Patin's Lessons - The Shape of Fear #369 Damn its fine
Posted on Wed Nov 12th, 2025 @ 1:39am by Patin
832 words; about a 4 minute read
Mission:
Character Development
Location: Celestial Temple
The Temple was too quiet. Not the reverent kind of quiet where prayers rise like incense, but the other kind, the kind that happens just before something explodes.
Patin could feel it humming beneath her bare feet, that taut silence of gods trying not to admit they were nervous. The Prophets hung in their circles of light, each one a shimmering idea pretending to be calm. She could feel their attention pressing on her, like standing in the middle of a hundred eyes and a thousand questions.
She grinned. “So,” she said, her voice carrying like a spark through the vast chamber, “who’s ready to talk about fear?”
The air rippled. Time itself shifted color, the stars behind the veil blurring to indecision.
The variable returns, said one voice, not a sound, but a translation of intent. The lessons persist.
Patin snorted. “You say that like I’m mold.”
You bring disorder.
“Correction,” she said, wagging a finger. “I bring flavor. You all been simmering in eternity so long, you’ve boiled out the spice.”
Several of them flickered in what she suspected might be outrage. Or possibly confusion. It was hard to tell when your conversation partners existed primarily as ultraviolet geometry.
We do not consume, another intoned, affronted.
Patin crouched, dragging her finger across the radiant floor until sparks followed the gesture, a line that curved into a crude circle. “There’s your first problem,” she said. “No appetite. You’re starving on your own perfection.”
The nearest Prophet pulsed brighter, tone clipped and incredulous.
Explain.
“Fear,” she said, straightening. “You talk about it like it’s a contaminant, something to avoid. But it’s not. It’s a shape. Ever-changing. You don’t get rid of fear. You learn its edges.”
The light trembled. The Prophets conferred, or maybe thought, in spirals of untranslatable energy.
Describe this shape.
Patin’s smile sharpened. “Easy. It’s the shape of me.”
A ripple tore through the Temple, through time itself. The Prophets reached, all at once, through the folds of potential: every version of her that had ever existed, every one that might. The child with dirty hands building her first bomb from copper wire and bad ideas. The soldier in the mud, timing her breath with the tick of an explosive charge. The woman now, uninvited guest of gods, grinning into infinity with defiance as her only prayer.
And they realized, she was unknowable.
Their chorus faltered.
Your unpredictability disturbs the pattern.
You alter outcomes by existing.
You are… beyond sequence.
Patin rolled her shoulders. “Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it?”
The silence was almost funny.
Then, from somewhere deeper, maybe a part of the Temple even they didn’t understand, a voice spoke. One not born of their harmony.
She is the Prophet of Chaos and Boom.
Patin froze. “…I’m sorry, the what?”
The declaration etched itself across the nonlinear fabric of existence, stamped right between The Arrival of the First Wormhole and The Day a Bajoran Sneezed on a God.
Her grin returned, slow and irreverent. “Well, y’all finally figured out what department I work in.”
The Prophets shimmered, as though embarrassed by their own revelation.
Her explosions are lessons in transformation.
Her laughter unmakes the boundaries of fear.
Patin spread her arms. “Exactly. You see it now. Fear’s not the end. It’s the fuse. You light it, you watch the world change shape, and then you decide what to build from the pieces.”
For a moment, just one, one of the Prophets laughed. Not the usual harmonic resonance of divine intellect, but a genuine, startled snort.
Patin pointed. “Ha! Caught you! That’s how it starts.” And she winked.
Later, or earlier, depending on which side of the explosion you measured from, the Temple still shimmered from her visit. The Prophets lingered in soft, contemplative suspension, replaying the echoes of her words across the surface of eternity.
We have studied linear fear for millennia, one murmured. Yet she teaches that even we can tremble.
Her defiance… breathes.
Perhaps divinity is not order, but motion.
Down in the linear dust of celestial reality, Patin lay on a hill overlooking the stars. The grass was still damp from rain she had conjured. She tore a strip of jerky with her teeth and muttered around it, “Prophet of Chaos and Boom. Could’ve at least added Saint of Snacks.”
Somewhere in the depths of the void, the Celestials probably flinched. Or smiled. Hard to tell.
She raised her imaginary glass toward the stars, or maybe toward them.
“To fear,” she said softly, “and all the strange, beautiful shapes it wears.”
And for the briefest moment, the night sky answered, with a small, impossible chuckle that echoed like thunder, remembering how to laugh.
TBC
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