Outside the cabin, there was snow. There had always been snow, far as the eye could see, and further still. It might be true that the snow extended forever in every direction, sitting heavy on mountaintops and green pines, on frozen lakes and frigid tundra. Asha hadn’t tried to go very far from the cabin. It was home, after all, and they had everything they needed there. But she did sometimes wonder what would happen if she left and started walking in a direction of her choosing: Where might she end up? Who might she become?

The cabin had seven rooms: Asha’s bedroom, which she spent most of her time in; a guest room, which was strange because they never had guests; the kitchen, stacked with pots and pans and an icebox full of milk, eggs, meats, and other items; the living room, where Asha sometimes played and watched old movies; Maker’s bedroom, though he was hardly ever in it; a locked room with no name; and the basement, which doubled as Maker’s workspace and where he spent most of his time building his miniatures.

Asha was in the living room, staring out the window at the falling snow, an old movie playing in the background to keep her company.

In it a woman was proposing marriage. “I told you. I won’t live without you. Not one day.”

Asha listened to the swelling music, waited for the man’s voice to come in.

“I have to go. I am needed at the front lines.”

“Wars are stupid. You are needed here with me.”

Adam would end up not accepting the proposal. He’d go off to war. Disoriented, eyes red from mustard gas, and two clean bullet holes in his side, he’d collapse in a muddy field full of smoke and barbed wire. A letter would get back to Evelyn by courier. It read, We should’ve gotten married.

Evelyn would tear the letter up in grief. She’d spend the next three years wearing black, like a true widow, before developing a friendship with the woman sent to repair her house, after she’d let it get away from her for too many years. It was supposed to be the house she lived in with Adam, you see. Eventually, Evelyn and Lily would become more than friends, though they wouldn’t marry until after they’d both grown old together in that house.

Asha had seen the movie hundreds of times. She knew every line by heart, knew all the moments the music would come in, thunderous and soapy—she even had her favorite notes, the places in the score that stirred something in her belly. But with every time she watched the movie, those feelings were getting smaller, less significant.

And now she was bored with staring out the window. She reached for the remote and pressed pause. In the kitchen, she made herself a bowl of cereal, using her spoon to submerge each individual rainbowed kibble until it was the perfect balance between crunchy and soft. Then she took the bowl and went down into the basement.

Maker was there, as he always was, adding some color to the bell tower in the middle of Lazarus, his latest town.

He heard her stomping down the stairs and turned around as she reached the bottom.

“I told you. No cereal down here.”

“I have to go. I am needed at the front lines,” Asha said.

“What?”

“Nothing. What are you doing?”

Maker looked away, back to his little town. “Passing time. Grab a new movie from the shelf.”

“I don’t want a new movie. I want to help.”

He looked at her again. He smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Soon. I promise.”

Asha glowered. “You’ve been saying that for ages.”

An expression passed Maker’s face that Asha didn’t understand. Then he said, “Come over here.”

Asha came.

“See that, right there.” Maker pointed down to a patch of grass across the street from Lazarus Theater. On the patch of grass, a man and woman were lying on a blanket, a picnic basket next to them. The man had a little rubber ball, just then throwing it, and Asha noted the hinge at the crook of his arm, the metal screw at his elbow. She heard the dog bark and then she looked for it. There, halfway between the couple and the line of trees, its short legs a blur as it chased the rubber ball to the edge of the park. It returned moments later, its movement less graceful now as it sauntered—jerky, incomplete.

“Do you understand the principles I am applying here?” Maker asked.

Asha had no idea what he meant. Reluctantly, she shook her head.

“See,” Maker said. “You need more time.”

“How am I to understand if you’ve never shown me?”

“That’s the thing. No one showed me either. Eventually, I just knew. You will, too. You have to be patient.”

