Thousands of pins of radiation popped the dust and floating microbiota of the air, bursting them into a last flash of light. Each flash begat thousands more, and God drifted forward in a haze of a billion brief stars. The world could not bear its glory, and offered all it could in incendiary hallelujahs, a picosecond auto-de-fe. If God noticed, they gave no sign.

Mazelton stood before the Stone God. Stood beneath them, because even if God graced the world with the trodding of its feet, it was still some seven meters tall. And God did not choose to dirty it’s feet with the red dust of the mortal world. It moved where it willed, without effort, without seeming to acknowledge minor matters like gravity, or inertia, or hope. It was. It is. It always would be. The black sun at its core would outlast the yellow star this pale blue dot orbited. You, the collection of matter that happened to assemble itself before it, were what, exactly? What separates you from any other heap of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, iron- what separates you from the whole rest of the indifferent universe?

Mazelton didn’t have to be told. God was aware of the black sun at his core. God… he didn’t know what God wanted. He walked out in front of Duane, walking the parapet’s edge. He was perfectly safe, so long as he didn’t fall. God fixed itself above the river, hovering over some large rock planted in the middle of the Roaring River. The vaguely femminine form simply waited, abolishing the world around it.

Mazelton drew in the heat in the cores around him. He pulled on Duane, and the forest, the fish, the buried heat in the earth and the thin scattering of heat coming down from the sky. He pulled it all in, and fed the black sun within him. He pulled in every scrap of the heat of the world that he could reach, and when he bottled it up, he threw it out again.

Thousands of trees, of fish, of cubic meters of air and earth, all that accumulated radiation burned down from his heart, through his thin arms and into the cores in his hands. Mazelton raised his hands before God in defiance.

Mazelton threw every scrap of heat in him at God, in a furious scream of outrage. I am here! I exist! I have worth! I AM!

The heat sank into the black sun of God with no more of a ripple than was left by an exploding fungal spore. So what? What is all that? That noise? The stars are far noisier. That heat? It’s less than nothing. Your existence… is that something worth noticing amongst the billion trillion specks of life floating through the universe?

God cast a line of heat out towards Mazelton, like a lazy arc of the corona of the sun, reaching out to touch something. Mazelton caught it with his own core, spinning the heat through him without letting it touch him. He caught it like an emigrant catching their wagon as it broke its lines and rushed down the slope at them. It burned him alive. All those little glass lines running through him seemed to melt under the impossible heat of God’s intent.

It wasn’t even an attack. Mazelton was vaguely aware of that, as he was aware of screaming and the way his knees were locked- refusing to let him collapse to the ground. This was just God confirming that what was before it was something worth its noticing. That this pathetic little mimic of its own core possessed some of the original’s charm.

Then something else descended from God. Something between a shadow and an echo, and a smell you can’t place but remember vividly.

Mazelton was back, before his awakening. His father had beaten him for dropping his food at the dinner table and embarrassing him, and his mother had beaten him for crying when Father beat him. He had run away, run and run and run and run and run deep into the Clan House, up into the rafters of a room nobody bothered to remember. He had curled up in a little ball there, and cried and cried without making a sound. He stayed up there in the dark, and watched the little rats and things scurry around underneath him. They couldn’t see him, but he saw them. He was safely above them all.

He was kissing her. Him. He was kissing someone and he was scared. This was getting a little real. It was getting a little serious. And that wasn’t good. You didn’t get serious. You played. You had fun. But you didn’t get serious, because you didn’t belong to yourself, and neither did they. You had a Destiny. And so did they. And you would be told what it was when someone decided the time was right.

Mazelton was resting his head in Danae’s lap, smiling up at her as the apple blossoms shook their faint beauty down upon her. She smiled and stroked his hair, and picked up his heart and ate it like an apple. He never really knew her. He only knew his dreams of her. And she was so very real. Strong enough to grow an orchard out of barren, radioactive land. Strong enough to keep it going by herself. She didn’t need him, and never would. He was just a nice-to-have. Her eyes weren’t mocking, as she ate another bite. Just calm curiosity.

Mazelton stood dressed in furs and hides, his women either pregnant, carrying one of his children or both. Behind him was the tribe in their hundreds, strong caribou pulling their sleds as they crossed the frozen tundra. He let his eyes crinkle into a smile, the rest of his face still. There was a good camp just a week away. They would set their tents there until the spring migrations began. The ice wasn’t too deep there, and the fishing was very good. Lots of fatty seals too. No one would go hungry. No need to worry about the cold either. His tribe could always keep warm, no matter the weather.

He was huddled next to the engines, the ship drifting through the void. The dry mind that was supposed to be keeping everyone alive had abandoned ship six seconds before the first alarms went off. Hard cosmic rays shattered the electronics and the crew with equally casual force. Now it was just the engineering crew that was still alive. They had to twist the exotic matter in the engine’s core to create that reality distorting well that the ship would fall into. They had to persuade physics that the speed of light in this tiny pocket was, somehow, much much faster than it was in the rest of the universe. They had to aim that little rolling impossibility at a habitable, developed planet, make planetfall safely, and do it all without the bow wave of particles accelerated infinitely close to the speed of light slamming forward when they stopped and exterminating all life on the planet.

He was nowhere. He was nothing. There was nothing. Not even blackness, just a void of perception as his brain desperately tried to fill in some sort of stimuli and was denied. Even the white noise or visual static that his mind would usually invent was hushed. It didn’t have permission to be rowdy. Not here. What was he. Whas he? He? Where? Was what why? Where is the why, what? Like a base note plucked on the tendons of his heart he knew the question- What Was He?

He didn’t know. He ddidddnnnnnnntt know? He knewwwwalllthe people who he was supposed to be, andthoughtheknewwhohewantedtobecome but it was all so hard to say. What was he? He was all the moments of the universe leading up to him. He was every errant thought, holy architecture and sloppy makeout in a nightclub bathroom that led to his existence. Same as everything else. What was he, as his mind fractured and his body burned and GOD stared down at him, unraveling his existence? He scrabbled with bloody fingernails to pull together as much of himself as he could, and in the obliterating void, he took one firm step forward.

He felt the wind shake the leaves and heard them whisper truths not meant for his ear. He felt the breath of the Stone God upon him. The beaten child on the rafters looked up at him and smiled.

The billions and billions of shattered stars paid their attendance upon God, as it rose from the river and swept away, trailing a galaxy of ecstatic obliteration behind it.

Mazelton slowly came to. His little channels were fine. His core seemed a touch larger, a touch fuller, than he remembered. His lips were bleeding from where he bit them. Slowly, slowly, he remembered himself. He tried to turn and see if Duane got away safely and nearly broke his ankle. A new sandbar extended out into the Roaring River, stretching to the rock where God descended. The water smashed into the sintered sand and rock, bashing off it and roaring all the louder at the interference. Right in the middle of the sandbank, six inches deep in the melted stone and earth, was a single firm step.