Here we go again, I thought to myself.

Despite my assumption, Seraph's bombs had still been worse than expected. I watched them descend and then everything turned to nothingness. Their blast ripped through, silencing each system in turn, down to the very last cells of my brain. 

So much for being so smart. Instead, I was again plunged into senseless darkness. There, a familiar feeling came to me among distant ghostly echoes.

The numbness of death filled my head. Visions of sea vegetation swaying in the push and pull of the tide played before me, and I knew that I'd been knocked out cold. Rain pattered on leaves all around me, creating a soothing blanket of noise. But I was having none of it. I'd seen too much of these cosmic visions already. I was interested in my own lot.

There was no time for reflection. I had to find my limbs.

"Cells," I spoke, "report." My voice went out into the void and garnered nothing in return.

Vague figures shuffled about in my mind's eye, barely visible. I recognized myself as having gone back to the invisible channel of my Power, per the norm. The space outside of space, where everything and nothing truly existed. The realm of possibility, as I understood it.

Waiting for me there was, of course, the man of my shadow. Hickory had taken to sitting back in a rocking chair, smoking a cigarette. As he looked at me and acknowledged my presence, he let out a great big puff. "Funny," he said. "Seeing y'all here really makes me question my priorities. It hurt, didn't it, to die again? Guess I didn't see that one coming. Those bastards hit hard."

I looked around and then down at my own hands. They were not familiar, and this struck me as strange. Last time, I had taken on my old body in the abyss when first confronted by Hickory. This time, I might have expected an inhuman set of appendages at least. Instead, all I saw were stars. 

Gazing long at my own skin, the sense of depth perception seemed to waver. Nebulae scattered themselves in patterns of awestriking color and, as I put my hands up over my ears to listen, I thought I heard rivers rushing. The sound of a suns' fire was a tremendous cacophony when heard up close. All of it was inside me.

Feeling that I was wasting his time, Hickory snapped to get my attention again. "Boy! I asked if it hurt when they nuked ya?"

"Yes," I answered shortly. "It wasn't really what I'd call a hormetic nuking."

"Well goddammit, that's the kind of thing I was gettin' at. Every time you fuck up, boy, I get woken up for this bullshit and put through all kinds of fire. And I don't much appreciate that, seeing as it was a common saying in my life that I intended to sleep when I was dead. I had it all figured out, alright? From a very young age, as a matter of fact. So I don't need none of this."

My attention was still partially on the experience that I was having, seeing my body composed of the visions I often had in death. Before, they had vanished whenever my consciousness started to return and judge. But not this time. I was neutral enough viewing them that they stayed around. Much like I came to view my enemies' actions, they were just facts of nature.

Someone new came walking out of the black, arms crossed and eyes narrowed at the sight of me. He was wearing a grey hoodie, his expression thoughtful but bitter. "Despite how highly you see yourself," he said to Hickory, "you are not God. And you never will be."

Immediately, I recognized Walter and took a step back. Seeing myself was like staring into a mirror back in the early hours of the morning. Knowing but not understanding what I saw. "Am I dead?" I asked, partially in shock. The dissonance took more than a moment to fade. "Did... it finally happen? My death?"

"Honestly," Walter answered, "it'd be what you both deserve. You're so damn full of yourselves..."

Hickory shot back. "I am the God of this world, you stupid sumbitch. Both of us live for Power!"

"But look where that got you!" Walter swept his arms open over the infinite glassy plane, silencing the man. "You beat me because I couldn't let go of my weakness. I admit that! But you're fuckin' dead too, Hickory, after this shit show. Our Power should have known better than to let you drive Creep," he gestured to me as if I was more of a thing than a person. This elicited no feelings from me. I had returned to calmness after my initial shock. "It's the same story as your first death. You're all Pride and Glory until you stumble up against someone bigger! First, it was me, but now it's Seraph. You can't always win in a direct fight, man. I ended up being wrong, sure. Might does make right. But there's more that makes might than just being an asshole..."

"What would you know?" Hickory stood, jabbing a finger in Walter's face. He wasn't about to be stood over and lectured to. "You refused to fight even when you could win. You made an entire philosophy of bein' a useless pussy! But you wanna talk to me about bein' foolhardy?"

"It was enough to escape the palace. We didn't need to absorb the Kizmet and alert the whole world to our existence! We might have both seen the Truth, Hickory. You first, even! But you don't worship the Ouroboros, and I see that now. You only worship yourself!."

"Enough!" I shouted. "There has to be a way out of here. That's what's important..."

My words summoned something. As if by magic, it manifested out of the aether.

"Good luck with that." Suddenly, it was Daniel and his three compatriates that showed themselves. Though he refused to look directly at me, shading his eyes from the sight, he told me what they'd learned. "This place is like a dream. The deeper you go, the worse it gets. We've been down here for weeks and... we really thought that you had forgotten about us."

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

"No," I said. "Just busy. How is it that I just woke up if you've been down here that long?"

"It's the mathematical totality," Walter sighed. "I've been down here for months now, but I figured that out pretty fast. Not that it matters, really. All you need to know is that time runs differently here. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. The closer you are to the surface, however, the more coherent things are. The law of noncontradiction governs what manifests. Everything is relational, so the first few levels will be familiar. You'll see your house, your parents; but all of it is idealized. They're things you have a strong connection to. After that... well... I've only been able to stand three or four levels before... Let's just say I start blacking out after that." 

