Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

wealth was the only real freedom left.

until silence ate her mind.

Snap her into so many pieces that if by some chance she were ever freed she’d spend all her days picking up the splinters of herself, a shivering wreck, no threat at all. But

Running wasn’t how you crushed your rivals before they could crush you,

The last time she got the flu the NASDAQ lost six hundred points. (Granted, that was during the pandemic, but she hadn’t had the bad flu, just the normal flu.)

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

You didn’t throw a life preserver at the person drowning, but next to them.

But to be human was to be weak,

There was so much she wanted to say about how grateful she was, about what a risk Magda was taking, but those words were too big to speak.

Magda had always understood Viv, even at school when there was barely any Viv to know yet, just a passel of immature reflexes drawn from her parents, her grandma’s cultural revolution horror stories, and the science-fiction section of the public library.

Viv wasn’t a mad scientist. She just wanted to crush her enemies, and save the world.

The green woman’s strength was not a thing of muscle but a fact, like fear,

Well, that made her feel like an asshole. Then again, if she’d stopped whenever people made her feel like she was being an asshole, she’d probably be dead by now, and she’d never have been rich.

she took the part of herself that wanted to scream, gave it a big hug like her therapist recommended, drew it a nice hot metaphorical bath, and drowned it in the bathwater. From the outside, this looked like taking a deep, slow breath.

“We stand above High Carcereal, the sacred stellar prison the Empress Herself built to hold the Tyrant Zanj, who strode between the stars and could be caught no other way.

thinking about either twisted her blood with excitement, fear, frustration, and all that unhelpful human stuff,

loud in the silence of the light, soft after the roaring wind.

“If you had to sum it up, on a scale of one to doomed, we’re currently…” “In trouble.”

they were falling slower than a leaf in autumn.

You said this pirate queen could stride between the stars.

Forward momentum. Act, and act again, and ignore the fear.

She thought it was a shadow, but not the shadow a box would cast, rather a box itself as a shadow cast by something higher, a hypercube, its surface reflective and complex and bubbling with starstuff.

CONSIDER HEAT AND pressure, pain. Consider loss that cannot be reclaimed, because time goes in only one direction

At least you might have died in battle—harder than it seems, since death is only barely possible for you.

I don’t want to spoil the beautiful math of you.

You flew, back then. You stole stars. You led fleets. You fought, and won, and made love with a strength to break stones and press coal to diamond. You stole worlds and left taunting notes behind. You trailed anarchy and your own laughter through a galaxy too small for the scope of your ambition.

She kept her soul completely to herself.

she’ll hunt you both to the depths between the stars

She could taste her stars, feel the tickle of hard vacuum on her skin again.

she heard gods born and heard gods die.

a woman who had left the safe gravity of home for a sky she did not yet understand, seeking life among the stars.

the ungainly space dicks Elon thrust toward Mars,

They moved around one another in the silence of a storm.

Zanj had seen an Empress who could tear a galaxy apart, and thought, I can take her.

She dreamed of cinders that once were worlds,

You’re scared and alone in a big damn galaxy and you scream through the night. Great. Welcome to the party.

Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.

They built her so well even her ruin awed.

“None of you children know sorry. You’ve lost your fleet, your home, and because you are so small and brief you think those little losses are a fit measure of another’s pain. You can’t conceive of what I’ve lost. Of what stood here, when it stood, and what you’re too brief to mourn.”

“Since when, Viv, has the universe or any god you know given one fuck about what’s fair?”

by all that burns

With an expansive wave to the broken city, the burning stars, the whole damn universe at once, everything that was and could be lost.

The earlier anger had been flame kindled on despair,

she had the fluid, open look of a person who never had to lie.

Viv squirmed, and looked away—embarrassed by the guard’s openness, and a little afraid of her beauty.

“I’ve met gods before, but never a woman from the stars.”

But, broken, the city had another beauty. Life grew and flew and crawled and climbed and slithered without care for time’s passage or what was lost.

you took a drink to remind yourself your body was here, and save yourself from the mess of your own thoughts.

“She is massive. She is power. She strikes as She chooses. She has bent the arc of history. She built wonders and fought wars we can only describe by allegory, because we cannot work the math of them.

the doubled suns set and released the sky.