It’s my heart, my beast-heart where a girl’s heart should be, as red and open as any wound. I am free, feral, my smile too much like a snarl, bloody knuckles, apple rinds, hounds at my feet, the sweltering sun at my back like a halo. On all fours I hiss at the stars, hunt in my kingdom of flora and fauna with my head crowned in briars and the breath of jacaranda flowers. At night I make a bed of blackberries and branches, lying under the old, cold sky snorting and smelling like dirt, veiled in pink begonias with purple-bronze leaves for cover. I sleep by fire and eat bones and instead of talking I howl until the moon breaks. I quarrel and struggle until my voice grabs heaven by the throat and the earth quakes with my clamor.

The day Juniper died was the last night of my girlhood. When I took Wren’s task of being on my own, developing my own consciousness about danger, becoming alert by myself, for myself, my mother died the same death. My first lesson under Wren’s tutelage: to let die what must die, there is something waiting for you at the edge of the woods, and your fate is to meet it. I watched my mother who walked with a scurry instead of a stride dwindle away, become thinner and thinner as she tried to make my life too safe. I let go of her hand, the glowing archetype of my ever-sweet, too-good mother. I had no pity. Her last breath crawled out like a clear, beautiful ray of sun on stones. I kissed her head. I couldn’t help myself.

Wren was strict at first but she loved the primal energy of my name, the way it rolled off her tongue like violence. Names like mine walk on four legs during the boundaries between day and night.

Kohana, the flower lion with all the mountains in the world, a creature of hint and nuance who flits by and is not easily seen in hard, clear light. For a year when the night was full of hard, bright stars I did nothing but serve Wren, wash her clothes, sweep her hut, sort the elements. When the moon appeared as a slender crescent, delicate and fine but firm in the promise of growth, I hunted the edges of the Earth. The woods resounded with the cries of beasts and the fishy deep shuddered where I walked. I was as certain as Death itself, the dark, thick, beast-filled forest where the unwary adventurer may lose not only his way, but his life.

Only in the second year did Wren allow me to sleep beside her and begin my education. Is this the proper way to teach a girl? I don’t know.

But I can tell you she bore several children. I know she carried weights too heavy for her back, and from her lungs I can tell you what she held back. I catalogued her being: tissue, fiber, bloodstream, cell, the shape of her experience, skin, hair, tried seeing what she saw, imagining what she felt. Despite each injury she survived. By the body of that old woman I was hushed. I was awed. It was from her body that I learned. In any prolonged experience of war, a soldier moves back and forth between life and death every hour of every day. I learned to endure Wren’s liminal space.

“You have been my best student. I am proud of you.” Wren’s smile curls across her face like a rapier whipping against the side of an opponent, taking her thumb against my cheek as if rubbing away a smudge. It is the loving touch of a mother sending her child off on their first day of school. It catches me off guard. “This has happened a thousand times before, a thousand thousand times. Kohana, your bones are stubborn.”

She gives me too much credit. I instinctively kept up appearances, worked at making good grades, acted as if my home life was normal. All my life I’ve followed the examples I saw in nature: animals wearing protective coloration so they don’t stand out, animals, when wounded or weakened, hiding their vulnerability to avoid becoming prey. While I can count on my physical courage and skill as a hunter, I feel no certainty about being welcomed home. Going back home, that’s a decision made by my heart, with hope that there will be a place for me now that I have proven myself here.

…That my accomplishments in the wild will make my father proud.

Under this hope the bigger hope: that my father will love me.

My breath hitches as Wren pulls me close, something she has never done. She empties herself, weeping bitterly. When she pulls away her craggy face is wet with tears. I come away crying, too. “How frail, this human heart,” she says, her voice little more than a murmur. Her body moves like it doesn’t have any bones left to keep itself standing. “It is an exit wound. The bullet, the gun, the finger pulling the trigger. Yours is the death I cannot mourn.”

But death is a part of my life, a part of who I am. I realize now that death and life cannot be separated. They are completely interwoven, an uroboros.

“I’m not dead yet.” I smile sweetly, like a little child with a caramel. “I hope my death will be like the satisfaction at the end of a good book or play, when the whole story is tied together and it all makes sense. I wouldn’t give up so easily, don’t worry about me.”

It is my indomitable spirit that devoted years mastering my craft in Wren’s wild. I roamed her land with only a bow and quiver of arrows I forged by hand. I can face danger. It gives me an adversary, something I can marshal my courage against. But to fade away, leave a gap in the world, disappear into oblivion without accomplishing something, anything—

“Listen to me, Kohana.” She sways ahead of me, blurred, as the miles we cross begin to carry me into a half-dream, the sky and the perfumed spring air skimming along past my cheeks. “You have endured all my tasks to a full initiation. Nature does not ask permission. Blossom and birth whenever you feel Iike it, my little wolfling.”

I move gently to and fro, pleased with the sound of rattles and timbrels of the outside world. From behind me comes gray wolves fawning on me, lions, bears, and fleet leopards ravenous for deer. I turn and smile as they wag their tails like dogs playing about their masters, pawing at me with their sharp claws. To my left I spy a rare mushroom half-hidden near the roots of a tree while Wren treads on, tossing a glance at me from over her shoulder.

