"Alright. Onto the story. ... You won't believe this," the Robot will say to eleven-year-old-Anders. Pause. "Well, I don't know, you might. What if I told you there has only been one war in the history of two planets in which it ended peacefully?"
"Oh, I believe you," he says warmly, eyes gazing lazily at the sky. Then he looks down off to the side towards the shadow of the Robot at the edge of his vision and says, "Oh."
"Yeah..."
"You mean...do you mean that all wars end...with fighting?"
"Well, not always. But they are all always coerced with force of bloodshed. Surrender is never done on principal. All except this single time. That's why I understand and forgive their naiveté in naming it The Last War. It seemed like it might just be. But we will speak someday about all of that. For now, I want to tell you about a dream the King had."
"There was only one?"
"What do you...? Oh. At the end of it all, there were none. During the war, there were two who claimed to be Kings, but only one of them truly was."
Anders laughs through his nose, though his smile is wide. "Wait, what?"
"One of them was called...Darian, let's say. The other...well, none alive know his name but me." She told it to him. "And now it's a secret shared between us. He would be happy to know you know it."
She doesn't ask him not to tell anyone else, but he never does.
"Did you know him?" he asks.
Pause.
"I met him, once."
"I thought you said that this happened before you were born?"
"That is true."
"But I thought you said you couldn't really travel through time, like, not, um, physically."
"I, me, right now, I cannot."
"So you used to be able to?"
Pause.
"Yes."
YOU ARE READING
Pale Fragments
Science FictionAn alien Robot came to me before she left to die. She sang to me the stories of how her ancient world and species ended, how she was created to travel through Time, how (in the far future) she met an essential boy named Anders, how she named herself...
