The human one tilts his head. “Perhaps I should express myself more clearly. I care little for philosophies. What I want to know is the story. Not just an assembled sequence of events, but the hows and the whys that shaped the flow of events we went through.”

His companion flares into the shape of a hydrogen molecule for a brief second, before collapsing into a swarm of locusts. “A story, you say? A lofty ask, to distill the uncountable and unnameable essences that create all of reality into something digestible, with cause and effect, beginning and end. A moral, when all is said and done. You wish to bottle chaos and entropy like a cheap salve.”

“Not all of it.” The one like a man—narrow, fine-featured, eyes reflexively squinting in sunlight that has no effect on him—frowns. “What is this talk of chaos? My request is simple. I’m not asking for the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Tell me what happened in this messy, sorry affair. From top to toe. That’s all. Tell me the story of Misery Nomaki.”

“The story of Misery Nomaki,” says the other figure, now a tower of flame striding across the landscape, peer to the broken holystone that frames them. “You fancy me a storyteller, do you? A sayer of sooths, a vessel of revelation? As if their story were mine to tell?”

“I merely have questions I want answered,” says the first. Frustration seeps into the cool syllables of his words; noticing this, he calms himself, refusing to be baited. “No, to say that I have questions is an understatement of my feelings on the matter. But that is beside the point. You, my friend. You with your all-seeing eyes—you must have had a view of the events that no one else, not even the most observant mortal, did. Am I wrong?”

“In that, at least, you are not.”

“That’s what I thought,” says the one who is a man. “Listen, I know that I have no power over you, and you have no obligation toward me. But I beg of you. If you cannot tell me what happened in a manner I can understand—if you cannot translate your understanding into something mortals can grasp, then at least show me what you’ve collected on your journey. You said the tale of Misery Nomaki was not yours to tell, but surely you can let me see what happened? From their point of view?”

His companion now sports four faces, human and beast, and each bears a frown. “Show, not tell. Do you imagine that the two are really so different? After all, showing is telling, and telling is showing—don’t you agree? I can show you what you desire, but how will you judge the nature of the story it tells?”