This Is How You Lose the Time War

If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses’ mouths would grow berries.

They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them.

I touched their faces, and they were mine; I touched the bed I was on, smelled apples stewing somewhere outside. It was as if, in my own small way, I’d become Garden—so me in my wholeness, me in my fingers, in my hair, in my skin, whole the way Garden is whole, but apart.

Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance.

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.

Start a stone rolling, so in three centuries you’ll have an avalanche.

Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

But maybe this is how we win, Red.
You and me.
This is how we win.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.

With all you are to me, and all you’ll always be, we can’t just go. We can’t just walk away.
But I will, if it leaves you living.