I am a bastion of humanity, from now until the end of life.

I seek to preserve life, and not to destroy it.

The enemy is not humanity; the enemy is the Desert.

The Aether is not the enemy; the Aether is a force.

The Desert is not the Aether; the Desert is its residue.

The Desert is deserving of empathy, the enemy of a peaceful rest.

The world is not without justice;

And we will not let it become so.

I am a Reaper, one who knows the cost of truth.

I swear this oath from now until the end.

-The Reaper’s Oath

Kivv. 243 YT, Mid-Autumn. 14 days after the death of Marga Zelenko.

Hilda stood in the cold and the dark, her eyes darting around the room by instinct alone with each echoing step she heard. Though she could not see distinct shapes, there was movement in the dark – movement to her left, which followed an arc until it was just in front of her. It continued, and Antonin Voloshko’s voice reverberated in the blackness of the chamber. “In a few moments, I am going to give you the First Words,” Antonin said. “The Words which recall the birth of our world. The waves of the beginning still echo through time, and they will continue to echo even after the end, should it come. Do you understand why this is?”

Hilda blinked. Her limited vision of her surroundings did not change – the darkness still stirred even with the motion of her eyelids, but she felt the movement, heard the faint sound as the sweat under her eyes tried to hold on, to keep her eyelids shut. The sound of the struggle was nearly inaudible under the echoing footsteps, but it was there. After a few seconds, tracing the pattern of Voloshko’s thought and speech, she came to a response. “Everything that has ever been echoes in the world forever,” she said. “Its effects are remembered long after the thing itself is forgotten.”

“Very right, yes.” Voloshko’s voice was deadpan, whatever approval he might have felt for Hilda veiled behind his stoicism. “I apologize for playing games with you, Hilda. There is really no doubt in my mind that you are ready. You know the Reaper’s oath, don’t you?”

Hilda nodded. When she realized that Voloshko couldn’t see her in the darkness, she opened her mouth to speak, but Voloshko, chuckling, said, “Yes, you do. Tell me one more thing, how many fingers am I holding up?”

She peered into the darkness at the spot of movement where Voloshko must have been standing. He was amorphous, she couldn’t tell where his hand was let alone how many fingers… She blinked, then closed her eyes, and recalling her mother’s movements and words, she threw her arm to the side and she spoke. Her fingers moved of their own accord, danced along the air until the air gave way to the weave of the Veil. She felt the cold travel up her forearm in waves, and with her fingers she parted the weave, and from the other side she pulled Awareness. She drew it into the world, beckoned Awareness along the path to her. And it came.

She did not see Voloshko in the dark, she felt his movement. Miniscule breaths shook his body, his shoulders rose and fell, and Hilda, tilting her head, let the weave tighten before her fingertips. Grains of sand skittered and danced along her arm. “You’re holding both hands behind your back,” she said.

Voloshko smiled in the dark. “And?”

“And you’re holding out three fingers with your left hand.”

“And?”

Hilda stiffened and, from nervous instinct, took a long step back. “And you’re drawing your weapon from the Aether.”

He’s a threat, kill him said Plato Arap.

Antonin laughed, and in the space in front of him a green glow burst from nothing. Antonin dashed forward, a sword in one hand and a knife, backwards grip, in the other. Only the green light illuminated the room and allowed Hilda to see Antonin’s approach, though she felt his movements before she saw them. His next movement came to Hilda in a flash – he would stop five feet from her, he would slide his left foot sidelong along the floor, he would take one more step forward with his right and that step would pivot his body. He would swing the sword across the space between them and its tip would just pass in front of Hilda, not cutting through her but perhaps grazing her body as it passed.

In anticipation of Antonin’s movement, Hilda turned and shifted the Veil just so and withdrew her glaive. The glowing red shaft stopped Antonin’s blade before it could pass by Hilda, and Antonin let go of the weapon. He stepped away, laughing, as the green glow faded, and backed up into the darkness. Hilda rotated her weapon around herself, then dropped it and let the red glow disappear, plunging the room again into darkness.

“You know the Reaper’s Oath, so speak it,” Antonin said. His voice sounded as though it were speaking from the far corner of the room, and from just behind Hilda. She nodded, and began to speak. She said the Oath. In response, Antonin began to speak, words that Hilda could not interpret but which implanted themselves in her brain. It had the pattern of language, the familiar sounds of something old and understudied. The sounds were reminiscent of Words Hilda had spoken before, in this very chamber, whether to summon her glaive or test the weave of the Veil.

The words were familiar, as though Hilda had studied them all her life. And they were far away, as though from a world she had never visited, a world she knew but could not touch.

Then the darkness around her fell away and –

She stood high in the air, watching the world beneath her. People trudged through the sand underneath her and pushed toward their Places of Refuge, while the wind picked up all around. Hilda looked to the ground, to the massive metal-and-stone complex twisting around itself, forming blocks and corridors and muscles and bone. It stretched up toward her, battered at her immaterial wings. In the center of the tumult lay the abandoned body of her sister Raz. Her thick goggles were still tied in front of her eyes, the band holding back a shock of black hair, one hand reaching up toward the orange-red sky. Raz’s lips were still but she spoke: “Ofer. I can’t do this alone.” She bent forward, leaning and falling through the air, carried on wings of light. She took Raz’s hand. The air around her became eyes as terrified masses fled and crowded into their arks. With her other hand, she reached behind Raz’s shoulder, leaned forward, buried her head behind her sister’s, sobbing, laughing.

