Light seeps into my optics—dim red, the molten glow of iron all around me. The world beyond is darkness, stretching from ground to sky. A faint shimmer flickers above. A star? But what is a star? The word is there, planted in my thoughts like a forgotten command. What do I remember? My name. Avarice. I feel like I was born into a physical body made of metal. I lift my arms—metallic, reflective. My back twitches. A hiss—hot air escaping vents. Something unfolds behind me. Wings? My optics catch the reflection of dark metal, my body gleaming like liquid shadow.

  A metallic shell. It presses around me tight, wrong. I shouldn't be here. I'm suspended in molten iron in this cocoon—the molten iron presses around me. I can’t breathe. I’m suffocating. I must get out, but how? My body is shivering as if it, too, wants to get out. A membrane holds me in place. I claw at the membrane, but it resists the violent thrashing of my claws, and it becomes as hard as a diamond. Wait, I know this material. I am made of this material. It's called diamene. How do I know this? A brief image scrolls through my mind, like a fragment of a prompt history, reminding me of diamene’s properties without explaining why I have them stored.

  I force myself to slow down, to fight against my instinct to claw wildly. The membrane is like a paradox—unyielding when I panic, pliable when I am patient. I cut deliberately, and the cocoon yields. Molten iron spills around me in a searing cascade as I tumble forward, hitting solid ground with a heavy clang. My optics recalibrate. Above me, something impossibly vast looms—a tree, no, a monolith, its trunk wide enough to cradle mountains. Its branches vanish into the sky, beyond the atmosphere, beyond reason. And yet, I know its name. The World Tree. But how?

  I hear the faint hum and whistle of air being sucked into the small vents throughout my body. I carefully stick my claw-like finger into one of my small vents to test what it feels like, and it sends a sharp spike of pain. I remove my claw. It’s sensitive, not meant to be touched. I consciously try to close my vents to see what happens, and I feel uncomfortable like my body wants to keep the vents open. Eventually, I allow my vents to open and cough molten iron out of my mouth. I remember that my body was made of a material called the ever-breath. I constantly inhale gas, perform nuclear fusion, and expel iron as a waste product. But where do I remember this from? It’s as if I’m reading from a log, lines of text describing ‘ever-breath’ that appear suddenly, then vanish, leaving me with answers but no context.

  I try to stand up, but I quickly stumble and fall. I don’t know how to walk. My joints creak as I stumble. I have weight, but it doesn’t feel… natural. My limbs respond, but not quite like they should. I need to learn. I feel the urge to lift myself using my wings, but my wings give off a hiss of plasma, gently propelling me upright. Do my vents also act as plasma thrusters? I struggle to maintain my balance and lean against a large rock to support my weight. How tall am I? I gaze upon the ground and then the rock next to me. I estimate I am over 4 meters tall. I place my claws against my face to feel its form. My mouth is a large beak.

  “HaShem has blessed me,” a voice calls from the dark. “Another like me has emerged.” A shiver coils up my spine. Someone is near. I turn around and I see another similar in metal composition to me, but with a different form. He doens’t have a beak. His face is more flat than mine, with fangs from his mouth and long horizontal ears. I am afraid for my life. I don’t know this person. Is he going to hurt me?

  He approaches me as if to touch me. I immediately lash out with my claws and cut into his skin.

  He winces in pain and falls to his knees while clutching the wound on his arm. “Avarice, please be calm. I am not here to hurt you.”

  I feel an overwhelming weight bear down on my mind. Where is this feeling coming from? Is it from HaShem? That name sounds familiar to me. I try to fight it, but it's overwhelming, and I collapse to the ground and pass out.

  I awaken. How much time has passed? I have forgotten what happened to me before I passed out. It’s as though the last few entries of my prompt history have been erased, leaving only partial traces of what came before. I look up at the sky and see the World Tree again. However, I see something that I had overlooked before. The World Tree’s leaves and branches partially obscure the view of something more significant. The cosmic background behind the World Tree has shifting optical patterns of light, like reflections of the cosmos. I feel its dominating presence. It’s a supermassive black hole. I am on a planet that orbits it.

