Kitsune glared into the puppy-dragon eyes, entirely resistant to their wily charm. “No. Nope. You’re not Eaera. Revert, thee, to thine pretentious airs!”
Ajinan scowled, flopping down to the cold steel floor. “I need this entropic flame. I’ve been building a stellar fabricator for a few particular exotic experimental materials, and some of them just won’t fabricate.”
“Make them yourself then. You’re the concept of creation. Nothing is beyond the reach of your eyes.”
“Yes- but…” he glanced down to the floor, utterly defeated. “I’ve explained this to you before. Many times. For hundreds of years- I need the flame.”
A pause, then. “You actually need the flame. You have a plan to use it, and aren’t just hoarding shining baubles for your experiments while simultaneously wasting everyone’s time.”
“Yes.” He shifted a bit under Kitsune’s incredibly unimpressed look. “Well… maybe.”
She settled a gaze onto him as an idea started to form in the back of her mind- enjoying in the meanwhile how Ajinan was increasingly unnerved as the moments flowed on. “So, scales… how much are you willing to pay?”
“We don’t even…” recognition flashed in his eyes, and he coiled inwards on himself with an exasperated groan. “You’re going to make me do something embarrassing, aren’t you. Don’t answer- I know you well enough to fill in the blanks… so, what’s the plan?”
Kitsune’s gaze turned into a buffer of blank surprise. Clearly the flame was actually important, if he dared the gauntlet of her imagination. She dredged the memories of infinite universes, channeling her most resolute Eaera as she pondered the legendary opportunity before her. A smirk graced her muzzle as she turned to the dragon prostrate before her. “Feathers.”
“Ah. You’ve devised a true torment for me. I assume you’re asking for… cuteness?”
Ajinan grimaced, and Kitsune could barely keep from cackling. “Four trillion years- and yes, you’re going to be just adorable.”
………
It was only later, after several decades of snide glances and faint laughter between Tabs and the damn fox that he realized he’d never asked Tabs what she was getting for her half of the project.
It was only after he asked her that he realized the depths of his folly.
It was now, above a half-broken world, facing their greatest foe with all the gravitas he could muster as a cute ball of fluff, that he realized he was going to be in for a very long eight trillion years.
………
It happened so-
The point between nowhere and somewhere unfolded as they entered the universe in a wash of flame, wrath and terror bleeding from the cracks in the universe- fire, chaos and order, in creation. Infinite annihilation, Kitsune in the height of her power, grabbed Sija’s norming technique and consumed, burning until even the concept of its existence was erased from the world around them.
Time quivered. The attack had never existed in the first place.
Ajinan locked the universe, rivulets of blood fuzzing into incorporeality and a bleeding atmosphere as he pulled the universe from the branch and wrapped a- moment, eternity- in a separate spatio-temporal interdict. Immense constructions of steel and sup-physical metamaterials, the tears of those metal-bright eyes, manifested around them, pulling at the universe and reinforcing it against their abrupt intrusion.
Tabs planned. She was the plan, chaos so powerful as to affect quantum fluctuations, collapsing the wave-function accidentally according to plan. Ajinan saw the plan written into a spatial fluctuation as it dragged Sija into itself with an acrid yellow scent, and ISON relayed its administrator’s wish to the eternal fox of fire.
Yellow shattered into the prismatic taste of impossibilities and spatial distortions as Sija shattered space around her, escaping the inevitable in a lucky moment where luck fails.
Tabs’ luck never fails.
Sija returns to reality in the center of two hundred and forty three overlapping four dimensional runic matrices, activating simultaneously, and she was locked in an infinitely blooming singularity. Trapped within an infinity of empty space, both able to flee forever and frozen.
Kitsune called upon the vastness of fire, and scars- expansive tears in the membrane of existence- sliced open around Sija, weeping flames.
It failed so-
Sija pulled on something. A bond, implacable, nonexistent, and stronger than the most resolute material, twisting it, tearing at it with a conceptual mastery beyond anything but the Seraphim over their own beings. Kitsune alone recognized its insidious pull- the same thing that had disrupted her all those years ago, when she’d first battled Primordial Fragment Blood. Just… amplified.
Kitsune attacked her enemy. Her enemy was no longer Sija, though- for that one attack, for that moment in her existence, her enemy was Ajinan. The jagged tears in the universe jerked away from Sija and her prison, drawing a line of fire through the dragon’s feathers.
Ajinan, even burning in the fire that consumed its conceptual existence, the fire that would obliterate it for a small infinity of time until a paradox impossibly resolved itself, sought only to free his ally. His ally, though, was not Kitsune- it was Sija. Silver eyes bled, as runic matrices flickered and failed, creation failing itself. It would only be a matter of time until she was free.
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Tabs’ controlled chaos absolutely- and their luck, her allies, now enemies yet still Seraphim were the unlucky ones. Chaos turned back on them in all its force, pushing them quickly down the road of destruction. It was what her ally wanted… but Tabs swapped chaos for order. As much as their every move was foiled by the whims of the universe and the will of Sija, she locked Sija into a single plan, a sole order.
Trapped in the gyre of Tabs’ chaos, infinite opportunities aligned to destroy them. The entire universe fell into Syzygy. The earth beneath them aligned with the fabric of reality, such that a single push would tear them to shreds. Spatial distortions connected everything together, such that nothing but a push would erase them. Sija didn’t take advantage of a single one of those- all she did, all she could do was to push at that ephemeral bond and watch them kill each other.
