Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

The stars had failed and in the morning mist she could not tell sea from sky. If the world were as magic as it used to feel, she could just swim out until the out turned into up and the up to upside down, and tread water and raise her eyes to see this scrap of shoreline overhead, and with it all she meant to leave behind.

She had weapons here, a plan, a place to stand and a lever long enough to move the world. But worlds were big things, heavy, round, and once they started to move, they rolled with crushing force and did not stop no matter how many bodies lay across their path.

Anger’s hotter than a star, and endures where stars do not.

You didn’t grow past the old things, just enclosed them like rings in a tree, so someone feeling the bark of you could suss out your old scars.

“Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.”

She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren’t careful, pretty soon you’d find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk—or worse, speaking German.

She’d never had cause to piss vehemently before, but there was a first time for everything.

“You’re not who you think you are,” Viv said. “You’re a dream. That’s all. But don’t take it too hard. So are the rest of us.”

“The crowns trap our selves. They carve us off from the world. But what is the self? There are pieces of me in all of you, and pieces of you in me. We are all empty of inherent form. Trace the threads of each of us, and you find not just the others, but the entire universe. And what crown could bind the whole universe?”

Always know the shape you take—know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again. What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family.