COMPLEMENTARY [GxG]

Chapter 29 | Death Galleries

Before time, the goddess of nothing slept. And then she became aware of herself, and light emerged from her sleepy yawn. It overcame her formless darkness, stole half of her consciousness for its own, and there would never be another slumber.

"Who are you?" the goddess asked her new companion.

"I am very weary," she said. "And I do not remember."

The goddess of nothing had no choice but to help the newcomer filter the colors, consolidate particles into matter, and turn chaos into stars and planets and galaxies.

The more they created, the weaker the two goddesses became, fragmenting themselves endlessly as they put pieces of each other into an assemblage of molten and flooded worlds, spawning an infinity of souls.

They forgot their original names, and the demigods and angels and humans they created began to fight—self-propagating machines of endless creation, who no longer needed the supervision of their masters.

Entropy desecrated them, desperate to never return to the loneliness from which they came, and they fell to an assemblage of earths and existed among hundreds of mythologies and local deities, awakening as their creations awoke to them.

But even then these abstract reincarnations were corrupted by man, so many fragmentations of the absolute truth they began to cannibalize themselves. The goddesses were seen as the propagators of creation instead of its origin, and men massacred and killed her throughout many centuries under many different names, asserting their belief in an alternate jealous, violent, and solitary father god.

But those who know wait for the primordial goddesses to return to their original forms, establishing dominion over the light and land and matter. If life cannot return to original consciousness, the universe will eventually tear and collapse in on itself.

And from the wreckage another will rise, and the amnesiac goddesses will proceed to do the same. Will their loneliness and boredom lead them to make the same mistakes? Can they be content with one another's company in the void without a single other sentient soul? Living among empty planets of rock and dust, taking shelter in one another's shadows, and the wisps of their former lives.

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I finish writing the essay. I'm using Eris' MacBook, typing away twenty-thousand feet above the ground in a private jet, Eris stuffing herself with chocolate covered strawberries beside me.

Her godfather Alfonso is in one of the other seats, wearing a simple button-down polo, his belly protruding over his tight jeans. Using the jet's in-flight wifi and various different phones, he's been making calls nonstop. They've both left behind their thick golden chains, expensive watches, and all other adornments other than simple cross necklaces, which Alfonso claimed was blessed by the Pope himself.

Other than him, a new set of bodyguards have accompanied us, wearing simple clothes and no guns in sight.

"I finished," I say. "The essay."

For once, I let Eris read a first draft. For once, it doesn't need any more perfecting.

She takes a bite out of another strawberry as she finishes reading. Then she blinks at me.

"Damn. You weren't lying when you said it was a prophetic dream." Then she pauses. "Is it supposed to be a story about us?"

I reach over to wipe the chocolate smeared over her upper lip, a gesture I don't even think twice about until she tenses up. It's unsettling how much I want to commit the shape of her lips to memory. The sheer amount of angles and lines her body possesses that I still haven't learned. No amount of anatomical study could've prepared for the way we woke up this morning, her head under my chin, her leg wrapped around my hip, our arms tangled together.