The night sky was a brilliant explosion. No, he was wrong, it was no longer the night sky, it was the other side of the sky, the truth behind the light. It was every mystery and love and horror and truth, or as close to the reality of those words as a little clay doll could hope to see. He was freefalling, pinwheeling amongst trees that spanned worlds and songs made of birds and three headed demons scourging the frogs hauling its chariot across the black vastness of the universe.

There was water, flowing like an endless river, a torrent, from where he could not see. Fires of all sorts, in every color and no color at all. They were every idea of fire as well as every truth of it. Earth, massive, compressing, cold, next to hot air dancing and twisting between the explosions of tulips and scampering beasts whose names were known only to the strongest mystics. And everywhere, everywhere, there were demons.

It was a madness. A swirling insanity of colors and lights. A sword stabbed into a heart again and again, sixty times a minute. Roses twined through lovers kissing, forming a bower and barrow together. A lily, floating in a lake the size of a dreamed ocean, slowly opened its petals. What could it hold? What could it reveal? It seemed to invite stares. Shudderning, almost convulsing, Truth forced himself to look away.

He knew he needed a reference point, something he could anchor himself to in the chaos. He swept his eyes around but couldn’t find Botis. The river? Manda was described as living water descending from heaven. He looked over, but the river was so utterly enormous, so filled with turns and twisting eddies, it made his consciousness want to flee. Valentinian, then. He had relied on that ancient’s meditations. He cast his eyes around, hunting for some sign of that unknown being, finding something twisting, something emerging from the darkness, not evil but vast, he couldn’t get his mind quite around it-

“And that’s enough of that.”

Truth found him himself summarily smashed into the dirt. Hard packed soil. It hurt. He didn’t have time to linger on that thought, as he was picked up and sat on a stump to look at a big rock. The rock was gray and fairly flat, but beyond that, it had no noticeable qualities. The fire was behind Truth. There was just him, the rock, and his shadow on the rock.

“Pretty sure I mentioned something about a clay doll staying put. Absolutely sure, in fact. No, don’t look around. I can more or less guess how this happened. Let's run you through the basics first, then get into it.”

He recognized the voice of his rough patron, sounding alternately amused and tolerant.

“First- what is this?”

A shape popped up next to his shadow. A sort of puppet made out of shadows. At a guess-

“A duck?”

“What? No! Look again.”

“Still looks like a duck, sorry.”

“What terrifying ducks have you seen that look like that? It’s plainly a dog.”

“Don’t know what to tell you, Senior. Maybe if you stuck your thumbs up or something, it would look more like a dog?”

“What do my thumbs have to do with anything? Just turn around.”

Truth obeyed, and to his quiet shock, the senior was petting a small dog. The dog had a long muzzle and flat ears. It didn’t look anything like a duck, but when you just saw the profile of the head in shadow? He still didn’t know why he thought duck. They really weren’t very similar.

“I’m guessing you fixated on ‘duck’ because you saw shadows on the wall and thought of someone making a duck shadow, right?” The man’s hair was just as shaggy as before, his physique as muscular, his attitude just as relaxed. Like no time at all had passed.

Truth slowly nodded. He didn’t have a better idea.

“Alright, now go and explain it to him.” The man waved at the rock. Truth looked over.

“My shadow?”

“You. The ‘you’ before you saw the dog.”

Truth was mentally exhausted before his involuntary vision. He didn’t feel like he was thinking any faster now.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a metaphor. Or, I don’t know, an allegory. You were ignorant. Not understanding what you thought you saw, making up stories about the shadows on the rocks, and then thinking you knew something based on the shadows.”

“Then I turned around.”

“Then you turned around, and saw the dog.”

Truth nodded. “What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“The dog. What is the dog’s name?”

“Sam.”

“Really?”

“No, it’s a lot longer, but I just call him Sam for short.”

“You have an actual dog.”

“Yep.” The big man nodded, happily patting the little dog.

“Aren’t you some kind of… extremely powerful spiritual being? God-adjacent?”

“Oh yeah. Although, what you think you mean when you say “God” and what “God” actually is, is pretty different.”

Truth nodded again. Most things are more complicated than you would think, in his experience.

“So. You are having an involuntary out of body experience. You may be wondering why.”

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“Yes, Senior. About a lot of things.”

“Short answer? A lot of hands meddling in your life, in increasingly unsubtle ways. Or just as subtle as they ever were, but now you are better able to see the messing around.”

“Three destinies?”

“Destiny is so much nicer sounding than ‘Beings beyond your comprehension have marked you and loaded the dice you get to throw, leading to increasingly unlikely results.’”

Truth watched the fire flicker and dance. The dog leaned into the filthy man’s hands, happy with his scritches. “You, Manda and who? Starbrite? You said that one of the destinies was related to what he did to my soul.”

“Wait, Manda? How did you get that old bastard out of all this?”

Truth blinked. At this point he was one hundred percent certain that Manda had been involved in… so many instances in his life. Dating back to at least his learning Cup and Knife. The rough man grinned, watching Truth’s face shift and twist.

