The blackness smothered her.

  It snuffed out the fire in her veins, as surely as if the flames had been doused.

  Sometimes, she imagined she could hear the flames. It was a roaring bellow, like the endless rushing of water over stone. It filled the blackouts between her memories.

  She was born in a tiny sliver of a mortal shell in the center of the universe, little more than a slab of rock amid the rapids of this ocean of space and time. That was where she put herself–stored herself. And became a forgotten goddess, waiting to emerge when the time was right.

  When existence itself called out to her, humming in the ancient tongue of worlds beyond this one, she must answer. When she weaved the Pattern of the True Source–ashes on the wind, fire in the air–there were many possible draws, but only one outcome. And all the sacrifice and death and slavery had brought her to this.

  The cards had been drawn, and she must be reborn.

  As a young girl who would be made queen. Her people would tell stories of the night she was born. They say the girl curled up in the womb and screamed, begging to not be released into the world. She fought with all her strength, but of course she was–true nature cannot be denied.

  She was born a girl with the ways of reality in her spirit and power in her heart and chaos in her mind. She was not destined for an easy life. She was destined for suffering and hardship.

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  For her world. For all worlds.

  The darkness rippled, billowed out, muttered in slurred tongues as it dissipated against the cosmic star-bright. Iridescent patterns of the intergalactic constructs–raw subatomic particles, flashes of plasma and bursts of electromagnetic radiation–trailed fire and heat through the fifty-two superstrings of hyperspace. Crackling with heat and catching brilliant light, the ta’lien erupted in a blast that illuminated everything in this newborn reality, igniting the beginning from the end, rebirth from destruction. Everything.

  The girl whose only name was now Grandmaster flared bright and became a star of flesh and deviation. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be reincarnated, willingly wiping her memories away, so she became an ordinary yet extraordinary deviant. Harleen Bawa, a deviant avatar. Her consciousness expanded at the speed of light before retracting into her mortal shell, reaching from one side of reality to another. A million stars, a billion worlds, and it was only until the last proton of the universe decayed when she realized she was pure ecstasy, pure joy, and would live forever.

  ...

  If time is a circle, then everything happens at once. Now. Then. Forever. Always.

  Grandmaster would forget, but she would remember again.

  As she waited, they were all blurring together. The lies and the truths and the memories. Sleep and then blackness and then sleep again. The days bound in a mortal shell all blurred together.

  So she told herself the story. The darkness and flame within her whispered it too, and she sang it back to them. The Queen of the Multiverse, locked within that body, waiting to be born, in the depths of her mind, recited the story over and over again, and let them unleash an eternity of pain upon her body. The story she told the man she loved so long ago.

  Once upon a time, in a land long since burned by flames, there lived a young queen who loved her kingdom…very, very much…