On impulse, Asha held her bowl out over the couple in the park and flipped it. The bowl of cereal fell as a deluge from the sky. The man looked up first, and Asha could see the shock in the way his mouth fell open. Quickly, he turned to his wife, or lover, and tried to shield her from the onslaught. But it was too much milk, and it washed them and their blanket and all the contents of their picnic away. The dog, cleverly, took to the tree line, the milk and the cereal grains chasing after it. The dog reached the trees before the milk did. This all happened very fast.

Maker whirled on her. “Why did you do that?”

“You’re mean,” she said. “You never spend time with me.”

“Okay. Okay. Tonight, we’ll watch a movie together.”

“I don’t want to watch a movie.”

“Okay, a board game.”

“No. I want to go outside. I want to see what’s beyond the mountains.”

“There’s nothing beyond the mountains.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“You don’t know everything.”

Maker didn’t reply. He turned away from her and began plucking bits of the wet cereal out of the park.

Asha watched him work, but her eyes wandered to the tree line. The couple was sprawled at the base of a big oak, lying face down in the drenched grass.

“Are they okay?” she asked.

Maker’s expression was hard. “They’re dead,” he said. “You killed them.”

She was surprised at her tears. She had done something terrible but had a strong sense that she’d only scratched the surface of how terrible it was.

“Go upstairs,” Maker said. “I’ll finish up here and then we’ll have a talk.”

Asha was two different people at that moment: the Asha that wanted to argue; the Asha that wanted to disappear.

Instead, when Asha got upstairs, she went to the front door and opened it. As she stepped off the front porch steps and into the waiting snow, her bare feet sunk all the way up to her knees. The cold was biting, but Asha did not worry about frostbite or hypothermia—she welcomed the cold, waited for her skin to numb to it, and within seconds, it did. She waded out in the frozen surf, pushing her way through the fluffy untouched snow. Her eyes were on the tree line and determinedly she reached it, the muscles in her legs adjusting to the journey.

The trees towered above her, soft light snow falling through the gaps and onto her kinky cloud of hair. She stuck her tongue out to taste the crystals.

It was darker below the pine trees, and as she looked deeper into the waiting forest, the shadows grew longer, darkening the path ahead. Still the drifts of snow sparkled—the snowfall lighter here because of the cover of trees.

Asha was not terrified. Hurt and harm were things that could happen to the characters in films, in books, not to her. She could do harm, she now knew. The image of the couple facedown leapt to her mind. Shame lurched up from her belly, violent and remorseless. Angry, she swallowed it, pushed forward. Not trudging, not anymore, leaping, sprinting, cutting through the snow as fast as her small legs could manage. She moved between the trees like a dancer. Something like joy overtook her, a little suppressed by her swallowed shame. She kicked off one tree and flew forward, planting her bare foot on the next tree trunk before pushing herself off again. Liking the new sensation, she continued to do this, and soon she barely had to touch her feet to tree trunks to send herself flying ahead. And then she was fully flying, curving around each passing tree, her body almost liquid.

She only stopped when she reached the next clearing. Asha flip-spun in the air, her final flourish before landing solidly on both feet. Her full laughter echoed in the open space, the sound traveling into the mouth of a cave several yards ahead.

Asha marveled at the hole in the earth, blanketed in snow. Above the cave mouth stood a tuft of young pines.

“What are you?” she asked the cave.

Slowly, she approached, leaning her head past the threshold to look inside. It was a true hole, the light of the day swallowed up by the darkness.

“Hello!” she said, and listened as the cave ate her question, pulling it down into its depths. She could hear the word repeating until the sound cut below a whisper.

Asha still didn’t feel fear, only curiosity. Without hesitation, she stepped past the threshold and walked into the dark.

The cave was a living thing. The drip drip of water falling from divots of stone, from stalactites, the sound of these little pitter-patters echoing through the interior. These smaller sounds blended with Asha’s quiet footsteps, her feet touching the wetness and slime of the cave bottom. She let some of her physical feeling return to her here, though it was only slightly warmer in the cave. She pressed forward confidently, her eyes adjusting to the thinning light just as she crossed into deeper darkness. She let her ears sense the space around her, formed a mental map to fill in what her eyes failed to see. In this place she didn’t have to push her sin from her mind. Curiosity swelled up in her, boundless. The cave consumed her curiosity without thought or care. Her infinity within its infinity.

