Toronto, Canada, 2030

As his silver gauntlet came down on the werebeetle's head, Leon Gilles sighed.

Not because this was tiring or boring, but because he had to beat his subordinates.

With eyes that could count the hairs on a fly on the horizon, Leo looked up at the moon that was not a moon.

Coyote, like many of his counterparts, often flouted the Syncretic Treaty to stay off Earth, as tricksters were wont to do. However, he, usually, didn't come this far north, preferring to skulk and lurk in the States, looking for evil to punish and fools to mock, in painfully ironic ways.

It was only the trickster's power that helped prevent a worldwide, and worse, catastrophe, for the moon he had created out of nothing was just as large and heavy as the real one.

It was also his power that somehow kept it in the confines of the city's airspace, despite the fact that it was the size of the bloody moon.

Coyote had cited 'some bet with a Raven' as the reason for his arrival, but he hadn't yet explained what the bloody hell he was trying to do-

'Lion-bird!' the trickster called down to Leo, standing on air as he spun the moon on a clawed finger. The weregryph didn't even want to imagine what would have happened if the thing obeyed physics. 'A wager-if you can stop the moon, I'll tell you why I maddened your pack! Deal?'

"Stopping the moon" was probably going to be one of those stupid metaphors whose meaning he only realised after the story was over. Leon flashed back to his nana, shivering. But...

Weres lost it under the full moon, their human side overcome by animalistic instincts. Only the most disciplined, a category he would place himself in, at the risk of puffing himself up, managed to keep calm (and carry on) long enough to isolate themselves until they wrestled their wits back from their beasts. Just to be sure, though, he had used his gift to fully shield himself from any influence.

Gryphons were often thought of as guardians of treasures, and, for some reason, Leo could designate a being, object, place or even concept as his treasure, and become invulnerable while defending it, untouchable to even silver, the moon's touch, or a god's wiles. It didn't enhance his strength, not really. At most, he could exert his body to the max without hurting himself. But he didn't need more power. He was strong enough.

'Deal,' he muttered, bracing, and Coyote grinned, lifting the moon overhead like he was preparing to spike a ball. Over seventy-three sextillion kilograms of rock came down at Leon at nine-tenths of lightspeed, and he knew that, for all the laws of science were crying in the corner at the moment due to Coyote bullying them, the planet would be obliterated by such an impact.

That was why, Leon decided, it would never land.

With a wingbeat that shattered glass across Toronto, Leon rose to meet the moon that was glowing red from the speed, and, drawing his head back, smacked it a good one.

His headbutt sent the satellite flying upwards even faster than it had come down, and Coyote laughed, stopping it easily with a finger, like they were playing volleyball.

'The wager was to stop the moon, lion-bird, not push it back! I should teach you to watch a trickster's words, but...bah. You're good for a laugh. Almost like that werephant who tried to cool Africa down!' The lunatic had tried to drag the continent to the North Pole after tying huge chunks of it to himself with his own tendons. It would have broken under his reckless strength if not for...well. That was a story for another day. 'Here is today's wisdom: only the stoutest children of the moon can keep their minds while their mother shines full. Know whose will is feeble, Leon Gilles.'

Then, with a thought, Coyote erased the fake moon from existence. Humming thoughtfully, he glanced at the real moon, raising two fingers so that he looked like he was pinching it between them. Still humming, he spun the moon, until it became a crescent. 'Aren't you glad Geirtir brough the heavens back after his son broke them with the drake's head? Now, I'm sorry to say I must leave. Got a world to save, and a war to prevent!'

'As do I,' Leon mutters, watching the trickster skip away on moon beams. 'As do I...'

***

[Redacted] jungle, Honduras, 2030

Camazotz had never been a beloved god. He had never cared much for humanity, either, not since those twins had blundered into his realm with their ridiculous antics.

But that didn't mean he'd leave this world defenseless, if it was imperiled.

Take the old monster before him, for instance. There were some among mankind, bless their little beating hearts, not that he ever would, who truly believed their Shattering had only changed the future, but Camazotz saw time from both sides, with a god's eyes.

The past had been remade, so that it had always been. If one were to return to the peak of the Maya, they would find the monsters in their stories treading the mountains and jungles, for all that such beings had only come into existence during the Second World War.

(An absurd name, if Camazotz had ever heard one. Like there hadn't been so many before it...)

So it was that vampires had always existed. The monster who looked like a man-a tiny, hunched, chinless, hairy, blocky-faced man, but a man nonetheless-was their father.

