The only things alive within the dome are the newborn numena.
The one who had been leaves is aware first, of heat and ringing noise, a self, a body, though the body is insubstantial. It feels temperature and exhaustion, it feels confusion and a need for something. Sunlight, except it isn’t leaves any longer. Or it isn’tonlyleaves.
Beside it something makes a noise, and it rolls its head—it has a head!—to see a sprawl of creature parts: bark-covered legs and mossy shoulders, too many hands and skin the same dark red-brown of their tree.
The one who was leaves gathers itself, uncertain how, and makes a shape like the woman. She was the last creature it remembers. It picks up its other self, dragging the gangly, dreaming other numen onto its back, and starts walking.
It finds her in the center of an eight-mile crater, sitting up, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed. Before it gets too close, she smiles again. “You made it,” she says, and the numen doesn’t understand the words, but the sentiment comes across.
“Gather yourself,” she says, patting the rough red sand beside her.
So it does, with its other self in its lap, and when she says, “It’s perfect,” it somehow understands she means the crater, the circle, and the very energy around them.
It sits with her for quite some time, perhaps days, perhaps years, listening to what she listens to, until it slumps against her and she pulls nothing out of the air, making substance, and feeds it to the newborn numen. That is how it learns it must still eat, though sunlight and water won’t cut it anymore unless they are transformed outside of itself.
She becomes nothing but a shimmer of light sometimes, or a hum in the air, as plants return to the crater and surrounding desert, as mice and snakes return, and vultures and kites fly over them.
The feeling of sitting with her is the only thing in its short—or long—life that settles the numen. It doesn’t have words yet, though more and more occur to it, but it knows peace. It knows life. It knows lively silence.
The woman who is also a shimmer of light gets up one day, kisses the numen and kisses its sleeping other self, and walks away as calmly as she arrived.
So Shade has always believed the first humans he saw were the men who climbed over the cliffs of the crater shortly after he arose to true consciousness. Technically he’s right, because the woman was no human any longer, and Never never says otherwise.
Never might have saved itself heaps of trouble if it ever mentioned that one of the reasons it leaves is to find her. Sometimes it feels her in the wind or the sun, or in singular moments of transcendence—like when its other self smiles for the first time, or when lightning strikes them and for that unending split second, they are electricity, too.
It leaves because that’s what leaves do. But it also yearns in the most basic knot of itself to understand something she’s at the heart of. Why. Why did she make them, what was her purpose? Why did she leave without offering answers?
“Don’t you love me?” Shade demands.
“Love you? I am you,” Never answers.
“We aren’t the same, and never have been.”
“Same tree, same birth, same particles.”
“Roots and leaves aren’t the same. Built of the same, but different functionality, different patterns.”
“Everything is like that! All the world and sky are built of the same!”
“But not the same.” Shade pouts.
“Fromthe same.”
“Do you love me?”
“Human necessities,” Never sneers.
Shade tells the humans he made the crater. He shows them how to pull the great river here, how to find minerals to hold magic, and they call it design. Shade becomes whatever they want, whatever makes them love him, and Never lives at the edges of their relationships, their houses and neighborhoods. Shade sings songs that call more beasts and birds here, brings the river into the crater because more trees can grow where there is plenty of water.
Never wonders where the river flows, when it leaves the desert. There is an ocean, it has heard from butterflies.
Shade pulls Never into everything he does, even when Never resists, says it’s silly or stupid or pointless, Shade merely laughs that Never is so boring, and if it made roots it would be less bored. That doesn’t make sense to Never.
Most of the moments when Never suddenly recalls that shimmer of light and its god-mother’s silence are moments when Shade does something incredible, something spontaneous. Something to make Never think,Beautiful, and wish beauty weren’t temporary, and wish Shade understood how glorious he already is. Shade is the one who figures out all the nuances of shape and form, the one who understands how to get what they want from humans, how to seduce fish and eels into helping with the water, how to lead sheep to slaughter, how to convince humans that eggs are better than meat even though it’s questionable at least. Things Never never considers. Shade wants to be human, but the most powerful human Never has ever known wanted to be something else. Something greater. Why?
Never leaves and Shade throws a fit.
Around the world are others like them. Few, but some, and Never dismisses most of them, too, because they are too obsessed with humans, like Shade, or too unformed to be interesting or to fly with it, or so separate from language they can’t even communicate with scent like a fox or with song like a bird or with pheromones and electrical impulses like a fucking mushroom. Never does not want other numena; Never wants a human who can become a god. Never wants its mother.
