III. The Voice, the First Telling

I am going to tell you what happened now, the way it actually happened — which is to say, the way it exists in the one fragmentary, protected corner of memory that survived her own total unmaking of everything else. I want to warn you, before I begin, that I am going to tell it more than once. Not because I am uncertain of the facts — I have already told you, this is the one story I refuse to lie to you about — but because the memory itself does not arrive whole. It arrives the way memories arrive when the person holding them has spent centuries, consciously and unconsciously, trying not to look at them too directly: in fragments, out of order, each fragment revealing slightly more than the one before it, until eventually, if you are patient, if you let the pieces accumulate rather than demanding the whole shape all at once, something like the true picture finally comes into view.

There was no image. I want to be plain about that from the very start, because I think it matters, and because I do not want you picturing something more visually complete than what actually exists. Whatever cataclysm this facet caused — and I am going to tell you, eventually, as much as I understand of its scale — the moment that survives, the one fragment of memory his own mind kept intact through everything that followed, has no picture attached to it at all. Only sound. A voice, speaking into a darkness so total that even Eremos, recalling it now, across however many centuries separate him from the actual moment, cannot tell you what either of them looked like as it happened, only what she said, and how she said it, and the particular quality of terror underneath the steadiness of her voice as she said it.

I want to try, even without an image to anchor it, to give you some sense of what that darkness held, because I think a voice arriving out of pure nothing carries a different weight than a voice arriving out of a darkness that has texture, even if the texture cannot be seen. There was heat in it, or something adjacent to heat — not warmth, nothing so gentle as that, but the particular scalding pressure of an enormous quantity of feeling compressed into a space too small to hold it comfortably, the way air grows hot and thin at the center of a fire long before the fire itself becomes visible from any distance. There was weight, too, a gravitational density that made even sound itself seem to travel more slowly than sound should travel, each syllable of her voice arriving as though it had to fight its way through something thick and resistant before it could reach whatever remained, in that darkness, capable of hearing it.

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My love, the voice said — her voice, I am certain of that much, though I could not tell you, if pressed, exactly how I know it — if you are going to destroy everything, I am going to have to stop you. This time.

That is the whole of the first fragment. I want you to sit with it exactly as it is, without the additions I am about to give you in the next telling, because I think there is something important in receiving it this plainly first: a woman, in a darkness with no image attached to it, addressing someone she loves with the same tenderness she might use for an ordinary goodnight, and inside that tenderness, without any contradiction at all, a plain declaration that she is about to try to stop him from ending everything that exists.

There was no answer. Not in words. There was only, in the space where an answer should have been, a sound — I have heard it described, in the deepest and most fragmentary layer of what survives, as a kind of tearing, though tearing does not fully capture it either, because tearing implies a fabric, a material thing being pulled past its limit, and I do not think what made that sound had a material shape left to tear at all. It was closer, I think, to the sound despair makes when it has finally exhausted every quieter register available to it and has nowhere left to go except outward, entire, indiscriminate, taking whatever stands nearby along with it.

That is all of the first telling. I promised you it would be small. I am going to give you more now, but I wanted you to have the bones of it first, uncomplicated by everything I am about to add.