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Jedao had stopped after the first sentence and knelt to inspect the floor. It wasn’t as solid as it seemed, especially the more he stood still. The carpet decomposed into silvery cobwebs the longer he looked, and the air smelled suddenly of dust, decaying leaves, corroded metal. Beneath the carpet, the floor was composed of gears rotating with an unceasing heartless click-tick-tock. Beyond the ticking, he heard a sudden faint singing in a voice at once too high and too deep to be human. He was tempted to reach down and—
“I’m being entirely sincere,” Mikodez said. “The presence of atrocity doesn’t mean you have to put your life on hold. You’ll arguably be better at dealing with the horrible things you have to witness, or even to perpetrate, if you allow yourself time to do the small, simple things that make you happy. Instead of looking for ways to destroy yourself.”
“Yes,” Kujen said, “he probably had this whole elaborate rationalization worked out for why thinking with his dick was a clever stratagem. Nine hundred years and it’s nice to know human nature never changes.”
“Ha.” Too bad he didn’t have more arms than the usual two. (Kujen could have built him that way if he’d cared to.) He could have fun waving around four swords at once and terrifying the everliving fuck out of poor innocent Kel. Or, more likely, impaling himself on his own swords.
Kujen’s voice turned vehement. “He was a good master, as masters went. I always knew where I stood with him. You’ll never endure that, you know. You will always have whatever you want to eat. You won’t have to fight off dogs in the streets to find a safe corner to sleep in. You will have everything you could possibly desire. I have made sure of it.” Jedao returned Kujen’s smile and hated himself for understanding, at last, what drove Kujen to entomb himself in luxuries.
And it was inside him. Kujen was inside him, manifesting in Jedao’s dreamspace. He appeared as the man he must have been once upon a lifetime. In that place dominated by the carcasses of stars, he rounded on Jedao.
