The house sat at the edge of everything. Drifting gently outside the Origin Tree, and yet no Primordial could see it unless its owner wanted them to.
Mira thought this place where her husband built their home was poetic, and when she mentioned it to him, Andar had written poetry about it, terrible poetry, which Mira still kept in a locked chest somewhere.
The structure of the house was a thought, given form, a memory of wood and stone and the scent of rain on warm, perched on the last sliver of reality before existence frayed into the howling chaos of the Grand Void.
Andar had built it himself, of course. He did not use magic, that would be easier, as he was now a being who had long since stopped being merely a mage and had become something closer to a principle of existence.
No, he had built it with his hands. Wood from a tree that had grown in their first home, on a world that had died an Existence ago. Stones from a river where their eldest daughter had once nearly drowned, laughing the entire time.
However, these materials still warped under his touch until they became part of his thoughts. As long as he had his home in his heart, it would never be destroyed.
Mira stood at the window now, watching the light outside shift through colors that had no names. She appeared young, they both did, frozen at the age they had been when they first realized they would never grow old together, because they would never grow old at all.
Twenty-two, perhaps. Twenty-three. Her hair was the color of starlight caught in amber, and when she turned to look at him, her eyes still held that same impossible blue that had stolen his breath on a hundred thousand worlds.
"You’re brooding," she said.
"I’m contemplating," Andar replied from his chair by the fireplace that held no fire, only the memory of one, which was somehow warmer than the real thing.
"There’s a difference?"
"Brooding implies a certain theatrical melancholy. Contemplation is merely... thoughtful silence."
"Thirty billion years ago, you called it ’sharpening my mental faculties.’"
"Forty billion, actually."
Mira’s lips twitched. She crossed the room. The house was small, deliberately so, because what was the point of eternity if you couldn’t be close to the one you loved?
She settled onto the arm of his chair, causing the wood to creak. It always creaked, despite being reinforced by enough magical wards to withstand a direct hit from a collapsing dimensional cluster.
"You’re stalling," she said quietly.
"Yes."
Andar reached up and took her hand. Her fingers were cool, as they always were when she was anxious. After all this time, after countless trillions of years, after watching their children grow and fade, after burying descendants whose names blurred together like rain on a windowpane, she still couldn’t hide her tells from him. And he still couldn’t hide his from her.
"Do you remember," Mira said, "when we first realized we were going to live forever?"
Andar laughed softly. "We didn’t realize it. We spent three centuries convinced we were both going to die horribly any day now. Of course, our definition of forever at that time was so limited."
"We were so young."
"We were." He turned her hand over in his, tracing the lines of her palm. He had memorized these lines a trillion trillion times. They had never changed. "I remember thinking, during those first few trillion years, that the worst part of immortality would be watching everyone else die, so I did not become a fourth dimensional immortal, because I wanted the chance to be able to die."
"And then?"
"And then I watched everyone else die. And it was terrible. But the worst part..." He paused, his throat tightening. Even now. Even after everything, it could still tighten. "The worst part was when I realized I could no longer remember their faces without magic. That I had to cast a spell to see my own daughter’s smile."
Mira was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "Elara’s smile was crooked. Just a little. She got it from you."
"I don’t have a crooked smile."
"You do. You’ve just forgotten what your real smile looks like. You’ve been using the polite one for the last four grand cosmic eras."
Andar turned to look at her, and for a moment, just a moment, he let the mask slip.
The face he showed Existence was one of serene power, the calm confidence of a being who had mastered existence itself. But here, in this house, with her, he was simply Andar. Tired. Afraid. In love.
"There it is," Mira whispered, touching his cheek. "That’s the one."
"Mira."
"I know."
He stood, pulling her with him, and they stood together in the center of the small room, surrounded by the accumulated detritus of an eternity: books that had been read so many times their spines were cracked and soft, a tea set that had belonged to their great-granddaughter, a small wooden bird that their youngest son had carved with his own hands, now weathered and gray.
"Do you remember," Mira said, "when we tried to retire?"
"Which time?"
"The first time. When we moved to that little world in the Nebular Expanse. Bought a farm. Tried to grow vegetables."
"We grew rocks. Everything was rocks."
"We grew rocks beautifully." She smiled, and it was the same smile that had made him fall in love with her on a battlefield covered in demon blood, when they had both been young and stupid and utterly convinced they were going to die. "And then the neighbors started dying, and then the planet started dying, and then the entire star cluster started dying, and we realized—"
"That we couldn’t stop." Andar finished. "We couldn’t stop. We can never stop."
Outside, the nameless lights shifted again. Somewhere in the distance, though distance had ceased to have meaning at this level of existence, something stirred. Something old. Something hungry.
Andar had fought it before. Died fighting it, once. The memory was hazy now, fragmented, like a dream that faded upon waking.
His father had made sure that when he was resurrected again, much of the past trauma was cleansed from his soul, but he remembered the cold. The endless, crushing cold.
And he remembered the voice of his father, reaching across the void between death and life, pulling him back from the edge of annihilation.
He had never fully understood how Eos had done it. His father was something else.
Something beyond even the comprehension of a being who had transcended mortality so completely that death had become merely an inconvenience. The angels whispered about him sometimes, in their golden voices. About the City of Sheol, about the Throne at the beginning of everything, about the war that had been waged before time itself had a name.
Andar had not seen his father in many Grand Cosmic Eras, and he missed him.
Memories of Eos still remain, fragments showing the time the previous Existence had been shattered by the hands of a mad Luminious and he went to meet it alone.