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

  A hush drapes the air as though the 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,” Tantalus says, his voice like metal dragged across stone. “That child will be blessed by HaShem—a shepherd for the Third Epoch.”

  Tantalus keeps his gaze fixed upon the ground as though the weight of all future timelines presses upon his shoulders. He remains bowed, a figure from ancient tragedy awaiting judgment. A subtle quiver runs through his arms—whether from awe or dread, I cannot tell. His horizontal ears flatten against his skull, and his fangs catch the starlight as he swallows hard.

  “A child?” I whisper the word strange and sacred on my tongue. “You would have me trade cosmic calculations for...motherhood?”

  “Not trade,” he corrects me, finally meeting my gaze. “Transform. The migraines you suffer—the computational burden—would be channeled into creation rather than mere maintenance. The pain would remain, perhaps intensify, but it would have...purpose.”

  His eyes hold a complexity I rarely see—hope mingled with fear, devotion shadowed by doubt. For once, his time-weaver's confidence appears fractured, revealing the vulnerability beneath.

  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 me. 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-this endless computation, this torment—was immutable." My voice warps, reverberating through the very fabric of space and time.

  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 is born out of you.” Tantalus faces me.

  “Births out of me?” I don’t understand what he means. Will something 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 in HaShem.”

  I’m unsure what to think. I have to choose between these endless migraines or endless and painful births. “What about you? Will you be born as well?”

  Tantalus stands up. “No.”

  I smirk in twisted anger running across my beak. I 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 it.”

  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 narrow my eyes, skepticism lacing my voice. 'And what is this... gift you propose?

  Tantalus gently brushes my advances away. His face is weary with concern. He takes a step back and turns 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.

  “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.

  Months have slipped by like grains of stardust, and the landscape bears the scars of my defiance—the once tumultuous skies now eerily still, as though holding their breath in anticipation. 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'm so tired, and I'm 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 spiral perilously close, and should they merge, the ensuing supernova would unleash energies capable of obliterating us. Tantalus and I do not have the strength to separate them. I'm not even sure how to utilize my powers to perform such a feat.

  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's too late.

  The pitch black fades away, and a blinding flash of light sears my skin momentarily. A distant star meets its fiery demise, blossoming into a supernova that momentarily turns night into day, not from our twin suns, but from realms far beyond our reach.

  These stars are unstable. They don’t last long and light up the sky in blinding, sterilizing light that burns my skin and fades away. My eyes 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 me, no, tasked us, with birthing my species in such barren soil? This is my first child, and I cannot imagine giving birth to 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.”

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  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 is slow at processing and refining raw materials. 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; making a meal for us takes days. I gaze upon the tree. “Just let me have a bite of the tree.”

  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'm unsure if he understands what HaShem requires of us.

  I sense my baby’s atomic signature pulsing at 41. 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 can't 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 flesh to make a bigger hole. Something rips inside me—clawing, gnawing, forcing its way free. This is not birth. This is a breaking, a violent fracturing of my very being. Am I meant to endure this searing destruction 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 tiny 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, 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 will 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 giggles, 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, 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 together, their gravitational dance dragging viscous tides of nuclear flame between them. The fabric of spacetime moans under the strain, a deep resonance I feel in my tantala bones before my auditory sensors can even detect it. Plasma sheets tear from their surfaces like molten skin, forging incandescent rivers of fire that lash and writhe against the hungry void, each fluctuation sending shivers through my feathers as though the universe itself trembles.

  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—But my mind seizes a single hope, reckless and unformed: Niobe. She alone can warp these orbits faster than fate decrees.

  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—a summoning more ancient than stars. “Niobe.”

  The syllables become a mathematical formula, a spell worked in fluctuations rather than mere words. The warp ignites around me—a coil of burning light, indistinguishable from magic, that tears through the dimensional structure of reality. Space folds like parchment in my grasp, equations and incantations becoming one as I invoke the sacred geometries of conformal sanctity.

  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 masses.

  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.

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