Ar'Kendrithyst

There was one thing Erick had forgotten to do when he made Wizard’s Clarity, but he did that now, because now he fully realized why he had not gained Divinity back there. Yggdrasil wasn’t back there at Abarial, and according to all the rules of Fractal Godhood, he should have been Cursed with Power.

But he hadn’t been.

And now, Erick knew why.

With a twist of power, Erick broke the [Telepathy] crystal inside of himself, taking out the Fractal Mark within, and joined that with his new Wizard’s Clarity. The Fractal Mark became one with his hiding-based magic, and Erick Established that it had always been that way. Where better to hide than in Infinity? There was no other place better—

Power melded with power. A fractal gift became one with a glowing corona, and light shattered in every direction, revealing paths through the nothing. Erick became the center of a shifting kaleidoscope of Infinity—

The Fractal Fairy stepped out of the Nothing, and onto Erick’s floating white stone in the middle of his Authority.

They looked the same as before; dense glittercrystal in the shape of a person, each of those glitters a universe unto themselves. Erick hadn’t seen it back then, but he certainly saw it now. He felt it, too. The Fractal Fairy was a weight upon reality that was unlike anything Erick had ever felt, except maybe when he was a tiny human, looking up at Melemizargo, before he knew Melemizargo as a friend.

The stress of having Them here was like he was holding up a world, but Erick was strong enough to hold up a world, now. Maybe even a few worlds.

Erick simply said, “Greetings.”

They held out a stack of papers in one hand, and though Their voice was a terrible, powerful thing, Erick withstood it as They said, “Your duties to battle corruption in whatever ways you see fit.” In Their other hand, They held a glittering diamond that was not a diamond at all, but instead an ever-inward-tumbling fractal of True Power. “A gift of guidance that is usable multiple times.” They gained a second and third arm on that same side of their body, and each hand of those arms grabbed at the fractal diamond and pulled another diamond out of that first one. Three arms became ten arms, which became ten diamonds, and then all of those arms folded into one, and all ten diamonds became one again, having never lost or gained anything in the transaction. “It is like the Mark I gave the previous Incarnation of the Dark before that Sundering business. He ended up using it to make the Mind Mages of Veird. They’re doing well on Margleknot, so you know. They did not choose to Join Together As One, but that is a normal enough choice.”

Erick was stunned for a few reasons. First, he experienced the presence of the Fractal Fairy without convulsing or falling over, even though that is what the entire realm around him tried to do. Erick grounded his realm, though, and it remained strong. And then there were the ‘gifts’ of more work, and a gift that kept on giving. Erick had no idea what to make of those—

And then the Fractal Fairy said, “Feel free to experiment more with your own Fractal Mark; you seem to be a good carrier of my power. I look forward to your cultivation of Life into a Fae existence! That is all!”

And then They left, vanishing from sight, though the papers and the fractal diamond remained; hovering.

… Erick had wanted to ask some questions.

A lot of questions.

In the smallest of ways, but also in a pretty big way, Erick wanted to make sure what he was seeing down there on Abarial was what was really happening; if Erick killing the monsters all in those specific slices of infinity really did clear up the infections that spread throughout all the other slices of infinity, and what it meant to start doing this sort of stuff for Margleknot… Or rather for the Fractal? Not really for Margleknot at all. But then he read the papers, hovering in the air, and the primer in the front of the paper packet that explained that each paper held 1 different infection that needed killing, and that to kill and cleanse that infection was to cleanse that entire small part of those Layers of problems in those specific areas.

And also, the only reason that corruption existed at all was because the Fractal Universe itself turned true problems that would end the universe into monsters that could be fought at all. The Fractal reimagined the danger into something manageable. The Fractal was already doing half the work; They needed someone else to do the real work, and that person was Erick right now.

“Well that’s an interesting mind fuck,” Erick said, as he picked up the papers and looked over his… 11 targets? “That’s all? 11 targets? Very doable.” Erick picked up the diamond next—

The diamond vanished into the air in his grip, disappearing entirely. The trinket had even vanished from the history of the space, and as Erick looked into the future a little, the diamond was still gone… But that wasn’t quite true.

