“Yes,” Jehovah agreed, “here time does seem a constituent component of belief.”

“Do you see time like matter, then?” Carlyle tested, growing eager. “Moments like atoms, so old things have more time matter? Or is it connected, like a string?”

Jehovah spent several silent breaths in thought. “I am nowhere near understanding Time. It seems to be a direction in which sentience can only move one way and perceive the other, but it also destroys, and twists, and swallows, making legacies differ from, or even oppose, intent. It annihilates, repeats, erases. It is too alien to me.”

Carlyle remembers a chill as she tried to read emotion in Jehovah’s eyes, and caught the full force of their starless, living black. “Sorry to ask so many questions.”

“I welcome questions,” This Kind God replied. “Now that this universe has taught Me what ignorance is, I will never willfully inflict it on a sentient thing, as My Peer does.”

“Your Peer, you mean This Universe’s God?”

“Yes. I would wish you a kinder Maker, but it is impius to feel anything less than absolute gratitude for the absolute gift of having been created.”

Carlyle smiled at Jehovah’s latinate pronunciation of the word, meant in its Roman sense, when piety was owed to states and parents as well as to religion. “It sounds like you don’t like Them. God, This Universe’s God I mean, you don’t like the way They run things.”

Slowly, with difficulty, always with difficulty come His answers. “I do not dislike, rather I do not understand. I need to find Him. I need Him to answer why He made His Universe so full of barriers, and ignorance, and limited perspectives, which make His sentient creations suffer and see evil in His plan. I need to know why He invented Pain, and Time, and Distance. I need to know why He creates portrait after portrait of Himself, but stays so hidden. I need to know how He found Me, how He created this flesh men call Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason, how He bound Me into it, and why He brings Me here as His Unwilling Guest, and then, strange Host, He hides.”

Carlyle smiled. “You’re not alone there. Everyone asks questions. Why am I here? Why is there Evil in the world? Why won’t the Creator show Themself? I know you must study as much philosophy as Dominic. That’s what it’s always been about. Everyone throughout history needed those answers.”

“Not as I do,” Jehovah answered slowly. “My Mycroft put it best. No matter how many beast companions Adam encounters in the garden, he needs Eve. Before I met this universe I was complete, neither wanting nor imagining anything beyond Myself. Here, watching humans, I have learned what it means for a being to have equals, to speak with another, debate, learn, grow. Now that I learn of that, I need it. I have never before lacked anything in My existence, but knowing that I have a Counterpart, a Peer, I need Him.” His eyes turned to the painted portrait of that Counterpart on the altarpiece before Him. “You called Him ‘Bridger’?”