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IN THE DREAM, the sun was still swinging down to meet the horizon where the sky turned to gold without occulting the pale dust and ocean blue; the disc of the moon fluttered across the waters before them, a little bobber suspended on a line of silk. He had never needed the gestures, not once since he began the work, but now he turned his hand gently over still, crooking his fingers and pulling taut each ribbon tied in bows around his pinky.
The salt waters twisted and heaved along with the quaking earth beneath them, but neither and both of them were consumed by the force of the waves - which occasionally receded, falling back for kilometers to expose the sedimentary bone beneath - which sometimes crashed far behind them, lifting overhead like tsunamis of perfect mercy. And as the oceans immersed them, she asked a question through the sea between her teeth.
She said, Mine other self, my own flesh and blood and soul, art thou any more content than I?
And he said, Never.
So she asked again. “Then Teacher, why do you persist in destroying yourself?”
And he just laughed at her by way of reply, smiling sweetly, gently condescending as a mother to his daughter, not even hateful or contemptuous. “Because God cannot be soft.”
“I don’t understand.”
And he said, “Neither did I.”
The exit wounds of the Resurrection Beasts tore light-years through the solar system, but now he repaired them one by one, each orbital geodesic wrenched free like a rib falling outward from the detonation of a heart. The bones of the solar system shuddered around them, CR-EAAAAAK, as he grabbed the armature of each body and finally deigned to set it gently to rights.
He said- “In the beginning, I still believed that I was outplayed, that there was anything I could have done. That I could have saved you if only I was bolder, if only I was braver, if only I was meeker, if only I knew the right things to say.”
He said- “In the beginning, I’d barely worked out where to put them so they couldn’t get away. In the beginning, I’d barely decided who to resurrect and who to leave behind. So I searched my mind for ideas, and in the end I made a box of all my dreams.”
And in this, at least, she understood.
She said- “And so you tried again.”
He echoed: “And so I tried again!”
He said, absently- “It was the most natural thing in the world. It was the easiest thing in the world. It was so easy a child could do it… it was so easy, the waters of the River leaped to part around me before I even asked them. It was easier than being awake.”
He said, now savagely- “I held them in the hour of their judgement and they held me in the hour of our judgement because it was all any of us wanted to dream about at night, that silver age when we still believed we would all survive… sometimes it was even all you wanted to dream about, the last time you still believed I would save you.”
He said- “How do you think you would have felt holding that river bubble in your hands, if you were still awake enough to remember that you were its lord and master?”
And he said- “I was their god, and it wasn’t enough.”
Every moon they didn’t think to hold fast before it fled was gone, turned to ivory and seashells for the soft tissue of the first and last revenants in the universe; almost every moon in the system was gone, then, where the Resurrection Beasts fled their cooling corpses and made exodus ships from the bodies of their kin.
The light of the sun existed at his discretion, but he was the watchmaker, and so the light of the sun poured forth. From the darkness of the outer reaches it began to rain, comets streaking in as condensation from the dust of the Oort cloud. Coronal mass and fusion ejecta blasted out from the white hot heart of Dominicus, baking ash into clay and hydrogen into iron, and from that black and white porcelain he fashioned flawless prosthetic moons, immortal replacement cogs for the gravitational clockwork of the nine sleeping houses.
She asked: “Teacher, how could you have ever failed?”
He said, half-laughing- “This game absolutely will not have a happy ending.”
He said, half-wistfully- “In the box, I was the only one who remembered, and that alone should have made me their god. Their days and nights belonged to me, each hour hand and second tick.”
He said- "In the dreams, I turned them over in my mind, closing their eyes to repetition, squeezing out all their power to resist. I turned back the gears of memory at my every failure, not because the waking world would ever change, but because I wanted to know where it all went so wrong. I walked across the squares of the gameboard because I wanted to know if there was any world in which I could ever have saved you.”
He said- “There wasn’t.”
She said, gently: “Teacher, whether you won or lost, what could that have taught you? Everyone in the bubble would have remembered how it really happened, even if they didn’t know that they remembered.”