“The working of fate is an eternal becoming,” she says. My ears, attuned to every tone, every inflection, effortlessly picks up her voice in spite of the distance between us. “A weaving and creating, and to everything that is, fate assigns its part in life and its peculiar character. They spin the thread, tear it off, and determine what is to come. Everything that you are is fraught with destiny.”

A smile breaks open on my face like a firecracker. “I am superior to my fate. I am stronger than my rock.” Hadn’t Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, known the full extent of his punishment? Hadn’t he put Death in chains? There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. “Flowers grow on boulders. I’ll accept stone when necessary.”

Our wind-whipped trek brings us across a clifftop, the edges peaking slightly upwards like the crests of waves rolling endlessly below. Sea spray fills the air, and I feel as though I’m braving the ocean from the prow of a magnificent ship. “It’s beautiful here, Wren.” The surrounding landscape itself is a marvel of natural delights, blushing sea pinks and wildflowers dotting the springy coastal grass around my feet. There is something mesmerizing about watching water tumble off a rock face into a raging river beneath. The noise it makes, the sheer volume of the ocean. I throw my arms out and spin around, laughing.

“My daughter,” Wren gently whispers to me. My cheeks quiver with barely held tears. I tell myself I’m not crying, though tears stream silently down my face.

I open my mouth, and the ghost of my mother comes tumbling out. All I’ve ever wanted was to be wanted.

“For so I hope I may call you my own girl. Can you measure to what extent the sky covers the Earth? Can you count the number of sand grains on a seashore? My love for you is as endless as the stars above. You should recognize my scent, my sound, my heartbeat. Not hers.” I wear the word love like a noose around my neck, knuckling away tears as they swell up. “Have I not given you happiness in my realm? Have I not given you everything you’ve wanted? Magic? Protection? Tell me you want to stay here forever, Kohana, and it shall be done.” When I don’t answer, Wren’s brows furrow and her voice turns thick and ugly. “When I call you daughter, I feel her fury as fierce as a thousand storms! But what can she do, the poor wretch? She is long dead, and I live. Daughter, daughter, daughter,” she chants, as if provoking my mother into appearing from the aether. “Don’t you want to be loved?”

I open my mouth, and out comes a bird thrashing against a window. Love, that word deep inside of me, rippling like a pulse.

I sob, a horrible, childlike weeping, huge gulps of air and sobbing, swallowing hurt whole. Isn’t love like this? Doesn’t love come running when you are small and broken and hopeless? Doesn’t love stab you in the heart and then ask what’s wrong, where it hurts? Love, easing me back from the brink. Love, tasting like a bruise. Brutal to love, more brutal to die, to die of love. I think I’ll never die, I’ll never stop running. Don’t I want to be loved?

All that remains is a jutting cliff rock that looks as though at any moment it too could fall off tumbling down the side of the mountain. Wren’s breath smells like bundles of violets clutched to the breasts of dead maidens, of gauze stretched over noble profiles and coins pressed into eye sockets. I’m overwhelmed, pushed to the edge of existence.

I fall through the elliptical orbit, the pull of gravity, the satellite motion. My mouth opens, a half note pushing the air, a quarter note traversing the earth. Startracks. Spiral nebulae. Craters of the moon.

I close my eyes and think of space filled with the presence of mothers, where everyone is a daughter, where white-haired women ring with the laughter of old lady friends. I think about the space that danced under my broom when I swept Wren’s hut. The space that charged when I cleaned out Wren’s tub, the threading of needles, the storage of leaves in jars.

I learned how to make time stand still, sometimes so very still that I had to wait to hear it move it again before I did.

My breathing is shallow, quick, my skin crawling all around my body. I’m itchy, haunted by an uncontrollable urge to scratch at massive, expanding mosquito bites all over my hands. I can feel something writhing and moving beneath my skin, bursting through blisters on my fingers, licking the pus that oozes and then slurping it up, the noise like a toilet flushing or pigs frolicking in a slough.

“Oh Aphelion, my dear girl, you are a magnet, and my heart is as true to you as steel.” I can almost hear these slick, slimy things scream, trapped underneath my fingernails thrashing about, fighting to live. “I shall make my absence as brief as possible. Not a day, not an hour, not a minute, shall I waste either in going or returning. I’ve brought the Summoner of Time, do you love me?”

My legs feel numb, useless beneath me. My head is swimming, eyesight blurred by senses that can no longer be trusted to guide me. I’m a host to worms that gnaw and eat, growing, filling my insides until I cough and a wad of larvae falls out of my mouth coated in thick phlegm. I don’t know how I’m still standing, but I can hear Hiroyuki talking. No, not really talking. These aren’t proper words. They are nonsense sounds, word salad.

Don’t you want to be loved?

I look down, my hands like desolate cliffs, gnarled old trees chewed all the way around the trunk left with large, irregularly spaced and rough-edged holes. I am being eaten away, devoured by all these writhing, wriggling bodies tumbling out of my fingers, fat black furry worms falling to my feet. Most of them are dead, but a lot of them aren’t and they’re trying to crawl away. My heel slips on them, and my stomach sees the blood before my brain and my lunch catches in the back of my throat, my eyes unblinking, my brain reeling from lack of oxygen. Bright spots of light flash in front of my vision, blotting out the horror.