… It was still there, somehow? Erick narrowed his eyes at the space where the diamond had been, and then twisted his hand a little—

The diamond fell into his hand while he was concentrating on it, but when his concentration wavered the fractal gem vanished again. Erick pulled the object in and out of Elsewhere a few times, just to be sure that he could do that without repercussions, and then he held the diamond in his hand and pulled another diamond out of the dense fractal gem. And then he had a second one that vanished or came back as Erick concentrated on the thing.

Erick made a few more of them, and then he packed them all away back into one diamond… And then he decided he wanted two of them, just in case something should happen to the first one, so Erick made two of them, and let both vanish into Elsewhere.

“Neat!”

Erick smiled, and then he looked at his paperwork. Flipping to the first of his issues…

“Let’s see…”

Anomaly #FLATT-1, named after the first assigned problem given to entity designation FLATT, located on Layer 578,927,221, this one requires complete anonymity to solve, but since you are new at this, we will forgive the transgressions of being seen. Try not to make a habit of it, though. You possess capabilities we do not often find, and thus we will keep your assignment list short. Your Valkyries are doing the bulk of the cleanup work, far, far outside of your view. If you wish to view that operation, then return to Margleknot and speak to the Fae Enclave.

You will need to return to them to get a better communication device, but you can do so without alerting them of your presence, too, and you should do that.

To begin, you need to travel back to the year where you started this assignment, back to year Veird 1453, in the war with Nothanganathor. Once you arrive, you are to IGNORE THAT WAR and proceed to the center of the galaxy designated OF-716-B-16. You might need to upgrade your yorddle to navigate there properly.

Once you are there, you are to confront the giant icky thing consuming one of the entrances to universe-designate BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap and then kill it and cleanse that entrance. Such monsters are typically called ‘door munchers’.

And that was the entire assignment.

… Well okay then.

Erick hmm’d as he read, seeing this as a test of willpower and a whole bunch of other tests at the same time. He decided to do it. Even though he would be driving close by the same year as Veird, he wouldn’t be anywhere close at all, and it wasn’t like he was ready to face Nothanganathor yet, anyway.

The Fractal Fairy had said, ‘I look forward to your cultivation of Life into a Fae existence!’ which implied that Erick was not a Fae yet… And he supposed he wasn’t? Hmm. He had kinda thought he was…

Well whatever.

He set the papers on a desk he conjured to the side… and then he looked at the papers and decided he didn’t like to be that messy. After a moment, he set down the papers under a paperweight in the shape of Veird, in a box he labeled ‘IN’. The 'OUT' box was empty, for now.

Erick turned to face the front of his floating rock space, whereupon he created a captain’s ship wheel out of stone. He smiled as he put a hand on the wheel and then whipped his hand to the side, sending the wheel spinning hard, and the entire gate space swishing to the side, like a giant ship changing course in an endless ocean.

Upgrade the yorddle? Pshhh! Erick knew his way around the universe without needing that.

Probably.

It was all theoretical knowledge, but Erick needed to work those theories to figure out how they worked, and he had time to do that. So what if he ended up crashing somewhere for a while?

… He wasn’t going to delay the Nothanganathor fight, but he was going to go in prepared.

Erick moved his gate space through the void where Benevolence would eventually exist, until he came to a place that was probably the correct-ish location. He popped out far, far above some sort of nebula-like galaxy, without any real arms to it at all.

Erick checked his Status, but mostly just his yorddle.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1317], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 1869]

“Right universe and Layer!” Erick announced to no one except himself. “Wrong time!”

He swung the steering wheel a little bit to the right, which was completely unnecessary and didn’t actually do anything, but the physical action seemed useful to keep around.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1456], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 2008]

Erick turned the steering wheel just a biiiit to the left.

Erick Flatt, [65-ish], [Current Reality: Above entrances to Universe BORING-IDC-Blaghargabap, Layer 578,927,221], [Current Year Veird, Layer 789: 1453], [Current Year Earth, Layer 99,081: 2005]

“Close enough! 1453! Let’s go kill a door muncher.”

The ‘door muncher’ was an ooze the size of a planet and it surrounded a black hole, like a whole lot of clear/black hair stuck in a drain. The muncher was eating the gravity or the time of the black hole, or doing something equally crazy like that, because there was no black hole right now. There was just a door muncher that occasionally slipped out of position around the black hole, briefly exposing the black hole, and briefly sucking in the time and space of the Fractal universe in a really cool lensing effect.

It was all sorts of neat, and Erick was kinda thrilled to be able to see a real black hole, in person.

