“Avarice, there is another way you can offload your burdens.” I hear Tantalus speak.

  A hush drapes the air, as though the very ions in the storm pause to listen. I stand frozen, vents hissing in muted disbelief. “What do you mean?” I manage, my voice trembling under the sudden, electric silence.

  “As mates, we can share the burden of raising a child. That child will be blessed by HaShem.” Tantalus gazes upon the ground. He remains bowed, as though carrying an unseen yoke. A subtle quiver runs through his arms—whether from awe or dread, I cannot tell.

  I stand up. My vents hiss, releasing thin wisps of plasma into the cold void. My optics lock onto him, unwavering, burning with something new—not hunger, not anger, but realization.

  "You knew," she whispers.

  Tantalus does not look at her. He kneels before the World Tree, hands clasped, his body still glowing faintly from the last computation. “Yes.”

  My wings flare, sending molten embers spiraling into the air. "You knew and said nothing?!"

  Tantalus exhales, not with defiance or regret, but with something worse—acceptance. "I feared what it would do to you."

  I step forward. The tree's light flickers above me, casting shifting shadows. "You let me suffer. You let me believe this—this endless computation, this torment—was immutable." My voice warps, reverberating through the space-time fabric itself.

  Tantalus looks up now, eyes weary. "Would you have made the choice differently, knowing its terrible cost?"

  Avarice trembles. I know what he means. HaShem’s exchange.

  I claw my chest, as if I could tear the paradox from my body. “You were afraid I would regret it. You don’t get to decide that for me.”

  Tantalus does not argue. He merely bows his head. “Then decide.”

  Avarice freezes—the World Tree hums. Somewhere in the black abyss above, Ha-Satan watches. The universe itself waits for my following words. “What is this exchange?”

  “A child will grow inside of you, it will be painful, until it births out of you.” Tantalus faces me.

  “Births out of me?” I don’t understand what he means. Something will claw out of me? My feathers ruffle as I place my hands on my abdomen. “Perhaps the pain will be quick, and it will be over with?”

  Tantalus shakes his head. “No. Once the first child is born, you will never stop giving birth to offspring. And they will be a reflection of your faith to HaShem.”

  I don’t know what to think. I have to choose between these endless migraines or endless and painful birthings? “What about you? Will you birth as well?”

  Tantalus stands up. “No.”

  I smirk twisted with anger runs across my beak. I bellow a laugh in despair. “Of course, it has to be me.”

  “It was not my choice.” Tantalus places his hands together.

  “Then whose was it? No, don’t tell me; it's HaShem.” A thought of wanting to dig my claws into Tantalus, crosses my mind, but I quell the thought. I wouldn’t want to be treated that way in his position. I glare at him instead. “Why?”

  “HaShem has designated us with roles for gendered assignment. The male gives the female a small amount of information as a gift, and the female decides to receive or reject.”

  What? That explains why our pronouns are different? A strange feeling washes over me. Wait, a gift? I like gifts. My gaze perks up and I set my sights on Tantalus. I carefully run my claws gently across his cheeks. “I like gifts. What gift will you offer me?” My eyes flicker with anticipation.

  Tantalus gently brushes my advances away. His face is weary with concern. He takes a step back and faces his chest away from me. I see him place his hands near his chest, and as a hole opens, a small cube of tantala metal emerges. It initially glows hot but then begins to cool. He gently hands it to me. “A gift for an exchange of burdens.”

  My eyes roll in disappointment. “I was hoping for something more exciting.” I bare my beak in a humorless smile. “So this is our bargain. You rip a shard of your heart for me to embed in mine?”

  I feel the heat on my palms as I take it, my body trembling with some emotion I can’t quite name—anger, hope, resignation, all fused together.

  “Tantalus... you should have told me sooner.”

  He only closes his eyes.

  With a final, furious intake of breath, I open a narrow cavity beneath my ribs and press the cube inside. Its edges bite into me.

