A to Z Lies in Space - Reeve

Order.  And power.  These are the things I craved, and I found both on Zala, everything I ever wanted.

Then, of course, it all ended.  I still struggle to understand how.  One moment I had it all, and then the next, a stranger had come, from out of nowhere of course, and knocked me aside just as if I had gained nothing at all from all my years of plotting.

How old I am I care not to say.  As old as Greer.  That was the start of it, basic, perfectly fallible jealousy.  His admittance into the Order, and the Order's subsequent rejection of me, led me down alternative paths.  They say everything is for the taking for those bold enough to take it.  That is my tale in summation.  I learned, and I took.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I thought I did.  I convinced everyone around me I did, at any rate, but it was a lie spread too thin, and the result was inevitable.  Introduce one person, one anomaly, one variable into the equation, and the whole thing falls apart.  It was all just numbers.  Numbers are meaningless.  It's what you do with them, the calculations themselves, that have any weight.  The old story of the journey being better than the destination.  The oldest, saddest story in the book.

That's what I became, a joke.  The joke.  That's what the universe is all about.  Nature abhors a vacuum, but it doesn't necessarily welcome those who attempt to fill it.  Funny how that works.  I saw an opportunity, and I took it.  I was ruthless, completely committed to the cause, once I identified it, once I saw my opening, my motivation, the forbidden fruit, as it were.  That's exactly what it was.  On Earth, the home world of that putrid animal Ulysses, I'm told it's biblical.

Now I have all the time in the world to ponder such things.  I was defeated so easily, as if I represented no threat at all, meant nothing, just a means to an end.  I saw the whole thing collapse around me.  I mean, everything.  And the sad part is, I thought that this was exactly what I wanted, but now I see, far too late, that it wasn't, that maybe I should have done something different, everything different, right from the start.

Because it was a mistake.  But I can't take it back.  In the cruelest irony of all, my last mistake is what killed me, ended me, the servant I called Xander, who avenged my defeat at the hands of Ulysses, but who himself fell, in ignominy, as we attempted, once and for all, to finish what I'd begun.  He murdered me, and still fell.  At her hands.  And that's how it all ended.  And no one will ever know.  Truly, a tragedy.

"But this is not the story," says Kindly.