As for the muncher itself, it was probably slipping back and forth between universes, somehow ‘munching’ on this door to the other universe, which was labeled under the ‘BORING’ classification, which Erick suspected was reserved for stuff which the Fractal found boring. This clean up right here was basically trash duty given to him by the Fractal.

But Erick was only 7 kilometers large at his largest point, and cleaning away the ‘door muncher’ would involve fully exposing the black hole, which would then expose him to the black hole. He was pretty sure he could survive the black hole rather easily…

But he had planned on using the Valkyries to attack the problem, since the problem was so large. It was the anti-Nothanganathor Plan Valkyrie plan; attack, surround, and devour. The problem was that whatever Valkyrie he managed to make out of this land would very much not survive the gravity well. Might not even be sapient, either, since there were no people to use as a base warrior. Also, there was no mana here, so everything would be difficult for people who weren’t as solid as Erick.

Anyway. Erick suspected that universe ‘Blaghargabap’ was called ‘Blaghargabap’ because the Fractal needed to call this place something, and so They had strung together some letters on the fly and attached them to this problem here.

Erick was beginning to think that the Fractal was kinda… not a serious god.

Good to know?

Erick got a move on with some initial tests against the door muncher, flying in close in his dragon form. Hovering in the thousands-of-kilometers-long tangles of not-hair, Erick found he easily warded off the corruptive effects of the door muncher through his natural Benevolence. With that test out of the way, Erick spat some [Benevolent Cleanse]s at the surface of the monster—

The very second that Erick’s anti-corruption magic touched the monster, the monster dipped its tendrils and its body below the event horizon, exposing the event horizon and suddenly filling the space that Erick occupied with crushing gravity and warped time.

Erick was fine. Wizards went through ‘doors’ like this all the time, back in the Old Cosmology days.

He was still inside the doorway to another universe, though.

Far, far below, was a universe that felt slimy, and worlds upon worlds of red-skinned, bipedal aliens with two main arms and two small arms. They looked to be nomads upon planets that were shaped like long cylinders that seemed to have no end and no beginning. Those worlds had hair-monsters, just like the door muncher here, at this entrance to that universe. Those hair beasts were the sizes of cities, and they reached into cities as they ate at the people.

Erick glanced upward and saw a sky with a giant hair-clog in the shape of the sun.

Ah.

So he was a bit inside the doorway, then.

The door muncher was above him right now.

Perspective was kinda wonky right now, here on this side of the door. Erick's own body started to feel kinda pressured, too, like he was at the bottom of an ocean. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

Erick started throwing around [Benevolent Cleanse]s, but when one of them touched a cylinder world, it ate away at that world, too, exposing a core that ran through the entire cylinder-planet, like a vein of magma—

Oh.

The cylinder worlds were hair.

Erick was currently the size of multiple worlds, and the cylinder worlds were all hair.

… Erick didn’t think too much about whatever thing the hair was attached to, and he ignored the hair, trying not to disrupt that stuff too much. He got to work on the ‘drain’, and on the monster occupying it. The door muncher shifted and died under Erick’s onslaught of dragonfire. The people living on the nearby hair noticed something happening to the ‘sun in the sky’, but they did not see Erick. Maybe a day of burning later, and there was a shift in the muncher. It could no longer fully occupy the drain— the door.

… or was it a drain?

Erick looked backward, briefly, and he saw an eye beyond the hair. It was larger than anything Erick had ever seen before. It was the size of a universe. It had been watching him for an eon.

The eye seemed to approve.

That’s when the door muncher died completely, the parts of its body faltering hard as it got sucked back into the Fractal Universe, and Erick went with it. The last thing he saw of the Hair Universe was water cascading down dry hair, and into the drain.

Erick soon floated in the Fractal Universe, around the door to ‘Blaghargabap’, and the black hole went from being a dead thing, to a spinning thing of brilliance around absolute black, and with two streamers of power shooting off from the top and bottom of the hole. Erick went to investigate one of those streamers, but not too close; that was a lot of water pressure right there.

Erick wasn’t sure what he had done, exactly, but it seemed like a good thing, so he decided to go back into the Hair universe to find out exactly what he had done; what happened. He touched the black hole—

And his claw tips broke away, sheared off from the water pressure.

