Andrew fought to control himself against a relentless tide.

Easier said than done. His psychic nexus ballooned alarmingly, reacting to a massive inundation of exotic energies beyond his ken. So urgent was that increase, he felt sure his complexus might burst at any moment.

A bewildering jumble of thoughts, memories and pre-human existence crowded in on his consciousness, each one demanding an audience and eager to be understood. Bolts of lightning battled across the turbulent vista of his mind, increasing the confusion a thousandfold. Then—just as it seemed he would explode—some form of cognizance within the Phoenix recognized his genetic heritage and triggered an instant cessation to the onslaught.

Spinning to a halt, Andrew steadied himself and discovered he was now nearly twelve million miles from his former position. Unconcerned for his own safety, he instantly threw his farsenses back toward where his father had been.

Keep moving! An insistent voice whispered in his ear.

Distracted, Andrew dawdled a little too long for comfort: Eh . . . what?

I said keep moving. We need to be outside the forming gravity well before its influence bends spacetime too much, otherwise I fear we may become unwitting participants of the transmogrification about to take place. Once it starts, the process is remarkably rapid.

Dragging his perceptions away from the coalescing core of ravenous hunger, Andrew recognized Aslan-di’el’s presence. He replied: Don’t worry about me. I know the dangers involved only too well, having witnessed a star imploding into a black hole on several occasions. Anyway, the precautions you’ve put in place should direct the energies to where they need to go. I’m just . . . it’s just that this. . .

But as your father would say, this involves your own flesh and blood, Aslan-di’el murmured, revealing an understanding of Andrew’s predicament: Someone who we can plainly see means more to you than life itself. Personal involvement always makes objectivity much harder to accomplish.

Andrew didn’t reply. He was too absorbed in the obscure manifestation taking place before him.

In their planning of the event, Andrew had been fully apprised of the fact that his father would need to generate sufficient mass to trigger a spiraling collapse. They didn’t just need to create a black hole. They needed a supergiant. And in order to sustain the continuing development of the huge galaxy encompassing them, a rotating one at that. Such a feat required prodigious power.

That fact troubled Andrew: Do you think we’ve got the clout to kick-start this thing?

Do not worry! Aslan-di’el assured him: Your father was being quite literal when he referred to his gift of divine essence. For that’s what he gave you. Uncorrupted tincture! He separated and retained the savagery of the Destroyer within himself. The rage of the Angel of the Abyss is a terrifying thing to behold . . . as we’re all about to see.

Apprehension caused Andrew’s psyche to spark crimson: But the danger!

You needn’t be alarmed. All that ferocity will be directed toward the catalyst he prepared within his complexus. For with his own destruction will come rebirth. You have never witnessed the authority of his unrestrained wrath, Andrew. Brace yourself. The focal point approaches!

Dismissing the urge for further questions, Andrew secured himself in position and scanned for the nearest cosmic chains, those dark matter ribbons he knew would be saturating the hidden strata of subspace. Attuning to each one, Andrew infused them with a gentle radiance that caused a glowing network of overlapping ley-lines to appear.

Once the grid had stabilized, he expanded it with a thought so it encompassed the entire galactic hub.

His father—by now a roiling mass of self consuming energies—occupied a position at its very center. Andrew could already see the chains surrounding that point bulging as they deformed in the presence of merciless gravity.

Signaling the others, Andrew then waited while Gaia-le’el, Gazad-riel, Olinda, and Ocean-az’el initiated the next phase of the plan. Situated as they were at equidistant points—north, south, east and west—twenty million miles out from his father, each Fallen angel opened a geodesic arch to somewhere else.

In Gaia-le’el’s case, that door led into subspace. No sooner had she cracked the seal than vast quantities of supercharged ions commenced pouring through at a tangent to Adam’s position. At that exact same moment, Gazad-riel—stationed across from Gaia-le’el—opened her own gateway bordering inner space. Subatomic particles, augmented way beyond their normal capacity, thundered through the gap. Joining the already existing matter stream, those particles exploded in a flurry of incongruent vitality.

Once the flow had settled, Olinda and Ocean-az’el acted in tandem, simultaneously unlocking their respective portals.

The contrast was startling.

Instead of a giddy rush, the obscure mediums of fold space and lower space merely oozed through. Exuding forward like giant amoebas, it looked as if the two outlandish masses might impede the frenzied charge of the primary tributary.

Far from it!

No sooner had the amplified rush careened into both walls of goo, than there was a mighty explosion of contradictory forces.

Andrew held his ethereal breath.

He needn’t have worried. Their earlier equations proved to be exceedingly accurate and the ensuing firestorm blended together perfectly to form a vortex where hyper-dynamic vitality thundered along a shared orbit.