Asha could feel the cave curving slightly, a corner she was banking in slow motion. The noises were quieter here, the cave narrower. Several more steps and she was descending, the slime here spongy somehow, yielding to the shape of her feet, the weight of her body. Something alive, Asha thought, like the trees. Was it something that could think, like her? Something that could create, like Maker? She only had a moment to wonder before her foot finally caught on something she did not anticipate. In the now true dark, she stumbled forward and when she tried to correct herself, she found that she couldn’t, her body pitching forward, falling. The cave floor did not meet her, and Asha had the sensation of floating, except wind was blowing up from beneath her, her loose shirt and knee-length shorts flapping in the upward gust.

It was the only sound she could hear, this wind, battering against her ears. She didn’t know how long she fell. All through this she was quiet, startled at first, but curious once again. What would happen when her body met the cave floor?

And then it happened, a pressure that made her mind skip like a stone across water. All at once, her whole body struck a wall of matter, the noise of the impact like thunder in this new place. Asha grabbed hold of her mind, pushing through the white-hot pain, but then the cave floor disappeared from beneath her, and she was falling once more, not as long as before, but this second time she hit the ground, and the impact stole the air from her lungs. The sensation of sliding against slime and finally landing in a shallow pool of water before her mind blinked out.

Pain woke her. So many parts of her body felt . . . wrong.

Asha tried to stand and found that she couldn’t. She used her mind to find her body, but she had the strange sensation that her body had expanded somehow, had squeezed out of its casing. Her fingers felt fat and thin simultaneously. Pain there too. She tried to right it but the effort exhausted her.

Finally, fear. Finally, screaming. The thought of pain like this never ending, the thought of being trapped here where Maker could not find her, where she could not find herself, her body continuing to expand until the cave became a second skin she could not escape. Pain and darkness and prison.

Terror slipped into defiant desperation. She would not remain here. She found one of her fingers, unbroken. Its proportions kept swelling and shrinking but she willed it solid inside her mind and from there she moved out across her hand, filling each finger with her will and healing what she could. She moved onto her wrist. So much wrong there—but she remained steady, undeterred. She did what she could and moved on, up and out and across and down, filling herself back up, pressing herself back into what she was, separate from the cave.

It was exhausting work, her mind straining and almost failing several times. She began to crawl across the slime, and then she found a stone elevated enough to pull herself to her knees and then her feet. A ferocious bellow escaped her.

“I’ve beaten you,” she said, triumphant.

The cave took her words and filled the space with them, but it offered no words in reply.

She considered climbing back up to escape, but she was curious again, and somehow, even here, she thought she could see. Shallow pools of water, the spongy backs of stones. And at the furthest edge of the space, something that looked like a stone door, near as tall as the cave itself.

Asha wouldn’t trip again. Remembering how she glided amidst the trees, she willed her feet off of the cave floor. In her mind, she shifted the gravity of the cavern, allowed herself to fall towards the door. She slowed as she got close, let herself fall right-wise, her feet softly touching the ground.

Up close, the stone door towered above her. However, there was a keyhole at eye level. Strange. Asha leaned forward, pressing one eye to the keyhole. She strained to see inside, but no matter how much she tried, whatever was in that hole rejected her will to see it.

Frustration like she’d never felt before—she tried again and again and . . . Nothing. Her eye had started to hurt, so she had to look away. It was then she felt it—warmth. And just as she named it, she knew she was wrong. Not warmth. The opposite of warmth, but also the opposite of cold. What she was feeling was the negation of temperature and her skin read it as heat, hotter than the coldness of the cave, but only because it stood apart from the cold. And whatever it was, it was emanating from the keyhole, like a pulse. She took a few steps back to see if she could feel it. One step, two steps, and the feeling was gone. She stepped forward again and there it was! She pressed her mouth against the keyhole and tried to breathe in. Nothing at first, but she sucked in harder, and something seeped into her.