Erick flexed his Authority… and still got his claws sheared short. Looking at the damage to his claws, Erick tried a different approach. He blunted his claws with an old spell of [Conjure Armor] mixed with anti-Elemental Water properties, along with some resons to make that sort of combination actually work on stuff that obviously wasn’t ‘water’ at all.

He knocked on the door.

The white glows and water pressure around the ‘door’ vanished, leaving a hole to travel through.

Erick went inside—

Suddenly, Erick was sitting in a kitchen from the 80s on Earth. He was still a dragon, but he was human-sized. The sun shone in the window and nice curtains framed a blue sky. Tea steamed in mugs on the kitchen table. The refrigerator was roundish and green… so maybe the 60’s, not the 80’s. And yet there was a flat color television hovering on the wall. So the style was really ‘anachronistic’—

A woman sat across from Erick and her hair was gorgeous and long and every color of the rainbow, but mostly brown. It draped from her head to the floor in rivulets, twisting and draping, and it flowed across the floor, to the edges of the room, where it vanished into the cracks in the floorboards.

The woman was about to say something, but then she paused as she looked at her body, and then at Erick’s body, and said, “You have a very sexually dimorphic species.”

Erick transformed back into a person. “Apologies for the miscommunication.”

“Ah!” The woman’s face lit up. “That makes more sense. Very good. I thought only your women had hair, but it’s good you have hair, too. You want something? Glad you decided to knock instead of trying to push your way in again. Coming in through the floor was bad enough. Gave me quite a scare!”

“… Ah. Apologies. I just wanted to come back in to make sure the problem of the door muncher was resolved. I didn’t see any pieces over there, and I wasn’t sure what was happening over here.”

“Oh yeah. It’s gone. Amazing what a little cleaning can do for the consciousness. You can tell Fractal that we can have tea again if they want, but all they want to do is fight, so I try not to bother with them too much. Their agents are much more pleasant. You want sex?”

“… Ah. No thank you. I am already practically-married twice over.”

“Hmm! Fair enough.” She set a trinket of silver and gold and water onto the table between them, saying, “I was eventually going to raise up one of my own to clear away that plug and I was going to gift them this, but now I guess I gotta talk to the Fractal again. Way before I was ready, too… But I guess this is what is happening now. You can have the thing.”

Erick took the gift though he wasn’t sure what it was even as he held it. “Glad to help. I’ll be on my way, now.”

The woman nodded—

Erick was a dragon again, floating beyond the illuminated black hole that was the door into the Hair Universe. Tendrils of light and dark were wrapped around his body for a brief moment, but they were already letting go.

Erick floated backward with something gold/silver/water in his right, clawed hand.

With a quick push through into Benevolence Itself, Erick settled down into his gate space.

The trinket turned into a torc that could go around one of Erick’s arms.

… It didn’t seem dangerous. It wasn’t mana-based magic, though.

It was probably fine.

Erick put it on, and felt out the magic it was trying to do as it touched him. As soon as he realized what was happening, he let it, and then he conjured up a big mirror. Thanks to the torc, Erick now sported a massive black beard and hair that came down to mid-back. With a flick of power, Erick tied the hair into braids and then brushed out the beard. He looked at himself in the mirror and smiled.

“Not a bad look.” He took off the torc, and his hair melted away. “Not for me, though.”

And then Erick looked around at the floating stone platform, and saw he needed to make some improvements to the place.

“A steering wheel and a desk is not enough.”

Erick considered—

“Ah ha! I need a ship.”

- - - -

Ten-thousand years later, and not that long at all, Erick set down the paperwork for mission number 37 into the outgoing box of his new office and smiled as that paperwork vanished through the port he had installed between mission #3 and #4.

That paperwork zipped off to Margleknot, to the archives, where no one would ever see it at all except for those who wanted to get their brains scrambled via time-twisting memetic threats—

A receipt came through the port—

Another piece of paper came through, and this one was a personal note ‘From the desk of Lady Aelorika of the Fae Council’, scribbled in flowing ink that mimicked vines that had met a weed wacker. Erick had gotten several letters from Aelorika so far, but he had been a ‘hidden agent’ until now, apparently. Usually the Lady was rather thankful without actually saying ‘thank you’. Now, she was all perturbed.

Erick laughed as he read it.

‘Fractals and Fate! I cannot believe I did not put it together sooner, but you’re the one doing this job now, Erick?! ERICK FLATT. Who is supposed to be having a war with Nothanganathor right now!’