I fall forward into Hiroyuki’s back, who turns with lightning reflexes and catches me in his arms before we collide, my eyes flickering open again. “Kohana, are you feeling well?” he asks, studying me with care. His eyes are like a lion’s, gorgeous. Impossible gold, molten gold. “You look pale, dear.” He gently lowers his lids before tossing an imperious, threatening glance over his shoulder. His is the glance of a tiger with a full belly, all bright with hate and hostility and happiness. “Did something happen in my absence?”

I take Hiroyuki in one breath. Ripe earth, sky-wind, honeysweet depth and darkness, a graveyard enveloped in a veil of soft, dull mist. When he looks at me the world is bathed in a caramel hue under the still-setting sun. His eyes are keen, narrow, the afterglow of an angel’s halo.

It’s hard to look away from him, but I have to. He’s too bright.

Hiroyuki is light upon light.

He is more brilliant than the light emanating from the sun, many times more powerful and radiant than the sun itself, yet I am not blind nor burned by him. What would a perfect rose look like? There would be no deficiency to it. No petals drooping. No lack of fragrance. No browning anywhere. How do we evaluate the perfection of a rose, or anything else? It is the absence of anything lacking. That is how perfect Hiroyuki is. He transcends the glory, beauty, and majesty of anything on Earth.

“Last night was a trial. Schooldays can be cruel.” The tones of his voice are milky, vanilla-tinged. Listening to him reminds me of cracking open a lightly-caramelized crème brûlée. “You can rest here on the Aphelion for a while, if you’d like. I would prefer it if you did, in fact. You will need a physical examination, a psychiatric evaluation–”

A blood-pumping panic pushes a sound out of my mouth: “No.” The sudden terror is so severe I choke on shallow breaths, my heart banging against my ribcage like a drummer hitting a thousand beats per minute. My hearing sharpens, my pupils dilate to let in more light, my muscles tense themselves for battle. “I’m fine.” There is fog everywhere. Fog in my throat, fog in my eyes. The fog is ghost-grey, melancholy. It crawls over me, a mirage that moves gossamer-fragile snagging and snaring every crag and tree until it forms the silhouette of a man I can hardly call my father. “I’m fine.” Behind him is an entrance up a steep, broad flight of stairs that leads to a church isolated and abandoned. “I’m fine.” The fog is almost smothering now. “There is nothing wrong with me.”

My father is cold, vaguely threatening, a nocturnal whisper, an autumn rain. Hiroyuki is invisible in the silvery vapour, this blight so dense I can barely see my hands. I feel cut off from the world, my thinking fuzzy, sleepwalking through a life that doesn’t belong to me anymore. I stare into my father’s ghastly half-formed face, at his grey hair, at his proud, bent shoulders. My father, kinglike, a victim of his own inflated image using aggression to mask his vulnerability, only happy when he is locked in a power struggle he knows he can win. Even here he has the upperhand.

I straighten my back, cover any evidence of internal weakness with the posture of an apex predator like I was taught. Looking at my father is like trying to maintain eye-contact with a shark.

“I made sure you were fed everyday, had a place to lay your head, and gave you the clothes on your back. Why wouldn’t you be fine? I raised a perfectly good child. There is nothing wrong with you.” I am tired of steeling myself against the world, fighting back the only way I know how. Why is it so important to be so strong and powerful? What will happen if I’m not? Can I even imagine that? “If you are not strong, you are weak. It’s good to be strong and bad to be weak. It’s that simple, Kohana.” My father batters me with words on a whim, expecting total obedience; I fall apart when I lose my grip on everything around me.

The fog gathers itself into a swirling funnel, a spiral of subzero light raging around me until it disperses without warning. I still can’t escape the echo of my father, the sound of scathing insults, disapproval so dense it thickens the air.

“Allow me to change the subject,” Hiroyuki says, brushing some of his hair behind an ear. “I know Death well. Like a lover. Like an old childhood friend. I know the exact number of ants you have crushed beneath your feet on your way to my ship. I feel their infinitesimal deaths in my smallest finger.” “The Shadow you fought was an aspect of Death, an extension of itself that functions something like a foot soldier. You will encounter more ere long. Your planet is being overrun with Shadows, conquered by Death. Unfortunately, the two of us are not enough to stop the imminent invasion.”

“And everyone else?” I arch a brow, having already anticipated Hiroyuki’s speech about how we have no choice but to retreat. “You can’t possibly expect me to leave trillions of people behind. I won’t. You can’t ask me to do that. I’d rather die. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself; what use would I be then?”

“I would ask much and more from you.” It sounds like a choice but it isn’t. Stay in the tower. Bite the apple. Climb the beanstalk. Hiroyuki is no longer a man but a terrible dragon guarding its horde. I am his treasure, his king’s ransom golder than gold. “You are a Summoner, a cosmic weapon created by Celestial Beings who hail from the planet Spectra. Celestial Beings are direct descendants from the All Creator, the omnipotent God. Your connection with the All Creator is far more potent than my own, as the All Creator is bonded to your DNA, and omnipotence serges through every atom that makes you who you are. Celestial Beings consider you the All Creator incarnate, along with 7 others whose Almighty powers manifest differently from your own.”That very power thrums through my fingers like lightning sparking across a grey-blighted sky. My magic reacts to his words. “You are the Summoner of Time. Doubtless it is that you have already known this, or suspected your relationship with the abstract concept.”

