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“Do you remember where you found me?”
I
You
He became aware of himself suddenly.
“Do you remember when you found me?”
A fissure
A fracture
A fluttering in the basal ganglia.
“Do you remember why you found me?”
A tweak
A thump
A twitch in the fingertips.
“I was anchored to a dying star,” she explained, and her voice, oh, it was like molten gold was spilling out from her lips. “I had my focus centered on a dying planet. An ocean planet.”
Her finger on the rim of the wineglass. Circling, circling the rim.
“Oceans,” she sang. “Oceans, oceans, oceans… blue and burning. It looked so pathetic I almost wanted to cry for it. I felt compelled to stay there.”
She closed her eyes, as if savoring every sense of the essence of the memory. Every scent, every flavor; the texture on her tongue, in her mouth; between her thighs…
“I wondered what it would feel like,” she said, “if I could just… reach out, and…”
With a flick of her wrist, she pressed her thumb firmly against her tongue, then pinched the air with a quick, decisive motion. She opened her eyes to see Him. His pupils round. Hers not.
“…snuff it like a lit candle,” she mused.
“Then I found you,” He said.
“That’s right,” she replied. “Then you found me.”
She stood up with a certain, sensual slowness, and He saw she was wearing nothing anymore. It was naught but stardust that surrounded her. A dense swarm of ash so thick He could almost taste it; feel it congealing in His throat like blood. She clutched her wineglass and turned it over in her slender fingers.
“What happened next?” she asked Him.
And He responded. “We traveled the universe. Together.”
“Together?” she asked.
“You and I.”
“Us.”
She smiled tightly, the muscles in her jaw clenched as she squeezed the wineglass. Shards of glass cut into her porcelain skin. Of course it was ichor she bled.
“Keep going,” she coaxed. “Your recollection is getting faster.”
He thought for a moment. Only a moment. “We created…”
She shook her head. “You created. I simply watched you thread the needle.” She rotated the last glass shard in her hand with measured movements, never once breaking eye contact with Him. “What, then, does that make you?”
He knew. Of course, He knew. He simply didn’t want to say it. The word felt like a venomous snake coiling on His tongue, its poison a bitter taste that stuck to the roof of His mouth like bubblegum.
Even so, she continued. “What, then, does that make them?”
“No,” He blurted. “I won’t see them in that way. I refuse.”
“You would refuse the truth?” she asked Him, smiling as beautifully as she always had. “You would refuse this certainty? Your place above them? Your station?”
“Not Kal’tsit,” He said.
“Especially her,” she replied. “I watched you build her. Hammer and chisel and all.”
“No.” His voice grew quiet. “Not Amiya. I… I could never…”
She walked forward then; her steps light. Even so, her expression remained unchanged. Even so, she tightened her grip around that sole remaining shard of glass, her fingers staining it with something altogether colorless, odorless, yet ever-present. “They were simple creatures once. Thoughtless things. Cattle. When we welcomed Originium, we welcomed a new understanding. A new conceptualization. Then you remade them in your image. And so I ask you, again: what does that make you, Oracle?”
He clenched His eyes and fists shut. “I am Nothing. Nothing without them.”
“No,” she replied. “You are Everything without them. You deserve a throne.”
He covered His ears. “I deserve a noose.”
“You should have lorded over them. Instead, you played. With the rats and the snakes and the gutter dogs. You played with all of them. It was perverse. It was sickening.”
He opened His eyes, and she was already there—with the glass against His throat.
“I am very, very disappointed in you.”