A pale fog misted the realm, casting his vision in a silvery film. Great trees towered around, carved from marble rather than wood. Dark breccia veins laced each of the pillar-like trees, weaving in and out of the white marble in a delicate interplay of fine lines and knotted clumps which came together in a pattern not unlike that of true bark.

His hazy eyes settled upon each hungrily. Each tree was a bastion of precious material, raw and unshaped, just waiting to be hewn into something beautiful! Every thought came slow and burdensome, fogged just like his surroundings. Thinking was like trying to catch smoke between his fingers.

Kosta was alone amidst the forest of marble and clouds of mist.

He stumbled forward through the stone trees, clawing at the fog in search of purchase, but Kosta’s confusion only grew as the mist thickened around him. Gossamer strands thickened and coalesced to become half-solid. All he could do was follow the silver-lined path beneath his feet.

Even the road was obscured by the haze, but somehow Kosta knew that it was the only sure footing to be found in this place.

The moon hung suspended above this stone forest. An olive iris was set into its pale surface, glaring down unblinkingly. Always judging. Always picking him apart to seek out some fault or imperfection. His shoulders tensed beneath its stern gaze and he hung his head while he hurried along the path.

His sluggish thoughts struggled to make sense of this place as echoes came from the fog. Old conversations. Old fights. Old creations.

He was here to do… something. What was it? It seemed so nebulous now, so far away.

It taunted him.

If only Clymere was here! He needed her. She was focused. Intense. Always looking to the next thing she could accomplish. Kosta wouldn’t mind a bit of light teasing about keeping his head in the clouds if it meant he could rediscover his purpose here. He’d even welcome her dumb jokes now.

Even as his forlorn longing waxed, his eyes trained onto something in the distance. A flicker of amber through the veil of mist. Light? Perhaps an illusion…

No, there it was again!

He quickened his pace and brushed past several of the great marble trees. Smooth branches covered in dark, knotted veins sprouted out from the pillars and spread into a vast canopy of interlocked pillars filigreed with golden leaves and the most delicate emerald edges. Ruby drops hung forever from the leaves’ tips, drenching the gold like dew.

Beautiful.

Kosta stared up, utterly enraptured, as his legs carried him ever onward through the haze and wavering forest.

All he knew was that he must press on to the light. He must. There was something about it that he needed. It beckoned him like a moth to flame, even more pressing than the forest of marble.

Thick sheets of mist pressed down on him like a suffocating blanket. Kosta parted them with the bronze knife that appeared suddenly in his hand and they vanished -

He almost stumbled as a plinth appeared in his path. It was white as the marble trees all around, but its surface wasn’t smooth. Instead it was faceted like a cut gemstone. The glaring moon’s light was caught and refracted by the surface and scattered into a thousand different directions.

His sandals had no issue gripping the frictionless surface. Kosta glided across it as he set his eyes upon a small pedestal upraised on the plinth.

The mist finally peeled back and ceased strangling this land.

With it went the marble trees and the plants wrought of precious things.

A pang of disappointment went through him, only to be immediately silenced as he blinked and found himself surrounded by a void. But light shimmered within, distant dots like gems sparkled, and he stared into it for an infinity.

Kosta stood within the cosmos, surrounded by great belts of stars which shone white as milk as they stretched above, glittering with the radiance of a billion worlds. Pale stardust hung suspended in the air, dancing and shimmering to the tune of some imperceptible conductor. Before his eye bloomed new stars that waxed, waned, waxed again, and burst apart in blinding flashes of stellar light.

Specks of vividly hued cosmic gas strewn about by the exploding stars floated beyond the stardust, collecting into vast nebulae that shifted and twisted and writhed into form after familiar form: the Archer, Evangeline’s Girdle, the Champion, Griffin’s Eyes, the Entwined, the Gorgon, and a hundred other constellations.

Some were natural. Others were commissioned by the Aretans upon their ascent. Countless others were new arrangements, strange and unknown. He recognized some familiar constellations, but they were… odd, as if he spied them now from a different angle.