My lips part into a smug little grin. What kind of student would I have been if I had not discovered I exist in my own timeline under Wren’s tutelage?

I am omnitemporal. My time has no intrinsic metric, whereas Hiroyuki’s time is physical. My time is completely distinct from Hiroyuki’s temporal sequence and cannot be captured by either temporality or timelessness. Me being the ‘Summoner of Time’ makes sense given Hiroyuki’s explanation, not that I ever doubted Wren’s wisdom for a second. “Are you trying to get me to admit I knew how to use magic the entire time?” I answer with some indignant pride. I frown, my cheeks puffing slightly. “Because of course I did. I didn’t want you to see it.”

I didn’t want to share my magic.

I didn’t want to tell him my secret.

“When death steals into our midst, its breath flutters through the black crepe of mourning, nips at funeral wreaths and crucifixes, and ripples through the gladiola. There is a cemetery, a corpse, a sadness here. Profound loss is your perfume, a devastatingly beautiful and melancholic floral.” He smiles, and it is as full of pity as a well overflowing with rain. I stare, stricken by it, my eyes full of tears. They spring fresh from my eyes, roll down my trembling face. Hiroyuki is cold, cold and cruel. He knows. He knows. He knows. “Sometimes I look at you, Kohana, and see a ghost crying and sobbing into the night. In some sense I have failed. The Umbrakinetic has gotten to you first, and I cannot apologize for my incompetence.”

He drops down on one knee like a knight showing obedience to a king, his long, thick voluminous hair tumbling down his back and shoulders, spreading out against the floor in graceful rivets. His heart bows before me in profound reverence, his gesture a sign of adoration, of divine acknowledgement. The sheer force of his adulation makes me tremble.

“You must pry yourself from Death, Kohana.” Tongue-tied, tongue-numb, grief pounds over me in waves that leave me gasping. “It will be difficult, and I will continue to ask difficult things from you. I will not be kind. I ask that you forgive me now, so you do not bother yourself with such frivolities later.” I am so heartsick, so empty that I don’t think the world has ever been anything but dead. There’s never been any colour here, and if there has, I’m the only one who cannot see it.

When I finally speak my voice is small and soft, almost a whisper. “What do you know about being empty?” I ask, spitting the last word at him. “What right do you have, to talk to me about grief!” My anger burns black, tears falling like blows onto the cold floor. “God made the universe? He couldn’t even make a joke! How am I supposed to live like this? The world broke my heart, and I’m supposed to believe you can mend it!” Like the universe I consist of empty space, completely dark, unimaginably cold, and I’m supposed to save it? I can’t help but gnash my teeth at the thought. “Wren isn’t the person you think she is. You don’t know her like I do. If she wanted to kill me, she would have done it a long time ago.”

“Transmission incoming.”

The voice of Hiroyuki’s ship interrupts our conversion and he rises to his feet with the sultry haze of late August, the grandeur of a Greek god. “Put us through, Aphelion.”

“Hey ‘Yuki. Taking your sweet time coming home, huh?” A man with skin the color of aged brandy stretches across a holographic screen in front of us, his eyebrows arched in a noble, bemused way over smoke-lashed eyes. His hair is voluminous, flipped to one side to exaggerate that volume. “What’s the matter, not in a rush to see me in the flesh?” His curls run wild, bouncing with every turn of his head, shaped softly against his jawline for a flattering look. His voice is like honey mead and dark as molasses. “Thought you would’ve been here already. A shame, guess I’ll have to cancel our date.” He is astonishingly beautiful, his strikingly-fine features only second to the infallible charm and grace he carries himself with. He purses his rich, two-toned lips when he sees me, curious as kittens. “Oh? Whose lost little kid?”

“Kid?” The word falls out of my mouth like broken glass, a clatter of incredulous syllables crashing down onto the floor. My upper lip twitches into a sneer. The glare I toss in this man’s direction is strong enough to break his neck in five different places. “Lost? I’m almost 16-years-old, and I know exactly where I am.”

The man chuckles. It’s a mellow, tobacco-velvet chuckle. “Right. Whose almost-16-year-old kid?”

“Come out of that screen and say that to my face–!”

“–This is the Summoner of Time, D’ivoire.” Hiroyuki interrupts me and I shoot him a pointed, sidelong glance. His smile catches me off guard: the dimples in his cheeks, his dazzling teeth, the way his ear-to-ear grin turns his eyes into luminous crescent moons. I’ve never seen him so genuinely happy before. Whoever this man is, he has Hiroyuki absolutely enamoured. He has completely forgotten I’m in this room in spite of his words.

“She’s adorable.”

“You take that back! I am not adorable!”

“–Or what? What are you going to do, rot my teeth with how cute you are? When you get to Spectra, we’ll see if you’re still swinging the same threats then.”

