By the seventh morning, Kai had built a house.
Calling it a house required generosity.
It had four walls, although the western one leaned badly enough that Kai had begun avoiding eye contact with it. The roof kept out most of the rain. The doorway had been widened twice after he repeatedly clipped his shoulder against the frame.
There was no door.
Kai stood outside with his hands on his hips.
"Good enough."
The western wall creaked.
Kai pointed at it.
"Don't."
It stayed upright.
"See? Mutual respect."
A bird chirped from somewhere above him.
Kai looked up.
"You weren't part of this conversation."
The bird chirped again.
He was beginning to dislike that bird.
Seven days.
That was how long he'd been alone here.
Seven mornings without Asha banging on his bedroom door.
Seven nights beneath unfamiliar stars.
Seven days without hearing another human voice.
Kai tried not to count them.
He wasn't particularly successful.
He turned toward the stream.
A stone rested beside the water.
The same stone that had taken him most of an afternoon to lift on his first day.
Kai held out his hand.
Nothing happened.
He frowned.
Then corrected himself.
That had been the problem from the beginning.
Origin didn't respond well to vague commands.
Come here sounded simple until he started thinking about what he actually meant.
Move through the air?
Teleport?
Remove the distance between them?
Move Kai toward the stone instead?
Apparently reality became annoyingly literal when you were allowed to argue with it.
Kai focused.
He pictured the stone leaving the ground, crossing the distance between them and stopping gently above his palm.
It rose.
Slowly.
No shaking this time.
The stone crossed the clearing and hovered an inch above his hand.
Kai smiled.
"Look at you."
He rotated his wrist.
The stone followed.
Up.
Down.
Left.
Right.
He sent it around his head.
Once.
Twice.
On the third rotation, Kai's concentration slipped.
The stone accelerated and struck him between the shoulder blades.
He stumbled.
Silence.
Kai slowly turned.
The stone lay innocently in the grass.
"Don't get confident."
He picked it up.
Moving things had become easier.
That wasn't enough.
Kai sat beside the stream and placed the stone on his knee.
He'd spent the previous night thinking about something Seraphine had said.
Origin.
Something older than his world.
Something she hadn't entirely understood.
Kai wasn't sure he believed that last part.
She knew more than she'd told him.
He was certain of that.
But she wasn't here.
So until she decided glowing mysteriously in space had become boring enough to visit him again, Kai was on his own.
He turned the stone between his fingers.
"Blue."
Nothing happened.
"Obviously."
He closed his eyes.
Not the word.
The colour.
His mind found Asha's favourite mug.
Blue ceramic, chipped near the handle because she'd thrown a spoon at him once and missed.
Technically, she claimed she'd dropped it.
Kai remembered the exact sound it made hitting the cupboard.
He remembered laughing.
He remembered Asha threatening to break the matching mug over his head if he told Mum.
The memory sharpened.
Blue.
Kai felt something shift against his palm.
He opened his eyes.
The stone was blue.
Not glowing.
Not painted.
Blue.
Kai rubbed his thumb across the surface.
Nothing came off.
He scratched it.
Still blue.
"Huh."
He turned it over.
Every part had changed.
Kai smiled.
"Okay."
Red.
The stone became red.
Green.
Green.
Black.
Black.
Then he tried returning it to its original colour.
Grey.
The stone became bright silver.
"No."
He tried again.
It turned white.
Kai stared.
"You're doing this deliberately."
Origin did not defend itself.
It took him nearly twenty minutes to produce the exact dull grey he'd started with.
That bothered him.
Changing something was easy.
Restoring it accurately was harder.
Kai put the stone down.
That felt important.
He wasn't sure why yet.
Food remained irritatingly normal.
Kai still needed it.
He'd discovered apple-like fruit growing farther upstream, and after several days of not dying from eating it, he'd promoted it from suspicious forest object to breakfast.
Today, he ate two while walking.
The third sat in his hand.
Kai looked at it.
Then at his empty palm.
Could he make one?
The thought had occurred to him before.
He'd tried.
Nothing happened.
But he'd been approaching everything incorrectly.
Kai sat beneath a tree and studied the fruit.
Red skin.
Slightly rough near the stem.
Pale flesh.
Seeds.
Juice.
Smell.
Weight.
He bit into it.
Sweet.
A little sharper than an apple from Earth.
He examined the inside.
Then closed his eyes.
Another one.
Nothing.
Kai opened one eye.
"Right."
He tried again.
Nothing.
An hour later, he had created something.
Unfortunately, it resembled a red potato.
Kai picked it up.
It was warm.
"Concerning."
He smelled it.
Nothing.