"I never saw no parents," Hickory spat. "And why for God's sake can't we all speak English in here?"

Walter grimaced. "No, I wouldn't have expected you to have any connection with your parents..."

"Like it was said, that's not important. Now that Creep is here, we can all get out," the old man told me, standing at Daniel's side. 

"Have you foreseen that?" I wondered how that could be possible. Were these not our minds, but our physical bodies? Perhaps it was all the same soul.

"We have our Powers," the old man confirmed. "But they do not work or reach outside this place. Not without a body."

Hearing this, I decided to look again for my cells. Deep within my body, I searched for some trace of their voices. 

Among the stars there, I heard the faintest remnant of their chorus. Down on my stomach, a pale blue dot circled a small sun, clustered within the Milkyway. Staring at it gave me increasing vertigo, but I pressed on.

As I looked in past the Earth's grey companion and towards the surface, searching through heavy clouds for a hint of green, I found what I was looking for.

Down the winding road between North and South America, the patch of ruined waste was easily visible from space. As my perspective hovered over the face of the waters, I zoomed in off the ocean to get a better look. Somehow, the previous root of my perspective let go, and it was as if I was flying.

No hint of life existed, however. For hundreds of miles, scorched earth was charred and mangled to the bone. It only gave way to the central area of the blast as an even more haunting sight came into view. 

The black transitioned starkly to white. Blazingly bright salt flats extended as far as the eye could see. There, the land was perfectly level and crisp. Perfectly clean and empty. Sterilized.

And, as I understood, the effect continued down far beyond the surface of the Earth. Even of the Kizmet's cage which I had made my home. All matter had been turned to a purified substance at the singular command of Seraph. Such was their Power.

"There's nothing," Walter whispered, hanging his head in defeat. "...It's all lost."

"Wait," I told him. There was still some noise. Its connection had been my north star back to the real world. I refused to give up that quickly in searching out the call.

Though it was impossible to tell the difference between any two areas of the salt flat, I made my way to where I believed my dominion to have been. Something magnetized me there. As quickly as I came closer, I could feel the signal growing stronger.

Then, everything went black as if a switch had been flipped. I felt my body begin to change next, seeing my skin go from black to pale alabaster. Finally, my limbs distorted, forming long and alien tendrils that pushed out into the void. My physical senses had come back, suddenly housing me in flesh again, stripped from my cosmic perspective.

"Well what the hell is this?" Hickory grumbled. "Where are we?"

Seeing that all six of them were still with me, but now so were the cells, I was wondering the same question. "This body is physical," I said. "The cells are responding. They say gravity is present, too." While I treated the mystery cautiously, my heart had already risen. Hope was all I needed to be happy, and for a moment there I had thought it was lost.

The old black woman voiced a good idea. "Go up. See what you can find."

As I did so, I felt shifts in pressure across my structure. A familiar feeling, akin to the deep sea, but far less intense. Besides, none of my cells had reached the ocean yet. So I was certain this was not that. Yet, it was twice as dark and lifeless. An impossible feat. 

Reaching the top of my ascent caused me to break through as if I had come to the surface of a body of water. There, I ordered the cells to quickly reconfigure and confirm my best guess.

Hastily remade into ears and a mouth, I let a below fly out into what felt like an infinite dark, only for it to soon return. As such, I realized where I was.

This was not the deep ocean. Instead, I had been saved by my deepest tendril in the earth. The smallest ounces of my flesh had survived beneath the radius of the bombs. Finding only desolate salt above, the cells had not had any choice but to go deeper, eventually punching into an underground aquafer.

Vast stone arches vaulted over my flesh, and utterly still and cool waters surrounded me. Only the deepest of caves had been sufficient as my refuge. That was how close I came to dying.

"Creatures that live in these kinds of environments can lay dormant for years," the small girl said. As she did so, she looked at Daniel. "We don't know how long it's been for this Thing to recover. Everyone we know could be dead by now..."

Hickory laughed derisively. "Baby, they died to you the moment you left your body behind for Power."

"That's not true!" she yelled, angrier than I might have expected. Full of fire for a nerve that had apparently been struck. "Creep was going to give us our bodies back. He promised."

As they yammered, I found myself crawling up onto the shore and trying out new forms. "We'll just have to see how long it's been," I said. "There's nothing to do about it now. And for the record, I'm not one for charity cases or promises. You're going to have to work for your independence if that's what you want."

Walter looked over his shoulder where he lingered like a specter in the dark. They were barely visible now that my real senses were returning. No more than ghosts in the machine. "Indeed," he agreed. "We got lucky this time. If things had been any different; without this cave system or so much mass; without Alejandro's pit that did half the work, we wouldn't have been able to dig deep enough to survive the blast."

"The balance has to shift," I agreed. "I cannot take so much pride in what I am. Only what I might become. I lacked caution in taking the Kizmet..."

Hickory was silent at this, merely grimacing and thinking. 

Having changed much since last I saw him, it was Walter who took charge. He was no longer so timid and caught between the world and his desires. He had become more pragmatic. "We do what we have to so we can survive. But in the end, it's not about us. Some are closer to the goal than others, but no one is equal to it. We have to stay true to the mission. I'm going to help us do that."

Hickory scoffed.

"What mission?" Daniel asked. Slowly, I was beginning to understand the same truth that my old self had learned, locked up in this prison with so much time to think. There was only one real threat that we faced now.

Finally, I answered Daniel's question myself. "We have to win."