Hiroyuki smiles up into D’ivoire’s beaming face. “No demure little cabbage, this girl. No paltry, well-behaved carbon dot. No follower of worldly orders. Quite the contrary.”

I open my mouth to say something, but then old growth trees tower around me in every direction. Ravenous pitcher plants and magnolias cover spongy green moss, the sound of roaring rivers and gentle streams drowning out the cries of orangutans and Sumatran tigers. To my left there is a flowerbed of Peruvian lilies edged by pink begonias, a dug out stump lovingly filled with sword-shaped leaves contrasting the softness and brightness of bellflowers and butter yellow sundrops. With Hiroyuki at my back, we find ourselves in the middle of a dense rainforest. Hidden in a tuft of creaking wood on the forest floor, a choir of frogs greet us with booming croaks.

“What kind of nonsense have you gotten yourself into this time, girl?” Wren’s voice is spine-tingling, all guttural thunder and sharp scalpel points.

All-present, all-pervasive, Wren suffocates me with the liminality of her being, both here and not here with one hand around my throat and the other clutching the sinews of my heart with the grip of a python. “How the planet trembled when you threw your tantrum! I could feel your sorrow all the way over here, so potent it was that it shook several realms, too many dimensions to count.” I denied her love. I can’t imagine she is anything but cross with me. “If you would have but stayed with me this wouldn’t have happened. I always knew you were an ungrateful, selfish welp.” She pauses, smiling as demurely as a witch can manage. It is not a gentle smile or a kind one. “But your baba forgives you. You brought your Advisor to me wrapped up so pretty like a gourmet chocolate!” Wren puts one hand on her waist, the other picking at her teeth searching for leftover pieces of meat. “It’s been a while since I’ve eaten a Celestial Being. He’ll make a filling meal, honey-and-soy lacquered ribs! Imagine him all brown and sticky.”

My throat feels like everything hard and dry, everything rock and dust. “He’s not for you,” I croak. The words feel like soot in my mouth.

“You don’t apologize, you don’t bring me gifts, am I meant to wrestle him from you? Are you defending food, Kohana?”

Hiroyuki isn’t threatened, rather, he still keeps his usual calm and amiability about himself. Here I am, trapped between two obscenely-powerful people with no conceivable way out. If I say the wrong thing Wren could explode, if Wren makes the wrong move Hiroyuki will no doubt hurt her. It’ll be a bloodbath if I wait any longer, but I dare not speak another word.

Wren’s smile is distant, as though she thought of something amusing that happened a hundred years ago. “A bit too pretty to be an Advisor, hmm?” She laughs, a sound like glass breaking, or ice shattering over a running river. “What does a pretty thing like you know about maggoty woods and gunfire? Kohana is always in full movement. Always poised on the pinnacle of a drama, a problem, a conflict. In her sleep she twitches and rolls, even falls off the bed, sleeps half sitting up. She is a sword swallower. A fire eater. The storms of doubt, the quick cloudings of hypersensitivity, the bursts of laughter. The curtains continue to move after she leaves. Everything bears the brunt of her strength. Even now, the earth beneath her is being violently marshaled, challenged, forced to bloom.”

“Knowing a great deal about the Summoner of Time does not and will not make you remotely qualified for my position as her Advisor,” Hiroyuki says in a tender, condescending voice, yet his serenity echoes in every spoken word and graceful movement. “How much you know about Kohana means nothing to me,” he adds, salting her wounds like a Multi-Michelin starred chef, seasoning her displeasure and making a meal of it. ”Did you think to intimidate me, knowing who and what I am?”

A storm gathers in Wren’s eyes. The lightning strikes. She’s all wind and hail and thunder, a powerful downdraft hurling itself towards my Advisor. “You are nothing but a military dog. A mutt. A hound! Broken down to the atoms and then built back up again to be the Commander’s perfect little pet. A boot-licker. Leashed!” Each word carries the force of a tropical cyclone. Each word barbed, poison-tipped. Her pupils shrink down to slits, every pore of her shaking with hatred, gushing with it. “You have no autonomy of your own. You would crawl across the cosmos on broken hands and knees if it meant pleasing that bald cyclops. At least I am not beholden to my masters. I know exactly who I am, Hiroyuki D’Accardi.”

Emotionally Hiroyuki is even-keeled and steady. He doesn’t even blink. “Do you now? I cannot imagine you have been honest with Kohana in any way, shape or form. My apologies.”

“Oh, Hiroyuki. Our story is rooted deep down in my unconscious mind. I have heard this story a hundred times. You think you are living, and do not realize that you are being lived. And they are indignant if the storyteller doesn’t tell it in the right way. It’s just the same when you try to tell fairy tales to children. They are furious if you vary them. They interrupt you at once and say, ‘No, it is like that.’ They say you must tell it again. They want to hear it literally the same way. It is like a ritual.” Wren stops to look at me. This time her smile is kind. “I am the third, the inevitable, the terrible, because all that is manifested in time has an end as well as a beginning. The first is Clotho, the spinner. The second, Lachesis, the drawer of lots. When we next meet, I will not be kind to you, Kohana.” Then her anger dissolves in lamentations: “Oh those poor Summoners, the poor people you Spectrians take from me. I won’t let you have this one, I won’t.” Wren begins to weep. When Hiroyuki walks towards her he walks into her very being with his soft gait. He puts his arms around her, consoles her. “Kohana, do not abandon me. If you abandon me, I am lost.”

