The Strategist. Gerrard Cowan

is there, when there is nothing at all?’

      Brandione opened his eyes. They had returned to the blackness.

      The Queen was by his side, her three bodies suspended in the air, weightless and timeless. Her gowns had been replaced by rags. Like Katrina Paprissi. Like the Strategist.

      ‘You are in mourning, your Majesty,’ Brandione said.

      Three heads turned to him. ‘Yes. In this place, we are close to death. Can you not feel it? Can you not taste it on the air?’

      Brandione sucked in a breath. ‘Yes.’

      The Queen nodded. ‘Last Doubter.’ She surrounded him, placing him in the middle of three ragged women. ‘What is there, when there is nothing at all?’

      Brandione looked around. ‘There is nothing,’ he said. ‘Just an empty room.’

      ‘But what if there is no room? What if there is no house, no land, no forest, no lake, no mountain, no stars, no moon, no sun, no birds, no people – what is there then?’

      ‘Emptiness.’

      ‘Emptiness,’ the Queen whispered. She glanced around the dark. ‘Once, long before my birth, there was only emptiness. We cannot know for certain what that emptiness was when it was alone. It is one of the great questions, is it not? What was there, before creation?’ She gestured at the void. ‘This is my imagining.’

      She stared into the blackness, and seemed to shudder.

      ‘My people call it the Absence. It was not good, or evil, or anything in between. It simply was. Or perhaps, it was not.’ She giggled, though there was no humour in it.

      Brandione gazed into the depths. ‘There is nothing here. Only a feeling of … death.’ He shook himself. ‘Not death – a void. Only the living die.’

      ‘Yes,’ the Queen said. ‘I never saw it in its original state. What a glory it surely was.’

      For a moment, Brandione felt a surge of anger. Was this all there was to the story of mortals? Were they nothing more than flotsam, pushed along eternal waters?

      The Queen sighed. ‘This is the Great Absence, at the height of its glory. But it is not a memory. It is only my dream, my drawing, of what the Absence might have been like, long ago. Before the mortals came to be. Before I came to be.’

      ‘I can’t see anything. But I can feel it.’

      ‘There is nothing to see. There is nothing at all, except eternity.’

      There was a sound, from far away in the ether, lasting only a moment: a low moan.

      The Queen turned her bodies away from Brandione, and lined up at his side. The smallest spark of blue had appeared, far away in the darkness.

      ‘The Absence was alone for such a long time. It existed, but nothing was there. It lived, but it was death.’

      The light in the distance began to grow. ‘But something happened to it,’ the Queen said. ‘The great emptiness, over the long ages of solitude, began to change. It developed … a mind. It recognised itself as a something. The expanse was no longer empty: something was changing, in the dark.’

      She sighed, and held her hands out, pointing at the blue light. It was still growing.

      ‘The changes accelerated. The Absence grew more aware of itself. It realised, for the first time, that it was alone. And it became lonely.’

      She burst into laughter.

      ‘Can you imagine? It realises its existence, and it becomes lonely.’ She laughed again, and the sounds were sucked out into the ungrateful void.

      ‘And so it decided to create companions.’

      Brandione realised, now, that they were travelling through the darkness; the light was not a light at all, but a planet, green and blue and wet and lush. New lights sparkled around it, and the darkness was no more: the deathly sensation dissipated and stars sprang up in the emptiness. A moon revolved around the planet, which spun around a blazing sun.

      The moment disappeared, and they were somewhere else: a field, in the sunshine. A naked man and woman lay in the grass, their eyes closed, their hands intertwined. Their bodies were surrounded by the blackness – by the Absence. It spun around them like a spider building a web.

      ‘What is happening to them?’

      ‘They are being created,’ the Dust Queen said. ‘This is the beginning of the world. Or rather, it is how I imagine it to have been.’

      The people stood, and it soon became clear they were not alone. Others rose across the field, the Absence crawling across them.

      ‘The Absence was no longer alone,’ the Dust Queen said. ‘It had created these things, so different to itself. Intelligent creatures, in a world of life.’

      The strands of Absence rose away from the people, and ascended to the sky, where they formed into a strange tapestry among the clouds. The people below stood utterly still, statues of flesh and bone.