Not air. Nothing like air. Void.

Alarm bells flooded her brain and suddenly she was choking, coughing violently. She had sucked it inside her and it was crawling through her, reaching down into her guts. She was wrong before: This was fear. This was terror. Asha collapsed, heaving. Inexplicably, bits of cereal came out first, wet with milk and bile. Then, slowly, the void uncoiled from her mouth, thick and lazy. The wisp of pitch blackness—again, she understood it not as blackness, but the opposite of light and dark—hovered there for a moment, suspended, before it shot back into the keyhole.

Asha sat there listening to her own breathing. And words came unbidden from a place beneath her mind.

Find the key. Open the door.

• • • •

Upstairs in her bedroom, Asha lay under her covers. On her walls were posters of her favorite film, the actress Liza Barnett in various poses. Just above her bed was Liza as Evelyn, the title of the film sprawled in the white space under Evelyn’s feet: Renovation Lane. On either side of Evelyn were Adam and Lily, both staring at her longingly. If you paid close attention, you could see the blood spreading on Adam’s otherwise clean uniform.

Asha thought of the scene with Adam, delirious and wandering through a field of barbed wire and smoke, searching for Evelyn even though she was thousands of miles away. He would not make it back from the war.

And suddenly the image of the couple in the park, facedown and unmoving, a pool of void beneath them.

Asha pulled the covers over her head.

Time crawled by before she heard a knock at the door. When she didn’t answer, the door creaked open. Maker came and sat at the foot of the bed.

“I wanted to apologize. You were curious and I was impatient with you. I was curious too when I was your age. I forget what it feels like to be so new.”

Asha pulled the covers down.

“There you are,” he said, smiling. “I’ve made two decisions. First decision: You can come down to my workshop whenever you like and I promise to be more patient, to try to explain things to you.”

Maker stopped speaking and Asha realized that he was eagerly waiting for her to ask about his second decision.

“Tell me,” she said, insistent.

He grinned wide. “I’ll have to show you.” Without a word, Maker stood up and left the room.

Asha threw the covers off and leapt from the bed, her footsteps hard as she ran to catch up with him. She found him down the hall, at the front of the door there, the one he’d never opened. Asha watched the door as if seeing it for the first time. Until now, she was interested in movies, in Maker’s workshop, in the environment directly outside of their cabin. But since her run through the forest, her descent into the cave, something had shifted inside her. She was not satisfied with staying within the lines, even as she was afraid of what lay outside them. The door had been an uninteresting part of her world, like the walls, or the ceiling. But now she was reassessing it under the light of this new self.

Maker handed her the key.

No hesitation as she shoved the key into the lock. An eager twist, the door swinging open.

Inside was—

Asha gasped.

It was like Maker’s workshop, only smaller: a wall of tools, another wall of paints (oil and acrylic and watercolor), a work desk with pens and pencils, paper, a workbench around a center platform just like Maker’s.

Asha’s mouth was still hanging open as she carefully stepped into the room. On instinct, she went to sit at the workbench.

Maker came up behind her. “I considered leaving you to make your own tools, but I decided to put some of mine in here. I was alone when I started making. But I realize now that you don’t have to do it the way I did. You have an example. It makes me happy to be your example.”

Asha blinked at him.

He laughed, a little self-conscious. “I am bad at this. I had no one to teach me. And you’re so different from me. Sometimes I am surprised when you don’t understand what I’m saying.”

He was wrong; she had understood him. And a new thought was snaking through her mind. Somehow it felt like it might’ve been strange to consider it before, but now it felt equally strange to have never considered it.

“Are you okay?” Maker asked.

Asha tried to smile. “Can I work by myself?”

Maker looked surprised, then apologetic. “Yes, of course. Sorry. I’ll leave you to it.”

Once she was alone, Asha grabbed a block of wood from the chest by her feet. She pulled carving tools from the wall and began carving the wood until she could see the rough outline of a person’s face. Unsatisfied, she put the carving tools down.

