“Call it… sentimentality,” he said, after a moment, and he found himself unable to meet her gaze, and so he began to inspect the diploma hanging on the wall over her tight shoulder, “You are determined to keep going despite it all. The Life-Struggle. Life striving against itself to continue on. The Universal Eros….” He his beak curved in something like a smile, “I suppose you remind me of her. Them. My other half, in so many ways. She’s still here, I suppose, so long as one thing yet lives that strives to keep this universe from emptiness, that still clings on. Even if with all the rest of Life perishing now, she’s… faded back into the Totality like everything else.”

Iqra blinked at that, “Totality? What do you mean by that?”

He finally managed to meet her gaze, now he was on surer, less personal ground, “Exactly what I said. Call it God, or the Oneness, or the Dreamer, whatever metaphor you like. This universe is not the first, not by a long shot, nor is it the last. When you are gone, so too shall I go. Without life, there can be no Death. We little shards of the Oneness, we little flickers of dreaming-delusion will fall away, and there will be Nothing-and-Everything again. Like it was before this kalpa began. And then, eventually, the Oneness of it all will awaken to itself again and it will shatter again as it always does. There is always some fragment, some little whisper within the Oneness that longs to exist, to be, to live… and that’s what does it, you see. As soon as that idea takes root, the Oneness can’t exist any more. For a thing to exist, there has to be a thing that it isn’t in order to contrast it. For there to be Being, there must be Non-Being. So, it splits in two, and then those two split again and again and again and then you have another kalpa cycle. On and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.”

As he spoke, the calm and almost introspective tone of his voice slowly changed and grew almost desperate, despairing, and she suddenly saw a man drowning in some fathomless ocean, “Do you understand, Doctor?” He asked, and his voice quavered and it was full of pain, “Once I take you, that’s it. I cease to exist until I come back and I… am tired. I am so, so tired. You always call me Death. Every time we are here, you call me that but that is not my name. That is not who I am.”

He’d stood up, lurched to his feet, talons raking at her desk and gouging furrows in it and he was staring at her, trembling. Her mind raced, absorbing everything he had said. What did one say to someone who apparently was tired of existing entirely? How did you react to Death all but proclaiming he wanted to die? She latched on to that last, despairing statement and swallowed hard, “Then… who are you, Ayam?”

He fell back into his seat and took a deep, shuddering breath, “Think about it, Doctor. You are the Universe knowing itself. Stars ‘died’ and their dust became other stars, and the worlds around them and the life upon them. But the atoms are the same, and they recombine in different shapes and combinations. Becoming rivers and mountains, animals and humans and plants and animals again. Flowing one to the other through the life-cycle of a world. The atoms in a plant become part of the animal that grazes on it, that become part of the animal that eats it, to the human that eats that, to the earth they are buried in, and the plants anew. The differences between all these things are, ultimately, an illusion. A dream. How, then, can Death be?”

Her eyes widened, as suddenly she understood his point, “You are… change. Transformation. One thing becoming another thing. You’re the very thing that’s causing you pain, aren’t you? Every time the universe ends, another begins. Every time something dies, it just becomes something else. As soon as the next kalpa starts, you exist. Even trying to stop that happening is just… more you.”

Ayam sat heavily in his seat and smiled wanly, “And so,” he said drily, “You see the problem. I want it all to just… stop. To stand still. It is exhausting, to be what I am. This is not the first time we’ve had this conversation. It will not be the last. I suppose there is a certain catharsis, to speak of it. To have it out there. To say it. Even if it’s only at the curtain-call.”

She stood up and rounded the desk, taking one of his talons in her hand gently, “You do not have to do this alone, you know. You don’t have to bear the burden. You are Change itself; surely in the next universe, you can be something different?”

Death stood, and he was tall, and thin, and robed in black and his hand was a thing of ancient bleached bone, “Perhaps,” he said, “Perhaps not. I suppose we shall find out.”

Her eyes widened as she realised too late the change in his form and what he was about to do, “No, wait we’re not finish-“

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