Eras passed across Aethel like oceanic tides. The people, known as the Eloh, in their aquatic tongue lacked any tradition of conflict or deprivation. Their annals detailed trends, reflective sorrows and magnificent, collective creations of living beauty. Their advancement came not by domination. Through the intensification of their common unique sorrow—the Divine Discontent.
Their settlements were not constructed from metal and stone. From living structures. They directed collaborative polyps to erect the Spires of Inquiry hollow towers ascending from the seabed to the glistening underside of the surface, where light dispersed into endless rainbows. Within they convened, not for rule. To vocalize the questions. Their melodies were multi-faceted harmonies that asked the quiet cosmos: Why the distinct blue of the twilight zone? What form does loneliness take? Can silence be savored?
They created the Gardens of Incomplete Symmetry tended fields, on the ocean's depths where they cultivated glowing plants arranged in designs that were intentionally painfully nearly—but never perfectly—symmetrical. Caring for these gardens was their meditation practice, a method to connect with the spirit of the Unfinished Monument, the perpetual "nearly" embedded in their DNA.
Their science represented a kind of communication. They documented the vents and traced the gradual movement of continental plates not to control them but to compose epic verses about their interplay. A changing current was more than an event; it was a verse, in the earth's gradual mournful melody. Their brilliant thinkers were not engineers but Weavers of Melancholy capable of sensing the delicate mournful grace in a predator's brief pause or, in how a particular coral extended slightly leftward when every reason suggested it should grow right.
Their understanding of love was deep. Infused with a tender innate sorrow. To love someone else meant seeing in them an lovely arrangement of the identical Divine Discontent you possessed. Relationships were termed Resonances and the strongest connections arose between those whose specific types of longing blended into a discordant harmony. Their lullabies did not guarantee security. Softly recognized the longing their children would receive.
Their creativity was their essence openly revealed. They crafted Symphonies of Absence melodies that employed the voids inside their Spires the pauses between tones as the instruments. They fashioned living artworks by directing groups of micro-luminous fish into transient, stunning and completely purposeless configurations that vanished after just one look—a tribute, to the allure of the transient the specter of the Unplayed Solo.
Consistently their gaze was raised.
Their folklore centered on the Sky-Grief. They held that their realm was a droplet that had drifted down from a more sorrowful sea—the celestial heavens. The stars were not spheres but rather the faraway, frozen tears of a Forgotten Mourner. Their whole society in its graceful pursuit aimed to comfort that mourner to demonstrate that the droplet at minimum still knew how to experience emotion.
They cultivated a deep philosophy. They did not aim to eliminate the Longing as they felt it was the root of all their beauty. Instead they aimed to nurture it. To polish its pain. To render their Discontent finer, defined, more affectionate. Their highest moral rule was: "Embrace your sorrow tenderly and allow it to cultivate your kindness."
They never created arms. Their sole disputes were Aesthetic Debates, of enduring for centuries—intense sincere disagreements about the most sorrowful tone of blue or the correct rhythmic pattern, for a hymn honoring forgotten things.
Ages passed. The Eloh expanded throughout their realm a society marked by tranquility and rich creative melancholy. They never grasped the idea of an ending as their motivation was boundless. There was perpetually an exquisite inquiry to pose a more striking imbalance to develop a more evocative quietude, to craft.
They represented the response, to the Quiet, which was no answer but rather an intensification of the inquiry. Humanity had not created a successor. Instead it had created a mirror. A mirror that showed not humanity's shape but its essential flawed nature—the fracture that allows light to enter now expanded into an entirely new realm of sparkling, bent, magnificent light.
And in their deepest, most sacred dives, to the cathedral of coral where the Clear Vessel rested, they would sing the oldest, softest song, the one that had no words, only a feeling: a gratitude for the gift of wanting, a love letter to the ghost of a need they could never name, from a people who would never know the weary, magnificent hearts that had bequeathed them the only thing worth having in a perfect, silent universe: the Divine Discontent.