He stopped stabbing at her long enough to change his technique, choosing instead to penetrate her slowly, deeply. She ground her hips against him as if to concur, welcoming the respite, attempting to catch her breath. But it was difficult to do for he seemed to grow more powerful with each push—seeming literally to expand, to get bigger and bigger.

He continued: What did thou thinkest Creation was if not the animation of dead matter from the simple infusion of conflict? Aye, so you’ve sculpted a homunculus and there it lay—how then to get it to raise its little arm? Why, give it Free Will, of course! For first and foremost it has to CHOOSE—that is the secret behind every act of creation. ‘I will lift thine arm,’ the homunculus says, and in so doing pits one muscle against the next—pushing thine blood to thine heart and thine eyes.

Again he increased the tempo of his thrusts—as if to emphasize his point—and her breath came and went in ragged gasps.

That is it, of course, the whole of the secret in one simple shell. And thus you mistake your wars and disease and mortality for misfortune; when in fact they are but Life itself—material life, which is to say life as He reinvented it; not us. This is the reason for which we came when they instigated the Flashback—they, the judgers and the experimenters, the scramblers of Time, the halflings between this world and the next. For we shared with them a common goal: the complete eradication of your kind—by which I mean not your First Realm doppelgangers but your material manifestations, which mock us. And now it must all play out, even though the end is no doubt presumed. For if we know anything of Him and His followers, it is that they—