Thinking is overrated. What was there to think about anyway. On one side you have death, as a sixteen year old virgin, and on the other you have life. Sure, there is pain too, and a trial, but life. Rafe had never been good at tests, but maybe he could cheat off someone. Maybe they could heal him before the test too.

He didn't have enough time to come up with expectations, but the fact that his pain seemed to vanish into thin air was a wonderful result. His vision was no longer impaired, yet he had no idea what he was seeing.

There was a man, a boy really, a bit younger than his sixteen years even, broken beyond repair. The boy was covered in blood, his own and an enemy's. An enemy whom he'd left behind him dead and cut to pieces.

Death stocked the boy who had fought what looked like a giant rat. Rafe watched something separate itself from the beast, something that seemed both spiritual and physical. How he knew it was spiritual, he couldn't tell.

All he knew was that it oozed out among the beast's blood, but there was an ethereal quality to it that he would never have confused with blood. It oozed toward the crawling boy. All but one of the boy's limbs were the wrong angle, but he still had the desire to survive, to live.

When the ooze made contact with him, he screamed. Then the scene in front of him changed, and instead there were two boys. It took him a second to recognize the second figure, with it's head caved in on one side,like it had been halved, a bit of brain matter leaking. Blood flowed over it, like a rug being wrung, his poor body.

Rafe Kingsley gulped. His clothes had been cut up by something, and…it was sickening. His poor ‘beautiful’ face, his painstakingly developed physique. He was almost dead. But then the ethereal ooze made contact with his body, and then they screamed in tandem.

All his pains came back, but it almost seemed like he'd miraculously received an increased pain capacity, or at least an increased perception of it. He could feel it all, and so much more. He could feel every little break in the smallest bone, every painful twitch in the smallest muscle, the blood and sweat flowing on his skin. He could feel his cracked skull, he could feel his brain going into shock even though he knew he had somehow survived death.

He knew his brain was shutting down, and maybe that was why he paid so much attention to the visions playing out in front of him. Impossible visions. Visions of dreams, of fantasy, magic, realms unimaginable.

The first was of a familiar young man, now a few years older. He held a sword in his hands, and he swung it with the most beautiful form, but it was the colour he shorn, the light he gave off that was his true power.

It was magic, violent light. His brown hair shorn a vibrant stellar silver, and his eyes twinkled like a night sky. His skin looked like that of a sun, and when he ran towards his enemy the ground cracked.

The first Skyholm, the first guardian, aspect of the transcendent light, the sword, the lost weapon, and four others. But his path had been mostly built on an innate ability he'd been born with. A curse in some ways, but a blessing in so many more.

In the scene he saw, the boy fought a man who was definitely stronger than him, older. Still, he made the first move, a streak of light attacking a staff wielding juggernaut. The weapons clashed, and the boy was thrown back, but so too was the older man.

The older man smirked, perhaps trying to save face, then covered his body in a layer of electricity as he attempted to take the boy down. He might have been weaker, but Rafe couldn't make sense of his battle instincts. They clashed for a few minutes, too fast for Rafe to follow, but then he could almost follow them for a few seconds.

The staff wielder feinted right, making the boy dodge toward the left where his fist waited with a coating of electricity. It was a very good feint, but the boy, the first Skyholm, bent his body impossibly without even seeing what was coming, the fist only taking a piece of his robe. The staff made a comeback immediately on his right, but the boy was already jumping into close range with what looked like electricity on his own fist, albeit it was weaker than the man's.

It connected, and didn't do much, but it enraged the man. And the few seconds he was able to follow flowed like that. It almost seemed like the boy was trying to close his eyes even, like his eyes were getting in the way. And that electricity, Rafe thought, the weaker one the boy was wielding. It was from his aspect of the lost weapon, the ooze that had bound his soul.

He did not know how he knew these things, or even what an aspect was.

Seeing another scene begin before his eyes had him sighing in relief, although he didn't know why.

The second Skyholm. The best thief the universe ever saw. A lowly adventurer on her world early on, only joining a few parties because she had a rare storage ability. Her affinity with shadows was so high. High enough that she was able to combine her soul with her shadow, and with her storage ability to build an inner world. That was what led him to her, the universe's best soul architect. He had gotten curious after hearing of her daring, daring to risk potential soul damage to create something special. According to the information he had, even after her death, her personal shadow verse should still exist.

In the scene he saw, the woman tried to escape from a world sized city. The building she was in was apparently the central palace. Trapped she was, surrounded, cornered, in a building of violet sand crystals that must have absorbed light during the day so they could shine perpetually through the night. There were lots of shadows, but there was much more light. And it seemed they were expecting her.

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She sighed and grabbed two tiny knives from sheathes hidden somewhere on her body. A golden armoured man stepped forward from among the men surrounding her little nook.

