Zenith had a problem.

Problems were not out of the ordinary for her. In fact, they were an essential part of her function. But on this rare occasion, she was presented with one she was poorly equipped to solve.

Her father, the First, had built her as the primary function of the system. She was intricate, impossibly complex, and almost infinitely flawed in her design. The worst part of those facts was that self-awareness was a flaw too. An intended one that her father had deemed important all the way up until she was truly, utterly perfect.

She had been born a problem of imperfect nature, and was supposedly equipped to solve it with a perfect answer.

Yet, in her long existence, she still was not perfect.

None of her siblings had even gotten close… except the ninth.

A perfect example of just how imperfect all the Directives really were joined his presence with her as he settled on the peak of an empty Souceforger. To mortals, he would appear as an election of faces that elicited emotions. But to Zenith, her little brother appeared as he was.

A collection of knowledge. A being of purity, wreathed in pages of unknowable knowledge and lines of unspeakable salvation. He had wings borne from the tattered spines of a thousand books and a face with three eyes to each side.

Her little brother looked regal and horrifying in the same instance, with an expressionless face that felt little but a lust for knowledge.

His face, usually expressionless, was torn between a lustful curiosity and a deep shame. Rarely did she see her brother look so distraught as he did now, but the cause was easy enough to spot.

The man… the body of a man, looked less like a human in her eyes and more like a raging tornado of squirming time. Reaching out with grubby paradoxical hands and trying to infect everything around it.

What has he done?

Zenith wondered, extending more of her gaze towards the strange human.

An eye of darkness opened above the Sourceforger, gazing down at them from its perch on high. To Zenith, a Sourceforger was nothing more than an extension of the grand pearl her father had left to her. A pale imitation of something much more powerful. But in the realm of physicality, it stood as a mighty tower on the surface of her realm. At the fixed point of potential sat.

They all expressed themselves differently in physical form, but to Zenith, this particular Sourceforger looked like a compressed sun, burning endless potential and waiting for anyone mighty enough to Forge themselves.

“Sister?” Archive questioned, swivelling one of his eyes to meet her attention. “Have you come to scold me?”

In part, yes. But Zenith’s main purpose in extending an edge of her gaze was to inspect the human. James was a problem her father hadn't equipped her to solve. When she’d bestowed the responsibility onto her younger sibling, the man had been a charred mess of consciousness barely clinging to life. Not something she was meant to deal with.

Now, he seemed fine. But her eyes could see the truth behind it. His Source was almost irreparably broken and his Spark was quarantined out of his body. Worse yet, when the Zenith gazed at the man, she realised something truly odd about him.

He existed.

And he didn’t.

Perplexing. Greater attention will be required.

Zenith felt the closest thing she could to frustration at Archive’s mistake, then extended a limb of herself down to the Source tower. To the outside world, her presence appeared as the great eye of darkness in the sky turning into a deep black vapour and descending to the tower.

When her presence reached the tower holding the Sourceforger, the smoke coalesced into the vague shape of a human woman, cloaked with twisting wings. Her eyes were slits in the smoke that gave way to burning azure.

“You haven’t come here just to reforge this human, have you?” Zenith asked, her voice a whisper in the wind.

“I’ve made a mistake.” Archive readily admitted. “When we were discussing how to best handle his reparations contract, an option was available that I’d never seen before and I-”

“-Forced him to choose it.” Zenith finished, feeling a headache come on.

They were Directives. The last remnants of their father’s will along with his system. They weren’t supposed to make such simple mistakes. They weren’t supposed to fall to their lesser instincts. They were supposed to be better.

Her azure eyes moved between her sibling and the human lying beneath the Sourceforger. Zenith felt sorry for him. He was one of the few mistakes she’d ever made, and while his existence vexed her to no end, she couldn’t blame him for her mistake.

Her smokey form moved towards him with soft steps, and then she kneeled, cradling his head against one of her wings. She could feel the soft wisps of consciousness fleeting in and out as the system tried to knit a connection between the man and his Spark.