Against his better judgement, he took the smallest possible bite.
It tasted like chalk.
Kai spat it into the grass.
"Absolutely not."
The red potato vanished.
He tried again.
This attempt had the correct shape but no seeds.
The next contained far too many seeds.
The fourth looked perfect until Kai squeezed it and discovered the inside was completely hollow.
He stared through the hole.
"How?"
By midday, Kai had produced nine terrible pieces of fruit.
None were edible.
That was when he understood something.
He could imagine what an apple looked like.
That didn't mean he understood an apple.
Kai looked toward the flowers growing beside the stream.
Smaller.
Simpler.
Probably.
He picked one.
White petals surrounded a yellow centre. The stem was thin enough to bend between his fingers. Two leaves grew from opposite sides.
Kai studied it.
Really studied it.
Not as a picture.
As a thing.
He peeled one petal away.
Looked at where it joined.
Split the stem.
Examined the fibres.
Dug another from the soil and traced the roots with his fingertips.
He spent the rest of the afternoon learning one tiny flower.
Then he placed his palm above an empty patch of earth.
"All right."
Roots first.
Not visible.
Still necessary.
A stem.
Leaves.
Petals.
Water moving through it.
Something alive enough to continue without Kai thinking about it.
Origin stirred.
A green point pushed through the soil.
Kai leaned forward.
It grew.
One centimetre.
Two.
A tiny leaf unfolded.
Then the entire thing turned brown.
Kai's smile disappeared.
The stem collapsed.
He touched it.
Dead.
"Well."
Kai sat back.
"That's depressing."
He tried again.
The second plant survived six seconds.
The third emerged without leaves.
The fourth produced one enormous white petal and nothing else.
Kai stared at it.
"I'm almost impressed."
By sunset, the ground around him looked like the aftermath of an extremely incompetent gardening competition.
Kai sat among his failures.
His back rested against a tree.
The original flower remained beside him.
Small.
Ordinary.
Alive.
He rolled its stem between his fingers.
Power wasn't the problem.
He could feel that now.
Whatever Origin was, there was far more of it than he knew how to use.
The problem was Kai.
He didn't understand enough.
That realization should have frustrated him.
Instead, it made him feel strangely better.
Understanding could be learned.
Kai looked at the dead plants.
"Tomorrow."
Tomorrow became four days.
Four became eight.
The house improved while Kai failed.
He added an actual door.
It fell off that evening.
He put it back.
The western wall finally collapsed while he was sleeping.
Kai woke beneath half his roof.
He lay there for several seconds with a branch across his chest.
"I warned you."
He rebuilt it without Origin.
That was deliberate.
Using cosmic power to repair bad carpentry felt like surrender.
The flower took longer.
Kai stopped trying to force it.
He learned.
Roots needed room.
Water mattered.
Soil mattered.
Sunlight mattered.
He started understanding the difference between creating something that looked alive and creating something capable of continuing to live once his attention moved elsewhere.
On the twelfth morning, a stem emerged.
Kai watched without breathing.
Two leaves opened.
Both were too small.
The stem leaned noticeably to one side.
White petals unfolded around a yellow centre.
One petal was fused awkwardly to another.
Kai waited.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Thirty.
The flower remained.
Kai touched the soil beside it.
Still alive.
He looked around as though someone might have witnessed what had happened.
Nobody had.
That hurt unexpectedly.
Asha would've laughed at the flower.
She would've called it ugly.
Then she would've become offended if Kai agreed with her.
Kai swallowed.
"Yeah."
He looked back at the crooked little thing.
"You're ugly."
The flower survived the insult.
A grin spread across Kai's face.
"You're alive, though."
For some reason, that mattered enormously.
He stayed beside it until sunset.
Time became harder to measure after that.
Days still passed.
Kai simply stopped scratching marks into the tree beside his house.
The first flower had taken nearly two weeks.
The second took three days.
The third took hours.
Soon the stream bank filled with them.
Kai deliberately stopped making more.
He wanted to see whether the ones he'd created could reproduce without him.
They did.
That pleased him more than creating a hundred instantly would have.
Water came next.
Kai raised a thin ribbon from the stream.
At first, it slapped him across the face.
Twice.
Then three times.
On the fourth attempt, Kai caught it before impact.
He held the water suspended before him.
A twisting line of silver beneath the sunlight.
"Got you."
The water immediately collapsed over his head.
Kai closed his eyes.
A bird chirped.
The same bird.
He was certain now.
Kai wiped his face.
"I'm going to remember you."
The bird flew away.
"Coward."
Eventually, Kai could lift water without thinking about it.
Then stone.
Branches.