Asha pressed her will against the block of wood. It wasn’t instantaneous. There was a blurring, the carved wood fighting against her, but she didn’t relent. She pushed and pushed until the wood changed. With her mind she stretched the pliable new material, made it into the exact shape she wanted. She sanded the outside smooth, gave it deep brown skin, like her own, a layer of pores and tiny soft hairs. Longer strands on top of the miniature’s head became tight knots of hair falling over its face. She finished the face, cheeks and lips that looked soft to the touch, alive.

And then she made it alive.

Little Liza looked up at her. “Where am I?” she asked, confusion and fear showing on her face.

Asha cut off that route in Little Liza’s mind. “You’re home,” she said. “You’re mine.”

Little Liza didn’t say another word. She understood perfectly.

• • • •

Several weeks passed in the cabin. Asha had spent most of that time in her workshop with the door locked. At first, Maker was puzzled by her sudden change in mood, but soon he seemed to accept her retreat from him, patient in the way he let her go on with her own business.

Until one day Asha left the door to her workshop open.

As predicted, Maker entered. He took one look around and said, “Not what I expected.”

She smiled at that, but looked away so he wouldn’t see.

The workshop was mostly untouched. All the stuff he’d filled it with still hung on the walls. The center platform sat mostly empty, with one exception: Little Liza, now dressed in her little clothes, sitting on a porch swing outside her little house. She was looking up at them both, expressionless.

“This is what you’ve been doing with your time?”

Asha nodded. “And thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

Asha said nothing.

Maker sighed. “Why are you still mad at me?”

Asha and Liza just watched him.

“Fine. Well, do you want to see what I’ve been up to?”

Asha nodded.

“Okay! Okay, great.”

Maker led Asha downstairs to his workshop. It was just as she remembered, even down to the smell of sawdust and acrylic paint. Except in the center of his room there was now a black pit. Asha went over to his workbench and leaned over it to look inside. It was a pit, all right, blackness stretching down and down with no bottom. It reminded her of the cave, the void behind the door.

Except . . .there. And there! Little spots in the darkness sparkled. As she looked more closely, she saw that the pit was filled with millions of these shimmering lights.

“What are they?” she asked.

Maker grinned and began to make gestures with his hands.

One of the specks of light exploded outward. It got bigger and bigger—not an explosion, Asha realized, a zooming in, an amplification—until Asha saw that it wasn’t one speck at all, but a cluster of specks. Another amplification, revealing a single sphere of fire. And out from the fiery sphere to a floating orb, with two moons in its orbit. Down into that orb. Down and down and down—Asha could not take her eyes away. A final gesture from Maker and the sight before her became a group of people huddled around a fire. They were dressed in shabby clothes, but their skin was real skin, real joints, not hinges. More complete, but also—

“Where’s all the stuff that was there before? The park? The buildings?”

Excitedly, Maker said, “Well, I decided it might be a good idea to give them stuff but let them make things themselves. I just had to make them smarter. See?”

Asha looked closely and she could see they were wearing clothes. They weren’t very good clothes. “They look dirty.”

Maker laughed. “Give them time. They’re figuring it out.”

She watched them, these people that looked as alive as Little Liza. But somehow they were more, huddled around their fire, engaged in conversation, the subtle expression of relationships among them. No person was the same and yet they felt like a unit, one group experiencing their world together. None of them looked up at her. It was as if she didn’t exist. Asha felt a sense of isolation so deep she had to squeeze her eyes shut. It was the first time she’d felt this feeling of lack, of missing something she didn’t even think she needed or knew existed to be needed, but whose absence detracted from her in some immeasurable way.

“To create something, you need empathy for it,” Maker was saying, “before it exists. Do you understand? Creation isn’t just imagining the thing itself, it is imagining the space the thing will live in. A thing needs other things. Other things like itself. Do you understand?”

Asha frowned. She was thinking about the cave again. “You think you’re so smart.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’ve put them on a little rock in a vastness they can never cross, with a universe between them and any real answers about what they are. For you, this is a gift, but it isn’t. It’s control.”

