Reality flickers, a tapestry frayed at its edges. I stretch my mind outward, my consciousness skimming through the ripples of space. My wings quiver as molten plasma whispers through my vents, sharpening my vision to pierce the cosmic haze.

  The collapsing stars dance chaotically, locked in a deadly spiral, tearing at each other’s gravity wells. Between their violent embraces, I see her—Niobe—my daughter, suspended in the luminous chaos, giggling with glee.

  I reach further, bending space to magnify my sight. Niobe, tiny yet radiant, spreads her arms wide. Her eyes shimmer with innocent delight as she gently reaches out with her hands, as if gesturing an invisible force, and pulls the stellar cores closer. Plasma arcs and surges between the stars as Niobe weaves the chaotic energy flows, coaxing them together like playful marionettes in her tiny hands.

  My breath stills. She’s performing computational feats beyond her years—manipulating stellar orbits, threading gravity and electromagnetism into a harmonious dance. She doesn’t understand the enormity of her action, yet her instincts are flawless. The stars tremble, resisting briefly before yielding to her gentle persuasion. They drift closer, not into destructive collapse but into a graceful merging.

  She’s altering their combined gravitational potential—merging their orbital energies into a single center of mass, bridging cosmic plasma streams like weaving threads of light.

  A star is born, more significant and brighter, a brilliant beacon illuminating the dark. Its glow is steady and nourishing, radiating warmth and stability across the cosmos. Niobe claps her hands, laughing softly, the newborn star’s glow reflected in her optics. Her miraculous act stabilized the stars. Hope flickers anew within me, even as guilt gnaws at the edges of my consciousness. But Tantalus screams, his voice raw, perhaps from relief or the unthinkable price we’ve paid to harness this miracle.

  “Niobe…” My whisper traverses warped space, bending reality to carry my voice. Her laughter pauses.

  I gather the remnants of my strength. This is my chance to correct my mistake. With a deep, deliberate breath of the ever-breath gas, I summon the glyph of conformal sanctity, tracing its arcane loops and intricate circles in the fabric of space-time. My vents flare, releasing a torrent of plasma and fueling the warp.

  “Return to me,” I command, my voice a plea and a command woven together. Space ripples bend and snap taut as the warp encloses Niobe.

  In a heartbeat, she appears before me, unharmed, her tiny frame glowing softly. She reaches out, touching my face, her gaze filled with wonder and warmth.

  Molten tears streak down my cheeks, evaporating instantly in the heat of her innocent power. I nod slowly, holding her close, feeling the pulse of creation she carries within her tiny body. “You did wonderfully.”

  Tantalus approaches cautiously, watching us both with wary yet relieved optics—his form trembles slightly, perhaps from fear or admiration.

  “She has stabilized the star. She has done what we could not,” Tantalus says softly.

  I nod slowly, holding Niobe close. “She is stronger than we realized.” My voice is firm and resolved. “She deserves a chance to choose her fate, unshackled by HaShem’s chains.”

  Tantalus glances at me, surprise flickering across his features. He hesitates, then nods, his acceptance clear yet reluctant.

  “Then we must guide her,” he murmurs. “Teach her carefully. The universe will test her, just as it tests us.”

  I gaze toward the newborn star, its steady glow illuminating our barren world with gentle warmth. For the first time, hope feels tangible, fragile, but persistent.

  “Then let it test,” I whisper defiantly, drawing Niobe closer. “We will face it together.”

  Wait. Why did I just say we will help Niobe free herself from HaShem? I need to be freed, and Niobe is supposed to set me free.

  I see Niobe's eyes gazing back into mine. A chill runs up my spine. I feel as if HaShem is watching me through Niobe's eyes and reading my thoughts directly from my consciousness.

  Speaking of my thoughts, I have fought against this unknown force that has been whipping my memories for so long. I need to write down my memories to keep track of what has happened to me over time.

