"I extrapolated from the available evidence. The available evidence supported her conclusion. Will you do it, Lottie?"

"...I'm not God."

"I don't believe that," he said, "in the long term."

"Will you hate me if I don't?"

Now he turned. "Do you care?"

You looked into his eyes. If you wanted, you could push your way inside them— he could not deny you entrance— but you'd seen how it was in there. Sort of weird. Lonely. "A little."

"You always were honest. I think the heroic thing would be to do something. They are not innocents, but they are not... it is no way to live. Not for anybody. If they saw the world, they might open their minds to it."

"Might," you said.

"Can't you see the future? You would know better than I." Richard sucked at his cigarette while you shook your head. "Well, then. If you left them, perhaps they'd eat themselves. Or perhaps they'd find something else productive to do. I have no sweeping knowledge of my kind. I will not hate you, no matter what, as I will be dead. Would you like a cigarette?"

"What? I don't— Richard, it's not ladylike."

"Are you a lady, Lottie? Or are you an enormous lizard in human guise? You can hardly pick up a habit now."

You watched him shake his lighter open, the yellow flame a hundred-thousandth the size of yours, and watched him make the end of a cigarette a little star. He passed it up to you, casually, and you looked at it for a long time before taking it. Confidently, you took a drag, and coughed, and coughed, and coughed, and took another, and coughed, and took a third, and didn't. Your head buzzed. The smoke was wafting around you in a helix.

"Good," Richard said, and neither of you said anything for a long time. "Lottie."

You had been smoking. "Huh?"

"You should know that killing the Wyrm— it is murder-suicide."

You discovered that smoking was a convenient reason to not respond.

"I have been mulling it over since the dreams were relayed. The Wyrm does not live, so it cannot die, in conventional wisdom. There is nothing there to kill. But the Wyrm is [WYRM], in its totality, and Laws can be... struck down. Naturally, to strike down [WYRM] is no simple task, or it would have been done. It would require enormous control over Law itself. Such as the control the Wyrm itself possesses."

"You already told me this," you said.

"Will I? It's important. Has the point been made, or should I draw this out to its logical conclusion?"

"...The point was made."

"Then that was all I wanted to say. I wanted to ensure you knew. Were we finished with the garden?"

With the garden: it was enough for then, but you were not finished in total. You had planted out the area around the manse— the cathedral, was what it was, though you'd always known that, had sculpted it yourself— but vast expanses laid sunlit but empty. You needed to do something that wasn't necessary in the slightest.

(3/6? I dunno)