As the doors opened, he was greeted with a room filled with things of interest. Interfaces, and weird objects. One that was in the middle was more interesting than the others. A strangely shaped thing of lines that went around each other and a black ball that traveled infinitely along the lines, making almost random decisions about where the ball might go next. Beneath it was a plaque, on which a name was engraved, "Lorenz," and nothing else.

Mostly around, there were many bookshelves, all filled with all kinds of books, and as Kanrel walked past, he could read their titles; it seemed that most of them were about chaos and things that were in relation to that. There is also a huge section of books that are about stars and things that are in space, like planets and such. There were many things Kanrel had never even heard about during his own studies. And he thought that he knew plenty about the skies.

He took one at random, one that was named "The Stars and the Gods We Saw There."

He read the first page of it: Before significant progress was made in the study of stars, we would find patterns in them, and we would call them constellations. One might see the shape of a bear in the sky and name it as such; in fact, before Kalma and his apotheosis, the people studied the skies, found the constellations, and gave them names; from there, they became gods we worshipped.

But there were so many of them in the darkness of the night, and we did not know how far they were or why they were there, but they gave us direction; one star could be used to navigate one's way towards the north, and it is said that the sailors of old used the stars for navigation as well.

But as time went by and those who were before us died away and we became the Sharan, it was inevitable that we would find our own gods; the heroes of old and the oral tradition of their great deeds would give birth to many as such. Many gods of war and hunt, of harvest and love, of anything that we could think of—those heroes replaced the gods that were above. Instead, those heroes became the constellations, as they were named after them.

And when Kalma, at last, came and conquered all that was below the heavens, they banned all other gods, for their magic was greater than all of the magic that was. He was the first to live long enough to become an immortal god.

Now long gone were the gods of the skies, and the constellations were no longer likened to the heroes that became gods. Now Kalma was the sun; he was the moon and he was the stars; he was war and he was peace; he was love and he was hatred; he was all that there was and that there is.

But who could deny him?

Luckily, this book isn’t about him; it is about the gods that were before, before the age of heroes, before we became the Sharan. This is a story about the constellations, the stars, and the gods who lived above us all.

Kanrel placed the book back where he had taken it; if he had time, perhaps he would have read through it. If he had time, he would be able to read through all of these many books that were here, to read all that there was to know about the stars, about history related to stars, about planets, whatever they were, and about the chaos that was apparently around us all.

He walked through the library, finding not a single other living being. The only other thing that moved here was the thing in the middle. The thing that was named Lorenz.

He returned to the elevator and waited for the doors to open. He was greeted with two faces—the same two that had entered the elevator earlier. He greeted them, but they gave him no regard. So he got in and pressed the button for the third floor.

In silence, he stood next to the other two as the elevator descended. Soon the doors opened, and the other two walked out to the first floor. As they left, they mentioned something about the Sharan of “Don’t Waste My Time With Useless Things.”

Kanrel could only assume that such things weren’t said about him but rather about the person on the third and final floor of the building. The doors closed once more, and the elevator began to ascend.

The last floor of the building was just another circular room, but one that had its whole ceiling made out of glass, and the room wasn’t much cleaner than the previous one. But at least there was another person here—one who kept looking into a massive thing that pierced the glass ceiling and was pointed toward the dark skies, toward the stars.

The thing that he saw was a massive telescope, a curious invention, one that would make an object that was far away so that you could see it as if that object were right before you and not perhaps hundreds of meters away. It is no wonder that an invention first invented for seafarers long ago was soon used to study the skies, the stars, and the many wonders that one could find there, but only when it was dark enough.

The person that looked through the telescope was a grand figure, one who was fully covered in scales, perhaps even beneath the clothes that they wore, and as they looked through the scope, they at times wrote notes on a piece of paper on a table not too far away from them. The table was filled with papers, books, and all kinds of things. These papers were filled with numbers; perhaps they were counting stars; perhaps they marked down the coordinates of the stars they saw; perhaps they just named them.

In a way, it was not difficult to assume who this person was. The Angel of Order and Chaos, the one who ruled the very same domain, and one who was so submerged with their own thoughts and interests that they barely noticed the world around them, for it had lost its interest to them. The stars held all that they wanted and ever desired. They were so stuck in the skies that they failed to see what had happened to the city they helped create. That they were supposed to rule over and defend.

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The person who was above Trav and the duty that they had was one who had no interest in them, not toward the Sharan, the people who worked below them, or even the city they called home. When was the last time they left this room? When had they ever needed to leave this room? Had they spent their time here ever since the telescope was built? Perhaps so…

Either way, Kanrel walked to them and demanded for them notice him, but their eyes remained at the telescope, and their vision was far from here. Even then, they still replied and spoke: “If you are here again, about things that don’t truly matter as much as you think they do, please leave; you can easily see that I am in the middle of something extremely important!” Their voice sounded annoyed—the voice of someone who was regularly asked for things they didn’t deem important.

“Are you to decide the things that are important and aren’t important?” Kanrel asked, with no other desire but to knock down the ego of a great being, or at least try to.