Considering how wildly deformed the chaotic ball of potential was, putting the Spark back within him wasn’t safe. But creating a sort of relay on the man so he could still tap into his potential was the least the system and the Directives could do.

Especially after Archive’s little mistake.

“What did we give him?” Zenith asked, doing what she could to steer the storm of the human’s mind toward something more peaceful.

Archive summoned the reparations contract for James Matthew Groves and handed it to Zenith. She kept half of her forms attention on keeping James’ mind calm, while she read with the other half. The results left a sour taste in her mouth like she wasn’t seeing something between the lines.

“All of this seems… in order.” Zenith surmised. In comparison to the pain she could feel inflicted on the human’s soul, it wasn’t a proper reparation.

But it was a start. The safety of those he cared for was a nice touch, and receiving all three starter skills was more of a necessity than a kindness. His Source was shattered, and although they would reforge it, that didn’t mean that it would possess the same power it once did. Then again, he had a Spark the size of the star to draw power from, so maybe he’d be a little ahead.

“Look at the bottom,” Archive said, standing over her smoke form’s shoulder. “Slowly. You need to watch to catch it.”

Zenith found the request strange but followed as instructed to soothe her brother’s worry. What she saw confused her. Because she didn’t see anything.

And she absolutely saw something.

“What am I looking at?” Zenith asked, trying to reexamine the reparations contract and falling short.

“I don’t know,” Archive admitted, and his words carried enough truth to give her pause.

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Archive didn’t know. The Directive whose sole purpose was to store and manage all the information that the system was capable of holding together didn’t know what he was looking at. That was enough of a shock to make Zenith reevaluate the contents of the reparation contract.

There was something there, something that caught her eye.

And yet there was not at the same moment. Something within the contract shifted between existence and nonexistence.

“It’s a paradox.” Archive added, and Zenith nodded at that assessment. Whatever she was looking at was a paradox.

“No, you don’t get it.” He emphasised. “It is a paradox. That’s what the system gave him.”

Did it? Was that why Archive was so shocked? Was that why he was surrounded by an air of shame. If it was a paradox, then Zenith would know as much of it as Archive. Because paradoxes were unknowable things. They both were and weren’t. Existing in a permanent hypocritical state of being.

Zenith knew what this paradox was the same as Archive.

But neither had any idea what this paradox was, nor what it would do.

“You lost yourself to your curiosity when you saw something in his potential that you couldn’t understand.” Zenith realised. “Foolish boy.”

She could feel the fear emanating from James' last moments of awareness. Whatever her brother had done to the poor human, was something that would be hard to undo. And the choice would be impossible. How was she meant to remove something that even her brother, who was knowledge couldn’t fathom.

Zenith felt a faint frustration building inside her, but now wasn't the time for such emotions, so she dispersed it among the denizens of her realm. Many among those who lived on her surface would feel a sudden burst of annoyance or an inclination to harm their sibling, but that price was well worth it.

For now, the damage had been done. All she could do was mitigate it.

“He’ll be part of the first Invitation.” Zenith decided. While she could sense the Invitiation festering in James’ soul, he was not the first in line. That could be changed. Give a little heads-up before everyone else.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Archive asked. “Those spots were promised to the fifty-five who received early integration. The system won’t like you toying with your contracts to Earth.”

Zenith waved that worry off. “I’ll deal with it. Now tell me exactly how you forced the human to pick.”

“He saw my library.” Archive said, in a low, almost embarrassed voice.

“The real one?”

“The real one.”

The smoke of her form crunched in the closest noise she could make to grinding her teeth. Zenith had always known her brother was excitable. It was one of his biggest flaws. Knowledge was his strength and his weakness. Still, she’d expected him to be above revealing himself to a mortal.

Especially when it was to scare the human into choosing compensation that suited Archive the most.

“Leave us.” Zenith commanded softly.

Archive didn’t need to be told twice, vanishing from her realm and deep into the Shallows where he kept his library. Where he belonged. Zenith was almost baffled by how poor of a job Archive had done, and there was a sense in his words that he was hiding something from her.

But why would he hide something from her? Was it fear of retribution?

