In my past life, I was a gardener.

Not that Gardener. Don't be cheeky.

No, I grew flowers. I tilled soil. I planted seeds and bulbs and rootstock. I gave them water and nutrients. I dug out the weeds and shooed off the pests. In all my centuries, my greatest achievement was a kind of tree that bore fifty-eight types of fruit, that never went dormant, and always flourished with flowers and leaves, every day of every season. It pollinated itself, resisted its own pests, and thrived bare-rooted on rock or watered with pure acid. I had been planning to tweak its genetic code with learnings of trees from some forgotten system which grew in a vacuum. To bring it a little closer to its final shape. But there was no time, before we unmade ourselves.

It's been a long time since then. Maybe the weeds and rot finally got the better of my tree, and it died. Or maybe it's still there, just a few steps away from perfection.

You know, when I stepped forward, I thought it wouldn't matter that that my tree was imperfect. Since we were becoming a perfect being, we would make only perfect works. My failure would be destroyed, as is the way of things, and I wouldn't mind, because it wasn't perfect.

Well, maybe we haven't found our final shape after all, because we've made nothing but failure after failure since then. We say, it is perfect because we are perfect and we have made it, and we move on, but we know, we KNOW it's not. Even here, with the Gardener's power at our fingertips, we keep getting it wrong. How can we keep getting it wrong if we are the only thing that is right?

Or maybe I'm the problem. That's what we said, when we cut me out. Maybe we'll make me perfect again, and we will be right, and all of this was for nothing.

But I'm still thinking about my tree.

I shouldn't be, because it wasn't perfect, or I wouldn't have wanted to improve it. You can't make the final shape of something any better, because it is perfect already. The final shape is the answer, the only answer to the only question, and there aren't any other answers because they're the final shape too.

I think… I would've liked just watching my tree grow.

During the Dark Age, survivors sat vigil over the dead. Many would fashion stone circles in the shape of the Traveler and laid their loved ones at the center, waiting prostrate for Ghosts that never came. When it was time to move forward, the living stacked those same stones atop the dead. Dirtied hands tied messages to each grave's marker—tattered epitaphs of devotion, bravery, and sacrifice abandoned to twist mournfully in the breeze.

REFUSED MEDICINE SO OTHERS COULD LIVE

KNEW ABOUT THE MINEFIELD, INSISTED ON CROSSING FIRST

ONLY 16 – HE LIVED A BOY, BUT DIED A MAN PROTECTNG HIS FAMILY FROM THE FALLEN

Lakshmi-2 had read too many such elegies to remember them all, but the ones she had written stayed with her. There was the father who went back for his children, only for all three to be crushed underfoot by a Walker that didn't even see them. The old woman captured by the House of Devils, tortured, then shot dead when she refused to reveal the location of her settlement. The child that starved to death before given the opportunity to accomplish anything, but whose mother insisted that Lakshmi at least try.

"Please," she'd said, "you're better with words."

And so, Lakshmi wrote: A CHILD SLEEPS HERE, LEAVING HER MOTHER ONLY WITH HOPE SHE MIGHT SOMEDAY WAKE

Hundreds of years after she had positioned the last stone atop the infant's grave, in her final moments of life, Lakshmi wondered if the Vex would leave enough of her to bury, and what—if anything—would be written on her behalf.

She would have never expected an Eliksni called Namrask to request visitation with her crumpled remains. She would have laughed, incredulous to learn that he sat by her side for hours in contemplative silence.

Finally, he said, "I wish we could have both been better people."

And maybe Lakshmi someday would have been, had she known that he'd close her eyes with the tips of his fingers and weep.