It ended so-
Tabs wrenched at chaos, pushing it into a being laced in order, giving her ally the greatest luck there ever was, localized onto them. Order met chaos and- she smiled, Sija screamed, and shattered in Infinite Dichotomy. Her concept fractured, chaos and order twisting at her being and tearing her apart.
Something outside of reality reached in, tearing Sija away in little chunks from the bloody red half of her being, pulling- reaching past a failing interdict and shattered spatial trap. Taking, the shattered pieces of her concept crumbling away through the cracks in the universal membrane.
Bloody eyes locked with Kitsune, deep and agonized, wrathful and- “why- I want- will- die- kill you- be- here. Together.” In the infinitesimal as she retreated, Sija in blackened blood twisted a bond and pulled them closer, until she could feel a confusing maelstrom of emotions. Fear, fire’s wrath, desire in twain, shattered hope, duality, horror, failure, anger. Anger, overwhelming all others. An anger that scoured itself to nothing and turned on Kitsune, a promise of unlimited hatred.
Then she was gone, leaving behind a crumbling world and scarred universe, held stable only by Ajinan’s constant maintenance.
The entire fight lasted less than a second.
………
The one who remained, the bone-beast who had tried and failed to fight the end of the world, the one who’d asked a question, the one chosen sentinel… dreamed. An infinite nightmare of the soul- trapped, slowly consumed- a god shell like the myths of the avians, consuming, slowly gnawing on him, on his legacy in the strata of the world-
A blood eye, stained in tears-
An eternal moment, trapped in space, swimming as fast as it could through the stone yet unable to get anywhere.
The divine of fire saw it, and found it wanting. It spoke and in its reverberating tongue that it could understand without understanding, it knew that it had failed.
It dreamed, eternally, of a tiny being, a transient mote which died. Worse than death- was subsumed, utterly reduced to nothing and integrated into Sija.
It dreamed of a shattered universe breaking, further falling-
Falling.
Then, astride a widening way of stars, a brush of white and the touch of possibility- it woke.
It had not expected to wake, but alone on a plain, lone and level and strewn with the jagged remnants of battle, shattered metal husks and torn seams evaporating in the harsh light of the sun, it did… but the fire. Tucked into that tiny form, the taste of ash and blurry edges tucked into a gentle voice… stood there, resolute as it had been in the first age of existence.
Tentatively, the one who’d asked asked again, long claw dragging characters in the shattered rubble of a collapsed underworld. “Did you save the rest of them?”
The fluff-ball, adorable like the one who’d… Sija, the part of Sija that had rejoined the rest, nodded with a solid hesitance, demure and intense all the same. “Indeed. You’re lucky we arrived when we did. Physics on that scale tends to make earth behave almost like a wave- I shoved in some dimension-locking monoliths, and manifested a stasis control planetoid in geostationary orbit.”
It understood… some… of that- the fire had told it stories of impossibly advanced image-forged long ago, but the most important thing was the fluff had answered yes. “The transients, then. They lived.” It was almost surprising to learn how much it cared for those specks of color, the two who’d made it dream of skies, who’d saved their world. “...thank you.”
“You were the one in the most danger.” The fire was right beside it, brushing a tail across its carapace. It was more than a touch it couldn’t have felt- a confluence of lifeforce, lighting it alight to life, a meeting of souls and something more.
It leaned into the moment of comfort, ignoring the devastation around it for a long time until it could work up the courage to draw. “I failed. They killed them all. The rest of them… I might be the last. I failed as a sentinel.”
“You protected the world. You protected all worlds-” and the divine told it a story as they mourned for possibilities dead, of five who’d once been one, unity unbound and an existence on a scale it could barely comprehend. The last and greatest answer to the question it’d asked so long ago.
They watched together the fluffy- dragon, as the divine of fire called the divine of creation- rebuilt the earth beneath them. It wouldn’t be the same- the strata were different, a beautiful and meaningless swirl laced through the bedrock- but for the first time in seconds, for the first time since the second age of the universe, it felt complete.
………
An island in a sea of sand, cloaked in mists and gentle sunlight dreams, dappled radiance falling through drooping leaves. Igneous built, careful vales wrought and inscribed with victory's story, fire's touch and the underlying order of creation. A forest draped in scattered rainstorms and vibrant verdancy, unique from anywhere else on the planet, as new as half the planet.
"What was the idiot here for?"
A moment of quiet in the soft jungle's breeze. "Norming, most probably. ISON reports suggest significant alterations to several million timelines."
A sigh, relief, the wind in the branches the slightest hint of volcanic ash. "We caught her early then."
"Evidently she plans for something. Her pursuit of normed branches is single-minded." Frustration. A vast biome constructed, a place of rest before they slipped through the boundaries of impossibility yet again. "I don't understand. It's so hard to fight something that doesn't follow the rules."
"I… when she ran, she pulled on that bond manipulation concept-" a wince, and a surreptitious glance to a yet-healed flank of feathers- "and the jumble of emotions was just… confused. Maddened almost."
"Sija is too smart for this not to be some sort of plan."
A long pause, hesitant acknowledgement, and a possibility- a different kind of terrifying. Hesitantly, the fire voiced a thought that'd been gnawing at her since their fight- "I don't think she's only Sija."
There wasn't anything to say to that, or against- they didn't know what they were fighting, but when had they ever? The only constant was Sija, and against her, the Seraphim. So many worlds, uncountable, little motes of fire, like magic, flitting endlessly away in the heavy mists and sunlight so faint.
For a time, they thought, and rested.
For a moment eternal, they were together, and neither would let anything come between siblings again.