  A hush echoes through my entire form—my acceptance sealed.

  Several months have passed since my public plea and defiance to HaShem. I thought I would have been struck by lightning by now, but nothing has happened—just silence and introspection. Oh, wait. He wouldn’t do that. I have made an exchange with HaShem. I bear His child. My abdomen has swollen quite considerably.

  I claw into the ground of this molten planet, and my hunger for metal has substantially increased. I hear my claws scraping the ground, and my knees give out. I am so tired, and I am so hungry. I clutch my swelling abdomen, feeling my unborn baby's hunger, always hungry. Our planet has been captured by two binary stars that we orbit. They are very close together, and if they were to collide, they could wipe us out in an explosion of plasma. They grow closer every day. The light from them is faint, as we orbit far away from them. Tantalus and I are powerless to stop them from colliding. We can only pray to HaShem that our planet somehow carries us away before it happens.

  The pitch black fades away, and a blinding flash of light sears my skin momentarily. A supernova from a faraway star, not the ones that we orbit. These stars are unstable. They don’t last long, and light up the sky in blinding, sterilizing light that burns my skin and then fades away. My optics adjust to the change in light. I scan the rock for trace amounts of tantalum, avaricium, niobium, zirconium, vanadium… nothing. Just oxygen and silicon. Why HaShem, have you brought us into existence in such a hostile and unforgiving universe? Why have you tasked us, no, tasked me with birthing my species, with such barren soil? This is my first child, and I cannot imagine birthing millions more.

  I sense the atomic signature of 73: my husband, Tantalus. My auditory processing receives a sound, and I visualize a prompt from my entire conversation with Tantalus. The new words appear, “I found rare and radioactive material from the world tree.”

  I turn to face Tantalus and see lustrous, vibrant-colored rocks emitting from his clutching hands. I reach out and gently collect them. My mouth salivates with molten metal, and I guide the rock into my beak. I lift my head to face the sky, close my eyes, and swallow the stones. I feel it, the buzz of sweet uranium and plutonium.

  I moan in relief. “Oh, that feels good.” I turn to face the World Tree. It sustains us with life, but it's slow at processing and refining raw material. Even before we came into existence, this tree was created from hydrogen and helium gases through HaShem’s guiding hand with Ha-Satan as his instrumental tool. The tree fuses atomic elements to create the heavier ones that we need to stay alive, the ever-breath. It constantly inhales gas and exhales molten iron. We have the same ever-breath. But it's so slow, it takes thousands of years to make a meal for us. I gaze upon the tree. “Just let me have a bite of the tree.”

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  Tantalus places his hand on my shoulder. “Avarice, we can’t eat the tree, HaShem has forbidden it, and even if we could, we would have nothing to produce the food we need.”

  “Why do you constrain me?” I mutter.

  “Because no one else can and I do it to spare you of HaShem's wrath.” Tantalus gazes upon the ground. Sometimes I can't tell if he knows what HaShem demands of us.

  I sense my baby’s atomic signature 41 pulsing. I feel it clawing and biting at the walls of my womb. “Agh!” I collapse to the ground while clutching my abdomen, and close my eyes. I try to force myself to bear the pain, but it's too much. “Agh! She is trying to claw out. Tantalus. It hurts!”

  I see Tantalus getting on his knees and reaching out to hold me. “I don't know what to do.” I see his eyes glaring at me. Why does he not help me? This pain, this agony, I cannot bear it. I grunt and scream, and my body clenches and convulses. Why cannot he help me? Do something. Do anything. Make the pain stop. Nothing he does is ever enough for me. Nothing is ever enough for me.