“Don’t confuse cause and effect, kid. Manda has a really unpleasant habit. He sets up all these little things, these little hooks and coincidences in the world. Nets sized for just the right fish. Then, when something runs into them, he turns up going “Ahah! The chosen fish! I had long foreseen your coming!” then the fish goes “Oh, what divine wisdom! He had even foreseen my coming!”” The rough man spat into the fire. The dog did not look impressed.

“He sets up things for people to discover and… then what?”

“Turns up and nudges them into doing things that he thinks are good. Like, imagine you went into a pawnshop and found a magic ring. Someone had to make that ring. Someone had to pawn it.”

Truth flashed back immediately to the tonic he bought for his breakthrough to Level One. “He planted the tonic that turned me part Ghul.”

The big man wiggled his hand a little. “Not quite right but, yeah. The most important thing, from his perspective, was that he linked you and me.”

“One of my destinies.”

“Yep.”

“You said I was born with one?”

“I did.”

“But you don’t know who gave it to me? Or what it’s about?”

“Nah. Well, I have a bunch of guesses, obviously, but I don’t ‘know’ know.” The big man grinned, wider this time, apparently finding the situation hilarious. The land still smelled of marsh. Green and vegital. He still couldn’t recognize the stars.

“That just leaves you and Starbrite.”

“Nope.”

“No?”

“No. Because I don’t know who “Starbrite” is, so the odds that they are the one muddling your destiny is unlikely.”

“You don’t know who Starbrite is? He’s the most powerful mage on the planet! The only nascent soul!”

“Ooooohhhh. That guy. Oh yeah, I’ve seen him around. No, that slightly larger ant isn’t responsible. At most he’s a trigger. Sort of like what Manda did- once the right circumstances were created, it manifested. The right sized fish swam into the net.”

“And now I’m dragging three nets?”

“I think the metaphor is getting dragged here. Look, it’s the allegory with the shadows, okay? You are seeing the shadows of much larger things, things happening someplace you can’t see, and you are trying to understand the nature of your existence looking at them.”

“That’s destiny?”

“That’s existence for you and everyone on your mudball. Looking at shadows and making up stories about what it all means.”

“Until you turn around.”

“If you can turn around, yeah.”

The fire grumbled and spat as the wood burned down.

“I’m thankful senior, but I must say you are a lot more… chatty… than you were in our first meeting.”

“You are just killing it with my legacy. Loving what you are doing there. Call it a reward.”

“I… am? Starting a war? Blowing up a volcano?”

“Again, looking at effects, not causes.”

“So… what am I missing?”

“Are you angry? At all this bullshit? At being dropped into all kinds of nonsense? At the whole damn world setting you up for a brief life of suffering? Even though you did your very, very best?”

Truth breathed out slowly, trying to control the sudden spike of rage.

“Intensely.”

“But it’s just shadows on the rock. None of this is really real.” The grin had a distinctly nasty edge to it now, and he had the sneaking feeling that the dog was judging him too.

“It’s real to him.” Truth pointed at his shadow. “And it’s the only “me” I know.”

“Until you turned around. Until you realized that there was a you that wasn’t the shadow, and there was a world to look at that wasn’t the rock.”

Truth nodded.

“Aren’t you angry, kid? Doesn’t it seem unfair?”

“I am. It does.”

“Don’t you want it to stop? At the very least, don’t you want to get back at the people who hurt you? Make them understand that it’s not fair, and you won’t put up with it?”

“So much.” Truth nodded, his eyes narrowing slightly. He had seen this game played before, and patron or not-

“Then you need to turn around and see the people casting the shadows, don’t you? You need to find out who to hit.”

Eh? “Well. Yes.”

“I didn’t make the world the way it is. I’m not even the first victim of the way the world is. But I do like to think I’m the first person to fight back. The first person to go, “No, that’s not right, fuck you!” and spill blood over it.”

Truth widened his eyes. “The actual, literal first?”

That got a little chuckle from the big man. The dog flattened down, bored with the conversation and the lack of petting. “Well. Like I said, I like to think so. Before me, everything was so… primal. So abstract. Even Mom and Dad were more like concepts than fully realized people. Took me ages to realize why they didn’t seem to have a clue about anything.”

“They didn’t turn around?”

“More like they never saw the rock in the first place. They just had no idea what they were seeing, or why any of it mattered.” Silence filled the clearing.

“I found a machine to spread a demon plague across the planet. There are almost certainly more of them buried. It could eventually kill all life on the planet. And I just happened to find one.”

“Hmm. Seems unlikely.”

“Not you.”

“Not me, no.”

“Then who?”

“Why, the person responsible for your misery. Partially.”

“Not you, not Manda, I’m going to just assume not Botis or Valentinian-”

“Safe bet. Also, don’t go looking for Valentinian. He isn’t there.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you look.”

“Figures.” Truth took a moment to pull his train of thought back on track. “If it’s not any of the originators of my spells, and it’s not Starbrite, who is it?”

“Why, none other than the little ball of mud you are running around on. Yes, the very thing that is making you suffer, that is making humanity suffer, that is going to lead, best case scenario, to the utter collapse of your civilization and the death of the overwhelming majority of humanity on your planet. And, I might add, an altogether great Angel. Sariel. Also called Sahariel. Which should really tell you everything, right there.”