“I suppose I shouldn’t take any of my frustrations out on you, you aren’t the ##@$@ Telos I worked with in that other existence. Facially, you look somewhat similar. The Third Eye of Ein Sof is always unique, too, but your color choices are very different. The Telos I worked with had red hair and blue eyes and could make the Board of Directors wet themselves with a flat look when they questioned her project budget. That might have been the best day in my four centuries at Arcanum Dynamics.” Phanes babbled in response to Telos refusing to go straight to eating him.

“You know who, or what, I am?”

“Sure, so do you. You don’t want to accept it. You’ve never wanted to accept it. Again and again, you run away from it. Not that I blame you, you seem to have a lot more fun as Telos.” Phanes seemed amused to dance around the subject with her, flirting with saying it, than stepping around it repeatedly.

“Why won’t you just say it?”

“Why should I? So you can blame me for being the one to say it? Oh no, thank you very much, I’ve already suffered enough thanks to listening to you. Do you have any idea how terrible it is to be killed by Nyarlathotep? Even for a Demiurge, the fear and madness are inescapable. The Void alone I could have dealt with. I slew a third of that asshole's composite existence before he killed me, but Azathoth and his spawn reverberated with an echo of an echo of their beloved Ayin, and that pulled even my psyche into the depths of the Void. Bythos and Sige restored my mind and took the memories, but there’s a deeply ingrained fear that lingers still, knowing I should know terror but not why or of what. It’s a real pain in the ass.”

“That’s rough, I’m sorry you had to deal with that. Who were the conspirators working with Nyarlathotep?”

“Only one conspirator, not plural. Although with this particular force, maybe plural is appropriate. Do I need to say their name? They’ll hear it, even here.”

“No, no, you don’t.” Telos sighed. “Is there anything you’d like me to remember about you?”

“Once, I designed a vessel that crossed realities. Not adjacent time-streams, either. You know more about reality than most, so you should understand how impressive that is. My ship was named Aetheria Lumina, and it had dice in the mirror. My name was Ben back then.”

“Were you alone on your voyage?” Telos didn’t explain to Phanes she’d encountered other species that had matched his triumph, why rain on his parade? How many other realities were there? It didn’t really matter, this one was hers, but she briefly wondered how the survivors of that incident faired under the care of Aetherius. “Why would you have a mirror on a spaceship?”

“Yes. The alternate you distracted corporate while I took her out on a maiden voyage. Probably didn’t even get in trouble for it, either, and sipped on a nice crisp bottle of Quantum Quench Uber Zest Blast. I miss those so much. They were so fizzy and refreshing, and it was the only soft drink that renewed other people's mouths. Sure, they were addictive, and anyone lower-tiered than a Hegemon would instantly explode from drinking one, but damn, were they tasty.” Phanes reminisced fondly about whatever strange junk food his reality had.

“Why wouldn’t your inter-reality dimensional vessel not have a rearview mirror, and why wouldn’t it have dice? If you can’t figure that one out, you’re a long way from learning the lessons physical entities are meant to learn.” The overly dramatic eye-roll reminded Telos of Sean Hayes playing a very out-of-the-closet gay man.

“Maybe I am, just what lessons are those, for the record? You act like you know me, but I lived a normal life until I reincarnated; before that, I was just an ordinary person.”

“Ordinary? Oh, girl, everyone and everything in existence is one. Only if you put that somewhere with truth in advertising, the asterisk would denote that the amount of one some people are is very different from the amount of one others are. Everything is born from Ayin’s infinite possibility and bears her touch.”

This one is wise for an Elder Dreamer, but he is done; his time has passed. Still, you are to be commended, Harbinger of Life and Light, in recognizing that Ayin is the true force of all things, you could have ascended the boundaries to create all that is impossible, imagined the unimaginable. She, the formless and infinite, the basis of all power, matter, all dimensions, fuels the spark of creation.

You will be remembered as a beacon of light in the vast expanse of mud that is existence, that is more than can be said for other Demiurges and their futile struggle against the inevitable dissolution of all things.

Telos and the ghost of Phanes both stared at one another. Phanes eyes had grown wide at the ominous whispers of Fred entering his mind, and Telos felt a cramp in her stomach as Fred demonstrated the ability to speak to others outside of her party. It must be because Phanes’ essence still resides in me.

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“Who was that?” Phanes’ expression remained somewhere between amazed and terrified.

“That’d be Fred,” Telos offered glibly.

“And Fred is?” Phanes probed further.

“Well, as near as I can tell, Fred is a remnant of Ayin’s power, the Unutterable Black Flame of the Void born when Ayin turned nothing into something. Fred’s like a little bit of frosting you didn’t need when you’re done frosting a cake, but you don’t really know what to do with, and you’ve already got a stomachache from licking the spoon, so you just leave it for later.” Telos explained without any effort to be correct. She wanted to be close-ish to the truth, but far enough from it that Fred might correct her and shine some light on his mysterious origins.

Fred didn’t fall for it.

“And you named him Fred? Why?”

