The Perasma spat the group back into Fig City in a heaping mass of sweat and fear. They huddled for a time, fearfully, into the darkened hall underneath the City’s library. If there was any safety left in this world it was there - in the darkness. Now that Alpha was awake, Miss Togami knew that they had a decision to make - or Mul did. Reset the world again, in Alpha’s image, to live in the ever narrowing loop of the lives remaining to them, or end the story once and for all for a promise nothing.

“We should set up camp here for now,” Ms Togami said.

She knew Mul would need time to process what had just happened to his aunt. She sighed. The bodies were piling up and she was responsible for her fair share already. But Mul was catatonic and no nearer to even understanding the mental journey he needed to go on to land on the choice of cosmic annihilation.

Mul’s aunty, all he had in this world of almost nothing, was gone. Taken from him like the final breath of a drowning man. He was using every ounce of his will not to give in to the void. He felt unprepared for everything that was happening to him.

“So you’re saying we just let it happen. Trade life for death?” Milk asked.

No one spoke. Not even the smart-mouthed scorpion, who had the least to lose opened his mouth.

“I’m not an adult,” she continued. “So I get that there is something I may be missing in all of this, but how can you justify ending every life in the whole Universe?”

“This isn’t life. It’s life support,” Exa hissed.

“This is the only life I’ve ever had,” she said bluntly. “And I’m just supposed to what? Let you guys just take it from me? From us?”

Ms Togami barely had the intestinal fortitude to look Milk in her eyes. When put into human terms – individual terms – what they would be asking of everyone seemed monstrous.

“The only life. The only life,” Dibs imitated.

“Milk,” Exa whispered sibilantly. “I can tell you this isn’t your first life and it won’t be your last if we don’t change something. Your body is new but you’re soul is as old as the Universe and as tough as leather. The young things of the cosmos are no more.”

“Says your crazy beliefs. Show me the proof.” She looked at Ms Togami for some sort of sense. “Has this shadow monster poisoned you against life?”

“You’re a two-type aren’t you Milk? You’re self is split. You’re the leading edge of consciousness. You have lived twice as many lives as the rest. Your soul has been trapped here for an epoch and they have you thinking they’re doing you a favour.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Perhaps not intellectually - I agree Milk you don’t. But at the core of you, there’s a malaise that runs as black as the ink of the sky.”

“So if nothing matters, let’s stop hiding the truth from one another. End it if you can.”

“It will take more than truth alone,” Ms Togami said, looking at Mul and back at her. “It will take him to do it. The thread that pulls the tapestry to shreds.”

Milk snorted with anger. “Do any of you speak English? What in the Heavens are any of you on about half the time?”

“It only takes one thing to end it all. We need to get him to Her. That will be the end of things. She needs his say so.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“I can’t let you do this. I’ll stop him if I have to, if you try to poison his mind too.”

“You’re being naive dear. Let me show you something,” Exa said, his dark shadow jumping from Ms Togami’s shoulder to the floor.

“Anapolo, tora – Anapolo, tora.”

“Wait what are you doing - I don’t consent to this,” Milk shouted, pulling her wand from its sheath and pointing it at his darkness.

Exa stopped incanting and looked at her for a moment with what Milk could only assume were eyes.

“You can be naive, you can imagine we’re lying to you, or you can see for yourself. You can look back. This isn’t some cheap magical trick Milk,” he hissed annoyed. “This is ancient, dark stuff only accessible to the dead. Lucky for you, I just happen to be a very powerful, dead, Match.”

“I feel so fortunate,” she bit back.

“Say yes - and I will show you the mercy you would deny a Universe of souls being tormented forever.”

“Yes then. Dazzle me. But only if she holds my hand,” she said looking at Ms Togami. Milk’s other hand was clutching on to Mul’s garment. He did not seem to register the conversation or what was about to happen. Ms Togami took her hand.

“Anapolo, tora, Anapolo, tora,” the old Scorpion continued.

And then it happened.

In a flash of light, registered more in her mind than her eyes, the world of past-lives unfurled around her. What she saw was (at first) the disordered mess of a trillion lives tangled together like loose thread. Then it began to order itself into images, like countless decks of dropped cards as tall as Mount Vouno. Those cards began to shudder with life and fly about her mind’s-eye, showing her only what she could take. She was a man named Eric from the moon of Kalmeda. She was a woman named Tharada who tended cattle on the farm planet Alquerada. She was a neglected dog, starving in a nameless city. She was a cumulonimbus cloud over the Jovian fields of Ganymede. She was a single thought in the emergent consciousness of a great ape. An eternal cascade of images, thoughts and ideas flashed by like old movies in a hand cranked projector. In one movie, which was whip-quick and infinitely long, she was a single electron dancing on the head of a needle. In another, she was the falling leaf of a maple tree, caught in a spring breeze.

“Stop, it’s too much!” She screamed into the expanding Universe of the before.

She wanted to pull herself away from the onslaught, but couldn’t. It was too much and it was too fast - so much loss, so much pain and fear. There was in that second, an infinity of despair; but also an inundation of love, and kindness. As the images flicked by she began to consider her life with respect to these others. These were genuinely her experiences, she knew that much. The tattoo of her personhood was stamped onto each version of life or whatever it was. She was able somehow to inhabit them all now; so that the edges of the person she knew she was began to blur, and blend and collide with others she also knew to be her own.

As seconds became decades, and centuries millennia, the existences she had lived began to fill every corner of possible experience. Every thought had been had, and every experience experienced. The possible permutations of the infinite possibilities were ticked off a Grand List, one at a time, such that there was nothing left to see or do in life or death.

A deep sense of malaise washed towards her like the lapping waves in a gentle bay. But those waves began to rear back like frightened horses and crash against the shore of her mind with increasing intemperance. A damn seemed to break in her psyche and what came was not anguish, or pain, anger or despair. What came was the serenity of a job complete - an eternity of wins, and losses. A balancing of the scales; perfection through iteration.

“But,” she heard Exa’s voice piercing like hot steel into her eternity,“the balance is failing.”

She found herself face to face with Ms Togami.

“Welcome back honey,” Ms Togami said, brushing the hair from her sweaty brow.

“I.”

“Yes. You, me, Exa. It’s something we few who have seen the truth, have to bare. We, are the ones who know. So we are the ones who selfishly hold on to more life,” she said.

“If you just showed everyone this,” Milk struggled with what to call it.

“If you showed everyone this knowledge. Just let people know and you will get the outcome you want.”

“You mean the end of everything right? Let everyone, everywhere just see what you’ve seen? Even if we could, what would they do with this information?”

Milk couldn’t bring herself to say anything more. She clutched Mul’s hand, and despite his catatonia, he squeezed back.

“They would all choose to close the book.”

“It’s not a choice to be made. It’s a choice to be unmade.”

“Please - no riddles.”

“A choice we did not have, was made by creatures who were not supposed to make it. You’ve met the creatures. The same monsters who murdered Flim.”

“Flim’s dead?” She said, shouting now.

“Alpha has taken his body as prophesied. And Madam is on the way to do her part.”

“Why do they want eternity?”

“Because they’ve never known death. They’re scared. So scared they have convinced themselves they do it for us.”

“Why did they kill Flim?”

“Because they don’t value life in the same way we do. They only know they won’t give up existence.”