Patin's Lessons - The Examination of the Celestial Codex
Posted on Wed Nov 12th, 2025 @ 6:54pm by Patin
1,531 words; about a 8 minute read
Mission:
Character Development
Location: Celestial Temple
The Celestial Temple shimmered in its endless golden folds, time pooling like honey over glass. Where mortals saw eternity, Patin saw potential energy, just waiting to explode.
She appeared with a sound that wasn’t quite a sound, half laugh, half thunderclap, and shook her head at the stillness around her. “Every time I come here, you all look like a painting someone forgot to finish.”
The Celestial Beings shimmered into coherence, threads of consciousness brightening into forms vaguely human, vaguely divine, always uncomfortably luminous.
We are complete.
Patin smirked. “No, you’re complacent. There’s a difference.”
A ripple passed through the Temple, the metaphysical equivalent of a frown.
She twirled her fingers and conjured her rider’s crop, black and gleaming, the handle etched with runes of forgotten causality. She smacked it lightly against her palm. Crack. The sound rang out like the punctuation of creation.
“Alright,” she said, pacing in lazy orbits. “Class is in session.”
The lessons… continue?
“No, darlings. The lessons are over. The test begins.”
The light around her shifted to a cool blue, a sign of curiosity.
“You’ve listened. You’ve echoed. You’ve prodded my life like children poking at a plasma coil. But do you understand?” She pointed the crop at the nearest ripple of being. “Tell me what you’ve learned.”
Love.
Patin’s grin softened, almost tender. “Good choice. Show me.”
The Temple’s folds peeled back, revealing a vision of Bajor, war-torn, twilight red.
A man knelt beside a woman’s grave, hands shaking as he laid down a bundle of herbs. The Celestial mists whispered through him, and though he wept, he also smiled.
Love is persistence beyond being.
Patin nodded, voice low. “Aye. And it’s also knowing you’d light the same fire again, just to feel the warmth.” She smirked. “Next.”
Loyalty.
The scene changed.
A resistance fighter, Zio, maybe, or someone like her, stood before a burning outpost, refusing to flee. Even when hope broke, she held the line.
Love with a death wish. Devotion through ruin.
Patin flicked the crop in salute. “Not bad. You’re starting to understand madness.”
The Temple pulsed. Loss.
Now they showed her herself.
Not as she was, but as she had been: the aftermath of detonation, smoke in her hair, ash on her boots. The kind of quiet that follows after everything important has already gone.
Loss is absolute. Yet she teaches: you fight. You laugh. You teach.
Patin swallowed hard and covered it with a wry smile. “Show-offs. Alright. What’s next?”
Time.
The vision unfolded in circles.
A Bajoran child chases her own shadow through sunrise and sunset, never quite catching it. An old monk records the same prayer every day for fifty years and never notices it’s already written on his soul.
The line is not real. All is now. The river flows.
Patin watched, voice softer now. “And yet, without time, we’d never know the taste of hasperat cooling in the evening air. Well done.”
Vengeance.
The sky flared crimson. An explosion, sculpted and deliberate, beautiful, terrible. From the chaos rose a mural of light shaped like wings.
Joy through destruction. Art through satisfaction. The pleasure is in the design.
Patin twirled her crop approvingly. “You’re quoting me now. Dangerous habit.”
Humor.
They showed a market square after the war. A veteran with one arm telling a joke to a street of orphans, badly, and yet, they all laugh until they cry.
Humor as armor. Pain as melody. Laughter as defiance.
Patin barked a laugh. “A+ for delivery. What else?”
Controlled Chaos.
A refinery detonation bloomed like a flower. Her younger self darted from shadow to shadow, grinning, alive, dangerous.
Destruction as choreography. Chaos as creation’s twin.
She smirked. “Now you’re just buttering me up.”
Dinner at the End of Time.
They conjured the table, her table, set for infinity, steaming with recursive stew and paradoxical pastries.
Creation through shared absurdity. Communion through joy.
Patin crossed her arms. “My proudest catastrophe.”
Spin the Dial.
