I found myself in a black void. No floor. No stars. Nothing in the distance at all. With an odd sense of detachment, I lifted my hand to make sure it was still there and was shocked to realize that I was dreaming—because it was the hand I remembered before my transformation from a year ago. In my dreams, I rarely had the black skin that was slowly spreading over me, as if I refused to internalize the transformation.

I was further surprised when I didn’t wake up. That’s usually the switch that wakes me up; when I realize I’m dreaming. Instead, a growing sense of dread overcame me as I floated in the endless black.

Wait, if everything is black, how the fuck did I see my hand? My eyes can see in the dark, but they still need some light—

My thoughts were interrupted by a wave of sound that sounded like a cough rocked all of creation. The coughing continued for several seconds, forcing me to curl into a ball with my hands clamped on my ears in a futile attempt to avoid the pressure. Eventually, the coughing died out, followed by someone clearing their throat.

“Is this working?” A titanic voice said, the vibrations making my chest hurt. “I swear if you still can’t understand me, I’m just going to kill you and the Orphan can suck my dick for all I care.”

Even knowing this was a dream, I was terrified. That voice was just so massive, that it pinged some sort of primitive survival instinct that made it nearly impossible not to cower. With a massive effort of willpower, I pried open an eye and did a double-take.

I was looking down at myself. I mean, the being that suddenly appeared in this endless black was me, only scaled up to be impossibly big. There was nothing near him so it was impossible for me to gauge just how big, but I was floating at an area near his throat and his eyes were still so high I had to crane my neck to look at them. Giant-me was wearing a tailored three-piece suit, all black save for a vest which was red and oddly wet looking, like blood. My normally shaggy hair was styled to frame his/my face attractively. He also sported a goatee, which was fitting if this was some mirror-universe evil version of me.

But the thing that really caught my attention was that his skin, eyes, teeth—everything was a familiar inky black. So black that I really should have trouble seeing him, even with my improved eyes.

“Well?” The giant voice crashed over me again, forcing my eyes shut in fear. “Can you understand me?”

I nodded shakily. “Hurts,” I forced myself to say.

“Hmm?” Other-me said thoughtfully.

I felt something about the universe change, a weird sense of inner-ear tickling, vertigo-induced nausea washing through my body before it settled out. I found myself on a surface. Something about being on the ground—er—grounded me, and allowed me to corral my fear.

“How about now?” A much reduced, but still incredibly powerful voice said from behind me.

I forced myself not to shudder and slowly climbed back to my feet, turning to find… a living room? It was like a set from a TV set for a show about a well-to-do upper-crust American family. I say set, because at my feet the carpet for the room started and turned into the room, with a cozy fireplace, bookshelves, and high vaulted ceiling with skylights… and behind me, there was just black.

In front of the fireplace were two large, leather chairs with a coffee table between them. In the chair on the right, I saw the back of my doppelganger's head. He turned and regarded me with an annoyed glance. “Well?” He prompted, gesturing at the chair irritably.

I cautiously approached and took a seat opposite him. We weren’t directly facing each other. The chairs were arranged to have the fireplace be the focus of the arrangement, but were angled so conversation would be natural.

Relief showed on the other me's face as I sat down. “Thank fuck,” he muttered. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for months.”

I frowned at his words. The only thing I could think of was the nightmares I’d been having. “My nightmares?”

Other-me nodded. “I had to keep dumbing myself down,” he said offhandedly. “No offense to you, but it’s been close to a hundred thousand years since I’ve had to communicate with anything as complicated as language.”

I frowned at the contradiction. “You had to dumb down to be more complicated?”

Other-me grinned, his smile stretching his face slightly too wide to be human. “You’ll get it if you ever become powerful enough,” he said with amusement. “All these steps you have to go through to get what you want when you’re born in a meat suit are just complications the universe has built up around us to keep us from the truth. Eating, sleeping, clothing, hot, cold, technology, magic—they are all just the fetters to convince you that you know the truth when the truth is so far out of your grasp you can’t even see the edges of it.”

“...And what is the truth?” I asked.

The grin became wider still, turning my face into something horrifying. “We are all just as powerful—and weak—as we want to be.”

His face returned to normal and he dismissively waved his hand, brushing away the topic. “But I’m not here to enlighten you on how to become a god,” he said. “You’ll either figure it out or you won’t. Most don’t. No, today we need to talk about the Distiller.”

“What?” My nightmares had started long before I knew my brother was missing. Hell, they had started before he had gone missing. “Did you know my brother was going to be kidnapped?!”