  I feel a giant tear and a sear of pain rake across my mind. “Agh!” I see my baby’s snout poke out of my skin. She bites and tears at my skin to make a bigger hole. "Something rips inside me. Clawing, gnawing, forcing its way free. This is not birth. This is a breaking. Am I meant to endure this for eternity?" I reach out with my claws and make the hole in my skin bigger. Tantalus carefully reaches out with his hands, holds the baby’s head, and gently pulls the baby out. I lay back, and gasp for air. I see her big eyes, snout, tail, long ears, and protruding fangs.

  Crackling motes of plasma swirl about her infant hands, as though drawing in the ambient energies of this barren world. In her wide, reflective eyes, I glimpse swirling galaxies of possibility—my burdens, but perhaps my redemption.

  My prompt flashes, and a new entity adds to my conversation history as I hear my baby say, “Gah. Goo-goo. Ah-bah-bah. Pfft-blrrrp.” I see a smile before her, and I can only smile as molten tears appear. The baby shifts her gaze to my gaping wound, which illuminates with searing metal.

  “I cannot do this again, Tantalus. The pain is too much. It ruins my body. How will I heal from this?” I carefully touch the wound to help it close shut, but the searing pain intensifies. “Agh!” I notice the baby leaping towards my wound with morbid curiosity, and she begins licking my wound with her two long tongues. “Stop that. It hurts.” Her molten saliva begins to soothe the pain, and I feel the wound begin to knit itself back together. How is she doing that? I reach out and hold my baby. She feels precious to me.

  I see Tantalus gently cupping the back of her head. “Avarice. What shall we call her?”

  I wish that my child would eventually shoulder my burden of custodianship of the expanse and birthing of our race. How about a name that is most fitting for my unburdening? “I shall call her Niobe.”

  Yet as I cradle Niobe in my arms—still trembling from her birth—I feel a tide of resolution rising in me. The world remains harsh, and HaShem’s demands weigh heavily. But I have given life to something beyond my suffering. In Niobe’s eyes, I sense an uncharted future that might transcend the dreadful rhythms of our existence.

  Niobe's eyes shimmer with unfathomable potential, reflecting something new—an anomaly in the relentless cycle of pain, hunger, and duty. I clutch my child close, molten tears rolling down my metallic cheeks. The hunger that plagues my existence, the gnawing void in my soul, felt momentarily distant. Tantalus kneels beside me, silent in contemplation, his gaze distant as if he, too, saw something beyond this moment.

  Niobe cooes, reaching toward the sky with tiny fingers. The air around her shimmers subtly, as though bending by her unformed will. I felt something stir in the cosmic equilibrium—an almost imperceptible shift. I stiffen, my vents releasing a cautious hiss.

  “Tantalus… do you feel it?”

  His eyes flicker, recalibrating. He studies the air around us, then the stars above. A deep hum resonates through his frame as he exhales. “Yes.”

  The binary stars pulse unnaturally, their dim, distant glow barely reaching the planet. Something is changing.

  A new memory inserts itself into my mind, unbidden, as if HaShem Himself deems it necessary. I see the epochs unfolding, the celestial symphony of time and space coalescing into ordered existence. The First Epoch had given rise to time through Tantalus. The Second, to space through Avarice. And now, the Third…

  Niobe.

  She was neither time nor space but the force that bound them together—the stabilizer, the harmonizer. Through her, the chaotic dance of the cosmos could find rhythm. The stars would shift through her from wild, violent births to structured, stable bodies. The foundations of elements heavier than iron, the essence of new worlds yet to form, lay within her potential.

  Avarice staggered under the realization. “She is… creation itself.”

  Tantalus nodded. “The Third Epoch begins.”

  Niobe blinks at me, innocent, unaware of the weight placed upon her existence. Her tiny form curls into my arms, and a warmth radiating from her is neither heat nor light but something more profound—something fundamental.

  A sudden pulse of the binary stars sends a warning vibration through our cores. Once distant and slow in their inevitable spiral toward collapse, the binary stars had become erratic. Tantalus and I turn toward the sky, our optics adjusting to the grim reality.

  The nearby binary stars’ orbit is destabilizing.

