Six
“Science had told me the age of the earth. A shard of the Comet—the one you gave me—got me there. Sorcery allowed me to survive there. For when I arrived at the beginning of all things, there was nothing for me to destroy. No injustice to correct. No world to reshape. Chaos ruled alone in the heavens.
“And I realized that I had to be the one to create.”
In that moment, the world seemed to implode around the grimy coffee shop table. This man that Lucca sat across from—that she thought she’d understood—had been…what?
“Are you…God?” Lucca asked.
The sorcerer chuckled. “Heavens no. I’m practically the guiltiest man alive. Everything that I hated—that I’d sworn myself to change—all of that guilt fell on my own shoulders as I created.”
He fell silent. The coffee machine hummed and mugs clinked on tables. People chatted quietly around them, completely oblivious to who was sitting in their midst. Lucca glanced around, as if to see whether anyone would approach, bowing and scraping, to the world’s creator, who sipped his drink thoughtfully. Nobody moved.
Lucca’s eyes fell back on the closed book between them. Job had suffered so much and deserved none of it. Whose fault was it? God’s? The world’s? Did it matter?
The sorcerer began to speak again, in slow, rolling, but excited tones.
“It was as if the world built itself, and time slowed to a crawl to let me watch. Rock melted and transformed into such diversity that I never could have comprehended. Water split into lakes and streams and ponds and majestic waterfalls. The sky unfolded, and patterns of stars and clouds swam across its dome.
“Trees grew to touch the sky, drinking the light in the day and casting long shadows at twilight. Bushes and weeds shared the soil with flowers and grains. Life overtook the shell I had made, and it all spiraled out of my control even as I marveled at the fish that began to enrich the waters and the frogs and bugs that vitalized the thriving, eager land. The power I had exercised for the briefest of heartbeats was again lost to Chaos.
“And then came the crowning jewels of that power, the lumbering beasts that ruled the fields and the oceans and the skies. The panthers and gorillas that barreled through forests by instinct alone. And finally…humankind. Us. The lastborn of the fleeting order I’d imposed.
“Yet, as this saga unfolded, I realized that humans belonged to Chaos, just like everything else that had unrolled from the earth since the rocks were laid—and even those began to shatter and erode. The people scrambled to take control of as much land as they could hold onto, subjugating their own brothers and sisters until their skin fell from their bones and their corpses rotted in the earth as their grandchildren killed over the same land they died on.
“The most noble of us wrote laws and built beautifully ordered cities and palaces. But as I watched, it became clear that we are not creatures of fairness. A judge would sentence one man to death and spare another because of how tired he was and how many cases he’d seen that day. A warrior would kill innocents indiscriminately and then return home to hail the virtues of loyalty and grace.” He paused. “A man in some distant Eventuality would suffer and be abandoned by his friends, having done nothing wrong.”
And back to Job again. Lucca sat, silently, in the hard-backed chair, thinking. This story was so absurd, and yet so familiar. And in the man sitting across from her and the book on the table, she found somewhere to direct her hatred that had so long been aimed at herself alone. That knowing smile on the sorcerer’s lips infuriated her most of all. You don’t know anything about me, she’d spat at him so long ago.
“No wonder this world is so screwed up,” Lucca said. “It’s only ever been built and ruled by humans.”
“Like yourself?” the sorcerer said, bearing the hint of an accusation.
Like…myself. And Lucca found herself nodding.
“Who knows? He might be out there somewhere. In that other world, they often said that people do the work of God. We’re his hands.”
What point is there in believing that? a part of her thought. What good does it do to believe in an impotent God?
Instead she asked, “How do you do it? Knowing that it’s all your fault.”
“I can’t always,” the sorcerer said. “But then I hear the laughter of the children.”
Abruptly, he stood. He thanked the proprietor as he walked out the door. Lucca hurried after him.
“Where are you going?”
The sorcerer said something in reply, but his words were drowned out by yelling from across the busy square. A rough-looking man was standing among a small group of carts, violently shaking one of them back and forth as a young woman, barely seventeen, cried out and tried to steady it. It was stacked with delicate glass ornaments that rattled precariously. As Lucca watched, the man tipped the entire cart forward and crushed the glass with his boots. He stomped away, swearing. The woman, dressed in clothing so ragged that it might have been the only set she owned, rushed around her cart, kneeling down to try and rescue the shattered pieces, and opened her mouth—
The voice of grief. For the first time in eons, Lucca was hearing it not from within, but with her own ears.
“Come on,” the sorcerer said.
But Lucca was transfixed on the woman’s anguished face. The twinge of pity awoke an even greater wave of anger from deep within, the same anger that she’d felt when her father died and she realized she’d let herself open her heart for a stupid, insignificant, century-breathing mortal. It was the anger that came to sweep her feet out from under her and wash her back to when she’d cared enough to suffer wounds for them.
And still this woman’s eyes pled.
No, whispered Lucca’s immortality, you, you’re just a pathetic, momentary creature to be swept away when this world is nothing but dust.
Just like yourself, Lucca.
“Wait,” Lucca said to the sorcerer. “Do you have anything for her?”
He shook his head. “I spent the last of it on my coffee.”
Lucca fished in her pockets and found that she, too, didn’t have any of this Epoch’s currency, only some loose tokens that would be accepted in the biggest empires of the Third and Fourth.
She looked to the sorcerer and then to the young woman and her tears.
“Here,” Lucca said awkwardly. The woman’s eyes widened as she saw the priceless crystal in Lucca’s palm.
“This should be enough to buy a nice meal,” Lucca said.
Then Lucca, ashamed, looked away.
“You win,” she muttered to the sorcerer. “Who does that turn out to be? Adelwyth? Siar the Conqueror? The great-great-grandmother of Hierocratus the Wise?”
“Does it matter?”
These words. I haven’t said them in…how long? “I…don’t know.”
“She dies from cancer two months from now. Her name is Johanna. No last name.”
“Two months?” Lucca croaked.
This wasn’t about history. This was about…her.
“We’ve talked about the God in that book,” the sorcerer said from beside her. “I’ve never met him. Maybe he’s out there somewhere. But how can he be any better than the best of us?”