The angel chuckled brightly. “Yes, in fact, I know not many who would dare suggest otherwise... But I’ll allow this transgression of yours and humor your thoughts, ask away your questions, and I will give answers to them that either satisfy them or not."

“Well… First, your staff below needs more people; apparently, they are being actively worked to death. Second, this city of yours is a shithole ruined by corruption, and those who care do not do anything about it. Thirdly, for a creature who is so into order, you have somehow managed to give birth to a city in which chaos lives and for which that chaos is the only destiny it has.”

Kanrel scoffed. “But apparently it doesn’t even matter; the city will fall either way, and there is no point in talking to a creature that could have saved it but chose to look at the stars instead."

The angel was silent for a while, and soon they wrote some more notes before replying, “Firstly, I am aware, and sadly for it, there can be nothing done; people who are born today have far less magic than they had a thousand years ago; secondly, corruption is inevitable and belongs to the nature that we all have; if there is a possibility in which one of us has the possibility to gain more, and the only cost is one that is paid by others, then why would I not partake in such corruption?”

“Thirdly, I do not only love order, but I also love chaos; such are the domains we all rule; the Sharan of Love and Hate does not only desire love, but they desire hatred as well. One cannot exist without the other, and if it did, would this world be as interesting as it is?”

“You see, whomever you are to speak to me the way you have spoken to me, this chaos you see is just another possibility that has presented itself to us; perhaps there was more order before, at least order that we could observe... But the chaos that is now, too, has an order to it, just one that for us is less apparent."

“In fact, I believe that there is nothing random or chaotic about anything; it just seems so, for we are small and we know so little, that everything that happens to us and in the world, in the entire universe, just seems so random and chaotic to us."

"Perhaps if one could see it all in its entirety, they would find patterns within the randomness, and they could calculate how one thing led to another. You could call it destiny, but I call it a mathematical prophecy, one that fulfills itself based on the many variables that an object in space is affected by."

“And with those laws of physics that so dearly affect it and us all, all we then need is time, another dimension of sorts, for things to happen. If there were no time, nothing would happen, or so I believe, thus time, too, must just be another law that governs this reality that we inhabit.”

“But again, if you’d see what I have seen, what I have imagined, and what I have thought, then you too could see how there are an infinite amount of possibilities that could happen, but only one of them does happen, for that just happened to be the most likely mathematical possibility.”

“All things in space are governed by this, but perhaps there is only one thing that, in a way, goes past, and it is people, us, and the decisions we make. Could this great equation, this mathematical prophecy, take us into account as well? Or are the things we decide to do far too complicated, far too random, for it to take account of?”

“But then again, the decisions we make and the actions that follow them—isn't there a pattern as well? There must be, are we not creatures that have fairly simple desires that govern our needs and thus our decisions?”

"Then, perhaps, we too are stuck within this equation that we can’t break away from. Perhaps we have to accept that the things we do and have done could only happen because the equation willed them to become so, and all that in the very first moment of creation. The birth of the universe and whatever or whoever decided to give birth to it, or if the equation willed itself to become a reality so that there could be this prophecy for it to fulfill and for us to live through.”

"Oh, how magnificent is this world we inhabit? I wish that there would be a day when we could travel to the stars to see them for ourselves and perhaps touch them. Imagine that, us, touching gods?”

The angel chuckled. “How beautiful would that be?”

Kanrel was left speechless. The impassioned speech of an angel and all of their thoughts gave him much to think about but still made him more furious than he was before.

“So you just don’t care?” He asked.

The angel chuckled once more. “It is not that I don’t care; it is that I don’t mind the reality that is to come." At last, the angel left the telescope and faced the puny creature that stood behind them.

Their face was that of a creature that had seen further than most, their eyes deep and gray, their gaze curious and never judgemental, one more aloof than anything else. "This, too, was known. All of this, everything that was to come, all the mistakes we had made and were to make along the way—all of it would lead here. We knew that it would end the way it would; we were just powerless to stop that which was already known.

They got up from their chair, perhaps to look down upon Kanrel, perhaps to show him what they were in all of their glory—golden, beautiful, and more powerful than anything that Kanrel could imagine.

“We tried; we all tried.” They spoke, “And one by one, each of us gave up. Each of us chose to spend the little time there was to indulge in the things that we enjoyed, and was there anything wrong with that? If war is inevitable, and if that is what the equation has decided, then why deny it? Why not embrace the end that was designed for this city?”

“If only you could see what was shown to us, what the Sharan of Time had seen, what they shared with us." They smiled, and sadness was present there, a sad smile that had accepted how things would go. “I had dreamed of greatness for this city; I had dreamed that together we could reach the stars... But it was not meant to be." They waved their hands. “Leave… Bother someone else, bother one of the others; perhaps Time could show you..."

And one by one, everything that was around disappeared. It began slowly, but soon things dispersed rapidly: first papers, then whole sections of the wall, the floor, the ceiling, the telescope, and at last, the Angel that stood before, one who held their saddened smile until the end, until they, too, dispersed into nothingness.

Now it was just dark.