Time Himself thirsted in drear, dry repose.

The endless progression of Orion, the purple banded dance of The Spheres, brought no pleasure, brought no elation, brought no passion, offered no satiation. Endless beauty was His, ever dying and temporary.

His scornful, favored mate was nowhere near for him to take. For fair Blue danced at the end of Near Eternity’s arm of light.

Time slumbered within Eternity’s well, with a weariness out of which he could not climb.

His current, rejuvenant form was fresh and sleek, well-formed of the most superior temporal stock. As he slept, as often as he woke, the Automaton’s His form wrought.

The ethereal dome within which he reclined in hopes of a semblance of experience that he might be but a fraction of Time, to wax temporary, was made sensuously fleeting by the presence of his darling Temporary. Entirely temporary, trained in dance and song, schooled in oration and epic by the ever-attentive Automatons, her name…

...He could not recall her name while he wandered in those too keen eyes, eyes that saw in him a universe of interest, a mystery to be plumbed for life—a life that will have expired when next he opened his ever heavy lids.

Beautiful beyond words, the actual and mere flower of life, a true temporary, not some noisome Deathless semblance of grace, but life gone in hideous haste, she drank of him, like a flower drank the morning dew.

She was small, in her white shift of silk, having been spared much of his titanic weight by his mighty arms, nourished of the stuff of temporal life by his loyal automatons—his nearest companions, truly dead and undying.

He was spent, his seed singing to him through the echoes of her satisfied need. She sang, sung a song of sorrow overcome, the sweet song causing his eyes to hang heavy and long…

Sensing Sleep, the robber of eternal nights, creeping upon him, he jerked open his eyes with a titanic issue of will, and saw her there, no longer fair, aged from maiden to crone in the blink of Time’s eye. Her song still fair, broke on the rocks of his aestheosis and her whimpering cry, her wrinkled visage judged with a startle ugly in the very mirror of God’s eye, his mere sadness for what she had lost, broke her into wracking sobs.

“My Dear,” he soothed, and in the time it took him to address her, she was being respirated by an Automaton and transported by another.

Closing His eyes, so sad to see her so, he exhaled deeply, kept his breath close, held for a space he thought he might have once knelt, and opened his eyes upon Orion.

She was there, he could see Her, far beyond temporal space, upon its distant banks, washed by stardust, and he groaned, senseless and alone…

“TIME, Lord of Thine,

You are not Alone,

We Pine, Lord of Thine,

Your Maidens Atone!”

The uncountable Chorus of Automatonry, his rejuvenating attendants, the cultivators of His Maiden Throng, sang to him. Their short simple song was sung and resung as the procession was painted across the ether dome. Those thousands of finely tutored companions, whose temporal nature made of each a breath of life—and no more!, No more—engaged in a procession, each of their lives of art and song, painting and dreaming, performers of magic dance and the subjects of tragic mischance, they, all thousand of them, had perished without the affirmation of His gaze in the age whence he held His breath.

Time was troubled.

The Great Chorus of Automatonry dithered and failed to sing.

Time moaned, accursed and alone reclining upon his starry throne, beneath his ether dome, sunken in the well of Eternity.

One Automaton, one mechanical rejuvenant, tittered forward on chromatic wheels, the lights of the spheres glittering from its turning wheels, sparkling from its stalling panels, arraying thought into light—forgoing sound—disassembling itself, and begging, “Take this, thy totality, permit this servant to join with deathless flesh, to repair to Pleades and sustain you a fitting mate?”

Time was uncoupled, described a pause, a thing unthought…

Time formed Thought, directly, as Automatonry preferred, not attached to the temporary notion of sounded thoughts, “Agreed, be one with Pleades’ deathless seed, would that she were scented with fair Blue’s fresh breath and savage need.”

The purple bands of Orion rose like a Chimera of night, forms untaken, thoughts unformed, lights brilliant upon the progression shone, and in Her beauty.

Time saw them there, as many as the stars and decreed, “Something about her, of the Temporary need...to bloom, shine and decline, to when I wake, yet beautifully shine.”

The Chorus of Automatons, sang in their mechanical dialects, the chants of their cyclic songs, their thoughts turning inward upon the One Automaton, that one mechanical rejuvenant, surrounded by their buzzing mob of song.

For once Time’s heavy brows did not yearn to blinding close, but to rise and savor an instant that would birth an age, His true Children being Ages.

The One Automaton, tiny, vulnerable, surrounded and alone, menaced by its many Choirites, bared it’s internals and called, at once, in light, thought and song, “Copy this selfless codex into fairest, deathless flesh.”

Time, for once, saw Eternity, rather than a remorseless maw, as a torrential journey. He sat tall, gazed across the void, seated there, above the Arc of Orion, a Mirror of limitless awe. There, the Father of Ages, pined in thought, light and sound, “Oh, for the fragrant scent of fair Blue. She shall not spurn me anew.”