There was a break in the script and some splattered ink stains that had transformed into ink flowers upon the page. The Lady had been interrupted while writing. She was obviously distraught.

Erick smiled.

‘I suppose, though, that according to this memo that I have just been handed, as I have been reviewing this case and putting together all that has transpired, that I am to ignore that breach of protocol because the war has spiraled far out of its initial bounds. It’s also still happening, apparently. I am not to do a thing except congratulate you on this work and tell you that your initial volley of requests are done.

‘Congratulations! You have earned a total of 5 favors; 2 from me, 2 from Lady Seraphaka, and 1 from Lord Dakka. Should you choose to use these favors against someone who has their own favors, they will be counted against each other on a 1-for-1 basis. Whoever has favors left over in such a conflict will find the Council on their side.

‘Nothanganathor currently has several thousand favors.

‘Luckily, we have already decided to forgo the usual favor-trading which would usually happen in such a scenario. You two are at war. Good luck, Erick; I hope you win.

‘You’re free to return to doing whatever you were doing before you accepted this assignment.

‘The Fae Council of Margleknot appreciates your efforts to cleanse this universe from corruption.’

Erick read the letter a few times, smiling wider as he finished.

And then he duplicated the letter three times and set one copy into each of his filing cabinets. The first cabinet was organized chronologically, the second was organized on Erick’s timeline, and the third was organized by Layer number. Erick only had a few hundred Layers visited so far, all of the boxes were small, but they could get bigger.

Erick was grinning as he shut the cabinets back up, and then he strolled out of his captain’s quarters, onto the deck of his ship. The great ship Worldsaver stretched out before him, like an old timey pirate’s galleon, and Erick stood at the wheel in front of the aftcastle. The ship was brilliant white and black and made of solid crystal Benevolence, while the sails were completely decorative and mostly invisible, to give Erick an unobstructed view of the cosmos. The whole thing was only a fraction of the size of Erick’s true draconic self, but it was comfortably grand.

The storage was filled with treasure, and Erick was filled with new experiences about how to win a Wizard’s time war.

Now that he had gotten true clearance to get on with his own life, though, it was time to do that.

Erick was ready.

Erick grabbed the steering wheel and spun it hard to the left. The readout floating to the side of the wheel rapidly flipped through Layers and Time, while the spots of light in the void beyond the gate space all rapidly turned to blurred lines of light, some fading, some growing, some turning into nebulae that spanned whole galaxies.

Erick navigated through it all, Worldsaver plowing through time and space to arrive exactly where it needed to be.

Hovering over the dark side of the moon, invisible to all, but with enough visibility for Erick to see everything happening down there, Erick and Worldsaver floated, and Erick glanced through the Fractal.

With his sight spanning a thousand little fractal splashes, Erick Saw everything big happening in his neighborhood. It was mostly a bunch of slimes, playing in the water. Big events! Erick smiled to see the ease of it all. The simplicity. The simple good, of slimes eating plants and playing in water and the light towers growing taller and the rivers rushing water out across the lunar surface.

According to the timeline it had been exactly 19 days since Erick was here with Shadow, sending him on a Quest to become fae. Erick had certainly done a lot in that amount of time. But had he become fae? Probably not, though he knew what he needed to do.

He needed to eat his ship, and become one with it.

This Worldsaver was the ‘environment’ he had created. Everything here, from the treasures of the Itiki-ki Islands, with their long histories of Counting Good, to the Blasted Lands of Shar, where the Valkyries had a major home base, and even to a land overseen by the God Cascadio, whom Erick had yet to actually get to Veird… All of it was who Erick was, and who he wanted to be. It was all just a mirror to all his time on Veird, though. Veird was his home, and his people.

And he needed to get back to it.

For right now, though, Erick expanded the scope of his spying on his own home-away-from-home, to see if there were— Ah ha! There was a satellite looking down at the moon. It was far away, but it had some good imaging stuff going on with it, but it bounced a signal off of a separate satellite in order to transmit its imagery to Earth.

Erick expanded his Fractal Sight, diving down into the ‘scrying’ ‘magic’ that the satellite was using, to spy on whoever was checking out the place. Sure, it was all tech out there, but with a twist of perspective and some resons to back up that perspective, and tech started to work like magic when Erick decided it should work like magic.