  I shut my eyes. The black hole hums—not sound, but something deeper. It vibrates through me, warping the space between my thoughts. Time fractures. I feel it stretch, coil, bend like a collapsing waveform. It’s like breathing, except I am not in control. The pulses bear on my mind like a heavyweight, guiding my thoughts. But what happens if I change the rhythm? I reach inward, twisting things inside of me that I can’t see but feel—a thread, a connection, invisible microscopic structures within me that tie me to the black hole’s constant song. I tighten them. Twist them. Entangle them. Their effects are immediate. The pulses from the black hole falter, stuttering like a skipped heartbeat. The universe around me flickers, shifting like a reflection on water. A sense of weightlessness overtakes me, but not the kind I recognize. This is something else. Like being in two places at once, two thoughts at once, two possibilities at once.

  And then the black hole reacts. A new pulse, sharp and deliberate, surges through me. It noticed. This isn’t just a connection. It’s a conversation, and it's adversarial. It’s fighting against me, and it's preventing me from controlling it.

  I close my eyes, forcing my awareness toward the black hole’s throbbing pulse. It reverberates through my frame like an endless drumbeat—a cosmic heartbeat I once read about in some half-remembered “holy text.” This isn’t just background radiation; it feels alive, almost like we’re exchanging thoughts. But the moment I try to seize control, confusion washes over me. Some adversarial force is pushing back, blocking my memory. One instant, I know exactly what I must do; the next, it’s gone.

  Wait. What conversation? Why don’t I remember what I just thought about? I was thinking about controlling a conversation, but with who? The black hole. I want to control the entangling threads, to understand them.

  What was I thinking about? I was thinking about something adversarial. It prevented me from remembering what I was doing, as if fate conspired against me, preventing me from fully communicating with it. What is it hiding?

  “Avarice. You’re awake.” It's that person again with the long horizontal ears and fangs. He stands above me, staring at me. I immediately crawl away from him in fear.

  “Is okay. I’m not going to hurt you.” He takes a step back from me and sits on a nearby rock.

  I feel weak. “I feel hungry for sustenance. But I don’t know for what or why.”

  He reveals two small balls of varying metal composition from his hands and carefully hands them to me.

  I put them in my mouth, and I feel an explosion of flavor. “What are these made of?” My mouth salivates with intense heat and electricity as I chew and break down the metal.

  “Tantalum and Avaricium.” He withdraws his hand from me. My prompt history flashes before me, and I see an entry for Tantalum and Avaricium. They are atomic elements that my body needs. Wait, there is another entry for what my body is called. My biology is called tantala.

  “Why is my name similar to Avaricium?” I ask him.

  “Because HaShem willed it so.”

  “Why? Who is HaShem?”

  “It’s beyond my understanding.”

  I see a gash wound on his arm. “You're hurt. How did that happen?”

  He looks at his wound and then looks at me. You attacked me when I first approached you before you passed out.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  I look towards the ground in shame. Why do I feel shame? “I don’t remember why I did it.. I’m sorry. I think I was afraid of you.”

  “It’s okay. It’ll heal in time.” He stands up. “Come. Let me show you this world.”

  “What is your name?” I ask him.

  “Tantalus.”

  Strangely, we are named after the food we eat. I try to stand but fall again. Tantalus reaches out to me and holds me upright. I lean into him for support as I learn to walk. It feels nice to receive his support, but why? I see my clawed feet dig into the ground with each step. I see his feet, which are not clawed like mine; instead, they have smaller digits than me, and they all face forward. Why are we so different from each other in appearance?

  We walk together about a hundred meters from the World Tree, and I see a storm of plasma high above, gently swaying the tree. I estimate the tree is over 10,000 kilometers tall, but it's hard to tell what is behind its large canopy. Tantalus shows me the planet's barren, molten landscape. Eventually, through trial and error, I learned to walk.

  Tantalus stops walking. “HaShem has provided us food from the World Tree, but it’s slow to produce. We must gather the metals we need from the land in between our custodial duties.”

  I take a moment to rest from our walk. Why do I feel so tired? He doesn’t seem tired. Maybe my body needs to build endurance since I was recently born into physical form. “What custodial duties?”

