A cacophony of gunshots killed the silence, and the three twitchy people guarding the entrance to the hazard dropped before the sound got to them. I casually walked up while Jun scanned the area for anyone who might’ve heard her attack and knelt down next to the closest Endra-spawn. Their armor wasn’t anything special, and I could tell their core had barely passed mastery twenty.

Unfortunately for them, the threat they posed to us didn’t factor their core mastery into the equation. I shifted my weapon into an axe and gave them each the quickest ends I could imagine, while activating wipe-away on each of them in turn. By the time Jun was confident we were alone, I’d already harvested the cores and set aside the bodies. She accepted the three with a nod and consumed them right away.

“Here we are again.” She said as the last of the cores disappeared into her interface. “I didn’t think we’d be here so soon, but I guess this is the only way to talk to it in person.”

“Yup.” I confirmed with a nod. “Do you have anything specific you want to ask it?”

Jun shook her head. “I’m only here for moral support. You’re the one that wanted to be here.”

I smiled and brushed off my knees as I stood. She wasn’t wrong–it was mainly my curiosity that brought me to The End this time, since I knew it couldn’t really do anything for us. If all I wanted was to talk, then I could've just used my interface and been done with it in a few minutes. But The End had disappeared for a good long while. Maybe… just maybe I could convince it to give us a little bit of its power somehow.

“See you in a second.” I said with a salute, then dropped down into the hazard entrance. When darkness overtook my vision I already saw the bottom of Jun’s boots, and then I stood in the Ossuary.

Perfectly in front of the Archivist and… someone else. A person who looked like they were made of glass, but inside of which raged a flow of molten black liquid that shifted to reveal blobs like molten lava that coalesced into an amused face. They wore the same ‘uniform’ as Archivist, but theirs seemed to be made of thicker material that stilted the movements of an arm they raised in greeting.

Words blew through my head like the whispers of a dying man. “Hello again, Sebastian. I’d hoped to see you in better times, but compared to the literal end of your world, I guess this could be considered a better time. Not by much, though.”

I blinked away the darkness that tried to creep in from the corners of my eyes. I knew that voice, even though I’d only heard it once. And I definitely remembered all the weirdness that seemed to come from just being in his presence.

“Hey. It's been a while, Overseer.” I said as pleasantly as I could. “Thanks for the spine of enmity.”

The Overseer’s smile widened ever so slightly. “It was all I could give you, given the circumstances. I heard you managed to get yourself promoted to Envoy, now. How’d you manage to find a completely lost species after less than a year on the all-world?”

I pursed my lips in preparation to spin the shortest version of my tale that I could, but Archivist intervened before we could waste what little time we had.

“Overseer can use the privileges afforded to him and access the records from the archives, as would every other member of the Ossuary.” They said flatly. “I understand you are excited to see Sebastian again, but this is no time for pleasantries. He is currently in the process of attempting to deal with a problem we should have prevented from existing in the first place.”

“I’m aware of my own failures, thank you very much.” Overseer sighed. His face melted back into his head, and the liquid took on a simple swirl as he spoke. “Who would have thought that she would be the one to actually turn the bragging and boasting into something real?”

“None of us. It is why she succeeded.” Archivist said, then gestured toward a hallway I thought I kind of recognized as leading toward The End’s room. “I will wait here for Juniper, and bring her to you the moment she materializes. Your conversation with The End is far more important than this little introduction.”

Overseer nodded in agreement and started walking away. The spiral on his head shifted and elongated as he walked so it was both pointed in the direction he was going and at me. I raised an eyebrow in interest and followed less than a second later.

His spiral shifted as if staring at me until I was right next to him. “I’m actually surprised you managed to get this powerful this quick. Last time I saw you my aura completely overtook you, and now you can push it away with just the strength of your mind. That’s some good progress.”

“Well, when you’re forced to fight for your life, you don’t really have a choice.” I replied with a shrug. “It was either get strong or die weak. And I haven’t fully died yet, so I’m going to avoid that for as long as physically possible. And… weren’t you a lot more intense the last time I saw you?”

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“Of course I was.” Overseer scoffed. “I was holding back the utter destruction of your home planet, organizing the forces of the Ossuary to preserve everything we could, and dealing with the edge cases who didn’t accept the world transfer when they were prompted to before they became a part of the mess. Now I finally have a few weeks off, and then it's right back to work.”

“Sounds strenuous.” I said sympathetically. “I can’t even imagine what it's like to do your job.”

Overseer’s spiral tightened slightly. I had no idea what it meant. “If we do our jobs right, then you’ll never have to imagine it, Sebastian. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re not exactly doing that at the moment. I’d love to just hand you a function that could solve all your problems, but the only reason I could give you the spine was because your world was already gone. Can’t do any more damage than that.”