As those disparate forces blended together in a frenzy of mutual destruction, their wildly fluctuating potential accelerated the process. Within seconds, a torus of kaleidoscopic passion bloomed into view.

Andrew assessed the condition of his father. So far, so good.

A massive ball of self-consuming, self-sustaining rage now occupied the center of the void. Growing larger by the second, it seethed with a ferocity un-tempered by heaven’s grace for thousands upon thousands of years. And yet, somehow, Adam was still in control. Andrew could taste his unbending refusal to yield in the face of such vitriolic savagery. A feat as terrifying as it was awe-inspiring. Fully committed, the former Overlord remained devoted to a single goal: the gradual surrender of his remaining essence.

The tumult magnified. Arcane convulsions spewed again and again from the heart of the stygian mass. In answer, more and more alien elements hammered or trickled through to challenge them. As the anarchy intensified, plasma spheres formed within the interstellar medium.

Then he saw it.

A portion of the matter stream was being drawn toward Adam’s position.

Here we go!

Glancing around them, Andrew completed several lightning-fast calculations. His attention flicked back and forth repeatedly between the accelerating halo, the Fallen, and his father.

Eventually, it was time to initiate the most dangerous phase of the plan. To Aslan-di’el, he said: Stand by!

Aslan-di’el made ready, drawing power in order to open the final, decisive geodesic archway between realms.

The others also joined their minds to the task, forming a six-fold conduit through which the anticipated effusion would pass, hopefully without causing harm.

Adjusting his acuity slightly, Andrew targeted a point within Adam’s rupturing threshold where pressure fluctuations were wreaking the most havoc. As those forces became more unbalanced, his father’s composition started to rotate

At last the moment was upon them.

The accretion quotient ramped virulently; hydrostatic equilibrium trembled on the brink of extinction; atoms split, overcoming Adam’s waning tolerance and shredding his essence.

Silver-white brilliance flensed the heavens of darkness as a quasi-star erupted to life in heliacal splendor.

A stunning creative blast followed, allowing Aslan-di’el to tear open a fresh spatial rupture right on top of them. One leading into the bedlam of mirror space.

Imploding-exploding inverse matter seared the already potent mix, devastating the normal laws of physics. All six ascendant beings combined to mitigate the stream, and once completed to Andrew’s satisfaction, they teleported to a safe distance, whereupon they immediately united once more in preparation for the penultimate phase.

As planned, the flood of converse materials caused the forming propagation field to swell alarmingly. Kinetic and thermal energy—combined with herculean gravity—also induced Adam’s metapsychic complexus to mushroom exponentially.

His threshold followed suit, inflating his tincture into an unstable proto-giant bursting with huge solar prominences.

The indigo backdrop of space paled for a second time, swathed in a blue-white luminance far, far greater than Earth’s own sun.

And still the process unfurled.

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The never-ending cocktail of five different kinds of exotic matter created an environment in which the expanding tessellation grid would continue to engorge at a truly terrifying rate.

Sure enough, before they realized what had happened, a supergiant manifested before them, a celestial conflagration blazing with the intensity of a million quasars.

Adam had now achieved sufficient volume for the final stage to proceed.

Wasting no time, Andrew appraised his father’s progress.

As predicted, the combination of amplified mass, together with unstable foreign exoparticles, had warped the newly forming electron-positron pairing within the spawning sun’s core. Already, an unseen and irreversible process had begun. The first hint he received of the coming paradox was a stuttering within the blinding crown of the corona. From Andrew’s perspective, it looked as if someone was rapidly flicking a switch on and off.

He then experienced a sharp upsurge in pressure as a massive quantity of bizarrely charged material formed within the nexus of actuality. Incredibly dense in nature, its presence triggered the collapse they had been waiting for.

Unlike a main sequence star, however, there was no blinding flash to herald an outpouring of rarified plasma. Instead, Andrew felt as if he was watching a balloon being sucked empty. The instant it started to deflated, he yelled: Now!

The Fallen responded, investing him with power.

As the fiery disc contracted, Andrew’s potential swelled to godlike levels. Unleashing that capacity, he ensured to accelerate the rate of collapse.

Shrinking smaller and smaller by the second, the blue-white intensity of the monstrosity dimmed. In no time at all, it darkened through indigo, magenta, red, and then mahogany. As it did so, his father’s mass became ever denser.

Completing a hyper-scan, Andrew breathed an esoteric sigh of relief.

Tidal shearing was now approaching one hundred and eighty-six miles per second. Even better, the gravity well had started to spin about one of its axes of symmetry.

As the light abruptly snapped off, Andrew thought, time for my embellishment!

Again! He cried out.

A further arc of rarified protons streamed out at the exact moment the black hole formed. Thrumming across the tabular of the event horizon, the filament covered the ergosphere in a skein of harmonizing nucleic forces.