He was lost in the beauty of the cosmos for an age. How tiny and petty he was in comparison to the infinity above! Time would pass, Kosta would die, and his name would crumble into dust while the moon and stars turned unbothered in the heavens.

An old memory flitted through his mind. Half-forgotten voices echoed in the cosmos.

“Sorry, Kosta! I didn’t mean to!”

A temple of tiny branches interlocked to form walls and archways and ceilings, some still marked by tiny viridescent leaves, leveled in an instant. Days of work annihilated. Clymere apologized again, clumsy fingers mangling the tumbled branches even further as she tried to pick them up.

He stared. It had been so pretty, and it was knocked over just like that.

Hours to painstakingly build it. Hours to find that precise, unique arrangement that had pleased him.

A second for Clymere to come running around the corner and crush it beneath her feet.

Why was it so much harder to make than it was to destroy?

Suddenly, one of Kosta’s hands reached out like a claw to snatch the glaring moon from the heavens and claim its argent light for himself. Something hungry and desperate surged inside of him, something terribly greedy that wished for nothing other than to suck the aether and light and stars into his grip so that he could drink them dry.

What wonders could be crafted from their beauty?

Another age passed as Kosta watched the heavens pass him by. New constellations drifted into being. Formations of nebulae flowed and rippled into new configurations. Starlight shone ever brighter, pulsating with the light of supernovae. Cosmic rivers twisted and turned.

It was gorgeous, but Kosta wanted more. The heavens were distant. He needed something new. He demanded novelty. He craved creation.

And around Kosta the motes of stardust solidified. The world itself came to exist in a state of flux.

Mountains rose and fell. Forests blossomed. Songbirds trilled in the air even as great winds whistled past him. Storms roared. The earth quaked, then settled. Volcanoes rumbled and buried the old in the new.

As countless seasons turned by in an instant, the vague impression of a human solidified from the nebulae, staring down at him like a giant. Every line of its figure was perfect. Every muscle defined to stand out beautifully in a complex interplay. Layer after layer of stardust coalesced to shape innards, wrought bones, sculpted tissue. Even the viscera was beautiful in its endless complexity, arranged just so to accomplish its intended function.

Life was the ultimate masterwork, Kosta realized.

Something hollowed out his heart.

Kosta turned away from the impossible perfection of the figure, staggered to an unseen table, and crashed down onto a bench that had not been there seconds before. He stared off into the distant cosmic canvas.

The skies were so beautiful. What could he craft to rival them? What work could challenge the heavens or test the valley ridges? What could he shape to surpass the delicate configuration of life that persisted amongst a billion worlds?

He glared down at the stone table. It was littered with his most recent works: misshapen figurines of legendary figures and those dear to him, an uneven wooden staff with a clumsy head of quartz tied to it by straps of leather, and a dozen other projects. They’d seemed impressive at the time. They’d felt as if he were moving in the right direction.

Imperfect.

Disgust rose in him as their flaws glared at him like the unblinking moon. Imprecise angles. Edges either too sharp or too round. Minute flaws in the anatomy that left his brain itching and his hands aching to reshape them.

Ugly!

He swept them off in a clatter of wood, shattering clay, and fractured stone.

Kosta didn’t care.

Frenzied hands plunged into the table and wrenched a lump of soft gray clay from its heart. He kneaded the mass with his experienced touch. It was of acceptable quality. His hands tested it, then began to mold it into shape after shape, always seeking perfection.

Beasts. Men. Roots. Mountains. Cliffs. Home. Palaces.

The clay molded to each vision, guided by his hands, yet every one of his efforts seemed fruitless. Cracks in the clay sneered at him. Subtle deformations mocked him. Imperfection after imperfection!

Kosta’s scattered thoughts trended towards complete and utter frustration, intensified by the ephemeral nature of this hazy place. This cosmic workshop lent a great depth to his fleeting whims. Each one manifested in the clay, sculpted into reality by his touch.

