Telos flowed through the River of Light like an orca attacking a yacht. Proudly and without fear. She was the River, and the Shore. More precisely, she was both Ein Sof, and Ayin, the nothing beyond the divine light of creation.

“To the death, then?” Bob manifested himself at the very tip of the dimensional axis. Telos had expected him to use his multiverse as a shield, but he separated himself from it and stood exposed. The illusory existence of an old man in white shorts and a Hawaiian shirt covered in pineapples had been dispensed with. The true form of her adversary reminded her of bad CGI in sci-fi horror movies.

Bob looked vaguely human, but he was missing a lot of parts of his body. Some had been replaced by technology, some had been replaced with grafts, and some were corrupted by forces she couldn’t immediately identify, presumably unique to the existence over which Bob ruled. The old man’s left arm was a dark tentacle, a clear sign of some type of Void infection, or an unhealthy obsession with octopi.

“I could heal you,” Telos offered without a price.

“I have no need of your sympathy!,” Bob screamed, enraged for reasons Telos couldn’t fathom. Thousands of pineapples formed around Bob and launched themselves at Telos. They looked dangerous, a mixture of technology and magic, but when they crossed into the River of Light they vanished without trace.

“The Light defends you? Arcanthar claimed to have struggled against one such as you.” Bob launched more attacks. Pineapples, lightning, black swarms of all devouring nanites, nuclear bombs, plasma missiles, railguns, none of it had even the slightest effect upon Telos. The great River of Light simply dispersed every attack as if they were no more than spitballs.

“No, it doesn’t defend me.” Telos corrected, while Bob drew upon the Void. His infected arm grew massive, and birthed swarms of void bugs. “Did this Arcanthar win?”

“He died a terrible, slow death, and I feasted on his corpse.” Bob answered with a smile. “As I’ll do to you.” Bob birthed a whole swarm of Void creatures and sent them to Telos. Yet again, when they entered the River of Light, they instantly disintegrated as if they had never existed.

“Leave the light, you liar!” Bob cried and summoned something akin to a squid.

Telos vanished from the light, reappearing in the depths of nothing beyond the borders of Ein Sof. It felt just as reassuring as the Light did, for she was Nothing, too. Bob’s squid immediately turned to dust and flaked away on invisible winds.

“This cannot happen!” Bob tried to summon another horror, then he summoned an immense space ship and had it fire cannons at Telos. None of it could even touch her, and she appeared next to the wretch. Bob seemed, with each attack and expense of power, to be falling apart and growing closer to destroying himself.

“You’re a fragile thing, to call itself a God. You were mortal, once, I can see that. The nanites, the artificial intelligence augmentations, flesh harvested from gods and monsters, and a spark of light at the center, long corrupted. Was that light Arcanthar?”

“Why can’t I kill you?” Bob demanded.

“Was that light Arcanthar?” Telos asked again.

“Yes, that was Arcanthar. I consumed him, and took what was his, and it is now mine. You cannot take it away from me!” Bob launched dozens of attacks at Telos. None made it to her, and no strain showed on her face, despite the effort the abomination put into it.

“The spark was a gift to him,” Telos murmured. “He wanted to be a shepherd and provide for the people under his protection. You ate him from the inside out, and then the corruption began. Everything you tried to do turned to ashes.”

“You don’t know me! I am the God of the ‘Verse, I judge lifeforms, I disrupt the schemes of the powerful on whims, I am not some insect to be toyed with like this!” Bob tried to enter mental combat against Telos, but all he achieved was looking like a mime, fighting invisible walls to no effect. Telos only bothered to keep two eyes on Bob, her Third Eye looked upon his history, his works, and his multiverse.

“I see it all. Your conquests and contests, your plans, the corruption spreading through your own family. You’ve been begging to meet me for the last half a million years, and now that I’m here, you want to fight me? That’s so quintessentially human. Tell me, Burt, why did murder Arcanthar? He was never going to hurt you.”

“There can be only one!” Bob cried at me in anger, before he deflated at me calling him by his original name. The name he’d wore as a human, one who could see and hear the truth when others couldn’t, who’d got trapped in a taboo creation against his will.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“There can be a billion, or there can be one, or none. See, again, what you’ve blocked out.”

History replayed itself in the form of overly pastel holograms conjured by Telos.

Arcanthar, unlike Bob who looked younger and more human, took the form of a man made of the inky void, constellations played across his ever-changing physiology.

“Our existence is encouraged by Ein Sof. If you embrace the role of caretaker, it will allow you to wield its power, but if you seek control, it will deny you.” Arcanthar lectured the younger Bob. “If you fight it, it will destroy you.”

“If it won’t accept me, what do I do?” Bob demanded.

“If you embrace being a caretaker, it will accept you.” Arcanthar spoke, unheeded.

“What about the Nothing?” Bob demanded.