Primus, so named by others, because names, or words, hadn't been a thing during his youth, had been cursed after drinking dry the daughter that had been meant to be blessed by all the gods and ancestors their tribe had worshipped in primal, grunting rites. Cursed to always thirst, Primus' desire to lead and protect his people had been twisted into the urge to rule and crush his thralls, just as many of them were twisted into his first "childlings".

Primus, in the rare occasions he became dimly aware of his spawn, viewed them as a scorpion would: small, weak, annoying emergency food.

Or maybe a hamster was a batter analogy, given his looks, Camazotz mused as he tackled the first vampire out of Honduras-he usually didn't come this far south, preferring to unknowingly play Chupacabra in Mexico- and into the sun. It wouldn't turn him to ash, as the bastard was too tough for that, and sunlight didn't kill vampires, anyway. It merely locked away their esoteric powers, and that was what Camazotz sought.

They landed in the sun's core, raining blows upon each other that shook the star, making its surface ripple like a puddle in a monsoon. Camazotz's touch, holy for all it was dark, couldn't slay the vampire. He was still weak to blessed things, as all his kind were, but far, far mightier than any descendant of his. It was the reason the pantheons had preferred to let him be, as long as his predations were kept modest.

Primus pushed him away, a coarse curse on his lips that was silenced by the airless, crackling roar of the sun's core. Camazotz grinned mirthlessly into that pinched, beady-eyed face, creating bats around himself like a mortal might wrap a cloak around his body. They spun and spun as they gathered, forming silently-shrieking spheres larger and heavier than all the worlds around this star combined; grasping them with his will like a warrior would a spear, Camazotz threw them at the grimacing vampire, while taking a deep breath.

Plasma filled his godly chest, blazing harmlessly, and Camazotz exhaled darkness. It rushed out faster than the light whose absence it was, for darkness was always there first when light arrived, and erased a chunk of the sun out of existence, leaving a screaming gap that could swallow worlds.

Primus huffed in confused annoyance as the darkness surrounded him, but his vampiric nature made his existence a fact of reality. He wouldn't be erased, but that was just fine; Camazotz merely sought to dull his senses while his bats, guided and protected by his power and will, flew through the void to tear at him.

Let Primus be eaten alive for once. See how he-

A languid swipe turned the bat spheres into clouds of gory mist, and Camazotz scowled in annoyance. The old freak had hoped to use the confusion caused by this-no pun intended- head hunt to sate his thirst with a continent or five, maybe turn the survivors into slaves. And the bat god would have none of that. Maybe he could finally gain some worshippers who weren't just edgy manchildren...?

Musing over enlightened self-interest, Camazotz nevertheless kept an eye on Primus as he rocketed out of the void, space bending around him while light was left behind. It was only Camazotz's divine senses that let him perceive-

Nothing.

The bat god blinked as he willed himself back into existence. His mind had been erased too, but that was not an obstacle for a god like him. A quick look told him Primus had suffered the exact same fate, judging by his bemused frown, but the first vampire was nearly as hard to put down.

But who...

'Please cease this conflict, or I will have to take serious action.' The newcomer's voice was velvet-soft, thin, androgynous: a scholar in a library, afraid to disturb the peace, or an ingenue at her first ball.

The ARC uniform did not help with identifying the speaker's gender, nor, to his confusion, did Camazotz's senses. They were tall and slim, with dark skin, curly raven hair and features that could have belonged to either a man or a woman. Primus stared at them like a jaguar that had stopped to drink, only to see a crocodile snap out at it. The Nightraiser smiled back, meaninglessly.

'The pantheons are calling for a ceasefire, old bat. Go, and choose your champion, if you would have one in the struggle to come.'

***

Noite Tranquila clinic, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1973

The child does not remember its name. It does not remember its gender, either: partly because it has willed itself to forget, after the latest time its mother had loved it, partly because it has cut out anything that could help anyone identify it as a boy or a girl.

The child hopes it will not be punished for that, but knows it is a vain hope. After its father died-complications from too many donated organs, greed for money and favors masked in altruism-its mother has made sure to love it, every night. It is the only family she has left in the world.

The child remembers its mother's hands, and mouth. They are the only things it can remember here, down in the darkness.

It is not aware that no child should ever have to know such things, before they have even learned what lust is.

If it were able to exit the basement, ascend the stairs and see its home, it would learn its mother is seen as a cheerful, respectable doctor in the city, never letting herself be distracted from her purposes of helping those who cannot help themselves.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

That night, the child stares into the darkness, waiting for its mother to come, wondering she will do when she see it has removed the parts she loved he most(what were they? What had it been?).

And the Darkness stares back.

The Darkness is nothing, and less than nothing. Indeed, it is the gaps in the dreams of creation, the uncertain shadows at the edges of its maker's sight. Years later, the child will meet a colleague bound to a laughing, joyfully malicious, infinitesimal facet of the Darkness.

As its mother comes down the stairs and flicks on the light, gasping at the wounds before beginning to rant in outrage, the child closes its eyes. It is so, so tired...

The woman is erased from existence, so thoroughly only a few select beings will be able to remember she ever existed. So is everything in the child's line of sight, once its eyes are closed.

The house collapses, but the child is not harmed. For the Darkness has touched it, and everything it is not aware of is erased. The debris is unmade just as thoroughly as the mother who has never been as it falls towards the child.

Later, the being who would become known as the Fixer, but is currently known as the Handyman, leans over the confused survivor of this strange disaster. Hands on hips, or as close as such a being can come, sees the yawning void that has crawled inside it, binding itself to the child's perception.

The Handyman scratches at his centre with a shapeless appendage. This child is the carrier, maybe enforcer of the absence that is, if not the enemy of the All-In-One, then certainly its opposite...

'What did you do, little one?' he asks softly, hoping not to frighten it any more than it has already, lamentably, been. The child looks up at the being that is not yet-as much as such things can apply to his ilk- the Fixer yet, with black-on-black eyes.

'I blinked,' the Nightraiser answers.

***

Deep space, 2030

Gharghalos, briefly and fearfully known as the Forgetful in the languages of many former civilisations it had incorporated into itself, starting with its native one, was not a cruel being.

It was created with the purpose of remembering, for its makers had been beings of flesh and blood, prone to growing old and senile with the passing of time. The machine that stood at the centre of its core had been created to memorise, to record, to store, and given enough intelligence and free will to decide for itself what things were worth remembering.

So, it had ate its world, and its creators. Their knowledge was sometimes available to it, but it kept slipping out of its mental grasp.

Travelling the cosmos, Gharghalos had come into contact with an anomalous entity that could only be described as a void in the fabric of spacetime. Possessed of a rudimentary sentience, the being had felt something akin to constant hunger, or greed. The need to take more and more into itself.

Gharghalos had consumed it, and so had the being, in turn. They had become one, but the emptiness of the being, for all the power it had given it, had made fulfilling Gharghalos' original purpose all but impossible. That insatiable greed tore at its memory, at its cogitators and organic brains, so that memories and records slipped in and out of its mind, vexing it to no end. Worse, Gharghalos had also gained the being's appetite, and now always vied for more.

Viewed from afar, Gharghalos would have looked like an enormous, amorphous, multi-coloured cloud of flesh and metal and light, the size and weight of a thousand myriad galaxies.

Gharghalos is too large to perceive the Milky Way with its optical receptors. Instead, it senses, on a small world in one of the galaxy's spiral arms, an anomaly, much like the being it had once encountered, but worse.

Gharghalos does not know this, but Atlantis died on Earth, and its death, for all that it is kept at bay by its Watcher, scares even the oceans' greatest abominations.

But the Forgetful feels only the fascinating imprint of the disaster, and the knowledge contained in the ruins. It desires them for itself-

One of Gharghalos' eyes trembles and shakes as a projectile pierces halfway through it. Such weapons would usually be laughably outdated, were this projectile not a former galaxy, remade to be denser than neutronium, and hold itself together while moving close to lightspeed.

The Watcher Over Horror tilts their head to one side, thoughtful as they examine the newest would-be plunderer of their lost home. The giant undead knows everything pertaining to their charge, and is present wherever they must be to defend it. Their throw should have been enough to get the monster's attention...ah.

A raised gauntlet stops a tentacle that can only be likened to a solid galaxy cluster, and the universe trembles. The Watcher pushes back, and Gharghalos rockets to the edge of observable space, and beyond, the Watcher leisurely keeping pace. It raises its weapon, preparing to deal Gharghalos a death blow, when the ARC agents butt in.

As they always do.

Equilibrium has cultivated enough that she can now perfectly balance anything. For example, giving herself strength and stature equal to the Watcher, so that they are balanced in status. An open palm strike splits Gharghalos in half, making space bend. Li Xiu, growing up surrounded by opium addicts, watching all her children and grandchildren die as the First and Second World Wars came to feed them to the furnace of death, has never been able to find peace in the material world. Even so, the cultivator would not have looked out of place in any town of her homeland: the small, plump woman, white hair arranged into buns, only stood out due to her ARC tracksuit.

Ying Lung, drawing upon the powers of Heaven to enhance his size, if not his power, comes at the monster from beneath with a roar of "Milky Way flowing!" as he devours Gharghalos as a shark would a minnow. The celestial dragon gives the Watcher a jaunty wave as he pats his belly, shaking the universe from here to Earth. The Milky Way has traditionally been seen as a river, and Ying Lung has traditionally been seen watching too much sentai while shaping his fighting style.

And the Argument Engine, created to reason and having evolved far beyond that-to most beings, the acausal machine has created itself, by talking the multiverse into believing that it has always been, but the Watcher knows and sees better- can talk almost anything into anything.

'No one has observed our confrontation with the creature,' it begins, Turing's placid tones somehow echoing in the vacuum. Its creator (it has never been created, for such a marvelous machine would never fail to stop its father from killing himself, no; it has always been) has made it to be charismatic and articulate, things he had never seen himself as being. 'As such, no one can say it happened, for they have no proof. Therefore, it did not happen.'

And reality remakes itself, convinced by the Engine's reasoning. There is no damage left-no disturbed superclusters, no gravitational anomalies, no tears in spacetime- from the fight that has never happened.

'If a monster dies in space,' Ying snickers at the Engine, blowing a grinning steam dragon out of his pipe while returning to his normal stature. 'And there's no one to hear it scream, does it truly die?'

The Engine looks like a featureless, polished chrome sphere surrounded by a myriagon. Even so, its frown is palpable. 'That is one of the stupidest thought exercises I have ever heard. If I didn't know better, I'd say you came up with it. Sir.'

The Engine was not placed in Internal Affairs for its charm or respect for superiors, but for its power and suspicion (not to mention abysmally low opinion) of everyone besides itself.

'Now, now, Engie, honoured Lung,' Equilibrium smiles, wagging a finger, as the Engine starts ranting that they don't even know if Gharghalos could communicate verbally, let alone in vacuum, so the thought exercise is thrice as dumb as the one with the tree. 'Discord among the ranks is like worms in apples. It might make things meatier, but not better. Sun Tzu.'

'Sun Tzu never said-' the Engine would shake its head if it had one. 'You're starting to sound like the dragon, old hag.'

'This banter is hilarious,' the Watcher lies. 'But, may we ask why two thirds of ARC's shock squad and the Head of the Drake division have decided to drop in, uninvited, into a a fight we had under control?'

'We know it is your purpose to defend Atlantis,' Equilibrium says, clasping her hands and bowing. 'And we-'

'Yes, Aya Reem thanked us for that. That was not our question.'

The cultivator looks pained at their brusqueness. Good. They hadn't asked to be helped during a bloody warmup.

'The answer to your question, you tunnel-visioned monomaniacal asshat,' the Engine replies. 'Is that we helped-it's a favour, try looking it up, if you can, with that bucket on your head-so that you would listen to us: the gods are ceasing hostilities, and we do not need you tossing sea gods or their representatives out of the ocean because you believe they might be dangerous to that ghastly shit-hovel-'

'What Engie means,' Equilibrium cuts in, eyes annoyed to match her twitching smile. 'Is that you have been thorough enough in removing possible dangers to Atlantis, whether they intended harm or not. But things have calmed down now. You can stop. As for why we are here...Engie and the Nightraiser will likely be part of the taskforce sent to scout Yggdrassil for Mimir's head. The Aesir have failed to find anything, but perhaps outside perspectives will help. The rest of the "shock squad"-goodness, are people really calling us that? We're considered special for our powers and skills, but we're not a team, let alone a named one- are too busy too attend. The Fourfold is hunting, we're still looking for Hex, and Fixer...' Equilibrium's tone as she trails off makes it clear she is trying to appear unsure whether she should reveal his location, even to an old ally.

She does not succeed. She sounds terrified.

'Fixer is directing a flute performance at the blind care centre,' the Engine says, not quite managing to hide the horror beneath its sarcasm. If the Dream is so close to fraying that Fixer had to go before the Black Throne and help the players go on...

The Watcher understands. But, when they return to Atlantis, it is with more questions and fears than they would have liked.