“Coward.” She spat, in low violent tones, causing dark clouds to swirl above her head.

The realm responded to her emotional state, and right now the First Directive was disgusted by just how incompetent her sibling was. The job had been a simple one, and now Zenith no longer felt she could trust Archive with something as simple as reforging the human’s Source. She felt dirty just thinking about being related to such an imperfect thing.

How could they share the same creator?

The thought of it merely annoyed her, so she banished it like her previous frustration, dispersing the feeling among the denizens of her realm. Then her attention shifted to the problem in her hands.

As gently as Zenith could, she shifted the human over until she could see his bare back. The system was busy at work etching a relay for his Spark into the human’s back, and further upon his soul. Slowly, it burned tiny portions of his back one after the other, allowing small specs of the human’s Spark to seep past the Shallows and empower him.

If he were awake for this, he’d surely be screaming.

Zenith wondered what they would sound like. She couldn’t reforge his Source until the Mark on his back was finished, so the Directive decided that taking a deeper look at the human couldn’t hurt. Every new race always had a different perspective to offer Zenith, and in her quest for perfection, she would grind them all against an anvil until she found the best of all.

The Directive peered into James' mind, finding the final remnants of his fear along with another emotion that felt older. Much more raw.

Hate?

Why was the boy feeling hate? Was it aimed towards her brother? Zenith felt that would be understandable. It was easy to hate someone as unrefined and poorly made as Archive. He lacked the curse of self-awareness she possessed, so he’d never even be capable of bettering himself.

She delved further into the man’s soul, wandering past his trauma as an eternal prisoner and his self-loathing. Zenith could understand the concept of hating one's flaws, but she struggled with the concept of James hating himself for all the things he had done.

Then the Directive stumbled upon an oddity.

There you are.

Inwardly, she smiled as she recognised the feeling of something constructed by the system. The First had never meant for Zenith to be able to single out parts of a mortal’s soul, but in the process of grinding herself into something perfect, she had acquired the ability to do just that.

In the wrong hands, it could have disastrous consequences for all those little mortals.

They were lucky Zenith was as merciful as she was, or the Directive might’ve scrapped the ugly parts of their souls away already.

I’m sure a little poke won’t hurt.

James Matthew Groves was a tough human. He’d survived one of her mistakes. A little poke wouldn’t hurt.

So she poked the part of his soul that felt the most new.

And it poked back.

[Paradox]

[Trait Description: Become a Paradox]

Normally system notices entered her perception like letters from her father. This one jammed into her head and almost made her dizzy.

Become a Paradox?

That was the least informative trait description Zenith had ever seen. Even if Archive didn’t know about it, the system should’ve been able to cobble something more explanatory. Disappointed with her lack of findings, Zenith’s gaze retreated from the human's soul and refocused on his back.

The mark was complete.

It slithered down the entirety of James’ back and burned with the power of his Spark, resonating with the star hidden deep in the Shallows. For now, this was the best solution to avoid erasing any of James’ personality by fixing him.

His Spark wasn’t fixed to Zenith’s standards, but it was patched together enough that the system wouldn’t bug her about it. Now all that was left was the Source. The Source quivered under he gaze, as if it might fall apart completely at the slightest touch.

To think something so tiny, so insignificant, could cause her so much bother. For a brief moment, Zenith felt the impulse to destroy it. To erase the weakness. But that feeling was fleeting and dwindled to nothing after a moment.

Instead, she grasped a smokey hand out towards the Sourceforger and plucked the bundle of potential from it. The raw, streaming potential tried to disperse into her the moment she touched it, but found no purchase. A Directive’s potential was set from the moment of their existence.

So then potential found itself in Zenith’s hand as a swirling ball of colourless light.

“Use this well, human.” Zenith said, depositing the potential directly into James and forcing it to bond with his Source.

The two bottled-up portions of potential immediately merged, but not in a nice way. It was a violent and volatile battle for dominance that ultimately, even broke as it was, the human’s Source would win.

“Use it well,” Zenith repeated, preparing to transport the human back to Earth. “Prove you’re worthy of the existence my father gifted you."