A hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it

One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red's hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, by El by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, is an incredibly poetic time-travel story.

Red is an agent of the Commandant; Blue is of the Garden. "My viney-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia."

Red:"Red likes to feel. It is a fetish."
Blue: "She wears antique typewriter keys on her fingertips in veneration of the great god Hack."

Some reviews liken it to The Time Traveler's Wife (of which I'm not a fan). I have yet to see a review that makes something of the obvious Doctor Who reference. Whatever the inspiration for this novel, it is beautiful, romantic, fresh.

Two agents on opposing sides leave letters for each other across time and space as they manipulate strands of time. The type of beings they are is suggested rather than explained, and the nature of the war is never addressed (and I like that it's open to interpretation). Similarly their letters take on very creative forms (e.g., one message is read in tea leaves).

In this regard it is similar to Basic Black with Pearls: the agents see everything as having a coded significance, but they can never be certain of it.

All that supposing Blue even sent this message — that Red has not manufactured it, groping in despair for meaning in broken images the next braid's twist will wash away. Art comes and goes in the war. The painting on the subway wall might be an accident. She might be making this up.

But.

There is a chance.

At least here, the feeling is mutual.

I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review you words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours.

The language at times pulled me out of the story. Nouns disguised as verbs led me down garden paths; I had to retrace my steps to unravel the syntax. But the poetry of it led me through the maze of my own heart.

Love:
"I want to be a context for you."
"Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak. How I love to have no armor here."

And hunger:

But hunger is a many-splendoured thing; it needn't be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red — to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth — is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out.

Blue has deep hunger inside her, and they have yet to learn what timey-wimey role Red had in inspiring it.

I remember a kiss and something to eat. It was so kind, I couldn't fathom it as unfriendly. As fairy tale as it gets, really. I remember bright light, and then — hunger. Hunger that was turning me inside out, hunger in the most primal way imaginable, hunger that obliterated every other thing — I couldn't see, I was so hungry, I couldn't breathe, and it was like something was opening up inside me and telling me to seek. I think some part of me must have been screaming, but I couldn't tell you which; my body was an alarm bell sounding. I turned all of myself toward Garden to be fed, to stem this, to me from disappearing —

Love somehow feeds itself.

My own folk are great gardeners. Our games are long and slow, and our maturation also. Garden seeds the a past us — your Commandant knows this already, whether or not it's considered need-to-know for you — and we learn from and grow into its threads. We treat the past as trellis, coax our vineyard through and around, and harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, pours us back into the root system in loving libation, and we grow stronger and more potent together.

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.

But while I've been enmeshed in this wholeness — they are not the whole of me.

By losing the time war, they win time and each other.