Other-me snorted. “No,” he said. “I merely started to contact you because you were driving me up the wall with your ineptitude and I thought I’d drop some hints and tips into your subconscious to speed the process along. No, I started to put in effort when you figured out the Distiller cult bullshit, as the light touch wasn’t doing shit,” he frowned severely at me. “You are unusually dense.”

“Why do you care about the Distiller?” I asked, ignoring the insult. I mean, he isn’t wrong.

“He’s a fuckface,” other-me said with surprising heat. “Why become a god if all you’re going to do is unmake everything? What’s the point? Where’s the fun? I mean, we all have our ‘raze everything and salt the earth’ phase, but CHRIST man.”

Other me pinched the bridge of his nose before pinning me with his black stare. “Aside from our philosophical differences, he’s a shitty neighbor and has been trying to take what’s mine. I keep kicking him out, but now he’s trying to find a back door into my house.”

“My universe,” I guessed.

He pointed a finger gun at me and “fired.” “Bingo,” he said, leaning into the back of his chair. “The funny thing is that he’s not even directing these little underlings. The powers they get by worshiping him are a mistake he hasn’t bothered to correct. In fact, I’d bet my left testicle that if he knew they were benefiting from worshiping him he’d take steps to correct that.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“So,” he continued, gesturing at me with one hand. “We have you. I need you to stop faffing about and kill all his worshipers in your universe so I don’t have to worry about him on two fronts.”

“Are you issuing a holy pogrom?” I joked.

“You aren’t one of mine, and it’d be weird if you were,” he said dismissively, which was NOT the reaction I was expecting. "So no holy war for you."

“Oh yeah, hey, while I got you here,” I said with forced levity. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU?”

“You already know, kid,” other-me said with the same dismissive air. “Or at least suspect. What do you call that presence in the back of your mind?”

“My silent passenger,” I muttered. “Which, I guess, isn’t fitting anymore.”

“Suppose not,” other-me said.

“But what ARE you?” I pressed. “Why are we talking right now? How come when I interact with you when I’m awake, I’m suddenly better with magic? And my magic gets WEIRDER?”

Other-me glanced at his watch before debating silently for a few seconds, eventually shrugging. “We don’t have a ton of time, so I’ll give you something to gnaw on until we can talk again,” he said, adjusting his suit.

“I’m… you,” he said, pausing long enough before continuing, making me think he was going to leave it at that. “From a higher universe. We share a lot of commonalities. Same parents, siblings, birthplace and time. Only my universe is way older, and unlike most versions of us, I figured out the Big Truth and ascended beyond the fetters of mortality and, because I owed the Orphan a favor, you are now the owner of a shitty, low-res and twice copied version of me.”

I stared, my incredulous gaze slowly shifting into a look that blended horror with disbelief. I remembered, quite vividly, the multiple times this self-admitted lesser copy of a god had attempted to speak to me.

“Why?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

Other-me shrugged. “The Orphan isn’t super talkative, as you well know. The only thing I know about them after being around for a couple of million years is that they love to get new shinies and will occasionally throw a machine gun into a monkey enclosure to see what happens.”

“Why this particular monkey? Or this particular machine gun?” I asked.

Other-me threw up his hands. “What do you want me to say, kid? I don’t know. All I know was that I was sitting in the Orphan’s back pocket for a couple of eons and then all of a sudden I’m crammed into the head of a dude who pissed off the Doorman. The Orphan has access to millions or trillions of ways for you to get out of that particular situation, but instead in threw a copy of a version of yourself where you grew up to be Kroger Brand Cthulhu. Instead of calling the mom of your bully to get him off you, he handed you the codes to a nuke and told you to sort it out yourself.”

“You have in no way been as effective as a nuke,” I said with some heat.

He inclined his head and gestured with his hand as if to say “You got me there.” “True, but whenever I try to help, you become as skittish as a virgin in a whore house. Granted, it’s wise to be cautious of an unfamiliar entity taking residence within your mind that you were forced to accept in life-threatening circumstances, but the point stands.”

Other-me waved his hands as if dispelling smoke. “But enough of that, you’re going to wake up soon and we need to cover some gaping holes in your capabilities before you get yourself killed. To that end: Why the fuck aren’t you using your fire?”

The sudden topic change caught me unprepared and it took me a second to change gears. “Uh, because it’s basically a fancy Bic at this point? I wasn’t able to fulfill the contract and the effect of the—the “power,” for lack of a better term, has diminished to the point of a fire starter. Even the tangential ability to see how flammable things are faded to the point of uselessness.”

Other-me nodded along while I talked, fingers laced under his chin, giving me his full attention. When I finished, he continued to regard me silently for a few tense moments.