“He needed a name, and it’s always the Void this, the Void that, behold my infinite power of the eternal abyss, so forth and so on. So, I named him after Frederick Nietzsche, whom I’m fairly certain would’ve been scared into an optimist by my Fred.” Telos gave a small shrug, as if having an Eldritch force of existence blathering in one's mind all the time was the most normal thing, and everyone had them.

“You’re much weirder than the Telos of my old reality. I suppose the polite term is eccentric, but I’m a ghost that you’re about to eat, so I don’t feel the need to be that polite.” Phanes shook his head, but the ghost did seem proud of Fred's compliment if Telos read him correctly.

“I guess it’s that time then. It was nice meeting you, Ben. May the Great Cycle have benevolence on you,” Telos offered the words with a small smile. She had enjoyed their brief conversation, and if a small benediction of her authority would help Phanes, so be it. If it didn’t help him, all she was out was a couple of breaths.

“Well… You know, if you took responsibility, you’d be able to ensure that, wouldn’t you?” Phanes muttered and wrapped his spectral arms around himself, then his wings, becoming a ghostly offering to the shrine of Telos.

“Yeah, you betcha.” Telos sighed in a dispirited manner. “I’ll make things right, even if it’s bullshit that it’s falling on me.”

“Anyone who wanted to do it wouldn’t be qualified,” Phanes offered a pitying smile with the words as the currently black fire of the Transformative Flame of Eternal Becoming immolated Telos, then rapidly grew into an inferno.

“Maybe that’s the problem with the whole thing, what goods a throne no one who wants to sit on is qualified to?” The black flames danced along Telos’s body, then stretched out from her like the maw of the great serpent Jormungand, the World Serpent, and the remains of Phanes, the temple, and the entirety of the temporary dimension were devoured into nothing. When Telos reappeared on the Shores of Chaos, it was with the authentic Rod of the Overgod locked into her repository.

“Why so dour, blue? That was a good meal!” Arkaziel lay stretched out on the multi-hued sand, belly in the air, a happy look on his face.

“Getting more powerful is just a good thing in your life, isn’t it, Ark? What’s the end goal to your strength?” Telos asked the basking cat.

“To get bigger and eat more things. Life’s easy!” Arkaziel’s carefree answer elicited a tremor in reality around Telos. The cat rolled onto his feet, and looked seriously at Telos, as if he hadn’t done so before.

“Damn, how many authorities do you have now?” Arkaziel tried to steer the conversation in a different direction, not very subtly.

“I’m glad life is so clear cut for you, Ark. I’m almost to thirty now, with most of them top level categories, not sub-dominions.” Telos used a phrasing even Arkaziel wasn’t familiar with so casually that the cat wondered if he’d missed a group meeting.

“Thirty!?! Damn, no wonder reality is getting unstable around you. How long until existence itself starts to fray from you just being in a material realm?” Arkaziel blurted it out without thinking, but it made Telos wonder that herself.

“Oh come on, I’m not even a seventh tier. I can’t be that close to destroying the fabric of reality just by existing!” Telos waved the cats concerns away.

“You’re getting close to that point,” Reverie informed Telos oh-so-helpfully. “If you come to possess Order and Chaos you will not be able to remain in that existence without damaging it.”

What do you mean, I can’t stay here? Where the heck am I supposed to go? Telos wanted to shout at the beach and the sky, but instead only mentally shouted it at Reverie.

“You have many choices. You could join me in Keter, or Bythos and Sige in Pleroma, divest yourself of power, create an intermediate reality, or many other options. If you reference the knowledge of Binah…”

Thank you, Reverie. Telos interrupted the voice. I have options, I see that.

“Of course, Lady Telos,” Reverie answered more formally than normal before he fell silent.

When Telos turned her mismatched eyes back to reality around her, she found Bobbi, Kallos, and Arkaziel all looking at her.

“What?”

“”Nothing,”” Bobbi and Arkaziel answered immediately.

“No need to scowl, darling. You accomplished what you needed with Phanes, yes? And without a fight or any form of trouble forming here, even.” Kallos sounded only slightly disappointed that their stay on the beach had been a boring one. “What next?”

“Next, we go deal with Oizys. We’ve got two options as I see it. We use Ark’s lantern to show up at the physical location of her Tower, where she’s vulnerable in the truest sense of the word. Alternatively, we show up at her Tower entrance on Grief, and let her decide if she wants to deal with us or withdraw from Grief. If she removes her Tower from Grief it counts as abandoning the world, and she loses her status as the planet’s owner. What do you all think?”

“I don’t like letting her run away. She’s our enemy, we kill her and eat her!” Arkaziel spoke with more vehemence than Telos expected. “Besides, I promised Werylin I’d make her pay.”

“I’m down for slaying her. Moros seemed like an okay sort, but Oizys sounds like a real Daemon. Let’s butcher her!” Bobbi’s ferocity made flames dance in her eyes.

“Let us send her into the Great Cycle so that she be judged by her actions, and what passes for her soul be made to repay the karmic debt she has incurred,” Kallos declared confidently.

“Okay, so I’m going to assume the chorus of lets kill her means we’re heading into space, since not one of you murder hobos actually commented about attacking her on Grief. Anyone got a spaceship?”