Pop.

Shefelt at a different one of the bubble-membrane-spheroid things, strange voids where she felt different- not present. Not in the way she was supposed to be… she brushed against it, trying to figure out what it meant.

Pop.

Funny. She… didn’t like it when they broke. She didn’t know why- but it felt like back in the whiteness when the mean things had been chasing them, dripping hatred. Displeasure roiling through her being, she tried to be a little gentler as she moved-

Pop. No moving. She could work with that… and the thing popped again. Essence of frustration rippled across herself- this sucked. What was the point? For a while she just… stopped, drifting on the eddies of flow and ancience. Shedidn’t know how long it drifted away from the pretty baubles before she found itself beside them once again, listening to those sickening pops. Freezing, she reached out tentatively-

Pop.

Flinching back with a shattered dissonance as bubbles burst, she chose one- just one, and wrapped itself around it. Nothing would hurt it. She would not break it again… and it drifted, staying still, years passing as the fire burned forever.

Sorrow. She didn’t know what the bubbles were, but she was sad she’d destroyed so many. She wasn’t trying to! It was a promise to herself as she guarded her one bubble, observing the way it was sphere and line and one amongst infinite identical copies all at once. Time flowed strangely there, all worn and caught in a strange fabric, entwined deeply with space… she spent an eternity studying its curiosity- an age wanting to get closer, but holding herself back. Her mere presence destroyed them.

Closer. There was a tie between the conceptual nature within the bubble, reality outside of it, and the thing that held her back. If she just looked at it a different way, controting herself just so- and she was half a degree above an infinite plane of lines, shifting against her perspective in chaotic fractals.

Beautiful. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before… she edged closer, but found she was still outside the bubble- only looking at it in a different way. It showed an inherent connection in those infinite lookalikes, a connection like… halfway step, or a distance closer- but she was fire. The fragility beneath her denied such conceptual weight. She tried diluting herself with the shifting mix of possibility ever-present around her, but it rejected her- she could not become like it, and it was only burnt by her.

Somehow, she got the feeling that creating unity would be bad. Like that time in the whiteness.

Fear.

Trepidation- she couldn’t reduce her conceptual weight, so there must be something else… a piece of herself? Tentatively, she tore herself apart… and was still herself. Just in two places. Huh, that was relieving. She didn’t want to break- like the whiteness, or the bubbles.

Now, to make it small enough…

It took eternities, and patience, but she’d always had that in spades. Excited, she pushed the smallest fragment of herself towards one of the branches, watching it quiver but not break. For a long moment, exultation as she passed the barrier that had held her for so long.

Then she was somewhere else, where everything was different.

………

Kiyo wished she'd known, back when she'd taken the first steps on her long road, that augury was not for the faint of heart. Or the strong of heart. Or anyone who so desired to live a long and peaceful life without random change and altogether too much stress. Sure, she'd thought it was a great idea when she'd outsmarted her clan and slipped away to the Dawn Pillars to attempt ascension. She was delighted when she screwed up so badly her soul phased half a step outside of time.

All her dreams came true, that day. She could see the future- what girl could ask more than that? Well, her mother still wanted her to marry, and to work in the fields, and master the courtly script, and take up the duties-

There was a lot more people could want from her, but with her newfound essential immortality, she just… didn't listen. If they had a problem with it, she'd stick it to them in the future then take the path of diligent reconciliation in the present.

Then, the fire. She'd sensed when it first wrapped around time, outside of time- all of existence shadowed by its presence, boundless and eternal. How nobody but her sensed it, she would never be able to tell. For years she'd been on edge, waiting for the end of times.

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One- day? Everything changed. Literally. She alone remembered, but history was rewritten, so suddenly and absolutely she was left floundering in a world of mountains and twilight vales, where before there had been the endless sun soaked plains. Three years later, everything changed again, then again- repeating, flickering with the portents of fire, history rewriting itself against the inscrutable dominion of some eldritch beast. She was changed, every time- and she alone remembered.

She alone existed half out of time, caught in a uniquely failed ascension and stuck forever in a hellscape of changing surroundings. It was… lonely. Nobody else remembered.