Several things at once.
Changing colour became trivial.
Changing shape followed.
Repairing remained harder.
That interested him.
One afternoon, Kai deliberately cracked a stone in half.
Putting it back together should have been simple.
He pressed the pieces together.
Origin responded.
The stone became whole.
Kai smiled.
Then dropped it.
It split along the same crack.
He frowned.
Again.
This time, he didn't simply ask for whole.
He thought about what had broken.
The internal structure.
The tiny fractures he couldn't see.
The relationship between both halves before he'd separated them.
The stone rejoined.
Kai dropped it.
Nothing happened.
He picked it up.
"Better."
He was beginning to understand the difference.
Creation could hide ignorance.
Repair exposed it.
That night, Kai sat beside a fire.
He'd made the fire normally.
Mostly because his first attempt at creating one through Origin had produced a flame that gave off light but no heat.
His second had melted the stones surrounding it.
The third had followed him.
Kai still didn't understand that one.
So tonight, wood burned.
Smoke rose.
Kai sat against a tree and watched sparks disappear into the dark.
He thought about Asha.
That happened every night.
During the day, he could work until the ache became quieter.
Night removed the distractions.
He remembered their kitchen.
Asha stealing pieces of chicken from the pan.
His mother slapping Kai's hand when he attempted the same crime thirty seconds later.
"Mum, she just did it."
"She's checking the seasoning."
"I'm also checking the seasoning."
"You're eating dinner."
His father had laughed behind the newspaper.
Kai smiled.
He could almost smell the kitchen.
Curry.
Rice.
His mother's perfume.
Rain against the window.
The old radio.
For one beautiful second, the memory became so clear that Kai forgot where he was.
A warm light appeared behind him.
Kai froze.
The fire crackled.
Slowly, he turned.
There was a wall between the trees.
White paint.
A window.
Kai stopped breathing.
He knew that window.
Their kitchen.
Warm yellow light spilled across the clearing.
A figure stood beyond the glass with her back toward him.
Dark hair.
One hand stirring something on the stove.
Kai's entire body went cold.
"Mum?"
The figure stopped.
Kai stood.
She began to turn.
His heart slammed against his ribs.
He wanted to see her face.
God, he wanted to.
One more time.
Just once.
Her shoulder moved.
Kai saw the beginning of her cheek.
Then he understood.
He hadn't asked Origin to do this.
But he'd wanted it.
He'd remembered home.
He'd wanted his mother.
And Origin had listened.
"Stop."
The figure continued turning.
"Stop."
Her face was almost visible.
Kai's hands shook.
He could let it happen.
He could finish her.
Her eyes.
Her voice.
Every memory he still had.
Maybe she would smile.
Maybe she'd say his name.
Maybe—
"No."
The word came out broken.
Everything stopped.
Kai stared through the window.
His mother waited on the other side.
Almost.
Not her.
Never her.
A memory given skin.
Kai clenched his fists.
"Take it away."
The kitchen shattered into golden dust.
The wall disappeared.
The window vanished.
His mother disappeared with them.
Kai stood alone beside the fire.
For a long time, he didn't move.
Then he sat.
His hands were still shaking.
He looked at them.
Origin could make almost anything he wanted.
That was no longer exciting.
It was terrifying.
Because sometimes people wanted things they shouldn't have.
Sometimes grief wanted things.
Loneliness wanted things.
Fear wanted things.
Kai reached for a piece of charcoal beside the fire.
There was no notebook yet.
So he walked to the side of his crooked little house.
On the wooden wall, he wrote:
RULE ONE
He stopped.
Then beneath it:
DON'T CREATE PEOPLE.
Kai stared at the words.
Too broad.
What if someday he needed to create a body?
A construct?
Something without a mind?
He rubbed out the second line.
Thought for a moment.
Then wrote again.
NEVER CREATE SOMEONE I LOST JUST BECAUSE I MISS THEM.
Kai read it twice.
That was better.
Origin wasn't evil.
It hadn't tried to hurt him.
It had simply answered.
Which meant the dangerous one wasn't Origin.
It was him.
Kai sat beside the fire again.
The forest stretched silently around him.
He missed Asha.
His mother.
His father.
He missed bad pasta and unpaid bills and the warehouse lights that made everyone look dead.
He even missed his alarm.
But he wouldn't replace any of them with something easier.
Kai looked toward the crooked flower growing near the stream.
The first thing he'd ever made that could survive without him.
Ugly.
Imperfect.
Real.
His eyes remained on it.
"Learn first," he murmured.
Then, after a moment:
"Change things second."
The fire cracked softly.
Kai leaned back against the tree.