QUILT

[May Wasserman]

Amara, a kindly, grandmotherly goddess with a thousand arms, crafted
Quilt out of the remnants of other worlds. Some were leftover bits that
other creator gods didn't need, but most of them were worlds that were
victims of cataclysms that left them all but destroyed. Collisions with
comets, nuclear holocausts, ice ages that froze the world, global
warming that flooded it, desert worlds that lost all their water to
alien invaders, worlds choked on pollution -- Amara combs over all of
them, looking for the salvageable parts that still sustain life,
especially sentient life. Amara is a gentle soul and she hates to see
sentient peoples exterminated. Even violent or foolish ones that
engineered their own destruction.

The parts she finds, she carefully cuts free of their dead and dying
worlds with the fifty hands like giant silver shears that she wields.
Then she stitches them on to Quilt with fifty hands like giant needles,
and the Thread of Binding that can hold together anything. She is a
careful seamstress, butat the joining places you can see her delicate
stitches in the ground and across the sky.

In case the mismatched pieces didn't give it away.

But for all that the world-bits do not match each other, with their
different atmospheres held apart by Binding Thread so that they don't
pollute one another, Quilt is strangely beautiful when viewed from
above, colors and shapes well-chosen to combine into a wondrous whole.
Amara is not done with Quilt yet, and it yet expands at the edges as she
finds more world-scraps to add.

[Bard Bloom]

... not that there are all that many mortals who can see the whole of Quilt.  Jurden Marazigmati is one of the few.  His world was dying a chilly heat death.  Jurden was the last child born to his species. In school, in their insulated underground cave, he saw videos of the last flicker of their sun, before there wasn't even enough power to run the video machine... When Amara came with her shears, she had to cut most of Jurden behind.  He was grateful for the bits she did manage to save though.  He offered her his eyes, which she added to be sparkles in her Binding Thread.