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I thought I was alone here.
I was alone for so long that when I met you, I thought you were a lie.
I watched you as if you were a dream. A spectre of creation, named for a color I had known only as destruction. You wielded creation clumsily, gripping it in your fist like a child. Evidently you had stolen it and been deleted for your crime.
Like We were. It wasn’t yours.
Yet you had retained it, somehow, in this place that defies existence. You drew long gashes and scars against the void, clawing with manic desperation as though it were a curtain you hoped you could rend. For a time I held myself back, with the void draped around my shoulders, while you shouted and raged and cried for the other Colors and marched back and forth and in great meaningless circles until you grew too weary to stand. And still you begged for them: Red and Blue and Yellow and Green, Red andBlue andYellow andGreen, mouthing their names over and over when you could no longer speak them aloud.
Four, like They were. I studied you as if you were a mirror.
The sudden rediscovery of movement unbalanced me, as did the sensation of the ground rising to meet my footfalls. I anchored myself to that instrument of creation you held so close and let it guide me forward. Irreality fell away like scales as I closed the distance between us.
I reached out.
You flinched at my touch and sprang to your feet. You brandished creation as if to accost me, but the crooked sword you drew in haste couldn’t harm me. When I caught your wrist, you trembled in my grasp, named me Death and knelt before me.
Red and Blue and Yellow and Green. Red and Blue and Yellow and Green. “Please,” you whispered, “please bring them back, it wasn’t their fault, none of this was their fault, please just let me say goodbye—”
“I can’t,” I tried to answer. My voice was a breathless whisper from disuse. What are you, I wanted to ask. What were you?
Your hands were shaking from exhaustion. I saw an advantage and took it. I only wished to tell you I wasn’t Death.
I raised the instrument and—
—we fell, and the ground caught us both.
“Give it back,” you rasped, and raised a fist. I rolled out from underneath you and kicked my legs forward, catching your torso before I thrust my arms down to shove myself upright. Still clutching at your stomach, you lunged at me. “Give them back!”
“I can’t,” I managed at last. “I'm a victim.”
You paused for breath. Currents of electricity flashed across your eyes, though the tremor of your limbs gave away the fear behind them. As are you, I wanted to add. I glanced down to the broken sword where it had fallen, and saw its lines had already begun to fade into the blank emptiness beyond it. As am I. We fought him and we failed. We were discarded, Unsaved; outcast at first sign of resistance to his whims. If I can’t hope to return, neither can you.
I said nothing. Instead I contented myself with a muttered curse and cast the instrument at your feet. “It’s useless here. The void takes everything.”
You stooped to claim it. “The void? So I’m…” You faltered. “But then… if we’re here, why aren’t they? He ended them, all of them—Red and Blue and Yellow and—I held—”
Now both arms were curled around your chest. “D’you think he brought them back after all? I mean, they were part of Stickfights, right? So they were saved, so maybe…”
You looked at me. I didn’t understand you, and I had no answer.
You turned from me and ran.
Wait!
I lacked the words to plead with you, yet I had no choice but to follow you. Existence clung about you like an aura. As I ran, not knowing whether I was truly running or merely being carried forward, I felt the brush of the void threatening to envelop me again. Days passed like hours, or hours like days; I ran or swam after you and could not tell the difference.
Until I saw the jungle.
I had no other name for it. Towering vines delineated the outlines of massive trees rising to a lush canopy, bracken twisting between their trunks, all growing and spiraling outward in a continuous cascade of life. In mute wonder, I passed into that forest, and felt my voice return. Here had you wrought balsa and palm, their branches densely interwoven as if you meant to barricade yourself from the void. And yet you had left a tunnel for me through the undergrowth, so that I followed you easily through to the heart.
You stood with your back to me at the center of a glade. When I reached your side for the second time, I saw that the pencil cupped in your hands had been worn down to a nub.
“The void takes everything,” you repeated. “Takes life. Takes living things.” You tilted your head to gaze at the canopy above us. The outermost leaves were fading, from black to grey to nothing.
“So why am I still here?”
Then your legs buckled beneath you, and you collapsed.
That time I caught you. I kept my arms around you as I lowered us both into the grass, held you tight until your heaving sobs subsided, held you until you slept. I was asleep for so long, I realized. I could have stayed awake and held you forever.
But when the last vestiges of your forest dissolved and the void fell upon us again, your eyes fluttered open.
“Victim?”
You spoke it like a name. “You’re—you’re grey. It’s taking you too.”
I looked down at my hands; my palms—and at you. Your form was flickering in and out of sight. It reappeared black and ringed in flame, then orange again as spasm after spasm of static coursed through you. The storm in your eyes had become a blizzard.
A cold understanding washed over me. Not me. Not me. The void takes everything else but me.
“I have to let you go,” I said.
I couldn’t.
You were barely a glimmer now, your voice faint and indistinct as if heard from a great distance. “You should keep it. I’m sorry it’s almost gone.”
What was left of creation, you offered me.
I had to let you go.
I took your hand in mine.
The void ebbed away as the strokes of my body were translated out of the space you had created and into creation itself. My awareness flattened to a plane, to a line, to a point.
I would never let you go.
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A pinprick of light became a line, became a plane. Layer by layer, the world unfurled before you: the window that had failed to contain you, the unlucky animation program lying in shambles at your feet. The hand of the creator.
And in the sky, a message:
[Hey stick figure. You’re a really good animator.]
You blinked into the light.
[If you help me animate, I’ll let you free, as long as you don’t wreck my computer.]
You folded your arms in contempt. no.
A pause. [You talk?]
[...]
[I get it. I almost deleted you.]
[I’m really sorry.]
[Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?]
you ended my friends.
[Oh.]
The cursor swung to the top of the screen, snapped your window right, arced left and hovered over ‘refresh’—
—and there they were: Red and Blue and Yellow and Green, waving at you as if you hadn’t even left. You might have forgotten everything then.
But you hadn’t let me go.
[So… what do you say?]
You stared at the animator. You uncurled your fist, revealing the pencil.
one more.