“I don't think you're coping with this in a healthy way.” Thomas looked at the naked woman draped over his chest, her black hair framing a freckled face. Her expression was concerned. “Why won't you let me do something for you, tonight? Why won't you accept how good this can feel? I can give you pleasure, but you refuse to experience it.”

“I don't think I have much choice about it, do you?” Thomas' gaze shifted up to the sky, examining the patchwork quilt of blacks and blues, the massive planets and moons each in their own little section of sky. There was a particular pretty blue planet with enormous gold-orange rings; he studied it, trying to memorize what it looked like. The woman shook her head, short brown bangs falling down over her eyes. She squinted, and blew up in a hopeless attempt to move them. “I can give pleasure; to experience it doesn't feel like I am in control.” Thomas reached over, fingers tracing over flesh, tucking the hair behind the man's ears, as the man began to talk, his voice quiet, breathless, eager.

“That's pretty much it, isn't it? You imagine yourself riding in a machine that is malfunctioning; you pull the levers, but your brain doesn't do what you want it to do, and you give it up as hopeless, that this is just the way things are. But you aren't separate from the machine, you are the machine, and the choice to not do those things is yours; you embrace an illusion of not having control over yourself, so that you're not responsible for not doing any better. You can let yourself enjoy this, and that is a choice, that is control.”

“Isn't it the way things are? I'm the machine, yes, but I think it's maybe fair to give myself a little empathy, to say to myself, 'Yes, self, you're not coping well with this, and that's okay, because you're just human.' I don't think making myself miserable over failing to not be miserable anymore actually helps anything; it's just an additional thing to be miserable about.” The man with the lion-face frowned at him, growling in reply.

“No, instead you just accept that you're miserable, and don't do anything about it. No, worse than that, you're embracing the misery. It isn't empathy for yourself to deliberately take everybody's pain into yourself, to refuse to partake in any kind of pleasure.”

“The empathy for myself is in realizing it's something I need to do.” Thomas looked back up at the sky, looking for the blue planet. There it was, partially hidden behind a brightly-lit chlorine-green planet, in a dark blue trapezoid of sky. “I need to be in control. I haven't felt in control.”

“Giving into being miserable isn't control. You're playing at masochism, but you hate pain. Let yourself feel good.”

“To choose pain is to be in control of it.”

“At what point have you, in this entire time, actually acted to avoid pain? That's not control, either. You have rushed headlong into situation after situation. You're lucky to be alive.”

“I'm lucky to have met people I care about.” The woman paused, sitting up, her expression tightening, her face wrinkling as she studied him. He noticed that her eyes matched her hair, gray.

“You admit to yourself you care about these people?”

“I don't think that's in question.”

“Then why didn't you take the spell that let you heal others without harming yourself? You heal them, but you hurt yourself, which hurts them.”

“It was less efficient at emergency healing.”

“You and I both know that's not the reason you took it.” Thomas looked away from those probing eyes, back to the sky. Where had that blue planet gone? He couldn't find it. The man's voice continued a few seconds later. “You want to be in pain. You want to take things onto yourself. You could heal them differently, but that wouldn't let you be a martyr.”

“I do want pain.” Thomas' voice felt distant, as he replied. “Pain feels right. But I already agree I'm not coping well with this. I don't want to be this; I'd rather seek out pain, because it wakes me up, it makes me think.”

“It makes you stop thinking, and just react. You don't want to be splashed with cold water, you want to lose yourself in a cold and distant haze, you want to feel like somebody else is experiencing things and doing things, so you don't have to. You want to ride a machine that is outside your control, so that you won't feel responsible for yourself.”

“Maybe. But it makes me feel alive, too.”

“Can't you feel alive in another way?” The woman's hand moved between his legs; Thomas hooked her elbow with a knee, halting her hands.

“No.”

“What, that pain is too much?”

“It's not my pain.”

“It is your pain. You know it, because I know it, and you know that, too. You can't let go of the idea that you are fundamentally in control of things, that you are the agent responsible for your experiences; you can't stop thinking of other people as beneath you, as things that are to be swept along in the current of your own being. You refuse pleasure you cannot control, because it implies you might experience pain that is outside your control, as well.”

“That's inaccurate. I don't think I'm in control.”

“No, you think the robot is in control, and you're the helpless rider whose instructions are being ignored. But you are the robot, you are the machine, you are your own brain and your own self. You have elevated yourself to the role of a deity, and then disassociated yourself from your own being when that turned out to be too much responsibility.”

“That's a bit much.” The woman just smiled in return.

“You think you're dreaming, don't you?” Thomas paused, at that, attention returning to the patchwork sky. It was blank and featureless. He gaze returned back down to the woman, but a blank mask of flesh stared back at him, eight pale limbs ending in human hands spread out around the torso. He blinked, and swallowed.

“I do.” The blank mask of flesh just smiled back at him.