Erick spied on a control room at NASA in Florida filled with Americans and Chinese and all sorts of other people, all of them staring at the images on the big screen. Empty coffee cups filled trash cans that overflowed. Break rooms were filled with people yelling at each other. The military had come and gone and were now present in full force, and the diplomats were four buildings over, talking about what was on the screen.

The big initial panic was just beginning, but the news of the stuff on the moon had broken across Earth 10 days ago.

There was some talk of the ‘Black Dragon and Shadow’ in Japan, but no one had connected any dots yet. A lot of people were making a lot of theories, though!

… Erick decided he didn’t want to do this Fae-thing here on the Moon.

He turned his ship around, and went to one of the bigger moons of Jupiter. Ganymede. It was a pretty big moon, maybe a third the size of Earth, and it was dark. The sun was a cold dot far, far away, and Jupiter was large and brown, tan, and red. This was a good, desolate place to make another Ascension.

An Ascension of the Cultivation of Life Itself.

Erick left his ship in park around the northern pole of the planet, and then he got to work terraforming. The interior of Ganymede was actually liquid water, which was interesting to find out, but it was ice, too, and so the whole thing was both unstable for big dragons on the surface and kinda weak on gravity, anyway.

A day later, Ganymede was twice the size but it retained the same weight, so as not to mess with its orbit, and the gravity was now Earth-normal. A forest of towers grew upon the entire surface, illuminating the planet like a spot of light upon the dark. The sky here was black as a star-filled void, with the Sun not providing much illumination and warmth at all, so Erick made the planet provide its own warmth.

Upon a prominence of stone, on the newly-terraformed moon of Jupiter, Erick turned into a full dragon and stared up at the invisible ship, Worldsaver, hidden inside Benevolence Itself...

A dread settled upon Erick, as he contemplated eating that entire ship.

That dread had been growing, but now it was here.

All Erick had to do was eat the ship of his memories and future and life, taking it into himself...

Erick recoiled from the idea of becoming a fae in a way he hadn’t recoiled in years. Not since he saw the orgy pits of that job at the undying-life world, at job #17, over on Layer 19,270. During that job, Erick had needed to take a moment to understand just how he was going to untangle all the souls from each other in that world, and erase that corruption, and now he was taking a moment to understand how he was going to be a dragon, eating himself.

This… This was like eating his own heart.

In fact, it was exactly like that. It was metaphorical just as much as it was literal. In this action, he would remake himself, he would die in the process, and be reborn. Erick had been thinking about this task for the last few… years? Maybe? It was all a recursive function, basically.

Erick created Benevolence, and now Benevolence needed to create Erick, so that both of them would forever create each other; so that Erick would always create Erick.

He knew he needed to do it, but it was only in looking at everything that he knew, that he knew he needed to do this. Even the [Renew] symbol was an ouroboros. His Benevolence and even Fate had been leading him here since forever! How much more obvious could you get, Erick!

… And yet…

Erick sat down on his dragon ass on the mountain he had made at the north pole. The Worldsaver floated above him inside an invisible space, and Erick himself was invisible, intangible, and not really a part of the world; of this world, or any other right now. The grassy plains of Ganymede stretched out in every direction, and the towers and trees that Erick had built covered all the land beyond that space. His Status and Lightning Path had not changed much in all his quick years as a fighter of corruption out in the universe, because no one knew he had done all that… or at least the masses didn’t.

Erick wondered if Lionshard had ever made a ‘Wizard’s Clarity’ like Erick had, to save himself from the Curse of Power. Probably not; Lionshard was still in Margleknot, and would not venture outside. Or at least that was what Erick had heard after showing up to job #23, to act as Lionshard’s invisible hand and to fix the corruption plaguing several worlds to begin the cleansing of an entire galaxy; to help those people there help themselves.

That had been a fun job.

Erick basically just followed his Lightning Path and tipped over a few castles here and there on several different worlds. The biggest thing he had done was to erase an autonomous drone system that was running amok and killing people because the corruption had gotten at its systems. That had taken half an hour. And that was the whole job! With just a little bit of help, done in the time span of 27 years, of which Erick had only spent 3 days actually doing work, had set that entire galaxy to rights.

Erick had learned a lot in his years out there, working with people who were so much more capable than him.

Mainly, he had learned that the universe was wider and simpler than it appeared.

