Artist Known

I'm near a museum. Museums are secondary battlegrounds in the war. Here, even as history of the past and the future changes, not everything gets bleached perfectly clean. Objects which defy the past they make still stain the fabric of the world. Sometimes the enemy has to accept that some stains will stick, unless they are willing to cut away even more reality and unravel even more spacetime. We hide in trenches cut up and down spacetime, in tiny redoubts of parallel dimension. Here, we wait to go over the top and be unraveled as the threads of our being are pulled to satisfy the new reality, all so we can grab a few more feet of history. In this trench of a garden apartment nearby, multiple Mes and others time-traveled from various points, crammed in and planning and waiting. The Oldest among us are nervous there is no one Older than them still. The Youngers are terrified that they will become the broken threadbare phantoms the Olders are, or simply disappear when the changes in reality become too much. All from our side know we have lost.

We fight not for our history, but for memory now. A beloved place here, a cherished name there. All things that an enemy we never wanted to make and don't even know are trying to erase, paint over, dye. All to get the reality they want with the places and people and names they want. Those places and people and names don't include us, so into the bleach we go.

I fight for a bauble, a bit of spun blue glass. In my daughter's apprenticeship, she heated the glass, drew it out into a spiral, careful, careful... and she wrapped leather around it and tied a cord to it. It was apprentice work. It was not her greatest work; that glorious piece of shimmering colors rested in the Ceberian Trust when such a place existed in spacetime. It was not her most expensive work, which sold at auction for nineteen million votens. But this spun blue glass bauble was her most important work, because she gave it to me as a gift and it is the last piece of her art which exists in reality.

It is pretty, pretty as her smile.

I remember my daughter's smile, and I confirm by asking the others of Me present; most remember it. She had blue lips from the azomeberries she would eat constantly. Those berries don't exist anymore/never existed. But I remember the smile and her blue crooked incisor. I remember how she would hold the glass bauble up to the light and paint the wall with blue, dance it about for me and my...

I had a wife. We had a daughter. I do not remember which one of us carried our daughter. They both do not exist any longer.

If I succeed in this mission, a glass bauble of spun blue will hang in a museum display, missed or reluctantly accepted by those who are bleaching away my reality in favor of theirs. Someone will walk in that museum one day and light will strike the glass just so. Color will paint their eyes with inspiration. They will carry that home and create something, something flashed with blue light. Paintings of lakes. Incredible dresses of cerulean silks. Songs full of serenity, courage, and wisdom.

In my trench in spacetime, I look to the other Me's. They are scared, trembling. Some are angry. Some I remember being, and others I do not. When you fight this much in time and space, people fray too. We are so frayed, threads plucked and washed out and ripped, like how Zhara would tear her wedding dress each day to avoid marrying Ilther.

I see no other Me who is older.

I hold up my bauble to the wan ceiling lamp to paint each of us blue. The others do the same. The light is cool on us. For a moment, we are blue with peace. For a moment, we know our daughter exists, regardless of what reality says.

We trade baubles around. The mismatch of baubles and owners will strain spacetime and one bauble might stick. Again, too much bleach, you can wreck the fabric. They might just have to leave it rather than risk an unraveling of reality.

After the war, someone will look at that bauble, see a description on a card.

Reality will know her, though.