There were monsters pouring in through the rift. Stupidly, they crawled over each other, grinning bereftly, showing teeth and eyes with nothing behind them.

Then there was a man in a straw hat, a flowing robe, leathery skin, and white brambly eyebrows who appeared in the center of the rift. Stepping through, he dusted his pants off and surveyed the carnage. He seemed to know right away that it was the Tripinctum, my enchanted helm, which was causing all these rifts to open. The man in the straw hat paused to watch Millagua, who was stuck inside the Tripunctum and sending wave after dangerous wave of reality-shattering energy into the air, opening gash after gash, through which hordes of monsters continued to stupidly fall.

“Take it off!” I called to Millagua again, but the God of Stasis was broken. He had witnessed the death of his son, and it had destroyed him. Millagua could only cry in agonized grief, which, unbeknownst to him, activated the Tripunctum again and again.

Then, finally, out of his mind with grief, he didn’t even notice as one of the monsters, scrabbling to wring its hands around his neck, snapped the chain on the enchanted necklace of amber he wore, which kept his body moving normally through space-time. With the chain snapped, Millagua passed out of normal space-time into stasis, where he remained until eventually, hundreds of thousands of years later, Isshakhu returned to that ravaged place, found that artifact, put it back on Millagua’s neck, and cried.

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On that day, which would come to pass in the distant future, Isshakhu would return to her home planet, which had long been abandoned. Ziph, her second husband, had been a good partner, but when centuries roll into eons, one gets tired of the same partner. Isshakhu had always known there was unfinished business back home.

Isshakhu was Millagua’s first love, and he was hers, and when he finally woke up on that day in the abandoned Colosseum, he wailed for his boy with fresh, bright, painful tears, for coming out of stasis was like blinking–it was as if no time had passed at all.

At the sound of Millagua’s grief, Isshakhu wept too. Eons had passed, and she had healed from the pain of the passing of her first child, but now it all welled back up.

The gods are strange creatures. Most of us don’t die, at least not of natural causes. The ones of us who can die of natural causes, like me, still live incredibly long lives. And, there are even some gods who cannot die at all, for they are part of the fabric of the universe, and even if you kill them, they can never disappear entirely.

Even Bagua had left. An imaginary creature made real by the magic of my Trimpunctum, Bagua the were-bat suddenly found itself subject to the same rules of time that degrade all organic matter in the universe. And the good news of that part of the story is that Bagua was now locked outside of Millagua, and thus could no longer torture Millagua in his sleep with black nightmares. Unable to bring psychological harm to Millagua, Bagua the were-bat shambled across the ruined Plane of the Gods until he died of boredom, and his body disintegrated.

But all that is a story for another day. Now it is time for me to tell you about the man in the straw hat, whose name was Shinna, and who was one of the high-ranking generals of Ram Gram Woole.