“You’re dying.” Hiroyuki gives the word ‘dying’ a mellowness that makes the world glow, that gives a warmer colour to the windows of Wren’s hut, to the fences of skulls, to the wise old trees

whose trunks are bunched and cracked as old womens’ spines. The sun seeps in. Everything is the colour of a tropical afternoon, a magnificent day of dawn and dayspring. Wren looks straight ahead, through and beyond the dark, eyes fixed, immobile like glass seeing her whole life flash in front of her. Then comes Hiroyuki’s laughter, creamy, comforting. “Face-to-face, at grips with your body. Eyes open upon Death. The noble thing to do is to be of comfort. I will not let you go alone, Wren.”

Hiroyuki ends his phrases in a hum, as if he puts his foot on the pedal of his voice and creates an echo. In this way none of his phrases end abruptly. His steps drag a little, like a lazy devil enjoying the earth. “She is of the dead.” Hiroyuki sighs gently upon me, as though blowing out a candle. “She is dead, already dead, and this death will be final.”

I feel my throat tighten, something gnawing at my stomach. A screech rips through my body, monstrous and alien, full of inhuman, bottomless grief. A screech so violent birds fall dead from their boughs and my ears ache to burst. My heart is nothing but a long, whirling scream.

I shriek owl-shrill into the ground, my eyes spilling with tears. Screaming and sobbing and clawing through the dirt till my fingernails snap off and my mouth fills with snot. “Hiroyuki,” I whisper, my throat squeezing out his name like blood from a wound. “Save her. Please. Save Wren.”

“Quiet, girl,” Wren snaps, crooking an eyebrow. My face burns with shame. I scratch my cheek, stare off into the distance. Anything to avoid her reprimanding gaze. “When have you ever known me to need saving?” And then she smiles, a real and tender smile, as from a grown wolf to a welp. “I thought your eyes were blue,” she says to Hiroyuki, tilting her head as if appreciating a work of art, “but I see now they are a strange and beautiful amber-gold. You glide when you walk.” Again Wren’s eyes clamp on me, and her lips part into a smug little grin. She puts a withered hand on my head, stroking my hair with a gentleness practiced on dozens of children. My breath catches, knots like yarn in my throat. “He is a fine Advisor.”

Above me: the sky eating both of their voices.

Above me: the stars eating all other sounds.

I clasp my hands over my ears, screaming to drown it out. I start to tremble–as though the somber tones of their voices achieved a terrible resonance in my bones–and I shake into rubble.

I stare into the darkness, feeling its substance, its limbs, its weight until a woman begins to materialize into view. Her wide black hat shadows her face like an eclipse, an index finger stretched against the length of an elegantly-crafted smoke pipe. What she exhales is an endless, wine-dark sea whose depths are strewn with stars and horned leviathans and secrets kept by unguessable fathoms. Molten gold glitters from the endless arch of void-black, newborn constellations spilling their milky light and bathing me in sequin-silver, polar-white. There is a breathing, pulsing familiarity in this smoke, like stepping into the cold witching hour, like hearing a story that can only be told when the night is blurred by a boozy cacao fog and the singing of cognac-filled cicadas.

She tilts her head and a smile comes out of her marrow, raw and livid, a stare like a lion flicking its tail. She has a cruel mouth, her lips full, slaughterhouse red. Her cheeks are high, aristocratic, blushing a little. “Hello, kitty cat.”

Her eyes are the same flickering color as mine, leaping and sparking. Pulsating irises, cat-slit pupils whose points are fiercer than teeth. She’s very tall, legs like a pilgrimage, and very, very beautiful, warm as the summer’s sun. I look at her and think of a lion that lazes and lies, ironic, considering there are huge cats lounging on every surface of this place, tigers and lynxes and panthers and leopards. The woman purrs contentedly when she sees me, a cheetah nuzzling its head with a soft thump against her shoulder, greeting me with a long, rough lick across its chops. I supposed I’ve always been a beast, curled and snarling in the dark.

My voice is still and quick all at once, the expression on my face like stars suddenly appearing out of the yawning void. “….Kohana?” There it is, my name, blacker than the bottom of a well. My name so far from the sun that my heart is a backlit monstrosity, a heart-shaped, light-swallowing hole.

She answers, a familiar, sweet chuckle from the abyss before drawing deeply on her pipe, a cloud of galaxy dust giving rise to knots that begin to collapse under their own gravitational attraction, hot cores gathering interstellar gas accompanying planetary systems. She tosses her voluminous mane of romantic curls, and they bounce about her face in an ombré of plum violet and electric purple.

I’m afraid of her, I lay in abject adoration of her, as of God or an archangel. I stand stock-still in terror, knowing she will continue to exist even when the universe ceases to exist. Tears rush from my eyes like a spring from a rock wall, streaming down my cheeks. “Please,” I weep to the woman, my face swollen with tears, “what does this mean? Who am I? What am I meant to be? I don’t feel human anymore. What am I supposed to do with all this loss?”

