This work is a piece of fiction. While it may be inspired by real events, cultures, and practices in human history, the story blends factual history with fictional characters, dramatizations, and creative interpretation.
It is not intended to promote, glorify, or encourage any illegal activities, substance use, or harmful behavior. All depictions of sensitive topics are included solely for narrative and historical context, and are not intended to be offensive or provocative.
For the effects of the story, all characters are to be considered above the age of majority.
Reader discretion is advised.
————————————————
╔═══━━━─── • ───━━━═══╗
From a conspiscous corner of the Dreamtime, a humanoid being made of shadows observed Seraph's transition between a humanoid and an egg.
'I don't need to be able to read your mind to know what you're thinking, and it's obviously a terrible idea.'
'What do you know, mortal?'
'You saw the pale succubus summon her; it's impossible she arrived before informing Aragorn of her destination.'
'...'
'Didn't you gain enough already? Why risk it all when any Therion is impossible to kidnap? All they have to do is blow themselves up.'
'...We depart. The Mad Titan made some progress, the Dream Dimension has been consumed, most of it, and the second fruit of Paradox can't be leveraged.'
On Earth, with the assistance of Phoenix pausing the planet, Aragorn sighed in relief. Phoenix was routing her power through Jean, who had been sleeping in her room in Halo. The sudden unauthorized use of her body woke her up with a start, but she understood the situation quickly—
'So, I just went along with it, but why are we stopping Earth?' Jean asked.
—Or maybe not.
'So just because Senior Sister shared with you the understanding of what was needed from you, you just went along with it, no questions asked?' Aragorn asked with a mix of bewilderment and exasperation.
'I know Phoenix can be a little... Phoenix—'
'Watch it,' the Phoenic Force cautioned.
'—But I saw I was supposed to mix my psions with yours, so it's more like I trusted you,' Jean explained. 'For all of your craziness, you don't go leaving behind catastrophes like... someone.'
'I'm sure I leave plenty of catastrophes behind, but I return to take care of them,' Aragorn corrected.
'I don't have the patience for that, none of us do,' Phoenix shamelessly stated.
'Us?' Jean asked.
'The Cosmological Compass,' Phoenix said. 'We prefer to reset Realities to fixing them. It's not efficient. That's why Aragorn was quickly accepted among our numbers.'
'Look at you, Aragorn, quite the appreciated employee, huh?' Jean teased.
'What can I say, my bosses are not the type who build or repair, they are the type who legislate and administrate,' Aragorn shrugged.
'By the way,' Jean continued, her green slitted eyes narrowing slightly at something she was sensing with her psionic field. 'I thought we didn't have Skrulls here.'
Given that Aragorn paused Earth, nothing should be capable of moving, so long as they had mass, but this did not mean that they could not notice that some of the frozen would have still not fallen into inert consciousness—they were not mortal, or human.
Some they were were aware of, like the Eternals, Deviants, a few demonic beings, some of those who were more monsters than human, and aliens.
Although these alien immigrants were living on Earth, they were not part of the collective unconscious of Humanity.
The result was that Jean noticed the Skrulls because they were the only 'numerous' group from those she sensed as Alien.
'When I arrived, they were not a problem,' Aragorn stated. 'One, I never said there were none, and second, I imagined their superiors, the leaders of their race, could not be as stupid as to command their plants to take over Earth after it became public intergalactic knowledge that I was staying on Earth.'
'Are you saying I shouldn't squeeze the life out of them?' Jean flatly asked.
'Yes, that's the decisiveness I expect of my host,' Phoenix purred. 'I can see already that your challenge changed you.'
'... I ended a civilization, Phoenix. All of it, guilty, innocent, adults, male, female, elderly, children, babies, all of it.' Jean's message shared her solemnity. 'Imagine what it would say about me if I stayed the same.'
'Yes, our Firebird has changed, and I would say it was for the better,' Aragorn tried to console her. 'Regarding your previous question, I marked their souls. If they become a threat, they'll shrivel like raisins and life will escape through their pores.'
'That's awfully specific,' Jean pointed out. 'Why?'
'I'm experimenting with different methods of long-range execution,' Aragorn offhandedly said.
