She can’t remember the last time she laughed. Really, really laughed. At least, not since that day. She was about seven or eight, and her cousin Teralyn was chasing her across the ash. On summer days the soot was so dry it would bloom off the dirt and dust your face as you ran. You could tell how bad you were at tag by the amount of ash on your chin, and so it seemed fitting that by the time Teralyn caught her, she had grown a full-fledged beard.

Looking at her hapless cousin, Meresine couldn’t help but giggle. And when Teralyn could only offer a brainless stare in response, she laughed so hard she started to cough. It’s only when the blood started pouring out of her teeth that she knew something was wrong.

The elders warned them to never go back. They said the ash was bad for their lungs. But they would do it anyway, laughing and scampering across stretches of ancient terrain. They would climb up the frayed, charcoal trees and take turns shooting arrows at the sky. They would crawl down into the smoke-stained dirt, laying their ears to the ground so they could listen to the mysteries of the dead. And while the smoke thickened and the earth cooked in the hot wrinkles of air, the land itself remained faultless. The ground underneath was home.

The coughs were violent then – the blood erupting from her throat – but now, years later, they merely echo, the flares of pain replaced with deaf streams of heat. When she touches her chest, the blood leaks unflinchingly down the wound’s lip, content to pour slowly over a dimming fire.

The dragon studies her jaw to jaw, because for all their distance, their fight felt the same. Intimate. Still, in the end this archer was just another mortal, another meager ant blind to the futility of its march. Yet what this dragon doesn’t know is that in another life, this mortal had stood side by side with the Dragonborn, the vanquisher of Alduin, and called this person a friend. Now those days are just a reflex, the way you can only look back when time ceases to move forward. And as the smoke rises from her wound, she feels another tug of nostalgia. A voice from a thousand miles away, urging her to come home and lay with the dead.

She spits in its face. Don’t make me laugh, she says, reaching for her dagger. We aren’t done yet.

They broke it down one day, our humble little universe. They documented it all with equations and charts. Some of them even drew pictures. Atoms, particles, strings – they showed how it all tied together, how everything was connected and why the choices you made had consequences.

Then, when they were finished breaking it down, they built it back up, piece by piece, from the invisible to the unseen. They showed how it got bigger and bigger until there was nothing save an assortment of dots, and the further you went, the harder it was to connect them. Pretty soon, all you could see was the emptiness.

And yet, whether all of it mattered or none of it did, whether it was part of a grand design or just the way things were, the one thing Sonja knew for sure was that the universe was working against her. And when dealing with a world that actively hated her, she figured the best thing to do was not make any plans. The less she tried to make happen, the less disappointed she would be by the outcome. So one day, she just decided to shut herself in.

With each passing day, the world outside grew smaller and smaller, and the space inside her apartment grew ever so big. She wondered if perhaps she was shrinking, turning so tiny that none of her roommates could see her. In the end, Sonja wasn’t sure if this made her a planet or an atom, nor could she decide which one she preferred to be.