He shook his head, now beginning to cut loose the ribbons of fire around his fingers.
He said- “Do you know why they even gave me that damn bomb in the first place, Harrowhark?”
She didn’t reply, because she didn’t understand; she waited patiently, holding out for exegesis, because more than anything she needed to understand.
He said, contemplatively- “We relived the ending years for seven days and seven nights, and every time it came down to the same wire. I never understood. I needed to understand more than anything. I had to know, how could they hand me the loaded gun and never imagine that I would fire it?”
He said, contemptuously- "I had to know, when did they decide that they could use me up, but that I would never eat them in turn? I had to know, when did they decide I was so pathetic that they didn’t even have to listen to the words coming out of my mouth? I had to understand.”
And he said with a voice so full of hate it was dead- “So I pinned them between my teeth. Every cop who came armed to the teeth and already prepared to blow our skulls open. Every last hostage negotiator who spent the last hours of their lives trying to reach a hand up my ass and disarm me instead of just shutting up. Every last yottarich motherfucker who served their own death up on a silver platter because they thought they were invincible. Every last king and president who decided to send us all to hell before I ever could.”
And he said with a voice so full of hate it was hotter than the sun behind her eyes- “It had to be seen to be believed. The depths to which they would sink to destroy themselves, no matter how I tried in the dream to learn from my mistakes and turn the other cheek. I thought I understood just how much the world held women like me in contempt. I thought I’d seen the worst from every last genocidal pakeha fuck. So I bit down until I broke their skin.”
And he said with a voice so full of hate that the hate didn’t stop, yawning open like the mouth of hell- “And I saw and tasted exactly what I’d always been to them, and I saw exactly how J- would never, ever be obeyed.”
And he said with a voice so full of hate now directed at her: You made the wrong choice from the beginning. You have made a mouthpiece of a poisoned well. You have made a champion out of me when I never could have even saved you.
She protested; truly protested, for the first time, as if she weren't speaking to her Teacher but to someone else entirely, speaking through a darkened glass.
She protested: “But why!? Why go on living like this for men you've already destroyed!? You, who already made us into your very Hands and Gestures! You, who wiped the Houses clean and remade this world in your own image! Why go on hiding this!? Hiding your own face!? From your own Fingers!?”
He laughed again. It was not entirely a kind laugh, this time. The cosmos shuddered around them with each sharp kick to the rotational speed of the First, inertia reduced to a bad joke. His eyes were fixed intently upon her like black hole mouths, his breath up close like the exhalation of quasars.
He said, swerving again- “How did you know that my daughter wouldn’t kill you for everything you and your House did to her, Harrowhark? When did you decide that you trusted her enough not to wall her up in the tomb yourself, let alone to take her as your cavalier?”
And ice water dripped down her spine.
“She couldn’t have hurt me,” Harrow said.
He said- “Wouldn’t, or couldn’t?”
She said, “Both.”
“Even though you knew she was my daughter?”
Harrow locked her expression down more tightly than ever before in her life, but it wasn’t enough.
He said- “Oh, yes, as soon as I met Kiriona, I thought you must have noticed that blood ward on the tomb after all. But it almost doesn’t really matter, does it? Not when you already knew she was immortal. Not when you’d already seen just how much of a monster she already was."
And this, more than anything, was what threatened to destroy her; not the Kindly Prince witnessing the sin of her birth, but that he witnessed all the sins that were worse by far.
He said- “But you weren’t ever really afraid, were you? Not of her. Not when you knew she already belonged to you in every way that mattered in the closed circle of your generation. Not when you knew you could use her up and that she could never bring herself to eat you in turn. Not when you saw through all the strength that came so naturally to her, saw all the way down to the desperate weakness of her soul beneath her body, that fatal softness which I could not stop you from seeing even with ten thousand years of my hands around all your throats.”
“No,” she said tightly, nearly begging him, not even knowing what she was saying.
No, it wasn’t like that between us? No, I wasn’t afraid, because she was already mine?
And he smiled that gentle smile again, smiled like a mother again, like the kind of mother she'd never had.
And he said, “God cannot be soft like an adulteress.”