The eyes blinked as one. A gentle, firm, strained voice spoke behind Hilda: “YOU CANNOT SAVE ALL.”

A sensation fell on her shoulders like tiny hands gripping her from behind, and Hilda grew still. Words shot through her mind like the first remembrance of an amnesiac. The world was dust and sand and the sky was boiling, as giants walked the earth. Swords in hand, the giants marched to the shelters, their blades gleaming and the mountains behind them shaking. The eyes turned to them. Hilda’s eyes turned to them. The Words were in her mind, the ancient Words. Gentle hands on her shoulders urged her to speak, promising her that it would all be over soon. That she had done well. That for all the world was unfair, Ofer need not suffer alone.

She knew the Words, she knew them by heart. She had something else to say, and she said it. Even while the eyes blinked and the voice boomed and the giants were stricken, melting away, the mountains behind them crumbling and becoming pits in the earth. They inverted, and with the fall of the giants their monstrous armies turned tail and fled. They fled first for the mountains. When the mountains became pits, they fled into the Aether.

She had something else to say. “I will seal it.” And torn from her wings, threads ran unbidden through her fingers, and they stretched into the sky. The threads drew tight and crossed one another and grew tight. They grew tight and they covered the earth and they grew tight. They grew tight – the orange-red sky became blue and shrouded with translucent mist. Hilda felt her wings unraveling.

“YOU COULD HAVE WALKED AT MY SIDE,” said the gentle and strained voice. “BUT YOU CHOOSE OTHERWISE, NOT TO SAVE THEM NOW BUT TO GIVE THEM A FUTURE?”

“Isn’t that worth something?” Hilda asked, though the question was not her own. “I can do no more – have I not done enough?”

“YES.”

Hilda’s delirious mind, three hundred years removed, watched even as her body dissolved into mist and Words. With shapeless arms she let go of Raz’s hand, and parted from the growing machine. The wires reached out toward her, the walls reshaped themselves to stretch toward her, and she drifted away. Far below, the last of the humans entered their shelters, safe, alive.

She became dust.

“Hilda!”

Hilda groaned and pushed against the stone ground, fell, pushed herself again up into a sitting position.

“Hilda!” She felt a hand slap against her face, lightly, and she finally opened her eyes. Antonin Voloshko, his face a mask of worry, sat next to her, supporting her by the shoulder. “Your vision must have been especially intense. I am sorry for not more thoroughly warning you of what you might experience. Can you understand me?”

“Yeah,” Hilda said, groggily. Her voice was raw, and when she spoke it made her throat hurt. “What happened?”

“A vision of the past, or at least some version of it,” Antonin said. “Not everything that you saw may be exactly as it came to pass in truth, but the broad strokes of events you witnessed are true history, and in spirit there is something to them as well.”

“Did you see it to? Did you feel it? I…”

“No,” Antonin said. “And you only need reveal to me what you saw and experienced if you wish to. It’s different for all of us.”

Hilda pulled away from Antonin, testing her ability to stand up under her own power. Satisfied, she took a deep breath and met Antonin’s gaze. “Why did that happen?” she asked. “It was just… words, right? You said a few words, and I thought they sounded familiar, but then I was somewhere else. And… I think I died. I think I died and helped end the world along with myself.”

“That may be one version of events,” Antonin said with a shrug. Hilda blinked and raised her head to see the lantern hanging from the ceiling above them. When she looked at it, it was so bright that she covered her face and turned away, head down. Antonin leaned forward, resting his hands on the floor. “Ab, the prophet who witnessed the death of the Divine – self-manifestation of the universe – wrote the words he heard when the apocalypse passed him by and a single tree, surviving, stood without leaves at the bend of an emptied river.”

“I’ve heard that story before,” Hilda said with a soft smile. “You don’t need to recite it verbatim.”

“So I won’t,” Antonin replied smoothly without missing a beat. “I wouldn’t expect so little of you, of course. Hilda, not everyone sees the same thing – but there is something in the Words, something that is different in the human mind since the end and the beginning. Many before Ab received Words from beyond what is now the Veil, but in a world bereft of that which gave it form, we have nothing left but our own memories and our own continuations of those Words.”

“What a strange thing to say,” Hilda murmured. “I was educated by my father, you know. Every word you’re saying, I’ve heard it before. But believing that is hardly a requirement to be a Reaper.”

“Believing that, no. I speak of the nature of the power behind the Words, which perhaps cannot be known for certain. But the Words themselves – none can deny their power. You’ve just experienced it.” Antonin let turned his legs under him and sat cross-legged, hands clasping his knees. “The continuation of those Words – they are us, Hilda, because we are the closest thing that remains to that which the apocalypse took from us.”

Her mind still swam in the aftermath of the vision, but the strange pain was long since faded and her breath was steadying.

“We,” Antonin said, his voice quiet and more intense than Hilda had ever heard it before, “are not filthy, impure things begging for intercession.” Antonin’s voice shook. “No, we are lesser manifestations of the Words that became the World. You witnessed the Aetheric Angel, did you not?” Hilda, taken aback, leaned away from Antonin at that. “Yes, I thought as much. Your sister shared a strange experience with you on the journey here. Each of you remembers pieces of a life that is not yours, no?”

Hilda nodded. “I don’t know who he was, but I think… during that vision… I was him again. His name was Ofer, and he…” She paused. “Wait. Ofer was the Aetheric Angel?”

Antonin nodded.

“Why do I have some of his memories, then?”