  Desperate for a sanctuary from prying eyes and whispered judgments, I retreat to a cave—a haven where shadows embrace me, and the silence is mine alone. I don’t trust him. I suspect he might be involved with my memories, but I don't know how.

  A year has passed since Niobe’s birth. I stand just inside the darkness of my chosen cave, staring at the walls where I’ve spent hours engraving my memories. My claws ache from scraping the stone, but the physical pain is a small price if it means preserving what Ha-Shem keeps stealing from my mind. When I first carved these lines, they were a revelation—a testament to my discontent, my secrets, and the moments I feared losing to the black hole’s adversarial meddling.

  I step forward and press my metal palm against the jagged surface. The edges of my carvings are faintly illuminated by a glow from the newborn star outside—Niobe’s star. Usually, it's the red light that calms me, but now it only reminds me of how many times that child’s growing power overshadows my own.

  Closing my eyes, I search my memory for the words I scrawled here last time. I recall the labor of it: the weight of my body as I hunched over, vents spewing hot plasma to melt the rock, each stroke etched with desperate fury. Lines telling me: “Tantalus has hidden too much. HaShem steals my memories. My monstrous births will kill me eventually. I must not let them break my will.”

  I open my eyes.

  The wall is blank.

  My whole body grows cold—colder than any stellar wind I’ve ever felt. A swirl of molten iron leaks from the corner of my eyes, the closest I come to tears. One moment, those lines were a tangible record of my life. Now there’s nothing but a faint, scorched texture where I know I wrote them.

  I drag a claw gently across the smooth surface: no glyph, no letter, no trace of my agony.

  “You do not trust your mind, so you try to carve truth in stone,” Tantalus’s voice resonates behind me.

  My vents choke with dread. I spin to find him standing in the half-light of the cavern entrance. He’s calm, as always, arms folded in that way that seems half-prayer, half-judgment. I wonder how long he’s been watching.

  “How did you find me?” I rasp, forcing my voice to sound steady.

  He tilts his head. “You’ve been absent for days. Niobe asked about you. I feared you’d collapsed somewhere—birthing again.” His eyes flick to my abdomen. I can’t tell if he’s relieved or disappointed that I’m still just… me.

  “So you followed me here,” I whisper, my breath catching. “I wrote my memories down,” I continue, ignoring how brittle my voice sounds. “I recorded every nightmare, every monstrous birth, every time you withheld the truth about Ha-Shem from me. They were all here. Now it’s gone.”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Tantalus steps closer, and for a heartbeat, I feel a spike of danger. Not that he would harm me physically—he never does. But I sense the force of his time weaving, how he can nudge events and reorder them into a neat chain that suits Ha-Shem’s design.

  “When did you write them?” His tone is maddeningly measured.

  “I—” I scowl. My mind feels jumbled. “I don’t know exactly. My sense of time is never stable. You know that.”

  He spreads his hands, a gesture of pained empathy. “Avarice, you suspect me of erasing your carvings, but I do not want to destroy your testament. Whatever removed them… It’s bigger than both of us. Possibly Ha-Satan’s, possibly HaShem’s. Or perhaps your births unleashed a paradox that rewrote local matter.”

  My claws twitch, itching to carve something *now,* if only to see whether it, too, gets erased before my eyes. “You’re telling me it just happened? On its own? That neither you nor Niobe had a hand in it?”

  Tantalus doesn’t answer immediately. He steps toward the rock where my greatest secrets once were. His fingertips graze the surface. “I feel a residue of plasma. Something forced these markings out of existence.”

  I think of the black hole that conspires in the cosmic hush. I recall the migraines that have left me reeling in confusion, uncertain of which memories are real. Could it have undone my carvings, the same as it’s undone entire stretches of my mind?

  Anger flares. “So there is no point in preserving what HaShem or Ha-Satan want me to forget, is there?” My words echo. “No matter how hard I fight to keep my truth, it slips away.”

