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“I mean, you’d think something as simple as the universal constant of gravity would be easy to understand but in truth nothing in this reality is simple! Take this star for example…”

Graphite smiled and nodded, too polite to interrupt her rambling. The blue light of the tiny star she had conjured into being tinged the black of the void with a curious sort of glow that, for a moment, made the never ending dark seem just a little brighter.

“Even something as small and insubstantial as this star twists and manipulates the fabric of reality. It may be trivial to us, but to the myriads things so much smaller than us, this simple star is their entire existence. Living fleeting in the spaces between seconds that feel to them like countless, never ending eternities… Falling forever down nothing more than a slope that exists in four dimensions. Which is, in essence, exactly what gravity is. A slope that exists in four dimensions, possibly more. It’s kind of like falling down a hill, except the hill doesn’t exist on a flat plane, it exists on a plane that’s been bent and warped to exist many many times, to the point that the flat plane is still flat, but its flat in an infinite number of ways…

Graphite are you listening to me?”

“I--”

“--But anyway enough about that. Once I was floating through the space between stars and I came across a black hole of all things. Now, I’ve seen black holes before. Remarkable, beautiful things. The way they grab the fabric of reality and wrench it so hard to the side that not even light can escape the multidimensional slope in space and time they create. It was then that I got to wondering: what’s it like to exist in the event horizon? The point of no return? I’ve never done it before, and I’ve lived for billions of years! So I did! And you know what happened? It stretched the infinitesimal things that hold my body together out to their limit and in the space of an hour years had passed, and when I finally left the black hole it seemed that the stars were just a little bit darker, and the universe was just that tiny bit quieter…”

She paused for a moment, reminiscing.

“You should try it one day. Good for the soul. If you have one. If I have one? I don’t know. Do you have a soul?”

“I--”

“Souls are awesome. They’re like what you are if you aren’t you but are more and less than you at the same time. Does that make sense? I kind of like to think of them as pieces of stars. They burn infinitely bright but at the same time it’s so easy to put them out. But then the silence is so wonderful in its own special way. Once I shut off my body and let myself run off the solar winds from a nearby star and just sort of sat in far orbit for a couple hundred years. It was relaxing. All I could hear was the ambient background hiss of space static, stars talking to each other. I didn’t know they could speak until then and there. But as I listened I could hear their voices. And their voices sounded so ancient and so young and so confused. A million different things at once. It was fascinating…”

The tiny star that had been floating above her hand the whole time blinked in seeming agreement. Graphite allowed himself the shallowest of sighs.

“What was I talking about again?” Rakshiv asked suddenly. Graphite eyed her sideways before hesitantly opening his mouth to speak.

“Stars…?”

“Oh right! Stars! So there I was! A billion years in the past because the present future was boring and I wanted a change. I saw a disturbance on the other side of the galaxy I was in. A great ripple of cosmic energy, something distorting the fabric. Of course I had to go investigate. So I did. And you wouldn’t guess what I found…”