“Do you know why you trade souls for power?” He asked.

Again, the sudden change in topic caught me up short.

“I don’t mean why you, philosophically, exchange souls for power,” he elaborated. “I mean to say, why are they necessary? Why souls? What are they used for?”

Was… this a trick question? Was I actually supposed to answer? “There’s been debate—“

“These are rhetorical questions,” Other-me interrupted, and I closed my mouth with a click of my teeth. “I’m about to drop some truth on you, kid, so pull out your notebook and listen diligently.”

Other-me stood and began pacing in front of the fire, adopting a speechifying professor's presence. “Souls traded to devils, demons, beings of other worlds and planes, are fiber-wire.”

I blinked.

“Or perhaps copper wire would be a better metaphor, as I don’t think fiber optics can supply power, just light. Hmm,” Professor Me paused in his pacing as he got lost in thought.

“Well, whatever,” he suddenly said with a shrug. “Souls aren’t traded between universes because they are valuable,” he said, stopping in front of me and pinning me with his black gaze. “They are valuable because they can be traded.

“Only souls can carry information and power between universes without expending HUGE amounts of energy. Remember the gate Mr. Love made for the Doorman? Remember all the blood, all the sacrifices that coated those steps? Imagine all the power that had been gathered… all for one, brief doorway.

“Which brings us back to you; you traded two souls but you needed four. But here’s the thing: the connection’s been made. You have the power. You killed a guy a million times with it. The only thing that’s changed is the bandwidth for the power has atrophied, unable to maintain itself on the shaky foundation of two souls.”

Professor me paused and leaned forward.

“But the power is still there.”

He straightened and mimed rearranging something with his hands. “Since the connection to Axtrixxinizinia has withered, we’ll just have to make some adjustments so you can manipulate the ability yourself. Supply your own power, so to speak. It’ll lose some utility, but who cares?! You aren’t using it anyway as it is.”

I listened to all of this with a frown on my face. “Won’t changing the… connection, to Trix, alter the power?”

“Nah,” other me said with frustrating nonchalance. “You already know. You have it. That can’t be taken away. Well, it can, but that usually involves cranial trauma. Listen, it’s like this: What fuels your future sight?”

Instead of making a guess, I just shrugged.

Other-me chuckled. “There’s a trickle of magic being fed to you constantly, along the line you paved with souls you traded to Axtrixxinizinia. Now with the fire power, because you needed a bigger stick to solve your little pirate problem, she altered the deal between you so that the normal, steady if reduced power you’d receive from just two souls was instead the maximum amount she could shove at you without severing the connection completely, which damaged said connection.

“But the first thing that happened was she sent you an instinctual knowledge of how to create and harness fire with your mind. Part of the pain that came with accepting the incomplete contract was her shoving that knowledge into a human mind that wasn’t quite ready for it.”

Suddenly my negotiations with Trix were taking on a new light. Stipulations she had adamantly enforced no matter what tactic I used I now suspected were in place because the deal couldn’t work without them.

“So what do I do?” I asked. As the words left my mouth, I felt a shift in the universe.

Other me sighed in contentment. “Already done, boy-oh. We’re nestled deep in your subconscious, so as soon as you decided to accept my help, I was able to make the change.”

Boy, did I hate that.

“Oh, don’t make that face,” other me said as he sat back down. “It was either that or nothing. We’re almost out of time.”

I grew mildly alarmed. “Can you tell what’s happening outside?”

“Nope,” he said happily. “Just that if we talk for much longer your brain will melt like ice cream left on the dash.”

“WHAT?!”

“I may be a shitty copy, but I’m still a shitty copy of a nearly infinite expanse of power and knowledge that you’d need the magical equivalent of Fort Knox just to be able to exist next to my boot print,” other me explained with some satisfaction. “The fact that the Orphan snuck me inside your head without killing you is a big clue as to why no one fucks with the thing.”

I shot to my feet and renewed my efforts to wake up.

“One last thing before I let you go,” other me said as he rose from the seat and stood in front of me. I had to fight not to cringe away from him. He had a presence like gravity, but sinister. It made my skin crawl. “You won’t be able to set things on fire from far away. Or you will, but it’ll be extremely tiring and make you all but useless. But you do have something that gives you range.”

I frowned in thought. “My magic? Telekinesis?”

“Bingo!” Other me said happily, his smile stretching too wide again.

“So… I should, what, funnel the fire towards what I’m fighting? Like a hose?” I asked.

Other me cuffed me upside the head. It hurt quite a bit.

“No, you fucking dense idiot,” Other me said with exasperation. “Combine them!”

“What?”

But my question went unanswered as the dream started to fade.