The Ossuary lurched, and then we were there. Standing before the same well-lit room with a table that I’d last spoken to The End in. Yet as I took a step towards it, everything seemed to stretch. The distance between me and The End grew and grew until I could only see it as a pinprick of light down the deepest darkness I could ever imagine. My breath caught in my throat as The End stood out of that pinprick, out of the wrongness that something had created, and flowed into existence itself.

Ribbons wound around the darkness in a tender caress. They wove in and out of reality to pull The End closer and closer to me, strings of power so great that I couldn’t even think when one brushed a few thousand feet away from me. They carried a weight I couldn’t even imagine, so my body simply made up sensations to fill in the gaps of wrongness.

And then, like a power surge in the middle of the night, darkness consumed everything. It wrapped around me like a smothering blanket, pushing down on my armor with a thousand tons of pressure. The metal creaked and threatened to give in. My senses stumbled over themselves at the sensation of something worse than I could've even imagined.

It ended. I stood before The End, ribbons wrapped around my body as the primordial pulled me into the gentlest hug I could’ve imagined. Its touch was finality. The heat of its body the end of everything cold. And its ribbons fluttered through my mind like the last dregs of a terrible nightmare combined with the relief of sleeping off a migraine.

I couldn’t move. My thoughts were rough and hazy, like my mind hadn’t had the time to sand them down to acceptable levels. I raised my hands, and against everything my body was screaming at me to do, pulled The End a little closer and returned its embrace.

…SEBASTIAN. I AM SO, SO SORRY.

“For what?” I whispered, though the sounds and letters of my words came out in all the wrong order.

I SHOULD HAVE PROTECTED YOU. PROTECTED THEM. THE TREATIES… THE REGULATIONS… EVEN THE THREATS. THEY ARE ALL JUST EMPTY SOUNDS. SOMEHOW, THEY KNOW I PHYSICALLY CANNOT INTERFERE WITH THE ALL-WORLD.

I frowned and pushed The End away slightly, only to realize I was still standing in the doorway right next to Overseer. Whose spiral had grown so large that it took up his entire head. I… all that had happened because The End embraced me. But hadn’t it touched me before? Why was it different this time?

“Wait. You can’t interfere with the all-world? Singular?” I asked as The End rose to its full height. “What about Sotrien? Or… Earth. Could you… I mean, if you really wanted to…”

The End shook its head sadly.

THERE IS A CERTAIN PROPERTY OF THE ALL-WORLD THAT DISALLOWS ANY OF MYSELF, FLUX, OR STAGNATION FROM PHYSICALLY VISITING IT. AND THAT EXTENDS TO THOSE IN OUR EMPLOY, THOUGH NOT TO THOSE WE CHOOSE FROM THE ALL-WORLD ITSELF.

It walked over to the table and pulled out a chair for me, then another for Overseer, and finally took its own seat at the head of the table. I shared a look with Overseer to see if his spiral had calmed down any, but it was still absolutely huge. Maybe that was his version of being stunned into silence?

“Maybe I just don’t know anything, but I don’t get what you had to do with this.” I said as I sat down opposite of The End. “You already told me that the rules keep you from crossing over, so was that a lie? Or is that just the explanation for whatever the truth is?”

Overseer quietly took a seat near The End, and a moment later, Jun and Archivist appeared at the doorway. She glanced at The End, then at Overseer, and finally at Archivist who was already taking a seat next to The End.

She sat next to me and nodded at Overseer. “Nice to meet you, Overseer. Archivist told me one sentence about you.”

“That’s about what I expected.” Overseer chuckled. “And I didn’t even see you flinch from my influence. That’s a lot better than Sebastian fared when we first met.”

“Comparing the Jun of now to the level one me of months ago isn’t really a fair comparison.” I argued, then waved my hand. “But we’re not here to compare power levels. We’re about to try to take Rainbow Basin back from Scalovera and Endra, and we need all the information you can give us.”

The End nodded thoughtfully.

OF COURSE. IS THERE ANYTHING IN PARTICULAR YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW, OR A SPECIFIC REASON YOU HAVE COME HERE IN PERSON INSTEAD OF READING THE ARCHIVES OR COMMUNICATING WITH ME THROUGH YOUR INTERFACE?

I didn’t even have to consider my first question, since The End had basically already asked it for me. Thanks to Okeria talking with Thraiv we knew The End had taken a little trip to Sotrien, which meant it could cross over to different worlds. For some reason, that didn’t include the all-world.

“You can go to Sotrien.” I stated, then leaned forward a little. “It isn’t just your rules that are keeping you from the all-world. There’s something else, isn’t there?”