Day One

CHAPTER ONE

Imagine a choir.  Two hundred constituents, perhaps.  All masters.  Their voices ring clear as space, rich as forest leaves, deep as oceans, warm as molten cores.  Every individual is unique, distinct, yet inseperable from the whole.  A river.  A beam of light.  A beach of sand.
A tapestry.
Its threads surround and bind and draw inwards: requiem wrapped around the wrists, toccatta shrouding waist and chest, hymnal harmonies trussed tight and tied, bass twined through battery and intestine and melody seeping, measure by measure, sotto voce, into the mind.  Each chord a caress.  Each pause a laceration.
So they sing.  Such beauty!  Such harmony!  Such crushing inspiration!
Now: select one.  That magnificent specimen on the far left, perhaps, clad in whorled silver and plumes of blue.  His mandibles are wide and his eyes are closed.  His expression rivals the flattest of salt plains in serenity.  Like the others, he sings perfectly in time and in tune.
Shoot him.

CRACK

Now, listen to the choir again.  Evaluate.  Jot down a few notes.
When ready, select another target, and repeat.

That is how a universe sounds when it dies.  So they say. 
I wouldn't know. I wasn't there.
But that is what they say.

My first memory: a wall, rough and pitted, marked by tiny rectangular niches.  Most are empty, but one, far above my head, holds a ceramic bowl with jagged flowers painted around its rim.  If I rear upwards, first and second set of legs braced against the wall, foremost arms straining... I can just touch it.  The merest of brushes with the tips of a tripartite pincer.  No further.
I want that bowl.  I can't say why, or for what purpose, but I want it.
I stretch, tail thrashing.  The bowl remains stubbornly out of reach. 
I thwack the wall.  The wall does nothing.  One of the niches puffs dust.  The bowl— its glossy sides, its mocking red-stenciled petals— trembles, slight motion large as worlds in my sight.
I understand.  The solution is only a matter of degree.
Headshield meets wall and wall declines the offer of engagement. 
A rustle, a faint whistling of air. 
A crash. 
Liquid courses across my plates.  Water— it was full of water, and now there's nothing to be full.
I sputter.  I drop back to all sixes.  Rivulets bite icy canyons from the back of my neck, droplets spatter from writhing afflicted arms.  It seeps into my eyes.  My mouth.  Drips from my jaws and pools, dust-congealed, amid jagged flowers converted to jagged pieces.
Footsteps—
The bowl lies shattered; I crouch before it, and scrabble at the shards. 
"Stumpy," says the ages.
I hold up a flower, split in uneven fours— a pair of petals here, the tip of a stem here, the spiraled center nearly intact between these three corners.  The edges are chipped.  Everything is wet.
"It's prettier this way," I declare.
Guardian Heat-Traces-Waver-in-Whispered-Torrents blinks.  He tilts his head.  He raises a armored foreleg and taps the fourth piece with a finger.  "Check your reconstruction, child.  It doesn't match."
The indicated segment is from a different part of the bowl; I rotate it thirty-six degrees to the left so it fits better.
"There."
He sighs, carved plates clattering, and as he kneels to correct me the golden strips bolted to match the curves of his headshield flash like the bent and broken ribs of a captured sun.  I have never seen a sun, but I know they are bright and good source of fuel.
"If you don't match the pieces," he says, voice low and patient and despondent, "it won't be watertight."
I select another fragment; it doesn't quite fit either.  "I'll use extra glue."
"Glue leaks."
"Then I won't fill the bowl with water once I've fixed it."
He intercepts a droplet rolling down my face.  "No," he agrees, claws glistening damp, "You won't."