“You know, you would have died if Anne had not intervened. I nearly had you, there.”

“I know I would have died then, yes. But we both know you aren't that thing, whatever it was.”

“Are you so certain?”

“I think I'd already be dead.”

“Quite possibly. Anne told you there are things that are ideas, made manifest. Is it so strange?” The black shadow that was not quite human looked up at the sky; there was a single moon, now. “Your sky is stranger by far; that a moon should be a distant sphere, balanced between impossibly vast forces.” That made Thomas hesitate, suddenly uncertain. He licked his lips, dry and parched.

“What are you?” An emptiness looked back at him, somehow quizzical.

“I'm a concept. A fragment. An idea. Anne told you, don't you remember? The world is built on ideas like me.” It was a baby, mouth full of too many teeth, grinning widely at him. “I'm why you're here.” A void, an emptiness, a black cloak that opened into a vast nothing. “Why you are all here, you things from another world. You are all, also, why I am now here.” A hesitation; the shadow looked around at the four-poster bed Thomas laid in while he looked at the sky. “I was, but was not. But I wanted to be, and thus, here you are.”

“Are you claiming to be God?”

“Not exactly. Not yet. And not in the singular, not the way you think about things.” A woman again, she smiled at him. “I'm an idea of a god, an idea you brought with you, here. I was already here, of course, but, well, what exactly is an idea that nobody has had? I needed you. I needed your perspective.” The woman's smile slipped. “I needed your memories. The Arbiter cheated, there.”

“So why are you interested in how I am coping?” She smiled again.

“You're my champion, of course.” The woman licked her lips with a forked tongue. “Well, maybe not you specifically. You're all my champions. I need champions in order to properly be.”

“So, what, you are powered by belief?”

“No, of course not. None of you believe in me. What you believe in is the bargain I have to offer.”

“And what is that?”

“An afterlife, of course.” Thomas paused. Opened his mouth to respond, and then closed it again. There were god-like … things, here. Was there an afterlife? He had never actually thought to ask; he'd long since concluded that when you died, you just died; that was it. His mouth felt dry again.

“You … have an afterlife to offer?”

“Of course. That's the bargain all gods offer. It's where they get their power; you choose their afterlife, they get the power you had in life. Your levels, as you think of them.” The bed was gone, now, and they floated in a featureless void, his perception and the shadow of a thing that occupied this not-space with him.

“I haven't chosen anything.”

“This is true, but the choice doesn't really have to be made in that way. Some people do it that way, of course, but The Arbiter will find the correct place for you, regardless of whether you choose it or not.” Thomas stared. And something clicked for him.

“You can't have me if I choose pain.”

“This is ... true.” The shadow shifted and spun in the air. “You were mine. I want you back. Why do you choose pain?”

“Because I needed to.”

“You didn't. Do you want an afterlife with pain? An eternity of misery and torment? You get exactly what you choose, and you cannot change your mind in death. No matter how small the pain, over the course of eternity, it adds to a torture more significant than anything else. An infinity of the mildest discomfort once a decade adds up to infinite torment; this may seem irrelevant from your perspective now, but as you experience eternity, you will discover that the decades mean nothing, and the mildest discomfort becomes a constant buzz, which grows until it is all you experience.” Thomas blinked at that, starting, for the first time, to genuinely doubt he was in a dream. He felt … too strongly, about this situation. Thomas hesitated, considering that argument, backward and forward. And then considered further.

“I can't trust this.” The shadows spun and whirled. “I can't argue against anything you say, either; I don't even know how to begin arguing with that.”

“You know I will win this argument.”

“I do.”

“Yet you do not admit you are wrong.”

“I do not.”

“Why?” Thomas took a second to gather his thoughts. They came with a curious kind of clarity.

“Because I think you would win this argument whether or not you are actually correct. I'm not good at arguing; the fact that I lose an argument doesn't really tell me I'm wrong, so much as it tells me that I lost an argument, which I'd do anyways.” The shadow took a few seconds to respond.

“I can't change your mind.”

“You cannot.”

“It is a curious kind of humility that gives rise to such staggering arrogance; you believe you are right regardless of what others tell you.”

“I guess so.”

The shadow faded. Thomas looked back up at the patchwork sky. The blue planet was still missing. The woman giggled, as she sidled up against him, bare breasts pressing to his side. “You should at least let me make you feel nice. It will help.” Thomas studied the man's face.

“Not here, not now, not with you.” He had a vague memory of other dreams. “If you aren't just a dream, if this is real, please leave my sleep in peace.”

“I'm your idea. I'm not anything you don't make of me. I am just a dream; I will cease to be, as soon as you stop thinking me. You give me life. But I am an idea, and I do not depend on you to exist.” Thomas blew, and the dandelion fluff flew away on the breeze. He had the sense that things were happening above, on the planets of his patchwork sky; he drifted with the dream to alien worlds where great constructions were underway.