The yells turned to shouts that turned to grunts and groaning. Since I was following in reverse, I had to see what happened first, and then make sense of it.

Madness launched some sort of attack that made the other Immortals disappear. The Evil Eye went spiraling onto the planet and the Simurgh was embedded into the Nothingness like a fresco. After that, Madness walked away with a blank look on his face.

Before that, the Simurgh was fighting the Evil Eye and somehow, the Evil Eye had been winning. I figured this was because of the many silver and rainbow colored wounds on its body. I knew this realm was a metaphysical one, and that the Immortals’ bodies in this realm weren’t actually physically real. Still, the Simurgh had to be hurting a lot if those sorts of injuries were appearing on its metaphysical body.

The Evil Eye, on the other hand, seemed perfectly fine, and as I followed their battle in reverse, I found out why. The Evil Eye had been cowering behind t the veil of Nothingness. It had been watching the events that were beginning to unfold in front of me.

Madness and the Simurgh had been fighting a devastating battle in the white void of Nothingness. Even though nothing here had a physical form, I could still see the entire place shaking under the power of the Immortals’ attacks. My own body, which should have been protected from the effects of the past by my temporal domains, was trembling under the weight of the Simurgh’s rainbow wings and Madness’ silver glare.

The battle ended when the Simurgh used one of its domains to give ‘order’ to the chaos of the battle. The discordant spells; lasers, bombs, missiles, waves of light and spasms of power, had become the rainbow wings and the silver glare that I saw clashing against one another. But from my perspective as someone going into the past, I saw the two uniform strikes turning into disorderly spells that only barely managed to cancel each other out. A few spells slipped past the barrage and landed on the Immortals’ bodies, but they didn’t seem to be doing much damage.

Physical attacks became interspersed with the spells. It seems the Immortals had been fighting from close range, earlier in the battle. I had to slow down my journey through time so I could follow their moves, since they were attacking at incredible speeds.

Madness used martial arts that I had never seen before. Fast jabs, roundhouse kicks, flinging his limbs around in exaggerated ways that couldn’t possibly make sense and yet, they were clearly pushing the Simurgh back. The Simurgh was trying to use its superior reach but even its large wings couldn’t help it compete with Madness’ strange martial arts.

Before bringing out the martial arts, Madness had been using some fairly simple techniques. The Simurgh’s reach had pushed Madness back through the void, and there hadn’t been much he could do about it until he broke through the situation with a well timed roundhouse kick.

And before this close quarters engagement, the two were firing energy projectiles at each other from just out of arm’s reach. These projectiles had been meant to soften up their enemy’s stance, giving them a better position for the close quarters fight.

I was observing this fight in detail because I wanted to know how the Immortals fought. If I had to deal with them once I returned to the past, it would help to know the kind of tactics they employed. So far, I had realized that I would always be at a disadvantage in close quarters combat. The Simurgh had better reach and Madness had better technique. I also knew that the Evil Eye preferred to fight from extremely long range, either because he was a coward or because his long distance attacks were better than those of the other Immortals.

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I learned that the Simurgh and Madness could throw out a barrage of magical attacks if they felt like they were being pushed back too much. It had been Madness’ superior martial arts that had made the Simurgh use its discordant spells, to which Madness had responded with a medley of his own. If I was to fight them, I had to remember to either take them down so quickly they couldn’t counterattack, or to always be ready to nullify a barrage of attacks that covered many different domains of knowledge and which would require all sorts of clever spells to counter.

From the projectiles, the two Immortals engaged in close quarters once again, although this time, their attacks were wild and emotional. I could tell this was more of a clash of feelings and wills than a clash in the physical sense of the word. The two Immortals were taking the entirety of some of the domains that they governed and were smashing them against one another.

Justice against selflessness.

Birth against sleep.

Kindness against love.

The domains did not need to perfectly counter one another, they only needed to be powerful. All sorts of related and unrelated concepts and ideas clashed as the Simurgh and Madness traded fists and kicks and even a couple of headbutts. Seeing the two otherwise dignified Immortals battling it out like schoolchildren was a little bizarre, but somehow, watching the battle in reverse made it seem so comical that it became, paradoxically, serious once again.

Before the fisticuffs, there was dialogue. And it was this dialogue that I had been waiting for. I already had some answers. I knew the way the Immortals fought. I knew that Madness had defeated the other two and somehow sealed the Simurgh in the Nothingness for many years. I knew the Evil Eye had become completely independent from the Simurgh, but that it wasn’t siding with Madness either.

In the dialogue, the Simurgh confirmed to me what it had once told me in the Nothingness. Madness was, indeed, an outsider from another world and he had taken many of the Simurgh’s domains and added that to the powers that he already held.

But Madness’ words and actions were a surprise to me. Not only was he not insane and disorderly like he usually was, but Madness rejected the Simurgh’s interpretation of events entirely. The Evil Eye was hiding far away and it did not chime in during the discussion. Based on some marks on its body, I felt like the weakest Immortal had been thrown aside by the others so they could have this discussion.

Madness said he had come to this world in search of the Simurgh, although the word that he used was ‘beloved,’ and the descriptions he gave also seemed to suggest that he had come in search of a lover not an enemy. Madness said that he was willing to wait as long as it took to get his beloved to love him back, and that he wished for nothing but his beloved’s happiness, even if that happiness led to his own misery or destruction. No, the word he used was ‘annihilation,’ and the Simurgh’s reaction to hearing that word had been strange.

The conversation had begun with accusations by the Simurgh. These were accusations against Madness for stealing the Simurgh’s domains. Madness replied that he did not want to steal anything, all he wanted was his beloved’s love.

Despite his saner outward appearance, Madness’ words made it clear that he was just as insane as ever. Their discussion had been at an impasse for centuries. Accusations countered by admissions and professions of love, all going back and forth and back forth between the two of them, shaking the realm and bringing a strange mix of order and chaos into the planet below. It seemed like the impasse had been broken by the Simurgh, who had realized, after a long time, that there was no point in trying to argue with a madman.

And before this near endless conversation, the two Immortals really did strike the Evil Eye and sent it hurtling into the Nothingness. And before that, the two of them had appeared in the Nothingness mid-conversation.

And before that they had been having their conversation by a little pond in the middle of a forest.