in a void. How are they supposed to have it all figured out? There just weren't a whole bunch of good parental role models to go by.
This was also probably why Apsu couldn't handle all the noise his kids made, all the squealing and whining and gunfire and giggling and endless questions. He started making a few noises of his own about how he would "just kill all of these brats off if they didn't shut up."
The problem was, this wasn't just casual verbal abuse on his part. He actually meant it. But one of these children was smart enough to realize this, and killed Apsu off before he could act on his not-so idle threat.
Then, of course, Tiamat, who initially hadn't wanted anything to do with all of Apsu's child-killing talk, ending up taking his side. She was understandably upset about her boyfriend's death, so she decided to take it out on all of her old kids by hatching up some new kids. Then she told these new children to kill off her original brood. Problem solved. Or so she thought.
What she hadn't been betting on was that one of those original children, Marduk, might be especially tough to kill.
Marduk considered himself to be something of an alpha male. He drank a lot of protein shakes, and had rivers of testosterone coursing through all of his bulging muscles. And besides this, he had four eyes and four ears. And perhaps because of a chemical imbalance related to the unhealthy metabolic processes caused by all the protein shakes he drank, he also breathed fire.
He was so tough, in fact, that all of the other children of her original brood, who themselves had been hardened and mutated by an unforgiving life of young god gang warfare in a void that had become something between Lord of the Flies and the worst trailer park imaginable, picked him to be their leader--on the condition that he killed their mother.
So he and Tiamat got into this big, ugly, Jerry Springer type argument. Some have called it a battle between order and chaos; between ego and the unconscious. Marduk, Mr. Order/Ego, ended up winning. He wasn't about to let Tiamat come back from this, either. He crushed her skull in just to be sure that he won; and, knowing him, he probably exclaimed some sort of very masculine catchphrase while doing so.
Then he ripped her dragon body apart, and pinned parts of her massive body to different spots on the void, and pretty much made the whole world out of her corpse. And that, according to some sources, is how the world began.
There are just a few problems with this story. One is the fact that Marduk really didn't win anything. The world is still made out of Tiamat's chaotic cellular matter. Most of us feel like this means the world still needs to be conquered. That leaves all of us ego beings, all of us Marduks, going around trying to slay the unfit dragon mother of the world in little ways, with five year plans, and well brushed teeth, and new construction.
But even with all of us world conquerers running around, there are still more and more children being born out of the chaos, and more and more Apsus who lose their shit and decide to kill off the vast and unagreeable population around them, instead of taking measures to control it to begin with, like getting vasectomies, or keeping abortion legal.
The hurricane pixie who Kara met was one such child of neglect and chaos.
The medusa mermaid who ended up feeling bad for Kara and pulling her out of the whirlpool was another. I haven't begun her story, but that is who is staring out of the art at the beginning of this post.
Some say that all mermaids, sirens, hurricane pixies, and the like are direct descendants of Tiamat. But let's not forget that Marduk is pretty closely related to Tiamat too. His hyper-masculinity and fascist obsession with order are just coping mechanisms to help him deal with the primordial neglect he went through.
For that matter, even Kara, as much as she might seem to have it all together--even she is made out that original chaos at the beginning of the world, which probably explains why she won't stay put in any sort of post that I try to write for her.
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