these gods, made by hand

Dear Architect, Flora said, when she was nine years old and just mature enough to decide that she could see her way clear to pray, please make me very wise, when I am older. Make it so I know what to do and how to be.

Dear Architect, thought Flora, as she made her bed, a twelve-year-old. I am not so old and not so pretty, but I think I am well-liked enough. Please give me the strength to be happy with who I am. Please don't let me be horrible, as a teenager. I'd like to be nice.

Architect, thought the sixteen-year-old Flora, I will surely have many a trial in my life. I will have more difficult decisions than which girl it is I make my night with in boarding school, when the time comes that I want to. Please offer me the guidance I need, that I am calm with the future as well as the past. And let me keep up my good grades.

Oh, Architect, thought Flora, when she had just graduated and was in the midst of wondering if this truly was the path she wanted to set in her life, we are here at the quietest of all impasse. Make me as you would see fit, and I'm sure I can find the rest with my own good sense. Make me kind. Make me thoughtful. Make me enduring. Make it, she thought but wouldn't say, so I have a better hope in myself than my mother.

And she prayed again, soon to follow, when she found that the continuity of the school day was a lurching burden. She prayed to know what it was that the Architect could offer to unassuming humans, besides Blades. Was that really all?

Oh, Architect... She mused. She mulled. She wondered.

Architect, who created all fantastical people that walk this planet with its many Titans, would you not send me a partner? Is there not a person in the world who could lead me, as I lead them, in your plan?

Flora did not say, please, Architect, send me a man.

But the Architect sent her a man. Actually, he sent her two. And she abandoned praying, eventually, because they gave her plenty enough to think about, but she did wonder if it was prayers or karma that had gotten her here.

"Do you believe in the Architect?" she asked Addam lightly.

Addam, with his face bare of airs and his head bare of crown, just stared at her in the lamplight. "Well, I do," he said. "Someone has to have made all this. I'm not sure I think it was just an atomic trick that created the logic of Blades."

Flora nodded. That was fine. That was sense. That was human.

"As well..." Addam pulled in a breath. "Something divine had to have made you."

And it was the same with Minoth, who didn't like to speak his mind because he appeared to be afraid that he'd be somehow skewered for it, or lose an advantage. His advantage, with Flora, was that he was handsome and keen, sharp for the future as he gazed into the past.

He was like Addam, and then again he wasn't.

"Do you believe in the Architect, Minoth?"

"I'm deciding," Minoth replied. "I'm not sure when or if I'll ever be done. Unless he walks up to me and extends a greeting. And even then, any street preacher could concoct a gag."

Well, of course. The great creation's force had no face, except that everyone assumed it some masculine mélange of anciency, some manifest portrait of regret and wisdom.

"And if I said I prayed to the Architect to help me become the woman I am today, what would you say?"

She didn't only mean in physical traits.

Addam pondered her, ever more mystified. He probably stopped to consider the immense satisfaction of his situation, how good it was going and if he deserved as good as he got.

Minoth just gave her that razor's edge gaze and replied, "Prayer is just another kind of self-help. Again, whether or not they hear you, you've got no way of knowing - but you're the one who tried. Who thought about it. Who grabbed the dandelion and wished."

"I wished for a partner," Flora said, idly. "Did you?"

Minoth snorted, not ungracefully. "I'm a Blade, or was. It kind of is - and isn't - what we do."