Paul has always sought to be a good listener. He listens now, faint creases of sorrow touching the corners of his mouth, his eyes, like the marks left behind by once folded paper. He presses his thumb down when God talks about his old dream, and traces a small circle as the sand falls from his palms.

"I didn't think you remembered all of that."

When was the last time he spoke so softly to anyone outside of his private chambers? A question so imprecise even his memory falters at first inquiry. Was it when he last spoke to his mother? A stray word to his sister when she still had ears for him?

Immaterial. He's always been too much of a solipsist when it comes to wonderings like that one.

"It has been a long time." Since the old dream on the beach, since the older dream on this one, since God set himself on a path of vengeance against the perpetrators of this grand murder. "That part, I still can't imagine. Being able to see a future...it isn't living it, however vividly you may paint it. You don't know the journey at its beginning, and by the time you've followed the path far enough to understand it..."

He breathes out.

"History has its inertia. People see their leaders at the crest of a flood and imagine that they are masters of its movement...they don't know that they are as swept away by it as everything else." He offers God a pallid, aching smile, with none of the easiness he brought with him at first. All of that is set aside. "And inside each of us is our own flood of history. We can't be other than we are, however it...whatever it costs us."