Corruption started at individual locations, for any thousands of reasons. There were people that tried to revive the dead, who used inferior magics to do so, and who made deals with entities that did not fully exist, except in their minds. There were revenge-seekers, who tried to annihilate problems through terrible reson-based desires. Those were usual starts for corruption. But then again, corruption started on job #30, just because a system of government failed on one world, and then the problem propagated to civil war and somehow corruption came about.

The main problems with corruption were not the corruption itself.

Erick had seen, that in every case of corruption, that it had all started on one slice of Infinity, in one Layer of Infinity, and thus that entire area of spacetime began to degrade. Corruption started at a source, and then leaked out into Infinity, replicating itself in inferior ways. Every version of Abarial did not fall to the same several corruption monsters. The corruption spread from those central slices of infinity into every other nearby Layer. Erick had just needed to burn out that corruption at the source to save everyone else.

All of life was like that.

All of Life was like that.

Every world had an infinite variation surrounding that world in the nearby multiverse, and all of them were visible when you were there, but it took a level hand to navigate that infinity, to go to the center of the major problems, where the major actors were causing major problems, to find them and to change everything. Not all of those major actors were even on the same slice of infinity, either, which was fun to find out—

Erick breathed out.

He didn’t need to think anymore.

He was ready.

Erick opened his maw, and ate his own heart—

Reality collapsed inward.

- - - -

Shadow watched from the backside of an illuminated tower as Erick ate his own heart, and then he spun inward, into himself, dying in that action.

Nothanganathor watched with her. He had been ready to intervene, to kill, to annihilate. That had been his original plan in coming here. But he held back, and it was just his avatar here, anyway. He held back, because others were present. Others that he actually respected… Or that he at least acknowledged.

Also, if he tried shit, then he’d get shit on, and that was that. He had already been trounced once.

Shadow kinda wanted him to try again… But no.

Lady Aelorika, Lady Seraphaka, and Lord Dakka were there with Shadow, all of them fitting into the same wide gloom behind the light of a tower of a [Seed of Atunir]. Yggdrasil was a bit larger of a presence, so he couldn’t fit very well, but he had his own leaf present, growing on the tower, in the light, like a little air plant; just a simple single flaming green leaf and some white roots and a tiny crown of rainbows. All of them were as hidden as they could possibly be, and though Yggdrasil was less adept at it, he hid just fine, thanks to the Fae Council helping him hide. Technically he shouldn’t even be here, but Erick was his father, and so the Council had allowed it.

Nothanganathor shouldn’t have been here at all, but he was an asshole who spent a thousand favors to watch, thinking he could actually kill Erick while he watched, and now he was down a thousand favors and that was that. Shadow had thoroughly enjoyed it when all the Fae Council fought him back from interrupting Erick’s moment; it was the only time she had ever won against the bastard—

Lord Eldraki showed up with a tub of popcorn, smiling— Until he saw that Erick was gone. “Dammit! I missed him killing himself!”

Dakka said, “Told you not to venture to Earth. He had sat down for a think; not to not do it.”

“Well I’m just glad he took my advice to learn how to hide his mana and stuff, and now he can be responsible for hiding us all in the future, instead of me having to do it all the time,” Eldraki said, eyeing everyone in the group. “That means he’s closer to me than the rest of you.”

Everyone scoffed at the absurdity of Eldraki trying to claim Erick as Of Him.

Eldraki grinned at his own joke.

Nothanganathor grumbled and vanished, but not before splitting Ganymede into ten pieces, casting the gathering and the moon into a drifting, broken orbit around Jupiter. No one really minded the attack; not like he had hit them. Seraphaka managed to cup Yggdrasil’s tiny leaf into a hand, so he was perfectly fine, too.

Shadow tumbled unconcerned, floating in the void along with the others, saying, “Any of you want to put that planet back?”

“It’s a moon,” Eldraki said, just to be a pedant.

Shadow didn’t argue. It was a planet now, dammit.

Aelorika was currently upside-down as compared to Shadow, and she was also drinking tea. She shrugged. The others were all angled weird, too, gently spinning as they drifted, but the group remained somewhat together.

Dakka moved first. He waved a rusted wing and the planet crashed together, though it had certainly seen better days. Everything grew at a weird angle now, and the careful balances that Erick had set up so that the planet wouldn’t pull in the other moons, or fall into the gas giant below, had been disrupted. But the planet looked like a proper warzone, and that made Lord Dakka happy.

