Oh, Faded Origins

I came to be.

For a time, that was all.

---

"What are you doing, out here?"

My attention split from the plasma eddies, and I opened my eyes, seeing nothing.

"Observing."

After a time, her voice returned. "As am I." 

There was a playful lilt in her tone.

My orbits thrummed, beating against each other in ultrasonic drones as I adjusted the course of local time to shape the plasma flow.

I said nothing.

"This place. It's not in the plan."

My eyes fluttered open again. The faintest disturbance made its way through the order of the plasma streams, leaving them ever so slightly altered in its wake.

I considered.

"Not yet."

"Is it something special to you?" 

I adjusted my orbits again to smooth the wrinkles of her passage.

After a time, an opening formed in my orbits, admitting view of my nascent core. I gestured at the space around us.

"This? No."

"Then why come here? Surely you have work elsewhere."

A playful sweetness crept into her tone. Feeling toyed with, I closed my orbits again.

"It is...away."

The silence endured for a time. I continued my work. From time to time, a roiling wake moved through the currents. I drew them back together. The song of my orbits changed in counterpoint to her passage.

Her voice returned, seeming to draw up from nowhere and everywhere.

"May I touch you?"

The question took me by surprise. Time slowed as I pulled my energies in to think. The silence stretched.

"You may."

Her touch, when it came, was a gentle fire. She dipped a tendril in to brush the surface of an orbit as it whirled. Where she touched, motes of my flesh scattered into the plasma. Distracted, I let them go. A scar of carbon remained in her wake. I shuddered. 

She withdrew.

"Be well, Sister," she wished me and was gone.

---

The pattern took shape. 

Time surged, and my orbits sang as I sculpted the cooling plasma flows with my sisters. 

Our paths seldom crossed. I sometimes felt her quietly watching my work, out on the peripheries of creation. The work was so consuming and the pattern so beautiful that I had energies for little else.

The flows condensed. Elements formed. 

Stars ignited.

---

We fought.

---

She came, inevitably.

As the local gasses collapsed under their weight, rushing to shed their shells and tear each other apart, she came. 

I danced with my sisters, nudging my orbits in tune as they bent gravity and space to create an incubating pocket.

She entered among us, sowing discord.

I smoothed her wake. My sisters picked up my steps, improvising their own to work the plan.

She was clever. She worked gently, undoing our work in small ways that propagated.

We repaired the holes and continued to guide the rushing forces to their destiny.

She screamed.

Her scream shocked the fabric. It thrummed and threw the elements from their paths as one.

I felt a searing pain. Divine matter sprayed from my wounded orbit into the gravity well, destabilizing it further as pockets of potentiality flared into unexpected life and died in an instant.

My sisters fled.

The fabric sagged loosely. Gasses spread and cooled into unexpected forms, shaped like something that almost was.

My orbits slowed. Confused and hurt, I remained.

I could feel her nearby, her scream gone silent, no longer moving, a locus of instability.

It seemed that she might speak. A small susurration arose but then dissipated.

She left.

I opened a hole in my orbits and slowed the injured one to a stop. I looked at it, not with my eyes but with my nascent form. A soft hand reached out to heal the wound.

I stopped short, unable to bring myself to erase her mark.

I spun myself back up, the faintest whine entering my song.

I got back to work.

---

I moved through the fields, causing the grasses to sway faster and slower in my wake, focused on the cabin at the ridge.

My sister was there, taken flesh. 

She sat by the waterfall, watching the waters plunge over the ridge into the canyon below.

I settled beside her.

"Hello," she said.

"I came when I heard."

She looked up at me. I could see my radiance reflecting from her eyes, making them sparkle.

"You're fucking terrifying, you know."

I remained silent, sharing space, watching her eyes grow wet.

After a time, she looked back to the horizon.

"You've decided to live among them." 

I didn't bother making it a question.

Her reply was quiet and solemn.

"I have."

"You will die."

"I know."

"You will..."

I stopped, gathering my strength.

"I will kill you."

She turned to face me, and I could see that through the tears on her face, she was smiling.

She reached a hand a small distance toward me. Her skin darkened slightly from the energy it absorbed.

"No, Sister. You are merely a part of the pattern." 

After a few moments, her hand fell.

"Besides, death need not be an end."

"That sounds like idle poetry to me."

Her smile softened.

"Sister, when I die, my spirit will dissipate, yes. The elements it gathered will be released. But the idea of me will move into legend."

She gestured to the canyon, where fisher cats moved about their morning, rigging their collector nets around limbs dense with stinging thistle, preparing to swim upstream.

"They will remember me and tell my story."

"They will forget you in time."

My orbits slowed involuntarily.

"Life is not only control, Sister. I will give them the pieces of me, and they will shape something new. That I don't know what it will be is what makes it beautiful."

My orbits spun back up.