Maker blinked in surprise.

“Tell me the truth,” Asha said. “Did you make this cabin?”

“We needed a place to live,” he said, as if this was the answer to her real question.

“There’s nothing outside but snow and trees. Did you make the snow? Did you make the trees?”

“Asha. You’re young.”

“Did you make the cave too? The door?”

“You must not go back there,” Maker said.

What was that expression? Fear? “What’s behind the door?”

“Danger. Asha, trust me, you must not go back there.”

“You can’t stop me. I can do whatever I want. I’m not yours.”

Asha turned and ran up the stairs. Maker was behind her, but as she left the basement, she slammed the door in his face. With her mind she melted the knob into a slab of steel and welded the door shut.

Maker banged the door. The force bent the metal.

With a touch more effort, Asha fused the door with the wall.

“Liza,” she called. Her creation came to her and leapt up to perch on her shoulder.

The front door exploded, Asha flying through the air amidst splinters of broken wood. In a second, she was at the tree line; within seconds she’d reached the clearing and the mouth of the cave. She sucked in light, willed her skin luminescent, and flew inside the cave, pushing away all shadow.

Down she went into the inner cavern. Up to the stone door.

“Now you,” she said to Liza, “go in there and become the key.”

Liza leapt down from Asha’s shoulder into her hand, and Asha carried Liza to the keyhole. Liza climbed in and when she’d completed the change, she stuck her head and shoulders back out. “Ready,” she said.

Asha held Liza by her now rigid shoulders and turned. There were multiple heavy clicks as the inner mechanism yielded.

With a deep groan, the stone door creaked open. Slowly, lazily, the void spilled out from behind the door. The pressure of it forced the door open further. Asha tried to use her will to push back against it, to cut through it. She could feel the place where her will touched the void, but nothing beyond it. Asha also saw that where her light touched the void, that light became void. And whatever the void touched in the cave, the void claimed to itself. It had no mind, no desire that she could tell—an object, like liquid but with the quality of fire, obliterating everything.

Asha understood. She reached for Liza to pull her from the lock, but Liza had already been claimed. Her eyes looked to Asha, her mouth open, trapped in the moment before a scream, and then the void took her completely.

Asha scrambled back, falling onto her butt, blind panic at the thing in front of her. In it she found the antithesis of herself, the antithesis of everything, the negation of all things come to claim all things. She understood now that this was not Maker. He could not have made it. But how could it exist and Maker exist at the same time? How had Maker trapped it?

The answer was clear: He hadn’t. He knew this thing intimately, had existed alongside it, but he had not mastered it. He had only built a wall. And he was not powerful enough to wall it off completely. There was a hole in that wall. A keyhole she’d made a key for.

The void was unhurried as it inched closer to her legs. She could get up and run, but she knew it would follow her. She’d reach the edge of Creation and it would still claim her. She thought of Liza’s eyes, her open mouth, the blackest pit rising up from the well of her throat. Nothing to do. Nowhere to run. Asha closed her eyes.

A noise from behind her.

Asha snapped her eyes open and saw the hand first, with fingers twice the size of her body. The hand reached out and gripped the half-open door. Asha twisted her body to see the hand’s owner: Maker, the top half of his body all the way to his torso, sticking out from the tunnel Asha had entered from, one arm reaching into the cavernous space, the other—still trapped within the tunnel—wedged tight against his body. He grunted, all of the muscles of his arm flexing, as he began to push the door shut. The void was already claiming parts of his hand, but he continued, relentless. Such a determined look on his face. The door groaned against the force of Maker on one side, and the infinite nothing on the other. But it was moving. Asha didn’t dare hope until it was done. An interminable amount of time passed, the door slowly creeping closed. Maker groaned, the whole cavern trembling with the sound, and with one tremendous last push, the stone door finally slammed shut.

There were still blobs of nothing on their side. But as before, it rose into the air and hovered, then escaped back into the keyhole.

Asha collapsed fully onto her back.