“There!” Dakka said, smiling. “Much better.”

Seraphaka rolled her eyes and then waved her hand and the desecration of War… lessened. The planet also moved into a new, stable orbit and then stayed there. “Now it’s better.”

“I liked the red lines I put on it! Like those Blasted Lands of Shar.” Dakka said, as he waved his hand. The planet buckled a little and some big cracks appeared, as though the fae had carved into the surface with giant claws. Those claw marks crystallized and sent out citadels of war, like towers made of metallic ice to pierce the sky. The planet had been turned into a war fortress, made for beings that were between 3 and 5 meters tall, on average, though it was completely empty at the moment. “A home base for the Valkyries he wishes to gather. He didn’t make one yet, you know.”

Aelorika sighed, tumbled until she reoriented, and then she pointed at the planet. The disturbed atmosphere and boiling red clouds and broken bamboo towers all shifted a little. The atmosphere evened out. Boiling red clouds became illuminated things, bringing natural light to the world. Broken bamboo towers grew taller and thicker, to become the makers of those illuminated clouds. “This part of this system is way too dark. It needs more light for all the plants, and your citadels disturbed that light.”

Dakka shrugged.

Margleknot’s Yggdrasil avatar fluttered down to the planet and planted itself at the northern pole.

Things evened out even more as a giant Yggdrasil grew taller than all the rest of the plants on the world, which were all multiple kilometers tall at that point.

Eldraki frowned at all of them, and then he pointed at the planet.

Shadow didn’t see what he did. It was, quite possible, that he did nothing at all. But his action demanded a response, and Shadow was the odd-fae-out, so she asked him, “What did you do?”

Aelorika also asked him, “What did you do?”

Shadow was a little surprised at that. It felt good to have backup, though.

Eldraki smiled as he pointed at his own cheek, saying, “Give me a kiss and I’ll tell you.”

Aelorika shrugged, and then she turned to Shadow, saying, “Good luck with your betrothed.” She vanished, back to Margleknot or wherever.

Seraphaka said, “Good luck!” And then she also vanished.

Eldraki said, “I hope he dies for real.” The bastard vanished.

Dakka said to Shadow, “Good luck with the guy. Are you going to stick around here?”

“For a little while,” Shadow said. “I’ll leave Eldraki’s present for Erick to find, but I do want to stick around.”

“If Erick succeeds, he’ll probably come back to you on that Earth Moon.”

“I’ll head that way soon enough.”

Dakka nodded, and then he vanished.

Shadow floated above Ganymede for a little while longer.

Erick was on his own.

- - - -

Erick woke up feeling a specific kinda shit that he hadn’t felt in forever, and also rather slowly. His mind was groggy and his mouth was dry as sand, and everything smelled… Not good? Smelled like sex, which was good sometimes, but not right now. Erick was pretty sure that his hand was gripping some sort of boob on some sort of woman —male boobs and female boobs were very different, after all— and it was squishy and warm, and his chest was warm and pressed against some sort of slender back, and someone moved around behind him, grumbling and muttering about needing a drink. It was a man’s voice.

Erick cracked open a crusty eye and all he saw was dark brown hair that smelled of jasmine.

He tried to sense the world…

And his mana was tired, or something, because nothing happened.

He did not panic, though his heart certainly raced hard. Rapidly, Erick woke all the way, and found himself in a bed with a woman and a man, both of them maybe 19 or 20, and a cheap mirror hung on the wall. Erick was 20 as well—

He recognized the apartment.

And then the man sitting behind him got off the bed and tugged at the covers, unceremoniously ripping them away from Erick and the woman, as he said, “Come on, you dweebs! It’s time for you to bounce. I had fun and I hope you had fun, too, but there’s some english homework I gotta bullshit, and I can’t bullshit it with you two bomb booties in my room.”

Erick sat on the bed for a moment longer, to look up at Erick Flatt, circa 1997.

Younger Erick was nude, of course. Erick always slept nude with people back in college. He teased the guys who he fucked, too, when they ended up looking at him like Erick was looking right now, in complete disbelief. Young Erick smiled, saying, “Don’t have a gay crisis on account of me! Or do, if you want. I’m pretty fucking hot.”

Ah.

Well then.