“Master Bear.”
Briggs was about to step away and return to Russia. He turned and faced the young man, basically a pre-teen child, although dressed in the same styles of the grown Eternals.
“Sprite,” he greeted the diminutive Eternal, not fooled by his appearance. “What business?” he asked simply.
“You can truly kill us?” the Eternal Child asked, his not-innocent eyes hungry for some reason.
“Yes.” Briggs had no reason to deny it. “Your monstrosity of a Machine will not save your kind.”
“Can you... break the other limits the Celestials have placed on us?” Sprite asked, a piercing light in his eyes, disregarding the threat in the other statement.
Briggs regarded the Eternal Child for a long, deep moment, and finally sighed, lifting a gauntleted hand. “Yes, but there is a price. You will have to start over as a babe, and truly grow. The reason you are frozen is that you are always brought back as you are and were.”
“Will I lose my memories?” Sprite asked quickly, only a moment of conflict in his eyes.
“For a time.”
Sprite licked his lips, but made his decision almost instantly, stepping quickly forwards and stopping in front of the Great Bear. What was time to an Eternal? “I’m willing! Please!” he declared with deadly earnestness.
Briggs nodded slowly. “You will grow to be tall and proud,” Briggs stated softly, and Sprite’s eyes flashed with every hidden desire in his heart as the large hand came down gently on his brown hair.
There was a flash of energy, and Sprite’s Eternal body was instantly disrupted. A flicker of power dispersed the atoms, and the soul of the Eternal was drawn away as his body was reduced to less than dust.
A white-armored, dark-haired Eternal stepped quietly up next to Briggs, looking at the pile of the dust that was all that was left of the Eternal Child. “So easy, Briggs,” he murmured. “Is it that simple for all of us?”
“Yes, Gil,” Briggs replied quietly. “The changes to the Great Machine have already been made. Endure would make it death, but Sprite is going to be reborn as a human, as is every Eternal going forward, including you. Your next lives will eventually regain your memories, but they will be different people than you, true reincarnations who can look back and see who they were, but are not bound to being them... and what the Celestials made of you.”
The strongest of the Eternals looked away at nothing, a troubled expression on his face. “No one’s ever claimed I was too bright, Briggs, but when I found out that’s how the Machine worked... it’s like it made a mockery of my whole life protecting humanity.” Something dark flickered in his gaze. “Zuras is already calling for the Uni-Mind so we can debate our next move. Some will want to stay, of course, but we all know one another and who we are. If they don’t want to leave with the Uni-Mind, I’ll track them down and kill them all.” His knuckles popped softly. “It won’t be the first time I’ve had to do that job.”
Briggs just sighed. “Just like humanity, there’s total bastards everywhere.”
Gilgamesh also shook his head. “And they think they’re so much better...”
Briggs clapped his shoulder. “If something happens, come find me when you grow up. I’ll still be your friend, Gil.”
The vastly older Eternal smiled despite himself. He’d seen Briggs grow up from a Russian-born slave thrown into the gladiatorial pits in Lemuria to a terrifying force of nature that had conquered first his homeland of Russia, and then destroyed Lemuria with a merciless thoroughness the Eternals had never dared to.
He had traded blows with the vastly younger man many times, and Briggs could hand him his teeth now. Where he had gained his unbelievable knowledge of combat and vast intellect Gilgamesh didn’t know, but the simple fact he’d figured out how to modify the Great Machine meant he was unbelievably intelligent, capable of mastering the Celestial-derived science of the Eternals.
He didn’t get his strength from an alien space god coming down on a caveman and making him into something new and better, either. Gilgamesh smiled as Briggs stepped into a rift in the air and was gone a second later, so smoothly the alarms against such things in Olympia didn’t even go off.
He had a fair idea who would want to make a play for personal power now that the Celestials were gone. They were tricky, conniving bastards, but they weren’t the Champion of the Eternals. He would see to them... and then, if all went well, maybe it was time for him to sleep, too, put his long years away, and look on the world through fresh, new eyes...
==============
Several months later...
“Sersi?” I asked, after opening up the door, stepping inside and looking around. “Are you well?”
One of the things having a Mimicked half-copy of someone floating around as part of you does is make you very sensitive to the original. If something is wrong with them, you can rapidly feel the difference in how they feel to you, even if you don’t get any explicit memories from them.
The first thing I noticed was that she was sitting forlornly by her bed, staring out at the moon and stars as they rolled slowly by. The second thing was that her normally green garb was all in red, and the third was that her hands were trembling.
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On a telepathic level, she was showing extreme mental agitation.
“Dynamo? Do not come near me!” she snapped at me, looking back my way, her eyes more than a little bit bloodshot. “This is not a good time to speak with me!”
“On the utter contrary, it seems like the very best of times to have someone to speak to,” I replied, radiating serenity at her as I glided forwards. Her agitation spiked, then hooked into my serenity, perfectly broadcast to play into the shadow of her mind that came with the Mimicked powers I had, and she calmed down almost forcibly as I flew right up and wrapped her in my arms.
She clutched at me hard, and I felt her start to choke, and then to cry into my shoulder. I said nothing, merely stroking her hair as I held her and let her emotions run out.
It took a full hour for her to gain control of herself, and even then, I could sense she was very unsteady.
“I am sorry, this is very unlike me,” she sniffed, but she did not let go of me. It was fine, I continued combing her hair softly. “I have, I have received some devastating news, and I fear it has harmed me badly...”
