Time passes in a single direction. Not even traveling backward can stop its flow. Luna tried and it didn’t work. She wasn’t the first, nor would she be the last, to the next attempter’s short-lived horror because it wouldn’t go well for him. In fact, it would go terribly wrong and no one would even remember it thanks to the intervention of Ink Pen.

What Ink Pen did when alone, and was he ever truly with anyone? Even Luna?, was not for mortals to know and the gods did not want to know. Not even her. And Death didn’t care.

This unending cycle of conclusions and beginnings, Ink Pen didn’t know when it first began, it seemed to have sprung suddenly and all at once he Was. As long as there Were, he would Be, too because everything had to end and Death alone wasn’t enough to wipe the slate clean and start over.

There was no rest, not ever. Not that he was seeking it. It was his single goal to finish what was started.

And then, to do it again.

Luna.

Many times ago she told him this was a punishment, like Sisyphus pushing the stone up a hill for it to roll back down and make him try again.

No matter how many eons Ink Pen devoured, no matter how many timelines he disrupted, another would begin.

If it was punishment then there was no escaping it. Maybe he’d forgotten something along the way, another life. If he had, he didn’t remember it enough to realize he’d forgotten and, in that case, it was the same as having never happened.

In the silence of space, the emptiness, he could feel them all. Desperately wishing for the end of the corruption. The wages of sin is Death. Yet every time he gave them what they wanted, every time Luna finally relented, they came back and did it all again. There was no escape. They wanted to live, to die, to try again and again though they failed every time.

Or, perhaps, it was Luna who wanted them to try. Was it her dissatisfaction that brought them back? Knitting together the molecules of each living thing. Going before the court to argue for another go, while Death opposed.

And Ink Pen was nothing.

A blot that they tried to ignore.

Except Luna.

If he was Sisyphus, then was she the stone? Or was it the other way around?

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Was she the mountain?

Death, the beating rays of the sun, or the dust beneath his feet. A pebble that caused him to slip and lose his grip.

Ink Pen was a mass of dark matter. Deeper than the ocean. Blacker than the darkest minds. The Void. Pulsating, pushing, reaching out to take what he could get. One thing at a time until Luna gave up and tried the experiment once more.

When she would have another name and another face.

What she was doing now, Ink Pen didn’t know. The sense of it was lost to him, but the ways of the gods were not his ways and though Luna was the one he felt the most affinity for, they were far from on good terms. She resented him and everything he inevitably did.

What she really hated was the insufferable creation that refused to do what was right and good. His existence allowed her to try again later and it angered her that she required it. Even now, when she didn’t remember, she held him back.

This time was different, though. He wasn’t trying so hard to fight her, to pull in and disappear the whole of the cosmos. Rather, he followed in a shadow that she couldn’t see, watching what she did. Such a small life she lived now and he didn’t understand why, but then he never did know why she persisted.

This action was no more comprehensible than the rest, yet it drew him near because it was different.

Somehow, she did not remember.

Neither did Death.

Hidden, the both of them, and unaware of each other. One a cheater and the other a counterfeit. What lives would they live until they reached a point of no return, when the memories flowed back, and what then?

That other place. Somewhere Ink Pen had never been. A place of nothing, though it looked like something. It wasn’t real and it was suffocating. Its existence was beyond the bounds of possibility, but it was there.

He wouldn’t go back.

And what of that man? The Snowman. He was like Luna except not. They were the same and so different in the same instant. They could not exist at once in any place but that place which was not a place.

Luna was often gone from her body, her tag along with her. The small thing hung, swayed in the breeze, and he devoured an unsuspecting tiny adventurer; a littler human than Luna. The dog returned home alone as though nothing happened.

Ink Pen did not care for the animals. They were lacking.

He watched her as she found out her birthday was in August, near the end of the month. As she received gifts from strangers who knew far more about her than she did them. He saw her days run together as they did for all people. All normal people.

But Luna was not normal or people. There was no one like her.

In that time, he made a decision.

Ink Pen would find a way to be more than a pen. He would be like Luna, like Death. He would have a body. He would play mortal. Perhaps he would forget himself as they did, though he did not know how so maybe he wouldn’t go that far.

Regardless, he would walk alongside them as they found themselves once more. As they lived and came as close to dying as they could. As they realized who they were and what they’d done and that none of it mattered in the slightest because it was all heading for the same ending as every other time Luna tried to keep things alive.

She was Life, Itself, after all, and Ink Pen would expect nothing less of her whether she remembered her role on the long road of eternity or not.