Empress of Forever

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.

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

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.

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

Learn so you can work. Practice so you can play. Follow so you can lead. No one stays who she is forever.

We learn systems so we may learn ourselves. A mind is as complex as a mindforge--but subtler; so subtle most beings cannot comprehend even their simplest thought in its entirety. We study so that when we are thrust against the limits of our our minds, we can break ourselves.

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.

To live is to grow secrets.

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

We study machines, and train our mind to mirror them. This ship holds many systems: Cloud engines interlace with crude chemical and subspace drives. We learn systems so we may learn our selves. A mind is as complex as a mindforge—but subtler; so subtle most beings cannot comprehend even their simplest thought in its entirety. We study so that when we are thrust against the limits of our own minds, we can break ourselves.” “Why would we—sorry, why would you want that?” “Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.” She recognized that line, handed down however many millennia.

She sounded like Tom Waits had a baby with Tom Waits.

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.

But you don’t change, or learn, or offer. You’re just you, always. You didn’t need me. And when you get where you’re going, you’ll leave, without a thought for what remains behind.

She had never been weak enough to need meanness.

A grin, Zanj had always felt personally, was more a state of mind than a set of the lips.

Zanj chose her words like an old woman crossing ice might choose her steps—Viv almost believed she was really so lost and alone.

Home is a dream, and only dreams survive on dreams alone. The real world takes real work.

Nevers and onlys and forevers grew as you did.

Viv tried not to look. 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.

none of the weird-physics inversion a contained color bomb would leave.

the human mind had assembled itself haphazard from spare parts meant for something else.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

With a thousand thousand eyes she stared out through the Cloud, and flexed a thousand thousand limbs. There was pain, yes, she’d forgotten the fullness of the pain—but there was joy, too, far worse. She wanted the pain to stop, and it did—Groundswell just reached inside her, obedient to her will, and turned the pain receptors off. Its systems embraced her, planet-shattering vast, obedient to her will. It needed her to want things. It needed her will to shape its own, to give its weaponized hulk frame and purpose. She was a girl in a palace, empty and immense, and when she shouted, invisible hands answered her every command. But no matter how she ran, she never reached the walls, and if she demanded a door, it only opened into the palace once again.

The sky went on forever, but if you had no context save the height of the nearest trees, you could fool yourself into thinking the blue hung just beyond your reach, when in fact it was never there at all, and what was, was deeper than you could dream.

A long time ago, out of some misguided urge to understand why other people seemed to have so much trouble enjoying themselves, she’d tried to compile a list of problems normal folks had that she didn’t. She’d started the list with honor, and, ten pages later, gave up after mortality and loans.