The endless song of the Astral Sea, the hivemind, the universe, is welcoming, overwhelming, tide and sky and space and stars spinning, spinning, spinning. You as a mote, a neuron, a bright-flickering conglomerate of thought, a nascent star rising to its constellation.

Still there is a thread that draws you back. 

Still there is a thread that stitches you into the well worn aching patterns of the material plane.

Still there is a thread that keeps you -- whole.

Still you cling to it.

Thus I am bound.

I do not abandon you...

Never that.

It has been a lifetime since you spoke those words to describe your place in the world as you saw it. You have passed to a place where in theory you should remember them only as one brief flickering note of knowledge among an endless library of it. A single book in an archive. A single star in its sky. In its rightful place, as all things are within the hivemind, but infinitesimal.

In practice, you remember only yourself. The words bind you to the shape of your soul, to the body you once were; the desires of the mind overwrote the limitations of the body and yet, and yet, your form in thought is a perfect copy of the form you have shed, have lost.

The singular form you considered lonely, once. That you considered lonely, for a long time.

You are not lonely now. Everything you yearned for in your solitude is here. You are here. A drop in the ocean, one mind among many, complete, whole, belonging.

(I remember the waves on the shore, the city so far north that the water ran cold - runs cold - in the height of summer. The city that he loves. The city that I fought for despite the odds. The cry of the seabirds, the salt water's chill, the bitter rasping touch of what they called Auril's breath. The winds that blew down from the mountains.

I remember these things still.

I remember what they mean to me -  I often complained, never fond of the cold weather.

I remember what they mean to him.

I remember that he laughed at me then...)

You are not lonely, not here - how can you be? but the thread binds you still. It knots around your nonexistent ribs, spine, throat, lungs, drawn out in the spinning-wheel depths of the heart you no longer need and yet still have. It is sewn into the very fabric of you, as if you were fabric yourself, a pattern that you did not make but in the absence of its giver recreate it yourself.

(I was not a weaver or a clothier or even particularly fond of clothes and all their tedious maintenance. I wore clothing, wore out my clothing, in a way that he often despaired of. He was, is, a great lover of them. He spends hours in front of a mirror when he can get away with it. I remember those long days, those long nights, in which I did the paperwork that so plagued him and he kept his hands busy.

He sewed, embroidered, furnished clothing for this person or that, endearing in his focus and in his strange, frustrating care.

No person of his acquaintance would come away underdressed.

It was a token of his love.)

The thread has existed for as long as you have been here, this star, this free-flying thought. A binding, a restriction, a cord to be cut. But you cannot bring yourself to, for all it weighs you down and tethers you to a place far away from this brilliant sky.

There is something

(someone)

on the other side

(that I left)

that you need.

The flight of birds is what you remember, when you are young. Young enough that the blurred memories of a bright castle, shattering windows, the sound of melodic singing that turns brittle and sour, seem like dreams to you.

(You waited by the window, because your father told you to, and you stayed there because your father never came, and you watched the birds scattering across the grounds. Perhaps if you were older you would have realized what it  meant, because no living creature ever visited that castle while your father was alive. They feared it like a predator.

Or, rather, they feared the man within it, far worse than any predator.)

Was the castle real? you ask him, was any of that real?

Of course it was, he says. You lived there, once.

And why don’t I live there any more?

(You remember your father’s smile, the way he laughed, the way he made you laugh. You were safe, and happy, and nothing could ever go wrong for you.)

I could explain your father’s deeds, but that’s not what you want to hear from me, is it?

The man who tutored you and raised you, made sure you went to bed on time and made sure you had friends to play with and answered all your questions no matter how inane or ridiculous, is...not your father (or rather, not your first father, your heart corrects, despite its conflicts.) Your father was broad-shouldered and boomed his words and was always, for some reason, armored.

You were happy with him. Your days were filled with joy and sunshine, those you can remember. Not a single ounce of wrongness or unhappiness stains those fuzzy memories.

I don’t...know what I want to hear, you admit, at last. I don’t know if any reason would make this easier, or better.

Then I’ve taught you correctly, he says, with a faint smile. Those feelings are yours and yours alone. You are free to choose the way you feel about me, and your own path.

Would Father have given me those choices?

That question brings surprise, the slightest amount. (You feel ever so slightly satisfied you can surprise him.) He has to think about it.

I believe he loved you very much, he says, like he’s choosing his words very carefully, but not enough, I think, to let you go so freely.

Is that why you killed him?

Not for that reason. There were many others.

For some strange reason, all you can think about asking is this. Maybe it should be more important to know what crimes your father committed, so you can decide for yourself how unforgivable he truly was, if he deserved to die. Maybe you should ask why the man who might as well be your father now kills people at all.

But you can’t think of any of that right now.

Would you have killed him, if refusing to let me go was the only reason? If there weren’t any others?

Ekkehardt’s smile is thin like a knife’s edge, and yet it’s not unnerving at all.