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They walk the world together as it becomes a million new worlds. Creatures evolve and die out. Civilizations rise and are destroyed. Stars are born and then explode, taking universes with them. All of this happens at Their feet, the transformation He was created to prevent. Perhaps it is no surprise how overwhelming He finds it. It is dizzying and reminds Him of the cacophony He used to hear inside His mind. But this constant change is not unlike the Voices in another way. The chaos abates when He looks at Her.
Unlike Him, She strides forwards with confidence, doing as She has done since the inception of time. She is the Princess, or perhaps a Queen, and yet She commands nothing, simply existing as transformation happens around Her. He thinks He would be frightened to have this power, but She accepts it serenely. Or at times with rage, or pride, or revulsion, as Her tapestry of faces ripples and changes. But He never sees fear in Her eyes.
He envies Her. He loves Her also, but that love is written in blood. His talons break Her skin and She stretches out a new hand to grab His, giving it a gentle squeeze. Their love is forever entwined with Their conflict, a conflict ordained by a higher power than Them, a conflict that burns with Their own personal animosity. Their love is a constant. He finds constants comfortable.
And while She can walk forever, Her position in space transforming as often as anything else, He needs to stop every once in a while. He begs Her stop, and She snarls and says no as She happily obliges Him. When He stands still, the world around Him stops changing, stops dying, stops being born. A bubble of permanence forms around Him; it could go on for miles or it could all exist within a single square inch, but there is a patch of flowers underneath His feet that are frozen in full bloom. If He stands here forever, they may never wilt.
She steps back and witnesses this with mild amusement, with disgust, with fascination. She faces Him, the colors of destruction exploding kaleidoscopically behind Her head like a cosmic crown while He remains in His patch of stillness. He is afraid to move.
“They are beautiful flowers.” Her voices echo, a discordant mess of tones. Horror. Sarcasm. Wistfulness.
“They won’t be forever.” His own voice is singular. He doesn’t know exactly how He means it.
She laughs. She wails. “They will if you have anything to say about it.” She laughs and wails more loudly. “And you always have something to say.”
The sound of Her voice makes His heart crack and spill over. Her mocking and Her affection are ever the same, a sweet pain. Retreating into Himself is the last thing He wants to do, but while He is stuck in His own moment in time, He may as well appreciate it. He turns from Her and leans down to pluck a flower. It pops effortlessly out of the ground, and the motion of His hand doesn’t so much as bend its stem. He brings it close to His eyes and observes its yellow petals, curved inward like a cup ready to receive. The flower waits for nature to shift around it. Who, other than a god, would He be to deny this?
He takes a step out of His bubble. Upon His foot breaking with the ground, the flower’s companions shrivel to soil, while the one in His claws remains pristine. As He approaches Her, the stale air around Him becomes a cool and freeing wind. The flower is not affected by it, but He certainly is.
He finds an ear — it doesn’t matter which, because while every one of Her faces is different, an ear is always an ear — and tucks the flower behind it. His talon scratches Her temple, and She lifts a hand to the wound, covering His. She cannot see Herself, but He watches in awe as the flower, which stands out against Her many shades of hair, fights itself, to remain ever in bloom or to decay before His eyes. The hands of Transformation and Quiet remain deadlocked around its stem, incompatibly.
“Is it too beautiful to let go?” She whispers, shouts, inquisitively, ragefully.
He admits it. “It is.” And then He lets the flower go, letting it dissolve into dust that gets in both Their eyes. “But it can’t be forever. Nothing can be.” He accepted this when He let Her live. It is a glorious truth. It is a tragedy and an inconvenience. It is all true at once, and that multiplicity makes His stomach turn. But He has sentenced Himself to this, willingly. He will let a billion flowers die if He can only get to see them laced through Her hair for a moment.