Working deftly, Andrew manipulated that skein, accomplishing two things simultaneously.

Firstly, the angular momentum of the leviathan meshed to that of its dependent galaxy. Secondly—in a bold move—the breach between normal and mirror space was torn open once more.

A gout of immense vitality radiated downward, before curling in like a giant florescent halo. Reaching the edge of the photon sphere, it snapped back toward the now rotating singularity. Boosted by the colossal incursion of chaotic energies from the alternate universe, the enhanced source matter caused the anomaly to swell even more alarmingly than before.

An invisible radius of unfathomable power coalesced in the ether before them. Within seconds it was the size of thousand suns. Then two thousand. Then four. Over and over the sum of its density increased. As it did so, molecular disintegration released vast amounts of thermal energy, X-rays and gamma-rays. Irradiated, localized cosmic chains glowed like neon signs, revealing the extent to which the spacetime continuum was being bent out of shape.

Extending his senses, Andrew felt the giant galaxy about them shudder . . . and then the matrix of its new anchor established a mutual synchronization.

Incalculable energies continued to build.

The colossus now contained the mass of over one million suns.

Initiating a cross tabular jump, Andrew positioned Aslan-di’el and himself just outside the event horizon and began assessing the singularity as it swept by each time.

Sending a head’s up to his team, he prepared them for the climax of the procedure: Remember. We have to time the influx just right. Doing so will moderate the breach forever, and begin a feedback loop that will perpetually bleed every ounce of extra energy away from the gravity well. In effect, we’ll create a self sustaining acceleration field! It will mean that, should my father’s efforts be successful and he re-ascends in the far distant future, this galaxy will be able to survive on its own without a parent black hole.

To himself, he added, as I now have to do. . .

Profound respect proliferated toward him from five different sources.

Strangling his self-pity, Andrew confirmed the ergosphere was now fully established. Tapping into its matrix, he strengthened the harmonic link between his friends, and commenced imbibing the resonance of the gravity well.

The leviathan now had the mass of eight million suns.

With adroit dexterity, Andrew deployed a cocoon of restrictive force about both axes of the maelstrom. In response, a magnifying nimbus of power started to synthesize along the event horizon.

Time passed seemingly without end. Through it all, Andrew continued siphoning ever more quasi-matter through from nether space.

At last, he deemed everything ready.

Changing the timbre of the flow, he compressed the energy into a gigantic plasma ball and held it ready. The ebon sphere before them began generating a storm of increasingly violent shockwaves, invisible convulsions that propagated out into the vacuum, rocking them to the core.

Andrew locked on to his target. Its plane of rotation was vast. The singularity now orbited a plane possessing the mass of over sixteen million stars and it took him almost a full minute to accurately project its course.

When the moment arrived, he couldn’t resist it. . .

Goodbye, Father!

With a heavy heart, Andrew unleashed the full fury of the blazing gobbet directly into the heart of the black hole.

Accelerated as it was by the crush of gravity, the compacted nucleus of limitless power seemed to strike a point of nothingness before shredding into a corkscrew smear of coruscating light. Helpless to resist, the very fabric of spacetime warped.

A thought somehow squeezed its way out of the charybdis: Thisssisss not goodbyeee. It’sss just the beginning—ingg—inggg. . .

The forbidden area of the newly formed galactic anchor flexed, and all six titans were swept from their perches by a hurricane blast of tidal forces. Ten percent larger than its predecessor, the maw began to feed on those stars and other interplanetary bodies inhabiting the inner rim, for they were now within its sphere of influence.

Opening his mind, Andrew invited the others to see the fruits of their labors.

Will it hold? Ocean-az’el asked.

Andrew gauged their efforts. His answer quickly became apparent: Yes, it’ll hold. All that material will help it . . . will help Father to mesh to his new charge and establish a gravity buffer between the dead zone and latest region of active feeding. Fortunately, nothing of consequence exists for several parsecs in any direction. The closest nurseries will remain far beyond its range, local stellar conditions will eventually stabilize, and the galaxy will survive intact. Life will come again . . . especially if we have anything to do with it.

The sight before them was simply stunning.

Majestic, both in scope and glory.

Regardless, the Fallen obviously had something on their minds. Crowding closer, Gaia-le’el was the first to speak: It falls to me to be your first guide.

My guide?

Yes . . . guide! She repeated: The flame you now hold is a sacred trust. It cannot exist outside of the Divine, for its eminence is as deadly as it is glorious. That you were accepted by the Phoenix is as remarkable as it is fear-inspiring, for in bonding to your psyche, it gives us a glimpse of the potential you possess. . .

. . .Remember, such a thing was never envisaged by the Prime Source. Both you and your sister are a paradox. Unforeseen, you were never prepared for. Untested, who could know how you would stand in the unfolding of His purposes? Unexpected, who could fathom your hearts?

