U’Prot awoke with a gasp that tore at his throat.
For several seconds, he did not know where he was. He felt his chest, his belly, his face. He found no blisters, no burned flesh. No blood either. Only sweat. Küny’s light entered through the balcony and turned the room into the same peaceful refuge he remembered having inhabited forever.
He had dreamed of a woman. He had drunk from her hands. He had died.
Or so he believed.
He rose on trembling legs, washed at the fountain, and stepped out onto the walkways of Rdrilveria. The citadel received him intact: ziggurats, gardens, paving stones, smiling residents. Everything occupied its place with a perfection that, for the first time, struck him as obscene.
A man floated above the crowd, flailing his arms and legs to remain airborne.
“Holi, holi, holis!” M’Krach called.
U’Prot looked up. Something in that voice drove a stab of pain behind his eyes.
“Good morning.”
“What a face, my friend! You look as though you died last night.”
M’Krach burst into laughter. U’Prot did not.
“I had a dream.”
The other man’s smile faltered.
“Dreams are dreams. We are happy here.”
U’Prot kept staring at him.
“Always?”
M’Krach stopped moving his arms for an instant and lost altitude. He recovered at once.
“Always.”
U’Prot took a step to leave.
“Good luck with V’Vota, T’Prot.”
He stopped.
The city’s noise seemed to die around him.
“What did you call me?”
M’Krach was no longer smiling.
“I said U’Prot.”
“No.”
The nearest residents had stopped walking. One after another, as though the same silent command had passed through the citadel, they turned their faces toward him.
“You called me T’Prot.”
M’Krach opened his mouth but never answered. Blue sparks ran across his body. His form unraveled from the edges, becoming luminous smoke that vanished into windless air.
U’Prot stepped back.
Then he remembered.
Not one life. Many.
He remembered V’Vota. He remembered Augusta. He remembered the Thermotrilitron. He remembered cities rising and disappearing, centuries folding over themselves, bodies bearing different names and the same pain waiting at the end. He remembered the residents celebrating. He remembered loving a woman so many times that love had finally become the instrument of his damnation.
All around him, Rdrilveria smiled.
U’Prot understood at last that the city had not conquered death.
It had domesticated it.
And he understood something worse: eternity was not the reward promised to its residents.
It was the cage.
Somewhere in Rdrilveria, a woman who did not yet know she would be called V’Vota, Augusta, or something else raised her head, as if she had just remembered a man she had not yet met.
And the cycle began again.
THE END