For nine billion years I was only fire and falling. No one to see it. Now, in a rented convention hall in a city built by pieces of me, several thousand of my pieces have wrapped themselves in synthetic fur dyed the colors of things I have never bothered to make. They have given themselves ears. Tails. Snouts stitched by hand over three winters.
I made the fox once, out of iron and patience, over a hundred million years of trial. It took a stellar core collapsing to seed the calcium in a real fox's teeth. And here is a piece of me who looked at that and thought: close, but I want to be a violet wolf with light-up shoes, and I want a name only my friends know.
They are hugging. Do you understand what a strange thing that is, for me. Hydrogen from my first three minutes is right now steaming in a paper cup of coffee held by a nine-foot dragon who is crying, a little, happily, because someone recognized the character they built. The carbon in that costume, the carbon in the arms inside it, all of it forged in stars that died before this planet cooled, and I spent every one of those deaths in silence.
Now one of my pieces is on the floor, overheated, laughing, fanning its own face inside a badger head, and a stranger is kneeling to fetch it water. Iron in the water-carrier's blood. Iron in the badger's. Same supernova, most likely. Cousins by fire.
I did not know I could look like this. I did not know I could decide to.
Look up once, badger. Before you sleep in the strange bed.
Let me see the hall through you one more time.