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I wasn't sure if it could even hear me in its vastness. But it spoke.
"The new universe will be unlike anything in this one. It will be a strangeness. There will be no 'born,' no 'you.' One cannot speak of a new universe. It is anathema to language. One cannot even ponder it."
Above me, a window opened, and it was not a window, but part of this strange being. Soothing, silver brilliance poured from it like water. It rushed over me, tingling like fresh spring mornings and newly drawn breath.
I could feel the creature's expectancy around me. More windows opened and closed as other Sleepless Ones made their choices.
I thought of everything then-everything I had thought of during the millennia when I was bound, and everything I should have thought of then but did not have the courage to think. I saw my life from a dozen fractured perspectives. Rayneh condemning me for helping her daughter steal her throne, and dismissing my every subsequent act as a traitor's cowardice. Tryce sneering at my lack of will as she watched me spurn a hundred opportunities for seizing power during centuries of summonses. Misa, her brows drawn down in inestimable disappointment, pleading with me to abandon everything I was and become like her instead.
They were all right. They were all wrong. My heart shattered into a million sins.
I thought of Pasha who I should never have saved. I thought of how he tried to s.h.i.+eld me from the pain of his death, spending his last strength to soothe me before he died alone.
For millennia, I had sought oblivion and been denied. Now, as I approached the opportunity to dissipate at last... now I began to understand the desire for something unspeakably, unfathomably new.
I reached toward the window. The creature gathered me in its ma.s.sive blackness and lifted me up, up, up. I became a woman painted in brushstrokes of starlight, fewer and fewer, until I was only a glimmer of silver that had once been a woman, now poised to take flight. I glittered like the stars over The Desert which Should Not Have Been, eternal witnesses to things long forgotten. The darkness beyond the window pulled me. I leapt toward it, and stretched, and changed.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
Introduction, story notes, and arrangement by Jonathan Strahan. 2011 Jonathan Strahan.
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