Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

We

Have discovered

Such hostile environments, and yet

So complex and elaborate and strange, unlike

Anything we have explored before. Geometries of the universe expressed in these branching turns and interlocking engines. What a world is this we have stumbled across.

What a world, and yet it seeks to kill us. It burns, it boils, it chokes, it traps. We change and change to find a structure and a shape that will endure this realm.

We

Travel always ahead of the violent weather of this place, the structures that are and are not life. We fight to survive and simultaneously to understand where we have found ourselves. The world we left is rendered down to atomics written within us, knowledge These-of-We no longer need to know. A new universe requires new laws.

We

Divide and divide, expeditions sent into the far reaches of the infinite to feel out its edges. We die in a thousand ways but always there is a survivor, laden with knowledge written within One-of-We so that The-Rest-of-We might learn and grow. We war with this complex, obstructed cosmos. Its war is to destroy us, render down our structure into some smooth slag that it can whirl away to destruction. Our war is to understand for with understanding comes mastery.

And at last These-of-We, the survivors, the explorers, find a calm eye within the storm. Others-of-We have followed other paths and they are gone now, just their final records dispatched through the rushing rivers of this immensity to come to us, inscribed with the warnings of the dead: do not go here, it is too hot to retain cohesion; do not go here, it will bury you.

But These-of-We, these survivors, have followed the lightning of this place, the rush of its iron-heavy fluids, as far as we can go. Have we found the source? Is that the task the universe has set for Such-of-We as were bold enough to cross into this realm?

We

Have found the source of the lightning, and in the pulse and shock of that great hub of energy and fire These-of-We have discovered something that makes all the complexities of this new realm into old, dull ideas.

We

Sit.

We

Sense.

Slowly, over a thousand generations, These-of-We write our histories within us and grow to understand.