The light travelled through the universe, and through the light the wizard was connected to all things. The Universal Wizard, they called him. His actual name was long forgotten. In truth there was no magic to what he did. His connection to the Universal Light came from an ancient technology, its workings so unknown they may as well be magic.
Light touched everything in the universe. It was everything. All that could be perceived was carried upon the Universal Light. The hope and despair of all that lived in the universe. The birth and death of stars and planets across countless galaxies. The rise and fall of even more countless civilisations. These events were all the wizard’s to witness; to take joy in the good and to despair in the bad.
Such it was that the wizard felt a sudden, violent loss, carried to him on the light. It wasn’t the slow, spiralling downfall of a civilisation. The wizard was used to that feeling. The echoes of that were like a slowly dying flame, reaching desperately for anything to burn for just one more moment. There was no violence in those deaths, only despair mixed with faint echoes of desperate hope.
But this new loss could only be described as violent. Like a rending of limbs; a punch to the gut; a tearing of being. The wizard had felt the violent deaths of stars as they exploded into supernovas. He’d felt planets rupturing as their orbits intersected with comets. But rather than carrying this pain, this violence, it seemed to the wizard the Universal Light was feeling it.
Like the universe itself had faced a sundering.
The wizard turned his concentration to the flow of the Universal Light. He felt it wrapping around him and, as he opened himself up to it, into him. Through the Universal Light, the wizard became, if only briefly, part of the universe itself. He shaped the light into a doorway and stepped through it. Anywhere the light reached, the wizard could be.
The wizard’s journey took only an instant, but through it he witnessed eternities. Beams of light stretched around him, as old as the universe itself. Galaxies formed around him, swirling in complex dances around each other. They collided in fantastic explosions of colours, scattering stars and forming brand new galaxies. The wizard stepped into one such galaxy and watched as nebulae formed around him. Swirling neon shades of gas twisted and contorted, eventually forming stars and planets. Black holes drifted by; the only spots the wizard was truly blind to. These heavenly objects performed their own complex dance on a smaller scale to the galaxies, but no less grand. Stars exploded and planets died, only for new ones to eventually form from their remains. The wizard stepped out into space around one of these planets.
Below the wizard was a planet in distress, its death throes carried to him by the Universal Light. The colours exploding on its surface were cries for help. The glowing light of its atmosphere was a desperate attempt to hold onto its last breath of life. Great spikes of stone and dirt erupted from its surface as its body struggled under the strain of the attack. The wizard relaxed his connection to the light. The violence was almost all he could feel around him, being this close to the event.
The wizard drifted through space, riding the light to the other side of the planet. The pain of the Universal Light grew stronger and stronger, until he saw the hole in the universe hanging over the planet. Light stretched from the planet, spiralling up towards the hole, flowing out of the universe and into another reality.
The wizard moved closer to the hole, following the light upwards. It was another universe; it was the same universe. But this universe was barren, devoid of life and its hopes and despairs. No, the wizard realised, it wasn’t life he couldn’t sense. It was the Universal Light of this universe that he couldn’t feel. If it even existed at all. All he could sense were the parts touched by the light of his own universe.
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What the wizard could sense through his connection was alien, yet familiar. It was an overwhelming feeling, a need common to all life. Hunger. But, not for sustenance. More like a desire to know. A hunger for knowledge. The wizard felt the Universal Light being drawn towards this hunger. And so, following the light, the wizard delved deeper into this barren universe.
“I have awaited you, wizard,” echoed a voice through the cosmos. “This universe has nothing left for me, and your light is so delectable.”
The wizard approached a barren planet as the voice spoke. Floating in the skies above it, a creature came into sight. A grand serpentine being of light and flesh. It glowed and grew as the Universal Light flowed into its body. Fantastic tendrils sprouted from its body, dragging it through space towards the wizard.
“You talk as if you know me,” spoke the wizard as he came to a stop before the worm.
“Of course I do, for I am space, and I am time,” the worm answered. “I am witness to all that ever could be, and thus I know your light is to be mine.”
With nothing more than its words for warning, the Worm of Space and Time lashed out at the Universal Wizard. The worm’s massive tendrils slammed into the wizard, grabbing him. He could feel them draining the light from him, empowering the worm further.
The wizard stepped back into the light, travelling eternities to escape the worm’s grip before emerging back into the alien universe. He fashioned the Universal Light into a weapon, flinging lances at the worm and directing searing, bright beams. Yet the Worm of Space and Time simply fed on the wizard’s attacks as it had the rest of the light.
The worm came for the wizard again, and the wizard retreated backwards along the light. The light, usually the wizard’s strength, was becoming a weakness. He couldn’t leave the small patch that existed in this universe, or he’d be disconnected and truly powerless. Yet there wasn’t enough for him to manoeuvre against the worm.
The worm’s tendrils undulated violently as it drifted ever closer. The light it had absorbed left trails of colours in its wake. The tendrils slammed into the wizard, knocking him aside and sending him spiralling towards the edge of where he could sense the light. Just in time, he stepped through it and back to safety, only to find the worm ready with another attack, charging at him with its maw wide open, feeding on the light that made up the wizard’s safety net.
The wizard closed his eyes and opened his senses wider, feeling outwards for any fragments of the Universal Light he could make use of. He followed the flow of the light in all directions as he reached with his mind, the worm approaching ever faster.
Then the Universal Wizard felt a pocket of the Universal Light, burning brighter than anything else within this barren universe. The wizard opened his eyes, his senses still attuned to the light. Before him, the worm glowed in brilliant, vibrant colours. It shined strongly with the light it had fed on. It coursed through the Worm of Space and Time, as much a part of it now as it was the rest of the wizard’s universe.
And anything that was of the Universal Light was the wizard’s to control.
The wizard stepped into the Universal Light, and into the light of the worm. He felt it flow around him, through him, as he attuned himself to it. He seized the light of the worm and flung it in all directions, scattering it into the barren universe the Worm of Space and Time called home.
Around the wizard, the worm’s body was ripped apart as its light was scattered. Its tendrils broke free in brilliant sparks, becoming beams of luminescence flung into the universe. The wizard stepped out of the worm, back into the Universal Light. He saw the eternities of galaxies forming as he travelled. He stepped back into the worm’s universe, and watched as it exploded in a brilliant, radiant wave.
As the explosion faded, the wizard entered the Universal Light and returned to his own universe. From the light, the wizard felt the hole in reality close behind him, no longer being sustained by the Worm of Space and Time. He opened himself up, basking in hope, despair, life and death. Only an echo of the pain felt by the universe survived upon the Universal Light.