He scowled down at his latest creation - his latest failure - and readied to tear it apart and start anew. Just as he dug his fingers into the grey clay, Kosta felt the bench shift beneath the enormous weight of something unseen as it sat down next to him.

Kosta’s red-rimmed eyes darted to his right.

Who knew what he had expected to see? A giant of a man like Headsman Linus, or perhaps even a lesser cyclops. The tremor and groan of the stone bench suggested as much.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Instead, Kosta was greeted by a smiling boy. Unremarkable features were illuminated beneath the starlight and the vivid rainbow hues of the nebulae and supernovae blasting in the cosmic sky. His face was always cast in brilliant teal, fiery magenta, a pale blue, or even stark white as the heavens bathed them in light, never in shadow.

At a glance, the boy might have been any of Kosta’s fellow Dytifrouráns. Yet something seemed achingly familiar about him. Perhaps it was his muddy brown hair, or his olive skin, or the nose just as crooked as his white smile, but Kosta couldn’t help but feel as if he’d seen him before. An anonymous face in the agora, perhaps.

“May I?”

Kosta finally nodded, offering the boy permission to remain. Frustration was no excuse for poor manners. His mother had beaten that lesson into him often enough that it may as well have been etched into his hide.

“And what is it that you dream of?” The stranger’s whisper was soft, caring, and compelling.

Kosta stirred as his original questions echoed in his mind. Something shifted in the ephemeral landscape as his focus solidified. The stars seemed a little brighter.

This was why he had ventured here. This was his purpose.

Yet it still felt beyond him. The question gnawed at Kosta’s mind. He opened his mouth, an answer on his tongue, yet snapped his jaw shut. All he could do was return to the clay’s puzzle. His answers must be there somewhere.

The potential was there!

For a moment, he saw the clay as the thousand masterpieces that might be derived from this little lump. Visages of great heroes sculpted by his fingers! Imaginings of Khrusopolis, the City of Gold! Clymere, little crystal phosogen in hand and knife in the other, staring down a monster.

Kosta himself staring down futilely at a little lump of clay. Wouldn’t that be deliciously ironic?

All of that potential flickered by in an instant, but Kosta gnashed his teeth. He could see all of them!

He only lacked the ability to draw them out.

What did he dream of? What did he want? The boy’s question rang in Kosta’s ears as he stared blankly at the clay.

Kosta wanted to create! He wanted to take something raw and knead it into something new. He wanted to rail against entropy. He wanted to make permanent, beautiful things that would stand the test of time and be admired and appreciated the world over. He wanted perfection.

And most of all, Kosta wanted a world in which everyone could do the same. Unbound creation! What could be more beautiful than that?

The boy had asked him what he desired. Yet what could this stranger with all the confidence in the world want?

No words spilled from Kosta’s lips, but the boy watched him attack the clay with blatant curiosity. He made no move to intervene as Kosta met with failure after failure, but finally his white smile widened as the empyrean light seemed to flicker behind his eyes.

Some great puzzle had been pieced together.

The smiling stranger held his palm aloft. There was no surge of power. No crack of magic.

Yet milky stretches of stars flowed from the heavens to his palm. Shimmering cosmic dust swirled, condensed into vibrant multicolored threads, then hung like thread from a loom all about him. Each filament shone brilliantly, nearly painful to look at, and more and more solidified from the depths of the nebulae above with each passing second.

Countless trickles of gas and stars flowed like a great river down to the boy’s seat and hung suspended all around him until the boy was fully illuminated by the stellar forge.

The boy nodded with satisfaction, smiled, and motioned for Kosta to return to his petty crafts now that the show was done.

And so he did.

Kosta kneaded clay. The stranger kneaded the metallic cores of stars.

Kosta stretched and molded the material into limbs that seemed crude and inelegant to his eyes. The stranger plucked glowing thread after glowing thread from his makeshift loom, twisted it into shape, and tucked it perfectly within his own craft.

And so it went.

Kosta’s mundane workings came out flawed again and again. What a nightmare! Only one or two seemed decent enough, and those were placed off to the side to hone to perfection. What facsimile of that ideal was in Kosta’s reach, at any rate.

