Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

Viv had dealt with people like the Ornchief before, heavy with true authority, too sure to need arrogance.

it had happened so long ago the names themselves had drifted beyond memory, all those people dead, their planet crumbled.

To get that power, she will break worlds, steal suns, lay claim to vast swaths of the Cloud.

“Do you really want to go with us? Leave your clan? Your family?” “I have had clan and family all my life,” Xiara said. “They will not vanish if I leave. I will take them with me to the sky, and they will grow with me as I travel.”

there Viv saw above her, battling, bloody, fierce and deadly and doomed but oh so free: Zanj.

she dropped to realspace to drink heat from an exploding star, she surfed a wave in a planetary ring, she stretched, strained, compassed the gap between galactic arms in a single jump.

Rage felt cleaner without thought.)

She sat upon a comet turning inward through the Oort cloud of a red and dying sun.

cinder-suns burning their last in a scorched sky.

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

A mind is a twist of thought curling back upon itself. She snapped that twist, and the thoughts no longer spun to frame an identity; they darted out forever into the Cloud, into the sea of souls. The mind was gone. A dripping, gross pile of data, of habit, memory, remained, a stain on her hands.

To use your hatred like a whetstone of the will.

“Reports of my impossibility, as the prophet says, have been greatly exaggerated.

Her voice held all the emotion of a teacher suggesting a student would find her questions answered in the syllabus.

Breathe. Nothing you want can stay.

I have stolen suns, and burned inside them.

And you should have taken my first offer, because I never give a second.”

how one woman no matter how strong or fast could have stolen suns and shattered fleets and stood against the Empress.

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

“They came from across the galaxy and from the depths between stars, to free themselves, to fight, to kill, to feed, to tell the tale. Old Ones who survived the wreck of long-gone fallen worlds, fleets of rebel machines, pirates and soldiers and fanatics.

CRASHING TURNED OUT to be easy. Staying alive was the hard part.

She had been born knowing how to decide. You curled yourself into a fist, and bent iron with your eyes.

“You’re not built for this sort of thing. No collision membranes, slow healing, calcium bones? What a mess. You’d pop in a stiff wind.”

Above, far above, past the blue and past the spark that was not a sun,

“It’s home. Shit still stinks, as much here as around any star.”

“Hospitality is a joy of wealth.”

“Your plan stinks of if,”

To live is to grow secrets.”

Because Viv was human, she felt a stab of primal fear. And, because she was herself, she crushed it.

Was this what they called growing up? She’d thought that meant maturity, weathering, endurance. But instead you gathered one terror after another to yourself, until you were a skin-clad skeleton cradling a self made up of wounds.

When you stand unarmed, the world must be your weapon,

“Centuries of mad dreaming. Streams of numbers. Spiral paths of silence.

parting them by microns and forever.

“This, we built. Took a day and we ate a star to do it: good star, too, one of the crunchy ones.” “Crunchy?” “Don’t ask,” Zanj said. “You don’t want to get them started on stars.” “Sixth or seventh generation. Lots of heavy elements, a dirty burn. You know it’s horrible for you, but you can’t help yourself. Like when you wrap bacon around, you know. Things. Like more bacon.

She had never been weak enough to need meanness.

She gulped the memories down one by one like coals, and lay there forever beneath the burning stars. When forever ended she pushed herself up.

Viv walked her own path. She did not wait. She did not linger, or retrace her steps. Sometimes her path lay alongside another’s for a while. But she would never shape hers to them.

It had been thirteen years since she last felt nervous around an ex. Granted, most of her exes couldn’t blow up planets.

Sentient beings given power beyond reason, and responsibility beyond measure, sometimes clutch the power to themselves like a blanket, and ignore the responsibility for as long as they can, until one day the capital city’s fires reach their palace, too.

Archivist Lan’s voice was smooth from infrequent use, like a blade drawn only to shed blood, and well cleaned after.

She did her business as defiantly as possible under the circumstances. She’d never had cause to piss vehemently before, but there was a first time for everything.

Zanj had her tricks and transformations, but Viv would never accuse her of subtlety. If she needed to hide in shadows, she’d just snuff out the sun.

She stood astride a star, thrumming with hunger and control. Magnetic fields danced through the aurora of her mind, and space around her fuzzed and popped with cosmic background static like blood’s rush down a vein, like a heart that took ten billion years to beat.

Cross-legged. Sit tall and still, core engaged. Breathe in, and out. Thoughts arise—let them. Thoughts fail. Notice yourself thinking, notice that thought for what it is, an experience arising from your being in the world, no more significant than that, no less.

Doubts, too, were just thoughts.

Breathing hurt her throat—Jesus Christ, who built humans, anyway?

“I am a soul passing through matter for a while;

Yes, it hurts. Just like anything worth doing.

Zanj the thief of stars,

dreams survive on dreams alone. The real world takes real work.