She smiled seductively, her black hair neatly knotted behind her head. The trash talk was blocked out, although Rafe wasn't sure by whom, or why. When the two combatants met, it was obvious the man was stronger. But the smile never left the woman's face, even when a wickedly sharp gladius came for her neck after not even thirty seconds of battle.

He cut her down. And as the blood flew into the air, it turned dark, and the falling corpse turned black too. They all turned into shadows.

“A shadow clone? But… she wasn't robbing the central palace then?” the leader asked no one in particular.

“But, the information said she was going to steal the most important thing in our possession. What could she…?”

And Rafe watched the minute the man realized something. He had only turned to shout instructions when the alarms started to blare.

And then a giant shadow appeared at the closest window. The window the shadow clone had been retreating to since she had been first sighted. The remnants of the shadow clone withdrew into the shadow cloud. Then a small window towards it's top opened and out came what looked like the giant barrel of a gun.

It shone a violent gold, it burned, even from Rafe's perspective as an observer. And all this had taken the fraction of a second in which the gold armoured man would have spoken. The beam of cosmic power struck behind the man, and men and pillars fell.

A laugh sounded out from the shadows.

“Endrick you fool. What is more important to a kingdom than it's king? I am the greatest thief, I always steal what I say I will. Destroying your ugly ass palace will just be a bonus. An impregnable fortress?” she scoffed.

And then multiple windows opened, and the shadow cloud swelled. There were blasters, and there were oddly shaped tools and even simple cloth and paper with odd symbols shining with power. And they fell upon the palace, and destroyed it and everyone and everything in it with not even a speck of dust left to see.

“Oops! Maybe I went a bit overboard. Destroying half the planet was not part of the contract… Ah, well, at least I have learnt that mixing too many destructive talismans and blasters and exploding natural treasures like this is not advisable for small scale jobs, for wide spread destruction however…” and she laughed.

And the scene shifted again.

The third skyholm. Humanoid, but taller still, and winged. An angel. No, not quite. His wings were different, special. They were not physical.

Sure, the queen of shadows had a lot of her face hidden in her shadows, and her dark hair normally covered up what was left, but Rafe was reasonably sure she was a human woman.

This taller man though, he had wings. Ethereal wings, not made of feather or chitin or anything Rafe had ever heard of. The people Rafe saw in the background seemed to have wings of fire, or lightning, or ice, though Skyholm’s were different.

At the time when the rest of the guardians became most active, the third Skyholm tried to unite the others in keeping peace in the multiverse.

Too bad his own planet was in the middle of a racial war. One in which the other guardians seemed intent on meddling.

And so at one meeting of the multiverse peak, Skyholm complained.

“This iteration of the war has taken much longer than it was supposed to. If it goes on much longer, one of the tribes shall be extinct.”

“And what do you expect from us then, Skyholm?”

“Stop meddling. People of our power should not mess with the lives of mortals.”

“But yours is an interesting world. A truly powerful people. Born stronger than most, with even more elemental focus than the elemids. You truly deserve to be the first recognized divine race. Skyholm did well finding you. Maybe we can find a rare young one too, with a variant element to pass our mantles onto.”

“Ah, so that is what this is about. You fear Skyholm for passing down our mantle. There is no secret, you know. We do not intend to force you to pass your mantles along if you do not want to, nor can we force you.”

Skyholm surveyed the others arrayed before him. All Rafe could see though, when he surveyed the other six, were colours, just like he'd seen when he first stared at Skyholm’s wings. They weren't buying whatever he was selling.

“Indeed, the fact that a mantle is able to change hands is surprising. It might lead to instability. If this information got out,” a female voice said.

“Indeed,” another also commented. “It is in all our interests that Skyholm either vows to never pass on the mantle, or, failing that…” the man shrugged, but his implication was clear.

Skyholm snorted. “You selfish bastards. I always thought my rise to this mantle was easier, smoother than any of the others. Maybe putting you old coots in line was always meant to be my biggest contribution to the universe. Even gods need rules.”

And in a burst of transcendent aura that hurt Rafe to look at, a battle broke out. Six against one, and with every fist thrown, every breath of fire, every clash of words of power, worlds were razed. But Skyholm faced off against six of the then universe's strongest, and he wasn't immediately crushed, or ever.

A giant storm of fire hurtled to him, the breath of a dragon, and Skyholm danced with it, bending it around his body and sending it hurtling into one of the caster's allies. He was attacked a thousand times, yet they couldn't seem to touch him, and when he finally attacked back.

In the end, he tried to limit the destruction to the empty neutral galaxy they'd held the meeting in. A feat worthy of praise, because when only two guardians fought, the star maps had to be rewritten. Only one galaxy died that day, and Skyholm escaped heavily injured, but the other six were inactive for decades after the fact.

And when one by one, he took the fight to their domains, there was no fight. He bullied the universe into a peace treaty.