Chapter Forty-Three
Trinity sings me its story.
It sings of tens of thousands of years of living and burning and evolving as the heart of our world.
It sings of what it was once, thousands of years ago: golden fields and green plants and flowers and water everywhere.
It sings of its pain and its loneliness, bittersweet and sharp, as it was stripped and transformed of everything it once was.
It sings of the saints it created, again and again, trying to reach out, to connect, to fix what was broken only to have each of us ripped away, dismantled, fed back to it in a horrifying cycle again and again.
My mind falls down, down, into the heart of the world, and Trinity reaches for me, folds around me.
It feels like Mama’s arms, when she would hold me at night.
It feels like Papa’s voice and his bright, sudden laugh whenever I said something precocious or unexpected.
It feels like the warm weight of Halle’s and Kelda’s heads on my shoulders as they fall asleep.
Hundreds of saints live inside Trinity’s song.
Those who came before me. Those who are destined to rise after I’m gone.
Their voices swell and they are soft and loud and wild and sweet.
They sing of their homes and their loves and their dreams and their pains.
Every heartache and triumph and moment in between.
It all crashes against me in a poignant flood.
It spills into every inch of my mind, and I thought it would feel more like dying—giving myself over to Trinity like this.
I’d imagined it as crashing, burning, smashing everything that comprised me against a wall of unforgiving fire and metal, but tasting the possibility of it now …
It doesn’t feel like obliteration or destruction or death.
It feels like an unmaking.
Chaos becoming something strong and alive and new.