Maisie knelt before the grave of her father. She murmured half-prayers, half-songs into her hands. Her eyes drifted between the ground and his grave marker, a cairn of grey stones with a bluish hue. They were the color of dusk after a hard rain, she thought. She whispered into her hands rhythmically, praising the gods of the harvest, the gods of the forest, and all the gods as she recalled their names. Her shoulders and arms bounced with her recitation of the rites she knew. Her breath escaped the spaces in her fingers in filigree plume. She wasn’t sure if she was being too loud or too quiet.
Our people have recited these hymns since the world was born, she knew. Maisie felt the wet grass on her knees. We sing and speak to the gods. This is as much life as anything.
She finished reciting the songs and prayers she knew and then she stood up. She turned to leave, and then looked back. The pile of stones looked like his eyes, she realized. Hot salt tears welled in hers. She felt like she should say goodbye, but to what? Turning and walking away from a grave is strange, always.
So Maisie walked, breathing slowing. Short-breath crying gradually gave away. She tasted the air and felt the enormity of the moment trickle back down into her like rain finding a puddle. Everything is going to be fine. It can only ever be fine. If it can’t, I won’t be here.
Maisie reached the top of a great green hill in the mist, and at the bottom was a silhouette. Not a black figure on the landscape, a negative space where something else should be. A humanoid figure cut out of the landscape.
Somehow she met it. She felt like her head was tilted back, and as she approached a curtain of grey and blue seemed to envelop her vision. A squealing, boiling noise came from somewhere.
“Maisie,” it said, voice like a hive of bees. ” Do you remember me?”
“No,” she lied.
” Don’t lie. You do,”
Her head was thrumming. She gritted her teeth and pinched her eyes open
The void said
” You are only a copy,”
his blaspheme started: ” You do not exist. You are an amalgamation of everything that other people think of you. Your dearest friends, your lovers, your blood relatives all have different interpretations of who you are. Whatever you are, inside your head, is not within anybody else’s head. Nobody thinks about you as much as you. Whatever your own conception of yourself, it does not overlap with whatever anyone else thinks of you. So what are you?”
Maisie turned her head and started to answer, ” Well everybody knows-“
The void screeched a sound like a new universe being born: “You’re within your own mind again!” He bellowed a grey and blue smoke into the heavens that gave neither heat nor light but still scorched the skin, but that’s to be expected of a void creature, so anyway,
” Whatever you are exists only within the moments where others perceive you,”
Maisie sat down and began singing those hymns again.
and for a few moments her voice was so sweet
that a man could understand
That we’re not alone
we’re not the One looking for everything
we’re a piece of all of it
So beautiful, so dancing with it
Maisie says “Well, hey. You dont’ have to be a dick about it,”
Void looks at me, I say: Here I stand, I can do no other
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