Paul sees God's expression out of the corner of his eye. He sees it in the flashing storm of the next second, and the next, when it drags him away from the knife's subtle tessellations.

"It's a dream where I get everything I want," he says, voices a tremor to match the whispers of metal against sand, drawing inward, "The universe kneels at my feet to give me a crown. I wave my hand, and the desert blooms. I close my fist, and my enemies suffer. I drown the stars in blood, and they call me a messiah. They call me emperor. And do you know what it feels like?"

It's a question he already knows the answer to, as close as the heartbeat throb of radiance in the delicate capillaries around his eyes, branching filaments of starlight that unfurl underneath his skin. The air floods with the electric stink of ozone as he raises the tooth and draws an arc across the ruined, blood-polluted beach.

"It still feels like this." Bleakness in every choral shade. "Like watching everything burn. Like nothing."

The word echoes across the sand in a tumult of languages. It falls into the night the way Paul's arm drops, seemingly unbearably heavy, across his knees.

"That's not the funny part," he says, the way people telling bad jokes always have. The wait for it, the no, really. The stay with me a little longer.

"I thought it could be different here." Paul half-smiles, and in the horror of the rest of his face, it is small and soft and human. "That I could be different, if I wanted to be. And then there you were, on the beach, the other end of ten thousand years, and I thought - there's the sign. There it is. If even you could be different, then -"

He lifts his shoulders, lets them collapse.

"But here I am," he says, in a unison of quiet ironies, "Here I remain."