This Is How You Lose the Time War

They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them.

What I can say: It was very cold out on the ice. Your letter warmed me.

Her hand does not shake as she slices into the skin. Her breath comes even. She’s kept her gloves clean, for the most part, but now she stains them red as a name.

Does she miss steam heat? Does she miss walls and a roof? Does she miss the dormant implants sewn through her limbs and tangled in her chest that could shore her against this cold, stop her feeling, seal a force field around her skin to guard her from this time to which she’s been sent?

Icicles drip and snap as the great trees fall, and felled, the trees leave gaps in green that bare the cold white sky.

Other pilgrims wander here, in saffron robes or homespun brown. Sandals shuffle over rocks, and high winds whistle around cave corners. Ask the pilgrims how the labyrinth came to be, and they offer answers varied as their sins.

It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.

In order to recall them you must seek my presence in your thoughts, tangled among them like sunlight in water.

I shall confess to you here that I’d been growing complacent. Bored, even, with the war; your Agency’s flash and dash upthread and down, Garden’s patient planting and pruning of strands, burrowing into time’s braid. Your unstoppable force to our immovable object; less a game of Go than a game of tic-tac-toe, outcomes determined from the first move, endlessly iterated until the split where we fork off into unstable, chaotic possibility—the future we seek to secure at each other’s expense.

Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns.