I look up at the stranger, swallowing hard. His very presence, this pressure, feels like it demands I fall in line; like a neutron star crushing everything into uniformity. “S-sir,” I stammer. “Belladonna can’t speak.”

I feel a sense of dread that I dared contradict him. Who is this? What am I looking at?

“No need,” he replies. “Belladonna can just listen. I’m mostly here for you, Liandan. That’s the true name you take; at least in most timelines. Most of the time it’s given by Belladonna writing it down, else by King Finvarra or the Fourth.”

“’Timelines’?” I echo.

“Yes. Timelines. Allow me to introduce myself,” he says, hovering over to us and taking a seat on the branch. “My real name is Albert Riftward. Most often, though, I’m known as Tri, or the Third. God of dimensionality, and force of Order. And to preempt you: yes, spacetime is a dimension, as are length, width, and height.”

A god. An actual, bona-fide god is sitting on a tree branch next to me. I can sense Bella tensing up in utter fear, and I can understand it, but it’s not quite the same shock and awe for me. I’ve already spoken to Meden in the first place, and if he’s not a god then he’s certainly close enough in my book. But that was true in the first place, and the more he speaks, the less intimidating he gets.

I don’t doubt what he’s saying is true, which I suppose I should if I was going by normal Earth rules, but it rings true to my ear. It’s just that, with every word he utters, he sounds… exhausted.

“And what do you want with me?” I ask.

“Your third condition,” he replies.

“How do you know about-“

“You told me. Or your might tell me, depending on whose perspective you’re taking,” he replies. “You see, I wrote the system you just attempted to access. It was a painstaking process; always needing little adjustments whenever one of the forces decided to play his or her role a little harder than usual. Bringing order to magic, which by its definition defies the natural order.

It could grant a modicum of power, sure, but it was mostly a way to catalogue things. Simplify spellcasting. ‘Training wheels,’ like you’d call it. A roadmap to abilities, a simple way to bind them to specific gestures and parameters, and a warning of them. A way to dull the damage of all but the most fatal wounds.

You’d almost always have a habit of playing with that; turning this and that on and off, messing with titles, spinning false readouts, obscuring real ones. The timelines when you’d earn administrator access were nearly always a headache,” he explains.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

I don’t know what to think. He’s talking about me like he knows me, or future me. Maybe he does; he says he knows my name after all. I don’t know if I want to accept that kind of march of destiny stuff. He’s couching his language in qualifiers. “Most,” “almost,” “nearly.” If that’s the case, then if I’m not mistaken about this: whenever he says anything about the future, taking his word for it is no better than taking a fortune teller’s, albeit one with a probably accurate read on probabilities.

“I, uh. I see,” I reply. “Did you want to ask me not to abuse that?”

Tri heaves a long weary sigh and looks down at the flames below. “No. What I’m telling you is this: it’s done. As of one second after your first opening of the system, I have erased it in its entirety, down to the last 2D logic gate in the aether, from that point forward.”

“What? Why?” I ask, surprised. I can sense Bella’s way more surprised than me. Shocked, even. I don’t exactly feel torn about not having to deal with something like that, but from what I’m gathering, this system of his has been a major part of the world for a long time. Or would have been.

“Because I’m tired, Liandan,” he replies. He holds up a hand, and in the blink of an eye a cigarette appears in his hand, and a heartbeat later an ember flies up from below and ignites it. He takes a drag on it and says “I’m tired of fighting about it. Tired of fighting you, tired of fighting the fourth, tired of fighting Meden, tired of trying to get everything into a neat box and balance things.”

“I…’m sorry,” I offer. “Maybe it’s for the best. I don’t know. I do think I’ll miss the chance to go leveling up, trying to break the game as it were, but I can’t miss it too badly if I never had it in the first place.” He takes another drag on his cigarette. “You know those are bad for you,” I say out of habit, to which he chuckles.

“My young fae, I may look like I’d get carded going to the triple-x holoshow, but I’m the oldest being in existence. In another 265 years I will be a googol years of age, and when I am, even my time will be up. That’s my curse,” he says with a wry smile. “If smoking manages to put me down before then, I welcome it.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you two are going to have to deal with the fallout,” Albert replies. My eyes widen at the implication. “Every sentient person, every nation, every world, across the entire local multiversal cluster, has had this system in place from less than a zeptosecond after T=0. You two are going to have to help this world, and watch it and its peoples either adapt, else go extinct.”

He takes another drag on his cigarette and remarks “I can think of no one more qualified.”

He raises his left hand and raises his index, swirling it counterclockwise, and time itself heeds his whim. The fires below us recede like a movie on reverse, rapidly shrinking in on itself. In mere moments where once there was scorched earth lay naught but the largest field of flowers I’ve ever seen. Even the ashes covering me were whisked away with the flow of time.

“I’ll be in touch,” he says, hopping off the branch and landing on his feet in midair as if he was on solid ground. In a flash he unsheathes his sword and slashes the air with it, leaving a tear hovering before him. He walks through, and it snaps shut behind him.

“Well, that was certainly something,” I remark to my twin, who nods slowly. “So, where do we go now?” I ask. Bella points out where the fires had been, and I can just barely make out airborne shapes in the distance.

“Oh! Good eye, sis. Let’s go!”