Whenever Kosta’s current lump was all used up, he simply plunged his fingers into the table and drew up more clay as needed. He knew that everything he could ever need was in there.

The boy worked in silence alongside him. Kosta ignored him for the most part. Comparison would only invite disappointment. And yet…

He dared a glance. The clay froze in his grip.

Between the stranger’s fingers rested the bones of a world: bare black stone, newly solidified from molten rock, was piled high above a silvery metal heart.

As Kosta watched, the boy picked over the glowing strands of stardust in his loom, plucked one seemingly at random, and wrapped it tightly around the rock. Great depressions formed a vast valley, which soon drowned as another thread, this one a deep blue, was fed into the ravine and became a stormy ocean that settled into a peaceful expanse.

The stranger worked with unerring precision. A sweep of a shimmering tool with a forked edge added texture to the otherwise smooth mass. Bevels refined the masterwork. Mountains climbed out of the rounded surface and ascended high. Some of the peaks bubbled with pinpricks of red light that emanated from their hearts, while others clustered in great ranges.

Thread after thread was fed into the creation. Each one invited drastic changes, though they grew subtler and more difficult to discern as time went on and the complexity of the piece increased at a staggering rate, every new thread inviting fresh, strange interactions with those that had been added earlier.

Features sharpened and blossomed beneath the boy’s skilled hand. At last, the stranger nodded to himself, seemingly satisfied, and reached for more of the incandescent filaments.

A dozen more threads were woven into the rest. Some were colorless, others bright as the sun, but all dissolved into a thin film that blanketed the world in a blue firmament. Kosta was soon lost in its depths.

Kosta’s hands twitched enviously, as if he wished nothing more than to reach out and claim the world for himself. It was beautiful. When he set his eyes upon what few creations he had deemed as salvageable, he was filled with frustration.

Imperfect!

The staff and figures clattered to the floor with the others.

Hours upon hours of crafting on this table, and still nothing worthwhile! Nothing perfect! Nothing even close to it! Creation after creation had been discarded and there was not a tangible thing to show for that effort. Kosta’s only satisfaction was that he was a dozen failures closer than he had been before.

Was that the nature of his path? Was Kosta to follow a road with no destination, each of its bricks a new failure taking him one step closer?

Kosta was so lost in his own reflections that he didn’t notice the smiling boy turn to face him. He was broken from his lamenting as an olive-skinned hand offered him a large, pale block of clay. Playful eyes, green like his own, challenged him.

Your turn, they seemed to say.

Kosta’s gaze flitted to the broken remains of his art on the floor. The stranger had watched him fail a hundred times and still offered him a chance? He hesitated, yet the opportunity to craft a world of his very own sang to him. His deepest wants resonated with the fantasy, and in that moment he understood this quiet boy and the satisfied pride he’d exhibited when his world had been finished.

Once upon a time, this had been the stranger’s dream as well.

So Kosta accepted the offering, spied the potential in the unshaped clay, and set to work.

His first attempts were clumsy.

It was easy enough to shape the sphere for the planet’s base, but refinement took time. Kosta etched valleys using a spare bit of wire that he found on the great table, pinched the clay’s surface to pucker up vast mountains that would later be smoothed with more refined tools, and otherwise let instinct guide him as he shaped his own little realm.

The hammer and chisel at his side allowed him to refine it further and further until it ventured closer to his vision of it. When the shell was marked by an intricate mix of deep grooves, flat plains, long networks of future waterways, and a hundred other details, Kosta leaned back to admire his creation.

Acceptable! There was some crude beauty to it, although it still screamed in that way that all unfinished projects did.

Kosta turned to the blazing chords nearest to him. The tapestry hung in a maelstrom of vivid colors and pulsating light. He hesitated for a moment, but at the stranger’s urging plucked one of the strands. The filament that Kosta had selected was a deep blue edged with silver tips that reminded him of the stories he’d heard of the Glass Sea and its frozen waters. It felt cool and peaceful to the touch.