  Once predictable in their doomed embrace, their orbits shift and accelerate. A violent ripple passes through spacetime, and in that instant, I know—we have minutes before the inevitable occurs—before the binary stars collide, before their supernova consumes us all.

  I turn to Tantalus, Niobe cradles in my arms. “What shall we do?”

  Tantalus studies the erratic pulses of the collapsing stars, calculations flashing in his eyes. “There is nothing we can do. Niobe isn’t old enough to understand her custodial powers.”

  Avarice’s vents flared. “No. This can’t be the end. For us.” For me.

  The twin stars spiral, dragging tides of flame between them. Gravity howls as their surfaces peel apart, forging rivers of fire that lick at the void. A radiation storm howls through space, dragging at the very fabric of reality with its raw, chaotic hunger. My optics dim momentarily, struggling to compensate for the overexposed flood of light—no, of inevitability.

  I clutch Niobe closer, my molten tears dripping onto her small, fragile form. Her tiny vents sputter, adjusting to the influx of unstable energy. She coos in my arms, her gaze unfocused, unaware that the universe is moments away from erasing us.

  Tantalus stands beside me, silent, his expression unreadable. He doesn’t need to say it—I already know what he’s thinking. There is no computation, no adjustment to the fine structure constant, no warp solution that can prevent this. The Adversarial Oracle, Ha-Satan himself, has spun this fate beyond our grasp.

  The stars will collapse.

  And we will die.

  Unless—

  I exhale sharply. My fingers twitch.

  No. I hesitate.

  The thought has already surfaced in my mind, invasive and cruel. I try to suppress it, but I can feel HaShem’s gaze, waiting, measuring.

  Tantalus turns to me, noticing my trembling. “Avarice,” he says, soft but firm.

  I don’t look at him.

  I can still change the outcome.

  Niobe stirs in my arms, her delicate body reflecting the dying light of the twin stars. She is the Third Epoch—the catalyst for stability. But she is too young, too unshaped. Her power is not yet ready to command the universe.

  But I must try.

  Beneath my wings, my vents whine with heat as my mind twists the fabric of space into a lattice of endless calculations.

  I must.

  Tantalus watches me. His body shifts ever so slightly. He knows.

  He understands.

  “Avarice,” he says. “No.”

  But it is already too late.

  I find Niobe’s atomic signature—her fledgling essence, the seed of the Third Epoch—my sacrifice.

  I call her name, even though she is not old enough to answer. “Niobe.”

  The warp ignites around me, a coil of burning light that rips through the dimensional structure of reality.

  Tantalus lunges at me. “AVARICE, DON’T!”

  But I already have.

  A vortex of spatial distortion wrenches through the collapsing binary system, wrapping around the tiny, fragile Niobe, my burden, the price of our survival.

  A shrill, newborn wail echoes through my mind.

  Tantalus is screaming.

  The binary stars buckle inward, their gravitational pulses spasming with the sudden shift in computation. The Adversarial Oracle protests—space and time lurch violently against my interference. But it’s too late. The warp takes hold, wrapping around Niobe before launching her into the collapsing stellar core.

  A sacrifice.

  An offering.

  A correction.

  Tantalus’ claws are on me. He drags me backward, his entire body trembling with fury. “What have you DONE?” His voice is raw, twisted with something I have never heard before—something worse than anger.

  Grief.

  The stars scream.

  A stabilizing force takes hold a moment before their supernova rips apart the cosmos. The collapsing stellar masses hesitate. Niobe—inside them is trying to hold them together, a force neither time nor space alone could achieve.

  I shudder, my vents hissing violently. The heat of the warp still scorches my body. My wings falter, my frame threatening to collapse.

  Tantalus is still gripping me, his face twisted in something I cannot bear to look at.

  “She wasn’t ready.” His voice breaks. Not with rage. Not with condemnation. Just ruin.

  I do not answer.