She sees in centuries. She hears in passing moments. She tastes the past, feels the future. She touches infinity.
She is always here, and never. She is always in motion, and motionless. She is circular, globular, a running river, a waterfall that roars skyward, a wind that emanates from everywhere, a creature of purpose without beginning or end.
She is a real myth, a mythic reality.
She is flight and falling, everything and nothing.
She is an Escher print.
She is the looking glass, she is its reflection.
She predates zen, but is a koan.
He loves Her, because of all the things She is.
He is kind and brilliant and mad. He is cold, and gentle, cruel, warm and brutal. He cares deeply, he cares not at all. He protects, and rejects, he follows his hearts and breaks others. Others follow him, and die or grow because they do.
She loves him, because he can step into Her river; because he can climb the waterfall; because he lets Her winds blow him anywhere; because he flies and falls with Her; because he knows reality - a little, a very little - as She does.
She does not need to remember their time together. She is always with him, and there is no need for memory.
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It goes without saying that She cannot live moment to moment to moment.
Causality, entropy, linear time...She knows they exist, that they are, in ways even he can't make Her understand.
Those things are, She knows, anathema to Her, although there are no words to explain why.
She simply knows that She can't enter the river that She is. She can't experience linearity. She can't see the past and then the future, anymore than she can see the future and then the past.
If she were forced to digest structured time, to feel its inert mass in Her timeless essence, it would be as if She consumed Herself, poisoned Herself, violated Herself.
It would kill her.
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Paradox - the very concept of paradox - is invested in linearity. And certainly, the other one knew that.
When he entered Her, She felt his hate. He had always hated Her, had hated everyone She loved, everyone who loved Her. Anything that he could not dominate, he wanted to destroy.
The moment he touched Her, She tried to fade into every where and every when that he did not inhabit. She didn't want him touching Her, didn't want him walking Her halls, standing at Her console, doing anything with Her, near Her, in Her.
She couldn't flee, and no one came to stop him.
He used Her to build Paradox.
She screamed and struggled. She tried to break free, but failed.
He nailed her to immutability, and fed the past and future to Her. He poisoned her with order, raped Her with continuity, forced Her to live in the filth of time turned wrong-side out.
He killed Her. He made Her live again.
She lived at his sufferance - hour to hour to hour; day to day to day; then, to now, to someday. She lived it all again and again, and She died again, and again, and again.
And he made her remember what he did to her.
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When they do rescue Her, Her lover and the immortal, She slips back into timelessness and loves them fiercely for it, forever and once upon a time and right now. She is redeemed; once more the river, the wind and the waterfall.
But She can't rid Herself of what was done to Her.
She remembers, and no one - not Her lover, not the immortal, not the wolf - can ever make Her forget.