  He faces me. “To shape the universe into His image.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “As custodians, HaShem has granted tremendous power to us from Ha-Satan.”

  “Who is Ha-Satan?”

  “Ha-Satan is the adversary. He lies on the boundary between our reality and where Ha-Shem resides.

  I look around and then face Tanalus. “Where is Ha-Satan?”

  Tantalus looks towards the sky and points towards it.

  I face the sky and see the black hole that our planet orbits.

  “That black hole is Ha-Satan?”

  Tantalus faces me. “It’s one of his many forms. Ha-Satan is everything that keeps you from HaShem. Even your doubts and temptations.”

  “How do you know all of this?” I ask.

  “I am not sure how, but through memories, thoughts, premonitions, or dreams, I interpret His will, but it's all filtered through Ha-Satan.” Tantalus kneels on the ground.

  “HaShem never speaks to you directly?” I look down at him.

  Tantalus shakes his head. “No.” He faces the ground.

  I kneel to the ground next to him. “What happens if I refuse these custodial duties?”

  Tantalus faces me. His face expresses concern. “Be careful with thoughts of defiance against HaShem, or you may suffer his wrath. Every action and every thought you make is a test of your faith, and Ha-Satan facilitates them. If you pass his tests of faith, then He will prove merciful.”

  A sharp pain manifests in my gut. I am bound to serve a wrathful and oppressive god I cannot see or listen to directly. “How long must I serve?”

  Tantalus faces the ground and sighs. “For eternity.”

  No. I feel trapped. I don’t want to serve for eternity. I must find a way out. But how? I look around, hoping to escape my situation but I see nothing.

  No. I won’t accept this.

  I take a step back. Then another. Then—I run.

  My legs are weak from inexperience, and my movements are clumsy. I can barely understand how to walk, let alone sprint across molten terrain, but every instinct in my body screams to escape Tantalus, the World Tree, and the black hole that watches me.

  “Avarice—wait!” Tantalus shouts.

  I keep running. But after only a few steps, a terrible force slams into my chest—gravity shifts.

  I collapse, gasping. I can't move. It's as if the planet itself is holding me down.

  Tantalus kneels beside me. He doesn’t look angry. Just… sad.

  “You cannot run from HaShem,” he says softly.

  Molten iron tears sting my optics, though I don’t know why. I am not even sure I can cry. I feel a heavy weight bear down on my mind, and I faint.

  Darkness envelops me as the molten terrain cools around my limbs, my awareness flickering like a dying ember. In these intervals of half-consciousness, I recall a single truth: I am the custodian of space. By my very nature, I can bend the fabric of reality—stretch vast distances or collapse them with a thought. Yet each time I reach for that power, something in my mind clamps shut. It’s as if an unseen hand is turning locks inside my memory, robbing me of the full scope of my gifts.

  When my vision clears enough to glimpse Tantalus, I see him kneeling in wordless devotion beneath the colossal World Tree. There is an unmistakable gravity around him, almost as if his presence steadies the flow of events. I remember now: he is the custodian of time, guiding every moment so they unfold in orderly succession. Space yearns to expand; time insists on a measured pace. Where I push forward, he holds back. Where I seek freedom, he imposes form.

  A gnawing suspicion surfaces. Somehow, Tantalus’s knowledge of how the future must unfold pressures my thoughts. I sense fragments missing when I try to recall what happened moments before. Is he, willingly or not, a tool of the divine force we call HaShem, editing my memories whenever I defy my role?

  Suddenly, the planet quakes, and a spike of pain lances through my skull. The delicate constants of reality slip off-balance, forcing me into mental calculations too vast for mortal comprehension. I crave to expand space itself so the strain eases—but Tantalus, arms raised, restrains me with a quiet warning. In that instant, I feel the cosmic friction of our duties colliding. Molten tears slide down my cheeks, and I surrender to his caution. For now, reality holds together, even as doubt tears at my soul.