Evaluating how he had felt when he assimilated the Flame, Andrew gasped: Are you saying this thing hasn’t even fully activated yet?

Gaia-le’el moved closer: Andrew, how could it activate when it had not yet judged you worthy? Phoenix is a spark of the Divine One Himself. All of the Host possess such an agent . . . Fallen or no. By not destroying you, the Prime Source has bestowed an unprecedented privilege. For in doing so, he has revealed his acceptance of what you might one day become! Although your heart is clearly pure, you are of fleshly—nay—Fallen heritage! The debased may not interact with the untainted. And yet, here you are . . . provisionally. Your actions may not only influence the outcome for your father, but in the end, the entire human race.

Oh Shit! Andrew blasphemed, before recalling the distinguished origins of his present company.

Amusement radiated throughout the vacuum around him.

Gaia-le’el continued: Knowing this, your father entrusted to us your higher education. Phoenix has been fashioned to activate in six stages. No doubt you have already witnessed the power of the first step as it bonded to your complexus. Each phase will augment the one before, as well as enhance your abilities many times over. And, as I’m sure you’re now aware, the process brings with it certain memories of his life . . . before.

Her words touched a nerve.

Wait a minute, Andrew interjected: I’m aware of my father’s previous standing. And I’ve seen him reveal aspects of his might on a number of occasions over the millennia. But just how powerful was he? I mean, how much of his actual capacity did he ever actually use here, on the mundane plane?

Andrew couldn’t fail to notice how the Fallen kept glancing back and forth between themselves. Neither did he miss their repeated whispers. Something about their undercurrent only roused his suspicions further.

WELL? He pressed.

Aslan-di’el floated forward: Andrew. Your father was contrite from the moment he was ousted from heaven. Once Fallen, he sealed his heart to the amplification Phoenix would have granted him. He felt unworthy to use that which is a reflection of the Most High. As such, over the tens of thousands of years since, he gradually ate himself away. Everything he achieved, everything he accomplished, was done without the Source’s ingrained exuberance. He only ever used that essence which empowered the Destroyer within him, or which he managed to subsume from renegades.

Indicating the awesome sight behind them, Aslan-di’el emphasized: That’s why he needed our help to build this! For as dread as you thought he was, he was only a shadow of what he used to be.

A shadow! Andrew gasped incredulously.

What you now hold within you contains the full grandeur of a Primary Echelon Angel. Out of the myriads of us, only seventy such beings were generated. And your father stood among the highest. By refusing to employ his former ardor, he hoped to demonstrate his penitent heart and secure a return through service to others. A dangerous gamble! For while this did indeed bring blessings—of which you yourself are a superlative example—it also doomed him to the eventual decay brought about by the workings of his core nature. He was the Angel of the Abyss, and woe betides any who were given into his hand. . .

. . .Do you appreciate now why he felt the need to lock himself away, where he could do no harm? In seeking to demonstrate his repentance, he is protecting others as he serves them still! Of course, in doing so, he needed to ensure you also had sufficient guidance for each stage of your own . . . evolution.

Andrew was moved to silence. Warily, he scrutinized the spark within him. The catalyst to unlimited potential. It gleamed and glittered within his complexus, as unfathomable as it was majestic.

Old self-doubts came crowding back: And it thinks I’m worthy? Me . . .?

. . .Oh God, we’re doomed!

Gaia-le’el came forward once more: That’s why we are here to help you. Each of us possesses a different Cardinal attribute. Mine is love. Where better to begin as you step into uncharted territory? If you seek to exemplify such a quality from the start, your journey is sure to be accelerated. As such, I will be there to shepherd you until you make the First Degree yours to command.

Joyfully, she linked to the fringes of Andrew’s psi-well: Are you ready, young Star-mind? Overlord of the Guardians of Earth . . . and so much more.

Alarm radiated throughout Andrew’s entire being: Ready? Are you kidding? If we weren’t already in transcended form, I’d need to change my pants! Who could ever be ready for this?

Then the weight of Gaia-le’el’s thoughts actually registered.

Overlord? Me?

Jeez, she’s right!

Steeling himself, Andrew struggled to fight down another flood of insecurity: I can’t think this way anymore. I’m . . . I’ve . . . Oh God! We’re truly screwed!

Ignoring his protestations, Gaia-le’el commenced bonding to Andrew’s complexus and thereby, to the Phoenix within him, infusing both man and Flame with a subtle harmonic tone as she did so. Her entire being shivered in delight as the fabrication blazed brightly once more: So radiant, so full of potential. . .

. . .Ooh! Let’s see if your Divine name will be revealed to us from the outset!

WHAT?

Then they were consumed by the light.