FORM

Chapter 13 : synthesis

When she came down from the mountainous tree with her new and different son (he was different, he was silver, he had no whiskers, in place of them there was only a sculpted horizontal slit) all the people, all her people gathered about her, about the Tree. They looked like they weren't sure of what they were doing but the children certainly knew.

"Tell us the rest of the story!" The clamor rose up from every little hand and whisker, a tidal wave of fiery curiosity, grown strong from the pressure of being pent up so long. She let her son join her two other children, and spread out her arms so the audience would create a larger circle.

"Despairing, having discovered the loneliness and fear that came with the knowledge of her uniqueness, Thierne thought to cast herself from the highest of her towers into the deepest of the mountain ravines. She longed to shatter her frail form until nothing of it remained.

"It was all she thought about, dying, killing herself. She was afraid of being nothing though. What if returning to the Nothing with no body meant she would have no way to escape the crushing force? She remembered the strength of Nothing well. It pressed without tiring and with so much force that all things within it would surely be crushed to nothingness themselves, given enough time. It could crush her tower, the mountains, the clouds, everything. She was sure of it. So how was it that the world existed? The Nothing could surely crush it all? How did it survive? What kept it from imminent destruction?

"As she continued asking herself these questions she found a new reason to live, something new to understand. Thierne rifled through the heavy tomes in the libraries of her castle. She returned to the birds and befriended them once more. They showed her their vast libraries of books formed of water and string. She searched there and in other far-off lands. When she had exhausted all the knowledge of her world, she ventured to the other sparks of blue in the Golden Stream.

"In each world she would meet new people or old friends. They would always give such a formidable scholar access to their most treasured libraries. In return she would teach them something of the knowledge of the other blue-spark worlds. When she had visited all the endless worlds, she felt no closer to her answer. Something nagged at her still. She thought perhaps to revisit the Nothing itself to see, but she remembered there was nothing to see. Besides last time she had entered the Nothing, she had outlived her closest friend. She had many close friends now, great scholars on all the worlds of all the sparks of blue, she didn't want to lose them.

"The more she studied though, the more her friends kept emphasizing one aspect of the matter.

"'I've never seen a question like this before,' one of them told her. He had one hundred eyes on each of his ten hands, 'a question that has never and could never be properly addressed.' This little matter had never bothered her though, she had already come upon something that could never be understood or explained so she said as much. 'You did?' The thousand eyes all blinked in unison, 'What? Where?' And so she explained her life story and why it was she was on this quest now to begin with. She hadn't quite finished when he burst out laughing, she thought he looked more than a little scary when he laughed, 'You already have your answer.' He chortled horribly. He was having trouble muffling his laughter long enough to let her in on the great joke that was the story of her life.

"'You are your answer. Don't you see?' He stuck a hundred of his eyes out accusingly or for emphasis, she couldn't be sure. 'You are the world's fragility all gathered up and stored in one body, and it is you. It is only because of you that the world can withstand the nothingness.' He smiled now, which was more frightening in an eerie promising sort of way. 'You truly are a great scholar, you discovered the solution well before you even knew of the problem.' Then he guffawed in a nerve-wracking manner at his own pun, she had been born before she even knew what a question was.

"'If you ended your life, no one would know, the world would end with you. It is born with you and will die with you.' That sounded somber-but it made her the happiest person in the world.

"She was never lonely again. When the world learned of the wonderful miracle that she was, they crowned her queen in her tower. Every year on her birthday they brought her the most delicate presents from all the worlds. She became a formidable scholar and invited her closest friends to live with her in her tower.

"From time to time she would wonder how it was that her father had known what she was all along. She never asked him even though he came to visit her almost every day."