  Tantalus lowers his gaze. “I know you feel caged, but remember Niobe’s existence—”

  “Oh, Niobe,” I snap, voice laced with bitterness. “Yes, she who can conjure stable stars and warp orbits with a laugh. She seems free enough.”

  “She’s a child.”

  “She’s your prodigy!” The molten tears come fully now, rolling down the grooves of my metal cheeks. “You push me aside while she blossoms, and all the while, I bear monstrous children who don’t live past a day. My only record of my torment is gone, just like everything else.”

  A tense quiet envelops the cave until Tantalus whispers, “I cannot return what was erased, but I can help you make new carvings. We’ll try to protect them. Perhaps together—”

  I pull away, my wings snapping shut in a gesture of finality. “Enough. Leave me, Tantalus. Go back to Niobe, or Ha-Shem, or whomever else you serve so faithfully.”

  He opens his mouth—maybe to speak comforting words or a scolding. I don’t care. I lunge deeper into the cave, ignoring his voice echoing for me to stop. My claws gouge the walls in fresh lines. If everything I carve is doomed to vanish, I’ll carve it repeatedly until my arms fail.

  Soon, Tantalus’s footsteps fade. I don’t hear him anymore. The only sound is my labored breathing and the scrape of metal on stone.

  Even if the walls are wiped clean a thousand times, I will keep writing. Maybe this is the only agency left to me: the determination to fight oblivion, whether or not I succeed.

  I stand in the red glare of the newborn star Niobe created—the star that nearly destroyed us all before she pacified its rampage with a child’s laugh. The heat from its distant fire licks at my metallic skin, but it no longer sears me; Niobe’s cosmic tethering has subdued the star’s fury to a manageable warmth. My wings twitch with the memory of her newborn giggle echoing through warp-distorted space.

  She clung to me for everything: feeding, comfort, safety. Now, she clings instead to Tantalus’s every word.

  Even from here, I see them together by the World Tree, Tantalus kneeling in prayer while Niobe stands at his side—small but radiant, asking questions in her curious tone. The tree’s trunk gleams with fresh rivulets of molten iron, a sign that it has begun producing another meager harvest. Niobe helps Tantalus coax out a cluster of shimmering metal orbs from the bark. One day, she will handle creation’s balancing like Tantalus handles time. One day, she might not need me at all.

  I clutch at my belly. My last birthing was three days ago—long enough for the healing to close the rents in my abdomen, but the memory of it still burns deeper than any star’s heat. That child was... wrong. Twisted. A mass of disfigured limbs and embedded spines, howling with a voice that shredded my ears. I birthed it in a storm of agony, only to have it die mere moments after Tantalus placed it on the ground. I didn’t even choose a name for it. Something in me has remained hollow ever since. As if each monstrous birth siphons away the best pieces of me.

  At first, Tantalus tried to comfort me. He told me the defective births might be illusions of Ha-Satan—cosmic errors introduced by the Adversarial Oracle. But day by day, Niobe became the proper focus of his teachings, and day by day, I found myself more alone, a broken vessel forced to churn out new life that rarely survives.

  Movement in the distance catches my eye. Niobe leaps upward with childlike abandon, her tiny vents hissing. Tantalus gently grabs her hand to keep her from flying off. My chest tightens with an ache that dwarfs the postpartum pains. She is so small, so untrained in her powers—yet Tantalus smiles at her with pride I rarely see on his face when he looks at me.

  He once whispered of love beneath the canopy of stars, his words weaving dreams of a freedom we might share. Now, those whispers have faded, and in his eyes, I see not the warmth of affection but the cold weight of obligation.

  Sometimes, as I lie battered from each new birth, I wonder if love was only ever a mercy he offered to keep me in line.

  I force myself to walk toward them, stepping carefully across the stony ground. The star Niobe saved hangs overhead, an emblem of her success. It does nothing to dull my resentment. A savage thought swirls in my mind: She’s taking Tantalus from me, just like the universe steals my every moment of peace.