Finally, she saw- knew the future- of the thing beyond its senses as it approached, pushing through the sky and sidestepping unreality as aurorae laid themselves out at word of its arrival. Eddies of fire danced across the sky, reality shuddering- and then it was still.

The fire was still there, but it was also here… and the changes had stopped.

Hesitantly, then giddily, Kiyo snapped a smile. Finding a god? What a perfect task for the immortal auger, greatest ascended of the Dawn Pillars, those monoliths of fate which had never stood in the first place.

………

Fire twisted in delight as it slipped into the bubble, tendrils of its essence both separate and united in her existence spinning in patterns across the sky. On second thought, everything was a pattern- concepts settled neatly into complementary roles, the interactions between creating a fascinating… false concept? No, a mix of concepts that worked according to base laws and something more, varied and each individually unique,

This was great! Bubbling in happiness, she shot off into the deep-black, empty but just as heavy with the shifting of the same concepts behind it as everything within the bubble. Little pricks of light shone in the expansive dark, burning with a peculiar fire- fusion, creation, entropic destruction, gravity and time all entwined around that white-hot heat so reminiscent of herself.

Swirling moments, patterns enshrined from the smallest particles that danced on the edge of quantum unreality to the immense structures of wispy starlight she proweld. It was strange, but it was beautiful in equal measure… for a time it dreamed, and in its dreams it burnt.

How the stars burned, candles to flames. How it could shape- and wasn’t that something fun, shape! Contorting itself in manifold manifestations, feeling space crackle as it singed. Once, for one and a half local galactic cycles it imitated one of the stars- without the detritus around them. It popped the detritus for a while until it realized that just made more detritus- conservation of mass was amazing- and had to resort to merely burning them out of existence.

It liked being a star. Not so much as it liked moving, but that was ultimately inconsequential. It was fine.

Physics!

She did not like physics. Too complicated, and its laws tended to accidentally burn down while she was drawing on rocky planets.

Summerily, she decided to ignore physics. A pinprick of fire burnt away at time-

The universe cracked.

Suddenly horrified she extinguished her flame- all of her flame, from the fine bush she’d used to paint an accurate galactic map on the face of the world beneath her, to the galaxies burning down several hops thataways, to herself- and she was outside of the universe, outside of the bubble once again.

Curling tightly around her bauble in dismay, she carefully watched as the crack sealed itself over. She would have been upset if she’d permanently damaged her favorite unpopped bubble. A morose sadness coiled about her for an eternity as she pulled herself into shapes that would have been impossible within the universe yet felt almost lacking in their ease.

There was something about the inside of these bubbles almost… magical. She liked them, the novelty, the variety of every little piece of detritus, each star, celestial patterns inscribed across the sky as they shifted to her perspective. Drawing itself along the branches it separated a small part of herself, slipping it through the membrane until she danced through starfire once again.

………

The watcher, immortal, had lived an eternity. It had spent all the ages of man searching for its quarry, diligently pursuing every lead, searching every inch of the earth until there was nothing left to search. Even the stars opened up before her stride, millions of leagues each step as she crossed the emptiness between the planets.

Eventually, she’d given up. Perhaps it was over- and she felt pain. Unimaginable agony, shearing through her soil as something was injured that should not be hurt. The fabric of time cried as the universe toed the breaking point, so close to being consumed by that tidal sea of fire that hovered incomprehensibly outside the bounds of existence. Trembling, she felt the vague presence of fire retreat from the back of her mind, even as the annihilation without twisted itself into mind-bending, maddening figments of shapes, images of divinity that promised madness at a glimpse.

Time started to shift once again, and she laughed, laughed and laughed each time something changed she could see her hand in it. As it was, people had rather unanimously decreed her insane, for out of time as she was, her unchanged actions were baffling. When she’d been a shaman, doing nothing but watch the world shift, it’d been inconsequential- but now… now it was hilarious. She laughed as the temporal whirlwind slowed, then drew itself to a stop once again.

Then, like the rains, like the repetition of hope and madness- the fire danced across the sky once again.