“Ayin, the Nothingness, is the birthplace of everything, but concepts cannot be actualized within Ayin. Only within Ein Sof can physical reality be manifest. To commune with either is to communicate with both, and if you are accepted, you will become more powerful than any other being within your ‘Verse.”

“But not more powerful than the Light?” Bob grimaced.

“Afraid not.” Arcanthar lacked Bob’s bitterness about that.

“That isn’t how that conversation went!” Bob’s vehemence sprayed more attacks at Telos, all of which did absolutely nothing to her.

“No, you remember it very differently, don’t you?” Telos laughed, not in a mocking way, but because she could see the way those memories had warped with time for Bob. “How long after that was it before you stabbed Arcanthar in the back and ate him and the garden he looked after?”

----------------------------------------

“I can’t believe you have dances in Winona,” Kara said in shock.

“It’s.. different?” Tyler answered diplomatically.

After a shopping spree in town which I had funded, I’d parted with Morgan at the home Kara’s parents, Kara, and Morgan had moved into. The newest homes built for the last wave of refugees were on the north side of town. It was a fifteen-minute walk from the north of town down to the south side of the Academy. We’d separated for a few hours there, and I’d returned to help out around the Academy and snack on Bobbi’s test dishes.

I got my hopes up when Kara came in, but Morgan hadn’t come with her.

“Everywhere could be like Winona someday,” I said, and the other two gave me a look that left me feeling very out of touch. “Couldn’t it?”

“This place is a weird kind of heaven and hell, man.” Tyler spoke up. “From what everyone says this world is like, super young, and we’ve been seeded here by the System. Transmigrators like me are using magic to cheat and build civilization from our old worlds, but most places don’t have anything going on for them but murder for survival, and no luxuries beyond what they can use magic or powers to make.”

I grimaced. Winona sounded like heaven compared to whatever these two had endured.

“I’m not a transmigrator, but even those of us who haven’t reawakened past memories can feel the youngness of the world. Breath in, it hangs on the air. There is a power, a purity, of the fresh born world, of terrible behemoths, titans, and colossi that tread freely around us. The fingerprints of primordial power is everywhere you look, like morning dew.” Kara spoke in a way that made me imagine her as an old seeress trying to impart wisdom to a clan. Did she mimic someone they had lost while fleeing Argarg?

“I’m not a transmigrator either,” I nodded to Kara, and she looked at me like I was a liar.

“You aren’t a transmigrator?” Derrick asked as he stepped into the conversation. We were clustered near the exterior wall of the Academy, near a lamp, so anyone coming into the gardens for the party would have to pass us.

“Derrick, this is Tyler and Kara, they’re new. Also, you’ve met my parents. Transmigrators don’t seem to have parents. This is Derrick, he’s a trap master and part of my regular party.” I sighed at him. “Where’s Aisha, Lilith, or your date? Way to not tell me you were marrying into Aisha’s family.”

I exaggerated things, a little, to make things awkward for Derrick. That’s what he got for not keeping me in the loop about his love life.

“Dude, you’re way too young to marry someone.” Tyler, the dwarf, told Derrick bluntly.

“Look, it’s just an engagement, and I didn’t know anyone outside of our families even knew. What the hell, Alexander?” Derrick laughed into the awkward silence. “Gotcha! Hana’d skin me if she heard there were rumors about us marrying though, so really, knock that off!”

I eyed Derrick, feeling a little numb inside. That had been an emotional rollercoaster he sent me on as a joke, but I felt like I probably deserved it. I needed to be a better friend.

“The girls will be along shortly, your sister decided to take them on a detour and told me to go on ahead and keep you company until they got here.”

“Are you alright?” Kara and Tyler asked almost simultaneously as I paled. Lilith made a detour. How did she find out I was interested in someone already? She wouldn’t make things awkward for me with Morgan, would she? Of course she would. She’d sent Derrick ahead to warn me of her arrival, so I’d be on even more edge and wouldn’t miss her entrance. I couldn’t tell you what her plan beyond that was, but I figured that much out.

“Yeah, nothing to worry about at all,” I lied.

“Did Alexander warn you to be careful around a girl named Akari, Tyler?” Derrick, ever the helpful guy, struck up a conversation with Tyler and detailed the young woman’s fascination with Dwarves and facial hair.

The last gasp of the day faded, which made Lilith’s entrance stand out all the more. Her hair created just as much light as my own did, but a new development created an even brighter entrance for her. She’d gained a halo, like our mothers, except for the fact that it sent cascading rays of rainbow light streaking through the burgeoning dusk. If she’d waited until dark, it would’ve been a truly amazing entrance. I wondered how she got a halo, would I get a halo? That looked really cool.

Derrick looked at me.

“Oh, right. Lilith leveled up while helping set up the party earlier, she said to tell you ‘suck it, slacker’.” Derrick delivered the message just as Lilith looked at me and winked. Why did her plans always work out, down to the second?

Behind Aisha and Lilith, a pale skinned, dark haired figure came in.