Her powerful shoulders square, hips flared provocatively, thighs in a feline crouch. The galaxies around us circle like cirrus clouds, reflecting brilliantly against her skinny-fit, vinyl pants. They’re high-rise, snug beneath a tight-laced corset. Around her neck, a ruff of fur bristles forbiddingly. She grins like a jungle cat who has just made a meal of a particularly fat vole, and I stare at her as vulnerable as a lamb beneath a wolf’s teeth. “Come here, girl.”

I obey, how could I not? Her beauty is annihilating, lightning-edged, full of power and surety. I want to please her very much—but more, I want her to like me, to love me even, to tell me about how much we are alike.

She laughs again, a long rippling laugh full of notes, almost a song. I was put on this earth to make her smile. I can’t stop wanting to make her smile, any more than you can stop walking on two legs or start breathing with your liver instead of your lungs. It takes a while, but I wrench my eyes away from her loveliness. My head cools and clears and smooths itself out.

“Hiroyuki’s many things,” she begins, her face souring with annoyance at the thought of our dear Advisor, “most of them awful, but he isn’t a liar. You are the Summoner of Time. Your purpose in life is to pursue Death, to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking. Being the Summoner of Time is an unforgiving call to perfection. A direct confrontation with meaning, identity, and the end. It is your birthright.”

Her beast of a cat licks her cheek fondly while my attention sharpens to a point.

I draw close to her, furious as a child throwing a tantrum. “I can’t even have my life but you want my death, too?” Anger crawls from my stomach and into my lungs. There is sorrow there as well, howling through my windpipe, clawing at my diaphragm. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair! It’s not fair! You want me to be a martyr, a blood-bound sacrifice for other people…” Slowly, the older version of myself puts her arms around me and I weep bitterly into her bosom. It all comes tumbling out of me, my old, sad wounds, my incalculable loss. With a choked sob I pry myself away, my anger reigniting. I don’t know what to call this feeling in my chest, so bitter and sour. “I’m supposed to save everyone, everyone, but who saves me?” my heart whispers, “who is my hero?”

“Think about how many doctors are dead after furrowing their brows over the sick,” she says gently, “about how many heroes are celebrated after killing thousands. One man after burying another has been laid out dead, and another buries him. All ephemeral, gone long ago.” The kindness in her voice is replaced by something hard and old and strong, her eyes two swords drawn in my direction. “I suppose generals are always foolish, no matter how dazzling the host they command. Already you are a tired-out, battle-fatigued soldier, but this is only the beginning. You have to be your own hero. So caught in your own hero-worship that you have no idea how to use your own inimitable gifts.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, don’t you talk to me like I’m just a child–!”

She slaps me hard across the face, my lip splitting like a twig. I spit blood on the ground, staring at her like a dazed animal. Her cat yawns so wide its eyes bulge and its white teeth show sharp. It licks its dark muzzle.

“Who do you think you’re talking to like that?” Her voice is utterly cold, a foul wind through the feathers of a dead crow. “Surely not I, surely not the superior version of yourself.” I take my wounded lip into my mouth, the metallic tang of blood heavy on my tongue. The gnash is deep, my flesh torn clean in two by the blow. Ripping a bit of fabric from my sleeve, I apply pressure to my mouth to staunch the bleeding. “Poor thing. You don’t have to glare at me like that. Someone was bound to slap some sense into you eventually and be less merciful about it, I’d imagine.”

I open my mouth to protest but think better of it, biting back spite and scathing insults. Instead I arch a brow and meet her fury with a question: “Is that what this is? We’re here now just because you wanted to hurt me?”

She looks at me, a little shamefaced, a little defiant. She’s so mischievous, so physical with her emotions that I envision a tail whipping back and forth behind her. Her smile returns, more narrow, more sly than before. “Watch.”

In an instant we’re a hair’s breadth away from each other, unbearably close. I gasp as she takes my hands in hers, the space between our skin shivering, crackling, the spacetime continuum ripping itself apart. Existence itself cannot handle the strain of our touch, rippling in ear-splitting agony until I tear my hand away from hers. My ears are bleeding. “You are 15-years-old. I stand before you, nearly forty, an older version of you. You may not remember, but this is not the first time you have talked to an alternate version of yourself. I suppose you could say me standing before you confirms your own immortality.”

“So you’re just going to ignore the fact that I’m bleeding because you can’t be normal for five seconds?”

“Normal?” she laughs. “We’ve never been normal. You are what Stellaria call a ‘Universe Shaper.’ They are some of the oldest and most powerful beings in the multiverse, and as such, they’re probably the only ones who could begin to classify your abilities.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you can manipulate the very reality around you however you see fit. You’re obviously way more powerful than the Stellaria. Powerful enough to even, say, pluck your adult self from the space-time continuum, a faster, stronger you to train you, to protect you.” I purse my lips as best I can at her, my hands on my hips. She runs one hand luxuriously along a leopard’s spine, amused with my incredulousness. It licks its paw nonchalantly. “You’re also what the Stellaria call a ‘Multiverse Constant.’ That means you are so powerful you are essentially a lynchpin for the multiverse, one whose power ties it all together, and that it cannot exist without. In other words, you may not have been born until a little over a decade ago, but you’ve always been a part of the multiverse.”