He fed it to the world. Water pooled in the trenches and valleys to form lakes and rivers. Great storms swept across the surface, then settled in seconds to evaporate, condense into clouds, precipitate, and repeat the entire cycle again and again before his eyes.

The cycles had him spellbound, but Kosta knew that it was still incomplete.

He plucked another incandescent string, this one a pale strand of aether, and he mimicked the stranger’s efforts to form a light shell of gas around the chiseled clay. It coiled about like a blanket, dissolved, and became exactly what he desired.

Kosta admired his world for a moment. The blue pearl between his hands was almost alive! It was dynamic! It was beautiful!

But not perfect.

Kosta bit his lip as he assessed the world. His instincts demanded that he push harder, yet he couldn’t fight the little swell of satisfaction that bubbled in his breast.

The planet was small and crude and simple, but it was his.

He turned to the stranger, uncertain of how to proceed. Although the water and atmosphere of this little world swirled and mixed to form gorgeous motion and entrancing patterns, this could be so much more! Where were the rolling fields, the towering forests, and the endless beauty of life?

Without that his creation would forever be flawed. Life was the final spark necessary to ignite this little world that he had chiseled from nothing but a lump of clay. When life blossomed upon its surface, Kosta’s world would be complete.

Kosta examined the thousand strings hanging like a curtain around the table. Raging red, deep blue, stark white, a light-devouring void, sickly green, chloric yellow, a rainbow-hued chord… countless choices waited before him. But which filament could possibly carry life within it?

As Kosta’s hunt proved long and fruitless, the boy finally moved. He’d watched Kosta with all the endless patience of a statue. While Kosta fretted over the little tapestry in search of the perfect filament, the boy nodded, turned to his own lifeless world, and rubbed the pad of his thumb over a truly enormous mountain’s jagged peak to cut his own tanned flesh.

Golden ichor beaded into a single drop from the cut.

Kosta’s hand froze before he could pluck a mossy green strand. His hungry eyes settled upon the ichor. Gold…

That was what he needed.

The boy pressed his ichor-stained thumb to that same enormous mountain and life exploded beneath it. Forests blanketed the surface. Great beasts burst from the forests. They flew and swam and strode the earth, then differentiated into ten thousand varieties and then ten thousand more. Kosta clambered closer with a gaze like a starved wolf to spy upon the blossoming life.

Nothing he’d ever imagined could rival the sheer, simple beauty of a living, breathing world.

This. This is all he could ever want.

As Kosta stood entranced, the boy cracked a white smile. He pricked his thumb a second time upon the sky piercing mountain, watched as the molten gold welled up from the cut, and grasped Kosta’s hand between his own.

Golden ichor mixed with the grey clay staining Kosta’s hands, seeped into the pores of his skin, mingled with his blood—

Kosta jerked back as a river of information flowed into his mind. Raw data. Unfiltered information garnered from millions upon millions of lifetimes, then memories that entwined with the molten knowledge to give birth to instinct, familiarity, and comprehension. It was all guided by threads of gold.

It didn’t hurt, but it was overwhelming.

His eyes clamped shut to better manage the deluge. The golden threads permeated his core, stirring to life his sluggish magic, and Kosta felt truly awake for the first time in his life.

The cosmos wavered around them. Cracks sundered the table. Stars fell in streaks of light.

“Your dream is within reach,” the boy whispered, hands still clasped around Kosta’s. One eye was a void. The other was filled with stars. “Seek it in the waking world, should you accept the challenge. Craft your world of infinite possibility.”

It was possible…? Kosta stared hungrily at the stranger as little strands of memory woven into his own were plucked by one of the last golden filaments.

For a moment, Kosta fondly recalled a towering genius, a humble workshop, and a distilled drop of golden blood.

He gasped. “Someone’s done it before! Who?”

The boy winked.

Kosta remembered dark hair, eyes clever and bright like a crow’s, and a crooked smile.

He tried to make sense of it all, and the stranger released Kosta’s hands. They were stained with golden ichor.

Then he woke up.