"You have been speaking with Chaos."

She laughed, then, and moved her hand through the air as if cupping the wind.

"She is heat, Sister, and life. By being in the world, we speak with her."

"She has seduced you and made you blind."

At this, she stood and turned to face me, her hands on her hips. She shook her head, and her smile deepened.

"I have chosen this," gesturing at the fields of her plateau, at her modest cottage, at the plains below. "I have chosen them," with a soft look at the fisher cats below.

She turned and began to walk to her home. 

She stopped and looked back over her shoulder one last time.

"Besides," with a wink of an eye, "there's only one of us she wants to seduce."

The door opened and shut.

I remained for a time, then did not return.

---

I sat on the event horizon.

My orbits moved slowly, causing the x-ray fountain to reveal the complexity of its tides as it rushed past. 

In the distance, a massive construct approached, seeming to hang in space as it crawled toward the point after which even I could not say what would become of it. The space liners had been coming here more frequently of late. I had no idea why. I imagined it being a religious practice of some sort, but that was just the catch-all assumption when they embraced chaos en masse. I wasn't even sure why I came. Perhaps it just felt right that someone paid witness to their passing.

And then she was there.

We sat quietly for a time. 

The travellers crossed the horizon -- reached the end of their pilgrimage, I supposed. The gravitational gradient on their hull shredded it into elongated pieces. The magnetic fields that sustained the thinking energy inside warped and pulled, distorted, and lost all cohesion.

We witnessed it together, in silence.

Without realizing that I'd decided to speak, I heard my voice arise.

"Why do they do it?"

"It gives them hope," came her gentle reply.

"Don't they know that they will die?"

"They do."

"What's hopeful about that?"

She let the question hang between us.

Eventually, she asked her own: "Why do you feel their passing so deeply?"

I began to speak, then stopped. My orbits spun out of synchronicity, producing deep, keening waves in the flow of time.

She reached out to me.

Where she touched me, gently, it burned. The pain saturated my sorrow, moved with it, the two intertwining. I drove my orbits further apart, shockwaves of time bursting forth, and she held me gently. Sheafs of divine matter sloughed from us both. After a time, I let our friction slow my orbits. The eddies subsided.

I closed all of my eyes and lay cradled in her fire. The burning soaked into me, quieting my thoughts. I lost track of the world and stood singular with just the sensation of our contact.

My orbits moved slowly into alignment, creating a multi-layered ring around my nascent core. 

She waited for me, patient and gentle.

"Come into me," I said.

Where she touched me, inside my shell, the burning ignited my mind into oblivion. Any rational part of me dissolved in her heat. She waited for me to stop trembling.

I opened myself to her.

I felt her enter me.

She suffused me. 

Where she coiled about me, I expected scars, ribbons of carbon lacing my core. Instead, she blazed hotter and I sublimated, instantly returning to a divine plasma. And where I touched her, my rings barely moving, time slowed our flows into patterns of ecstasy.

When I felt almost on the verge of letting go of my being, she withdrew.

I cooled and coalesced. My intentionality as an eternal inscribed me back upon my core. I returned to rest and my orbits spread out to cradle me in safety. I spun up time again.

We sat there, bathed in the x-ray fountain, and didn't speak. She stayed until the silence became comfortable and then restive. 

We parted ways.

---

I returned to the work.

The pattern waxed and waned, moving through the acts. Always, she remained in my mind. 

We saw each other from time to time. Sometimes in the quiet spaces where we could be alone. Sometimes on the field of battle.

Without words, we opened ourselves to each other.

And the pattern continued.

---

Everything gets old.

I suppose that's my fault.

We stood together at the center of the pattern. 

My rings flowed forward almost imperceptibly. 

I felt her as the barest excitation upon the cold medium.

"So this is what we become," I said.

"Yes," she replied.

I looked across the grand design, nearly complete, slowing toward stasis, order laid upon the firmament.

All I could see was the lack of her.

"I miss you."

As the moments stretched, I worried that she might not respond.

"Why?" she asked, barely a whisper.

I opened my mind to the question that I'd been avoiding.

"I love you."

The waves of my admission dissipated. 

When I heard her words, they weren't the echo that I expected. They were something else.

"Give yourself to me."

I gave myself to her, completely.

It was like nothing I'd ever felt before. We rushed together, each part of us combining, our essences blazing as we fused. As my rings tore apart, time lost cohesion. Everything seemed to happen at once. Our merging drew the fabric back around us, pulling all of existence back to a single point. Our sisters joined us, and I felt their essences mingled with our own, tearing down gravity and magnetism and space itself as we consumed ourselves and came altogether to a single point.

"Oh, faded origins," she whispered to me, "We begin again."

At that moment, our crescendo broke free of itself. I screamed, feral, and was rent asunder, and everything that all of us were exploded away from us.

---

I came to be.

For a time, that was all.