He lived in a box much of his youth, a box that had no shape, no limits and no essence. His box was a sea of blankness that stretched too wide for him to see and left him feeling confided and powerless in the same absurd measure that it fed him freedom and power. He endured countless eons, long before there was such a ridiculous notion as time or space, until, finally, he could take no more.

He grew restless, and then he grew hungry.

He grew hungry for stimulation and for purpose.

He doesn't know how long it was before whoever had created him chose to answer his silent request, his burning question. He was shown the outside of his box, and then he was told of his function.

And so he became he who ends all.

In the beginning, he took pleasure in what he did simply because it was the only thing that there was for him. A life as long as his could not be bore without even the simplest form of satisfaction. The abyss was cold and empty as it was, and he still had so many eons to spend there. At first, he was rapturous, his form buzzed with power and intent for the first time in his uncountable years, and he acted swiftly and greedy for more. The beginning of his reign was violent and chaotic and perfect in his mind. It felt like something that was never to be ended.

He ought to have known better.

After the daze was over, when he noticed what was left behind, his bad mood retuned. In his wake endured only the void, he could create emptiness and nothing else. He grew bitter and bored and torn like his old self, save for now, unlike the first time, he was accustomed with it. He was in control, and that was all he needed be to fulfil his duties, to erase the essence that he had craved and dreamt of for eternities. He kept to his purpose, and for another long while, that too, was enough.

It was after he accommodated to his routine as well as he could that she made herself known, disrupting one again whatever order he had forged for himself in the dark.

She was a mass of colour and sound, and he remembers that she startled him with her warmth; with the promises of wonders and the veiled threat of pain that she carried. Hidden it was, yet he lived on destruction and she could not hide it from him. Most of all, he was disturbed by her very existence.

It was a presence that he embraced instinctively, easily and fondly. He had never met her before, yet she is connected intimately, fundamentally, to him. He knew her like he knew himself.

She was, and is, she who begets all.

For what was ages but felt only like a blink of an eye, they danced around each other, probing and strengthening the strange bond between them. She was beautiful and inviting, and she offered him what he had strived to find when he was still purposeless: life. He could only end it as well: substance tore under his touch, stars grew dim and scattered faced with his gaze, and light died out and seemed forever lost. His anguish seemed unending, unlike creation. She sat bright and tempting beside him, and from what he ended, she shaped all. She patched stars and galaxies and the limits of the boundless space from the chaos he left in his path. She conjured worlds for him to end, so as to not leave him, once again, adrift into the void. She was beautiful in the best of ways; she was his other, gentler, half.

He kept the cycle running; she kept his pain manageable and forever alive. He feared touching her, he feared that she would be gone and he would, once again, have naught.

He hated the pain as much as he hated fear. He hated her ferocity for making him weak and making him unending.

He hated her more for the fact that she was beautiful and everything he needed, he hated her for making it hard not to love her.

Like a child unbeknownst to her own beauty, she was transcendent and soft-hearted in every way. Her gaze was warm and powerful, pulling him in hopelessly, and, yet, her inquiries remained strangely undemanding.

He hated his love for her- the sweet, beautiful, unending pain- the most.

The life that moved and breathed and felt was a mistake, the first and only such foolish, potentially dangerous mishap, she was to make. It was a mistake that placed her farther away from him and in the same time intertwined them all that much closer. It turned out not quite beautifully, and not quite ugly.

The life that she then created is fragile, sparse and unbelievably short and he admits that it holds some of her beauty in its self-indulgent yells for attention. They were creatures moulded after her heart's content, creatures so unlike themselves that he wondered how she had managed to think them, and only the smallest part of her essence made them both real and delightful in their variety.

Those shattered fragments of her power clung to her so desperately, and fought him so lengthy, that he pitied them. Her bosom was warm and inviting, and he understood why they scooted to her embrace so whole-heartedly. All that was to be known as alive succumbed to the beauty of her smiles and the light that shone amber in her all-seeing eyes, even if only for a fleeing moment.

She was always welcomed, greeted and sought out with vehemence that ruined much and many; a vehemence that many a time ended with him taking what was still not ripe.

He too was once welcomed, in the beginnings, but that was before she grew comfortable in her power and beauty. It was before she learned how much stronger she could become, was she only to act more generously, before she made the pain feel dull in comparison to all else she had to offer. Before she learned enticement and found herself enticed.

She gave all life a part of herself; she graced them all with time. The end was always and shall always be the same, he would wait, and then he would rip them apart from her, and they would either curse him or accept him. Never would they truly, wholly embrace him; not when after the first void, uncertain moments, they would finally be able to see. Not after she would show herself to them, unabashedly, and they would be left craving for more.

She alone, sees him with clear, longing eyes. She alone loves him, for reason he dares not question.

She, alone, is forever seeking his tight embrace. And he alone runs from her warmth and gives in only in his weakest moments, ending and creating life all at once.

Because he is the one to end all and she is the one to begin all.

And he does not want to end her.