“Has something happened with the Uni-Mind?” I asked calmly. I knew that the majority of the Eternals had merged into it and left Earth, and it was slowly heading out of the Solar System, going somewhere else to look for enlightenment. I’d sensed them go in my Cosmic Awareness, their whole conjoined existences unaware of where to go, only that Terra was no longer suitable for them. Perhaps they’d be loyal dogs and follow their masters to another world...
“No, not that. It, it is the rest of them...”
I cast my Awareness down towards Olympia, and frowned. I shifted into the area around it, then sighed and opened up my Awareness to the whole planet.
The only sign of active Eternal or Celestial technology was at their resurrection point in Antarctica, which was cold and silent.
There were... supposed to be a couple prisoners there. Neither were present, but whispers of death seemed to accompany my survey of the place... which, incidentally, should have been largely hidden from this kind of thing.
I focused back on Olympia, and peeled back the days and weeks.
My breath hissed out despite myself as I saw what had transpired. “They are all gone,” I murmured to her. “They are gone and will not be coming back.”
“The Great Machine, it is not rebuilding them. I do not know what happened, but it is not bringing any of them back. They, they went mad, and fought one another...”
She lifted her head up to stare into my eyes, the terrible weight of probably being the last of her kind, the hundred Eternal souls that had known one another for ages unknown by mortal men all gone, save for her.
I shook my head slowly at her. “They are truly gone... and yet they are not,” I informed her. “In truth, all of them have already been reborn.”
She blinked at me in shock, and partial disbelief. “What? How? The Machine has not worked at all!”
“Your Great Machine was altered.” I looked past her, at the functions and workings of the thing, and the souls it was tied to. “Ahhhh. They found out,” I said softly.
“Found out? Who? What?” Sersi demanded urgently. “What is going on?”
“They found out your Great Machine’s ability to resurrect the Eternals is powered by the murder of young humans.” My eyes focused on her. “I think you can figure out who ‘they’ are.”
She stared at me, her lips working, trying to say their names, refute what I’d just said, and then a horrible realization filled her eyes as she understood the truth of it. “They passed judgement on my people... and some could not take it.”
I reached up to cup her face, knowing she was including herself in the latter. “Their souls have all been reborn as human children. In time, as they become adults, the memories of their prior incarnations will be opened to them, as their power returns to them. But they will not be the Eternals you knew. Those pasts... will be memories, not personalities. These are true reincarnations, not skipping lives. They are all new people who, in time, will remember being other people, but are not bound to them or their desires.
“They will remember you, but they will not be the people you knew.”
She stared at me, and if anything, her mind fractured even more. “This... this will happen to me, as well?” she asked hollowly.
I nodded slowly. “And if those in the Uni-Mind ever die, to them as well. They will all once again join the human race they looked down upon, and be a part of it, instead of apart from it.” I brought my head forwards to rest hers against mine, and despite herself she closed her eyes at the calm of my thoughts right there, resisting the rising, almost rabid emotions that were starting to tear at her, the accumulations of who knew how many millennia of life.
I had the full memories of le Fey, Karnilla, and Amora, and I had gone through and relived them all. All three women had met Sersi in the past, and naturally she had been old even then. She predated all of them by countless years, Karnilla the least, an Eternal wrought by the Celestials in mankind’s prehistory.
Despite that, the Celestials had not really mucked around with the minds of the Eternals that much. They had apex human minds, but humanity had not evolved to endure the weight of endless years. This was now what was crushing down on Sersi, facing all those endless years, of so many things happening over and over again, as they had before, and facing them alone...
That was a difference between us. Not only was I not made from a prehistoric human, the Asgardians WERE evolved to endure long years, with a sense of time and timelessness that let them brush off the weight of centuries without effort. They could face a coming feast with the newness and eagerness of not having participated in tens of thousands of such things, remember the deeds of yesteryears like yesterday, and rejoice in the deeds of comrades lost without such deaths weighing upon them, certain of greater truths beyond death.
It was a semi-welcome ability to have, especially after the crushing events around the Magus. Saying goodbye to a billion souls I had to kill had brought it to the fore, and such no longer weighed down on me like they had.
It was a Wisdom of long years, and the Charisma of me being myself and not defined by them. Sometimes, being smart meant being a whole lot more than smart.
“You do not want to be alone, and you do not want to die and lose yourself,” I said quietly, looking at her gently. “The stress is weighing upon you harshly, Sersi. I can feel it tearing at you. I would help you, if I could.”
“How?” she asked, her voice starting to crack. “How can you help me? You are not an Eternal! What can you do?”
“Well, at the moment, I am half of a certain Eternal.” I wiped away her tears as anger, sorrow, and laughter warred on her face. “Do you know how to initiate the Uni-Mind?” I asked calmly.
“The... Uni-Mind?” she asked, startled despite herself. “There is only us here! There is nowhere near the quorum needed for it to form!”
“There is you, and there is another half of you here,” I corrected her gently. “Come.” I closed my eyes and rested our foreheads together again.
She took a deep breath, shuddering, but instinctive control was what she did best. Particle effects began to swirl and touch, and reach out to me, touching the copy of her in my Aura.
Without much effort, I reached out, grasped her through the power that wanted to do exactly that to us but didn’t have the strength, and pulled her into the empty shadow of herself inside me.