“So that’s it, then? You’re supposed to save me?”

“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be here.” She crosses her arms across her chest, loudly indignant. I can’t seem to get a read on her. “I had business to attend to, and now Alpha is going to wonder where I am. Vanished, right in front of him. Poof, gone. Just like that, thanks to you.” Her leopard’s pink tongue flops out between sharp teeth. “Though if you wish to stay here forever I don’t mind. Cats are good at waiting, but.” A feline smile stretches across her face in overly-satisfied triumph. I scoff. “If you want to leave, if you want to live, think of everything bad that has ever happened to you.”

And why would I not have listened?

Why would I not sprint towards the exit?

Something ancient unravels my body, ripping a scream from the very bottom of my being that sounds like shoulders breaking. I choke, I moan, every pore of me thrumming, open, shaking. Thousands upon thousands of gleaming black crows fly from my mouth, soaring up and out like an exhalation of dark angels heralding the Apocalypse, their wings wild and half musical as the sunlight catches their feathers, glowing deep violet against the pale sky.

A whirlpool of dead branches snap and lash around my body. I’ve become a black hole absorbing all light and life, drowning all in a sea of evil, devouring myself in my own darkness.

“Do you sense that monstrous guilt, Advisor?” Wren asks Hiroyuki, her smile wide and wicked, the cruelness of victory on her cracked, full lips. “Have you ever seen an epilogue as a prologue? Hah! Of course not. I was certain our little koshka would die under the strain of this. No matter.” She snorts at having caught my Advisor off guard, giving herself a congratulating slap against her belly. “What a feat that would have been, taking your precious Summoner of Time right from under your nose! Even you must admit I’m good.”

“It is impressive, to be sure,” Hiroyuki answers with his carefully patient voice, raised up a register and sweetened, cultivated to calm the elderly, like talking to an irascible child. “However, I need not rely on Kohana’s resilience when I know you still care deeply for the girl.”

“You know,” Wren says thoughtfully, “perhaps I spoke too soon. After all, the Shadow has yet to emerge.”

The Earth battles against me, against the waves of destruction exploding from my body, whirling, churning, devouring. The bitter reek of sticky blood and lingering decay clogs my nostrils, heavy, sickening. It happens all at once, the soot black hand forcing its way through my eye socket like a flower in full bloom thirstily reaching for the sun.

I screech with pain, burning, searing, each new heartbeat something to fight against, to stay conscious through. “This Shadow is my magnum opus,” Wren continues, “I’ve named it Ananke, after my mother. No images, no words can easily represent her because, in some sense, she’s unthinkable! Ananke is the void I’ve mined from your precious Summoner, the dark logic out of which the universe is spun. She is irrefutable, indefinable otherness.”

Death, the absolute form of necessity, frees itself from my body. This Shadow is born of all my dread and despair and desperation. With a hand pressed taut against my empty, gushing eye-socket, I stare into the inescapable, the inevitable, the beyond my comprehension.

“Men are not built to be gods,” comes Wren’s thunderous voice, walking towards the monstrosity she’s unleashed upon Earth with her arms thrown open. “They are not meant to take in the whole world. They are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses. Gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it, know what it is all about and for. But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster, then he is in trouble! Man cannot get rid of his nature even if he throws it away, even if he tries to throw it to God.”

A cold shudder runs through me as the Shadow, several metres tall, grabs Wren with a colossal hand. My head reels, pulpy chunks of flesh and viscous goop seeping into my good eye, clouding my vision.

“Fate is three women,” Wren begins, her voice rich and wise like aged cognac swilled by philosopher-kings. I stare at her through growing tears. I don’t understand. I will never understand. “The first made young so that she has the courage to be cruel, a rose of no man’s land, a rotten, faded flower. One old but older still, the spicy scent of fallen leaves, the bitter scent of damp tree branches evocative of a different time, of days gone by. The oldest: the colour grey, stimulation in grey, liaisons in grey and everything in a grey abstract scope–an ever-lingering ghost. When they are at their work they become dogs, wolves, hounds of death, hounds of joy.” Wren laughs, her smile broad and beautiful, her dark eyelids rippling slightly like the surface of a pond under the moonlight. Her face breaks into wrinkles, her cheeks wet with tears. “They take the strands of life in their jaws and sometimes they are careful with their jagged teeth, and sometimes they are not. Kohana Outtaike, my dear-as-diamonds, my forever-treasure-trove, our story is one of Necessity, and all round it the wolves of fate run, and run, and run. Nothing can occur without them, but they take no sides.”

I’m half swooning with horror as the Shadow vomits sticky black from its wide, grinning mouths, greeting me with a shrill laugh. I cling to Hiroyuki, whimpering hysterically, sobbing out an incoherent stream of words. When I call out for Wren the Shadow groans, a shock of syllables sinking its claws into Earth’s crust. When the Shadow finally releases Wren, she collapses to the ground in an inert mass of mangled flesh wrung out like a wet cloth.

My screams dissolve into peals of hysterical laughter.