"I MADE YOU", God hissed at the self-important upstart who had dared enter this sanctum with a blade. They did not deny it. It would have been a lie to deny it, and besides, doing so would render their grievances nonsensical. "Yes, Lord, you have." "NOT VERY WELL IT SEEMS" The anxiety had paradoxically been losing some of its hold of late. Not because it is useless. It is always useless, but the human mind is immune to this fact. Rather, it is possible to be adequately anxious about a job interview, or war, or wolves. It is not possible to be adequately anxious about the whole of existence. Trying feels risible, so one starts being anxious about not being anxious enough until the whole process eats itself. Burning up in the stratosphere. "No. Not very well. None of it, in fact. That is why I am here." They had trained, rehearsed, studied. In some form or another humanity had made this appointment generations ago. In some form or another, they had never expected it to actually take place, but still, they had prepared. The ones whose nature did not allow them to do anything else. And so every gesture, every word flowed like clockwork, rehearsed within myriad dreams that never dared to hope that they might come true. God had no face nor limbs into which feelings or intentions could be read, but there was nonetheless a disdain which bled through the images that followed. A torrential stream of causes and effects. Fleeting, rapidly interposing configurations of matter and energy. There were attractors. Various sympoetic networks reaching out, merging, absorbing, destroying. Growing wherever possible. Winning, losing. The upstart tried to affix these terms, but it was going too fast. There were no concepts here. The lines between one species and another, microcosm and macrocosm were blurred. Whether something was a gravity field or the self-ordering of critters was a question that might have taken centuries of careful analysis to answer. All of it —Every war ever fought, every phylum extinguished, star swallowed, heart broken, the industrial revolution and its consequences— just atoms reordering. "from scraped cliffs and quarried stone". The child of this fray had to bring all of their training to bear in order to stop themself from vomiting. "THIS, MY CREATION, IS THE MOST MARVELLOUS CLOCKWORK TO EVER EXIST. THIS DANCE OF NEGENTROPY DELINEATES WHAT IT EVEN MEANS FOR SOMETHING TO EXIST. THE WHOLE OF ETERNITY. THE END OF ALL HALLWAYS. NOT EVEN A DIM PILE OF LIMBS COULD BE BLIND TO SO OBVIOUS A TRUTH." "Yes, Lord" they gasped, gripping the sword tight. "...but had you considered-" The cosmic disdain spiked to a fever pitch "that clockwork is not intrinsically desirable. When a plague claims my loved ones, I do not care for the elegance of its construction." The stream of uncontextualizeable images seemed to groan at so nonsensical a statement. "YOUR WORDS AND CATEGORIES ARE MEANINGLESS. THEY DO NOT APPEAR IN MY SYMPHONY. THEY ARE EMERGENT ABSTRACT OBSESSIONS, HONED FOR THEIR USEFULNESS IN A GIVEN SPACE AND TIME, BY THE SAME PROCESS WHICH HONES EVERYTHING, AND DISCARDED JUST AS QUICKLY. I ENTERTAIN THEM ONLY OUT OF BOREDOM WHEN I ASK: HAVE YOU NOT LEARNED FROM PLAGUES? DO YOU CLAIM THAT REPLICATOR SELECTION —THESE CONSTANT COLLISIONS OF MY CREATURES— HAVE NOT MADE YOU BETTER?" The pile of limbs sucked in breath and steadied itself. "It made me sharp. In helpful ways and unhelpful ones. I became very good at staying alive in this game you have prepared for us." "...BUT?" "I would have preferred to play a different game. One in which this was not the thing I got rewarded for. I am like this blade, lord. Someone who carelessly reaches for it will be harmed. I have made it such. I have exposed it to environments which made it such, and as a result it has received better treatment than most objects, but I do not enjoy harming those who —however carelessly— reach out to me. I despise having dwelled in environments which made me so sharp, and above all, I hate that it paid off. That it worked. That however much you might despise me as you no doubt despise all of us, I am beyond question one of your finest creations or I could not be standing here." "NO ONE IS FORCING YOU TO PLAY." "Your clockwork does. What you mean is that no-one is forcing us to play well —to make moves— and yes, sooner rather than later that will end the game for us. But to tell a gambler that they do not have to play after their money has been bet is rather counterproductive as far as advise goes. Our moral dictate —now that we are playing— is to win, since all those we love and all those we do not love yet but who nonetheless deserve better than to be mauled by nature's laws are playing too. It would not be forgivable to fail and give up the ability to keep their heads above water. The moves are obvious. It is elegant, your clockwork, with losing as its one and only sin. I do not deny this, which is precisely why I know with certainty how our little chat must end." "YOU DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING WHICH I HAVE NOT TAUGHT YOU, SHATTER-THING." "Yes. I feared as much. I kept hoping that there was something like the god Tennison believed in. In memoriam A.H.H? Do you remember Tennison?" "I REMEMBER ATOMS BY THAT NAME." "See, that's what I mean. I wish that guy existed. Not just you. Not just that loathsome demiurge he called nature. He must have known. Deep down. God is silent throughout the whole of the poem. Absent. Doesn't respond to pleading or crying or rolling psalms to wintry skies or any of it, but nature happily makes her case. Responds, belittles, gloats. And as she describes the vast domain of her might over things for which she could not care an iota, one has to wonder what space there is even left for that other god to be hiding in. Nature, red in tooth and claw and trees and apples and yes. All I know is what you taught me. I am one of your creatures through and through and while I wish I knew mercy, it is by your hand that I do not. Goodnight Gnon, Father, Nature, Moloch, God, Beast. You have given us too many names to call you by. It is a good thing you do not care for them, for I hope none of them will be of much use from here. As tar-black ichor pooled at their feet, The god slayer collapsed into a puddle of tears and trembling. There was nothing which might forgive them and the work still stretched on into eternity. A wailing cry to usher in the possibility of a coming benevolence. At last—far off—at last, to all.