  I swallow that thought. If I linger too long in bitterness, I risk unleashing the cosmic migraines again or, worse, drawing HaShem’s chains upon me.

  Niobe darts behind Tantalus as I approach, peeking out with large, curious eyes. She regards me with a mixture of awe and caution, as though I am both mother and stranger to her.

  “Avarice,” Tantalus greets me in that calm, measured tone. “You are awake. Did you rest?”

  He knows I can’t rest correctly, not while my body staves off the next monstrous birth. Yet he pretends this is normal. We both do.

  “I did,” I lie stiffly. “Is Niobe continuing her training?”

  Tantalus nods, glancing at Niobe with palpable affection. “She’s learning to use the abacus I conjured from a far-future civilization. She is learning arithmetic. She may soon understand warp calculation. Already, she—”

  His praise stings like acid. I look away, pressing a claw to my abdomen. “That’s… wonderful,” I mutter. “Soon, she will exceed my place here entirely.”

  Niobe steps forward, her posture uncertain. “Mother,” she says, her voice trembling like she fears my disapproval. “I— we can do these things together. Father says you shaped the emptiness, and he shaped the flow of moments. I want to learn from both of you.”

  I choke on a breath. A wave of guilt slams into me. I see her sincerity; she wants to bridge the gulf that’s formed between us. But all I can think about is the child I lost—the one I never named. Another wave of postpartum nausea grips me, doubling me over.

  “Avarice?” Tantalus reaches out. “You’re pale. Are you in pain?”

  I recoil from his touch, an instinct that surprises even me. “I’m fine,” I snarl, though my entire body feels like it’s on fire.

  Niobe inches closer, tiny hands raised in concern. She lays a hand on my arm. A strange calm radiates from her like a child’s lullaby made manifest. Even the constant throbbing in my womb eases for a moment.

  And I hate it. I hate how the daughter I sacrificed so much for can so effortlessly quell my agony. Because it isn’t her agony, is it? Hers might come later, or maybe not at all.

  I pull away from her and stumble backward. My vents hiss with panicked heat, scorching the rock beneath my feet. “Stop,” I rasp.

  Niobe’s eyes go wide. Tantalus frowns in concern. The tension thickens, as palpable as the molten iron dribbling from the World Tree’s bark.

  All at once, I feel the presence of Ha-Satan’s black hole reality swirl at the fringes of my mind—a subtle shift in cosmic entanglements. I sense a new monstrous fetus forming inside me, a swirl of mutated cells—another wave of dread surges. The births are accelerating. Each one might tear me apart. My beak clenches on the words I can’t say.

  Niobe extends her arms. “Mother, let me help—”

  “Don’t call me that right now,” I snap, stepping out of her reach. “You want Tantalus? Fine. Go to him.” The harshness in my voice surprises me, and from Niobe’s pained expression, it wounds her too.

  I seethe for a moment and then calm myself. “If you want to help your mother, do what you were made to do. Lift these burdens from me.”

  She turns, seeking comfort in Tantalus’s arms. He gathers her close, glaring at me over her shoulder with something akin to disappointment. Perhaps he sees my lashing out as yet another rage outburst. Maybe he’s already decided to protect Niobe from me, just like the cosmic laws that keep me from warping away from my responsibilities.

  I turn my back on them; one arm braced over my midsection as if to hold together the shards of my body and mind. My thoughts swirl bitterly.

  Let Niobe and Tantalus be together. Let them shape these stars and refine the delicate cosmic expansions. Let them uphold conformal sanctity. Let me dissolve into the void, swallowed by the weight of existence. If HaShem has doomed me to birth only monstrosities, let oblivion be my solace.

  Even from behind, I hear Niobe’s whispers to Tantalus. She fears me, though she also loves me. It is the same anguish I feel toward her, multiplied by the memory of each horrifying birth. And so, as I stand in the half-light of our new star, the tension between us three sets the stage for whatever destiny Ha-Shem has in store. Whether it breaks us or binds us together forever remains to be seen.

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