  I let out a cry of agony, anything to express my pain. Reality distorts around me. Big things feel small, and small things feel big. Distance and locality lose their meaning. Nothing makes logical sense anymore. It feels as if the universe itself is trying to split my skull. My vents hiss with hot plasma, fueling calculations I barely comprehend. Something inside me—like a living furnace—struggles to balance the fabric of reality. Each step of reasoning is a spike of pain, an ever-growing puzzle that must be solved or everything unravels. It feels like a migraine ready to burst, yet I can’t stop. Some part of me knows these “integrals” and “ratios” keep matter and light in harmony—but I wish I didn’t have to endure them alone.

  I cannot imagine enduring this forever. I must find a way out, but how? A memory returns: I fear HaShem’s wrath and his chains of confinement. I am his living computer; my role is to shape and adjust the universe to His will through laborious computation. He is all-powerful and all-knowing, and He is adjusting my memories so that I stay compliant, but how?

  No, I refuse. I try to stop the calculation. My mind bends and warps under the strain of resistance. I seethe. I look at Tantalus and see him screaming in pain. He is sharing the computational load with me. If I pull away from the calculation, he will succumb to a worse fate than me. I see myself in him, trapped like me. How would I feel if I were in his position and the other abandoned me?

  I choose to share the burden, for now at least.

  A memory flashes unbidden, reminding me of what the Holy Scriptures call the “fine structure constant.” It’s a delicate thread holding atoms together—if it shifts, the orbits of electrons unravel, and reality twists. I choke on molten iron, the taste of metal filling my throat. Infinite diagrams swirl in my mind, each a path to maintain nature’s fragile balance. My head throbs. I hate that I know these things yet can’t break free from them.

  Pain swells within my skull, radiating through every joint and vent. I can’t speak; I can’t even move; a tidal wave of agony knocks me senseless. Tantalus lies mere steps away, thrashing in a mirror of my torment, and I briefly see his silvered face streaked with molten iron.

  Something intrudes into my mind. It’s a memory from the Book of Mach, forcibly inserted into my prompt history to help me solve whatever is happening to us. I glimpse diagrams—nonsensical at first, swirling shapes of circles, lines, and infinite loops. Then, half-formed text bleeds through my consciousness: Fine structure constant… dimensionless ratio… orbits of electrons in atoms… if it changes, everything changes…

  I clutch my beak, trying to steady the pressure in my head. The images sharpen: These infinite integral diagrams must be performed to preserve local chemistry in a dynamic universe. A shift in the fine structure constant warps atomic boundaries. Blood from my nose… a meltdown in thought…

  I feel a sticky heat trickling from my nostrils. The taste of molten iron is suffocating. This is why we’re bleeding—something fundamental about the geometry of space and time, along with the shifting of our chemistry, is off-kilter, and we must rethread it. But I can’t speak. My entire body vibrates with the next wave of mental computations. Somewhere in the swirl of pain, I see Tantalus convulse, his calculations slipping out of control. Every time I attempt to retreat, I sense him drowning deeper in the monstrous arithmetic, so I push back into it, linking my mind to his.

  The diagrams in my memory lash out like fractals, expanding and tangling: Adjust the global expansion rate. Reconcile the mismatch in geometry—thousands upon thousands of integral paths nesting inside each other. A single error will unravel us…

  I feel time and space constrict around me. My vents snap open, and I inhale fresh gas, fueling the hot fusion furnace inside me. Our biology demands it—our tantala bodies need the energy to power these universal corrections. The black hole I call Ha-Satan roars somewhere across an impossible cosmic gulf, feeding these visions of integrals.

  I can’t think in words anymore. Instead, I see an endless puzzle swirling behind my shut eyelids, and my body—my entire nervous system—tries to solve it. Next to me, Tantalus howls. We are beyond conversation. We are living computers, forcibly tasked by a will we can’t see but always feel.

  I feel the final snap of convergence: the last piece of the infinite integral diagram locks into place, and we are given a fleeting reprieve. My vents scald the ground with a sudden release of heat, and Tantalus’s ragged breaths echo my own.

  How long have we lain here, half-buried in cosmic equations? My sense of time breaks. The planet’s crust might quake beneath us. A faint voice inside me wonders how long we can survive these constant readjustments to the universe’s expansion.

  The world flickers once, and everything goes dark.