She didn’t see Maker return to normal size, but she heard when his footsteps approached, heard him make a pained sound as something thudded to the ground. When she saw him standing over her, he looked the same, except that one of his sleeves had been torn free, his forearm below his elbow missing.

A cloud of void hovered next to him and suddenly floated away.

“Did it touch you?” Maker asked.

Asha pushed away the memory of coughing up void from her belly. “No,” she said, sitting up. “You came just in time.”

Maker struggled to sit next to her—he had to fall a quarter of the way—then let out a tired sigh. “I keep making mistakes. I’m not good at this.”

It was not what she wanted to hear. She wanted to rely on someone that didn’t make mistakes. But she also needed to hear him say those words, for the deeper parts of herself, parts that felt so foolish now that calamity had been so narrowly averted.

Maker turned to look at her. His smile was warm, genuine. Then he looked back at the door. “I call it The Question, only it cannot be answered. To answer it is an impossibility. We exist because it exists.

“When I awoke it was there. It might’ve been there before me. It might’ve sprung into existence at the same time I did. It might’ve created me, a mindless thing creating a mind, a paradox. I don’t know.

“I can’t tell you how long I’ve spent thinking about it. When I created this place, I had to lock it away so that I wouldn’t go mad. If you obsess about it, you’ll go mad.

“Lock it away, Asha. In yourself. Lock it away and forget the key.”

Maker looked to Asha. In his eyes, she could see his pleading. She wanted to release him from that desperation. She nodded.

He took a breath, shuddering. “Good. Good.”

“Your arm.”

Maker dismissively waved his remaining hand. “We are endless. I cut myself off in that direction, but there are infinite directions I can grow.”

Asha remembered Liza again. She wanted to cry for her, but she knew that Liza wasn’t alive, not like the beings Maker had made. She’d cut off Liza from any semblance of life from the very beginning. It was a tool that obeyed her.

“I have to tell you something else,” Maker said. “I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

Asha searched his face. Whatever he would say, she couldn’t tell.

“You are gifted, Asha. What you can do with Creation took me lifetimes to even attempt. At first, I thought you were like me, that you’d figure things out alongside me. And then I thought you weren’t like me at all. Because I was here first, I needed to be your parent. I needed to guide you. Now I realize that you are unlike me, and I am in your way. That beings like us need space to become themselves, unique and separate, free to explore their own desires.”

Maker put a hand on her shoulder. “This isn’t a punishment. This is the best thing I can do. You are right. You are not mine. And you’ve already grown beyond me.”

“Where will I go?” Asha asked. Tears were in her eyes.

“Beyond the mountains, there is vast Unmade. I will help you pack some things to take with you, but once you leave my lands, you won’t be able to return.”

Maker tried to smile but did not succeed.

“You’re abandoning me,” Asha said.

“No, I am letting you move on without me.”

“And the Nothing-Void?”

“A good name.” Maker looked to the door, perhaps to make sure the Nothing was still behind it, perhaps to hide some emotion he didn’t want Asha to see. “It will stay here, on this side, with me.”

Asha understood. Here the Nothing-Void would be locked away and the vast Unmade could grow and become. Perhaps Maker might make others like them. Perhaps Asha might make a few of her own. A whole world might come to exist beyond these mountains, might be allowed to exist if Maker stood guard, held the door closed. Perhaps generations could be born into the world never knowing that there was a thing that could negate existence. In that she saw possibility. Was it selfish to leave him with the responsibility? Yes. And no. Asha knew herself a little more now. She knew that she was not satisfied with locking it away in her mind. The puzzle of it would consume her if she lingered too close to it. She had to go. For Maker’s sake as well. And once she was gone, she would not speak of it. She would let the Nothing-Void be nothing for everyone else but her.

Asha wiped at her tears.

Maker seemed satisfied at that. “We should leave this place.”

She stood. Carefully, deliberately, she put her back to the door. She was still so small, but from her height, she finally could look down at Maker from above.

“Help me up?” Maker asked.

Asha extended her hand.