I do not know how long it took; time no longer had any meaning, but this shadow finally succeeded.
I could see how it happened, although it did not ask me any direct questions about my situation. It was patiently crossing off every other possibility, slowly tightening the noose around my neck, giving me no space to lie or shift the blame.
This feeling... as if there was nothing I could do to free myself from this trap, almost drove me insane, and there was nothing I could do but watch this black hand slowly close around the truth... and finally it was here.
"How strange...This morning... there is a strangeness on this morning," the shadow says, the sliding features going still for the first time. "There is a scar, the same hours, worn smooth. Tell me." The compulsion sharpens, reaches deeper than it has reached, down past the channels and the crystallized core, down toward the thing only the fox and I have ever carried. "How many times have you seen this morning?"
And I cannot stop it. I have kept the loop behind a door for hundreds of resets. The last time I told the Oracle, she went insane and killed me. I had mentioned it to others, but none of them seemed to understand what I was speaking about, and I had decided that the mysteries of this loop went beyond what anyone else could understand.
And yet, this shadow, even without me being able to speak, had been able to slowly figure out this answer, and I did not want to confirm it, because more than anything, not even the Pale Matron, this shadow scared me above all.
Yet, no matter how scared I was, I could not stop what was happening. The shadow-man reaches past every door I have ever closed and pulls the truth out of me into the open air, and I hear my own frozen mouth answer in a voice the compulsion has borrowed from me.
"More than I can count," I say. "I wake on a cot to my sister’s voice, and I walk toward a red sky, and I die, and I wake again. Hundreds of mornings. The same morning. I am the only thing that remembers, except the fox. The world resets, and I do not."
The shadow-book drinks it. I feel the loop, my loop, my secret, the spine of every plan I have ever made, written into the shadow-pages in letters I cannot read, taken out of the one place it has always been safe, which is inside me, and made into a thing an enemy knows.
And the shadow of what I know... I know, was the Sovereign of the Stars goes very still, and then it does the worst thing it could do.
It laughs.
∞
The laughter from the shadow was delighted, warm, and genuine, when I had been expecting panic or anger. It was as if the Sovereign had just been handed an unexpected toy after years of boredom.
"A time-scarred world," it says, and the sliding features arrange themselves into something almost like a smile. "Oh, this is marvelous. I have ascended through eleven heavens and consumed the light of forty fallen worlds, and I have never once found a world that fights back by folding its own hours."
What... what is he saying? Eleven heavens and forty worlds? Was this bastard not born ten thousand years ago and was responsible for wiping out the gods and bringing the mages to the forefront of this world?
It closes the shadow-book with a soundless clap and tucks it away, and its attention comes back to me, and I could feel its terrible interest. "There had been theories that something like you could exist, but it always seemed so ludicrous, and not even the High Heavens would have allowed such an errant code to be written in the fabrics of reality, but your existence... this world has proven me wrong. Do you understand what you are, little time-scar? You are the immune response. A world I have marked for harvest, sensing the harvester, has reached down into its own physics and grown an antibody, and the antibody is a boy who refuses to stay dead. You are not a Celestial. You are not a golem or a reincarnator or any of the small names. You are something far rarer and far more delicious. You are a world’s last argument."
I cannot move. I cannot speak except when it lets me. The entire world seemed to be frozen, even the fox is rigid against my neck. And the shadow of the Sovereign of the Stars looks at me with fond attention, and for a moment, it was as if only I and it existed in the world.
"I came through this door," it says, "to inspect a lock that is finally failing, a small administrative matter at the edge of a harvest I have planned for seven thousand years. I did not expect to find you. I certainly did not expect to find a recurring you, a boy stitched into the seam of the morning, dying and dying and learning and learning." The features lean in. "Most worlds, when they sense me, do nothing. They are sheep, and they go to the slaughter, and there is no sport in it, only the dull mathematics of consumption. A very few worlds fight; they raise heroes, armies, desperate magics, and they lose, and it is a little more interesting, but they lose all the same. You are the first world in forty that has fought cleverly. That has cheated. That has reached past my reach and given one small soul infinite tries."
It straightens. The continent-weight of its attention does not lessen, but something in it shifts from scholar to patron.
"So I will give you a gift, little argument, because you have earned it, and because I am old and bored and you have made me curious for the first time in an age." The sliding features fix on me, and the voice drops into something that is almost intimate, almost kind, and is the most frightening thing I have ever heard. "I am going to let you try."