Visions spiraled again, possible Bajors, forgotten futures, names fading and reappearing.
Curiosity and consequence. Memory as motion.
Patin exhaled. “You remember too much.”
The Shape of Fear.
A ripple of light, trembling. For once, the Celestials hesitated.
Her unpredictability… unnerves us. She is the Prophet of Chaos and Boom.
Patin grinned, wolfish. “About time you admitted it. I still like that by the way.”
The Dance of the Boot.
A sparring ring. Her foot connects with a jaw. The sound echoes through eternity like a metronome.
You defy inevitability. You are a paradox.
Patin twirled her crop and bowed slightly. “You’ve been paying attention.”
What it means to be Bajoran.
And last: the image of a people rebuilding. Heat, dry, lack of rain. Tired. Scarred. Singing anyway.
Suffering as sustenance. Endurance as ritual. Survival as defiance.
Patin watched long enough for the ache to settle behind her ribs. “That,” she said quietly, “you got right.”
The visions faded, leaving only the soft hum of eternity.
Patin stood in the golden dark, crop resting against her shoulder, eyes bright with mischief and melancholy.
“Well,” she said finally. “You’ve learned to see. Maybe even to feel.”
We have learned... what you have taught.
“Then the question remains,” she said, voice low and testing. “What do you want to learn next?”
The light trembled. For a long moment, silence was their only language.
Then...
We wish to understand... forgiveness.
Patin tilted her head, thoughtful, almost sad. “Ah. That one’s trickier than a detonator in a rainstorm.” She smiled. “But we’ll get there. One boom at a time.”
She tapped the crop against her boot heel, and the sound echoed like a heartbeat through the folds of the Celestial Temple.
The lesson continues.
Patin smirked. “Always.”
And with a flicker of light and laughter, she was gone, leaving behind a chorus of eternal beings whispering among themselves, trying, impossibly, to define what forgiveness might feel like.
Silence returned to the Celestial Temple. Not absence, silence. The kind that hums between seconds, that gathers after laughter and before memory.
Where Patin had stood, the air still shimmered faintly, a residue of her pulse, her irreverence, her impossible humanity. The rider’s crop she’d conjured rested on the floor, no longer physical, but remembered. The Beings gathered around it as one might around a fallen star.
She departs.
Yet the resonance remains.
A pause. Then a softer current:
We perceive... contradiction.
Contradiction is her constant.
Her defiance teaches motion.
Her laughter teaches endurance.
Another ripple of light shimmered outward, slow, spiraling. It carried the shapes of her lessons in faint echoes: a boot’s arc, a flash of flame, a mortal’s grin in the face of eternity.
She is chaos.
And yet... she brings order to us.
A collective stillness fell, reverent, puzzled, and almost... fond.
We do not understand forgiveness.
Nor regret.
But we have felt something akin to... warmth.
For the first time since the dawn of the Temple, the beings did not speak in perfect synchrony. Their voices overlapped, uneven, human.
We remember laughter.
We remember love.
We remember... her.
The golden mists of the Temple began to shift in subtle imitation of her. The light no longer held still, it rippled, danced, flickered unpredictably. Like a joke with no punchline. Like a fuse still burning.
She was here.
She will be here.
She is.
And somewhere, at the edges of eternity, a sound rolled through the folds of time, a chuckle, maybe, or thunder, and a single bootprint appeared in the golden floor.
The Mortal Who Danced Through Eternity
We record this so the motion does not fade.
She entered uninvited.
She spoke where silence reigned.
She struck the air until it laughed.
Through her, we learned the symmetry of chaos.
Through her, we felt the weight of humor, the sharpness of love, the ache of loyalty, the shape of loss.
She named herself mortal.
We named her the Prophet of Chaos and Boom.
Where she walked, paradox bloomed.
Where she fought, mercy took form.
Where she laughed, time bent in reverence.
She is gone.
She remains.
She will return when the dial spins once more.
And beneath the final line, etched in a human hand, not a divine one,
“Next time, I’m bringing fireworks.”
—Patin
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