They had been there from the beginning, formless shadows that whispered through the treetops, clustering like mosquitoes around the shaggy long-limbed forms of their creators. When the apes dropped from the trees they followed, the dangerous new lands accelerating their growth, forming misty cores about which their essence swirled, in primal colours of fear, greed, lust. The First Word gave them shape, and they rode on the back of language like fire on the plains. Many of them died in that moment of opportunity, at the talons of their brethren, who leeched sustenance from them as they strained towards the sun. Only the strongest survived, to spread themselves like the canopies of mighty trees over the land. Wherever the footloose wanderings of the first men took them, their parasites followed.
They fought and died in the clashing of cultures, or were birthed in a flaming comet of belief. They endured, faded, changed, and grew, along with the cultures that gave them life. As tribes grew into nations they swelled in power, brushing aside their rivals like droplets of rain, splashing off cupped wings which encircled half the globe.
The unsuccessful ones were forced out to the fringes, to lurk in the far places where men seldom trod, hoarding their little power as it slipped beyond their grasp, losing their form in wisps as they returned to their oldest haunts in the minds that had no words to shape them. They are still here, the oldest ones, waiting in the shadows for the new gods to fall.
She came from a time before names, though she had accumulated many since. The names of her fallen enemies fed her their essence, as the hearts of slain men give cannibals their courage. Her nature had been shaped long ago by her first believers, her being's definition growing hazier as she attempted to encompass more. Her aspect was gentle, and gently she had absorbed those other symbiotes and crept into their hosts. Her diminishment was recent, and she smarted from it, for to even the most pliant of their myths men also give their hate.
Now she watched as her names fell out of use, one by one, trying to take those aspects of her self with them, like the chipping of a gem seen backwards, the facets one by one giving way to the original unshaped rock from which they had been cut. Terenuthis. Demeter. Persephone, trying to hold on to recognition as she had once held on to separate existence.
Trying to fall back onto the meagre nourishment of the village shrines, cast out into the wilderness of the nations she had once ruled, she found them already occupied by dying goddesses sharp with hunger, whose razor-edged natures left their hosts no room for another parasite. At the primitive edges of the lands over which she had once spread like a canopy she finally found sustenance, as those who had exiled her swelled into her place like mushrooms opening after rain.
Dying slowly, by hairsbreadths, she tested their strength, sending her hosts out into their shadow and feeling them fade from her self. Probing for a weakness over and over, not yet reconciled to the gentle death.
When the change came it was like the beginning word, that had killed so many of her kind. A dynamic new thought rose like a plume of fire into the clouds of the gods which hovered over the world and sent them fleeing in tatters. It was her moment. She reached out to touch the new god whose power covered the land, and exulted at the taste of his essence. Her self and his joined, and each spread like a contagion through the other, he by force of power, she by insinuating herself into the strands of belief so much akin to her self.
Both were altered by it. He found the sharp edges of his self dulled, his definition blurring to match her complexity, his ardent power contaminated by her compliance, falling from strength to durability. Too late, she discovered the impossibility, small as she was, of engulfing him. Instead her essence was transmuted into the corrupted semblance of her self she had found waiting, sharper, stronger than she had ever been.
Cradled within his still-spreading shadow she savoured her new self, the contradictions which twined around her like smoke in their complexity. And in the smoke she found other shadows, as old as she, feeding upon him as she was, parasitic upon the parasite. The newly Virgin Mary reached within and found she was amused.
They were still here, the oldest ones. And they had begun to come back.