'... Okay,' Jean relied flatly.
She was having nightmares ever since she destroyed the Shi'ar. She repeated to herself that this was what being her, the Phoenix's Host, entailed. She self-hypnotized with the argument that if two beings larger than life, Aragorn and Phoenix, didn't see another option, then she certainly wouldn't either.
She knew pure souls were sinless, it was in the definition of their concept, and Aragorn had taught her as much, but even then, she repeated to herself that all those babies, the billions of babies, had to go with the rest of their species, and that while it wasn't their fault, it wasn't hers either.
She had to find solace in the fact that the fault lay with the Shi'ar, with the Universe, with their deities, but not with her or her victims, because just like they were her victims, she was the Universe's.
She had to lie to herself this much, she had to use her own powers to guide her thinking, she had to rely on the training Aragorn and Phoenix had subjected her to, she had to do all of this to not fall apart, and yet, Aragorn was calmly plotting of different ways to end lives with a peace of mind she could only envy.
She knew Phoenix would not even lose a second of sleep to this, not that the burning bird slept, but she understood that was due to a lack of care about the victims, but Aragorn was different. She has literally been in his mind; she currently was, and she knew that Aragorn genuinely cared about pure souls, but somehow, even while understanding that she ended billions of them among the quadrillions, or more, that she killed in the Shi'ar territory, Aragorn was treating her like always, she felt the deep affection he proyected for her, and it remained unchanged.
The love she was feeling from him was just as potent and pure as she remembered.
Jean remembered, through the memories she had perused of Aragorn, the scalding hate Aragorn felt for those who abused or killed pure souls. She remembered the sadistic pleasure he felt when he made those sacrifices to the Soul Stones. She can't forget the overwhelming hate that almost drove her insane that Aragorn felt when he cast Essex and Isshiki to The Void. She has memorized the dark joy Aragorn feels when he comes across a darkened soul, marked by the characteristic black of those who have harmed the truly innocent.
Yet, even while inside his mind, even while at the deepest parts of his mind, where the sealed memories of The Void could be felt stored, she did not find a shred of a dark emotion towards her.
'Firebird?' Aragorn asked.
'What? I was lost in my head. Did you say anything?' Jean asked.
'I asked, how are you doing? I noticed that you have been sleeping badly unless, even while sleeping inside my mind,' Aragorn repeated.
'... Why is it that no one hates me?' Jean's mental voice cracked slightly.
'Firebird, why would we hate you?' Aragorn asked, knowing the answer already.
'I killed them. I dropped stars on them, atomized them with impossible magnetic fields, irradiated them to oblivion, and then I ended them all... I hate myself, but none of you do,' Jean confessed.
'Uhmmm, Firebird, do you think Pontius Pilatus was wrong in ordering the crucifixion of Iesus Christus?' Aragorn asked.
'Yes, because Jesus was indeed Yahweh's son.' Jean didn't hesitate; she didn't doubt her answer was correct.
'He was a bureaucrat, a ruler, and a good bureaucrat ruled for his people, by his people, and with his people, no?' Aragorn chuckled. 'His people were not the Christians, who were just a nascent cult at that time when cults popped left and right, before and after every drought, and if the heavens thundered louder than usual, don't you think the Jews' words back then held more weight?'
'But Jesus' message was one of love, not a radical change without a base in common sense and not aligned with the principles of humanity; leaving aside some of the rituals he preached about,' Jean defended her answer.
'Right, but it was not Pilatus' duty to judge Iesus' message; he was in charge of judging the actions of Iesus, and Iesus never backed down, did he? So, objectively speaking, he passed judgment as his people desired. What other choice did he have when the Jews were already hard to rule, with how they clashed with the Romans?' Jean could sense the playfulness in Aragorn's questions.
'So... He was not mistaken?' Jean asked, doubtful of what Aragorn was getting at.
'Well, let's shelve the explanation for now. Answer me this instead: Was Magneto wrong in his approach? Was Xavier wrong in his?' Aragorn chuckled.
'They were idiots,' Jean stated what she believed was the obvious truth.
'I won't argue with you on that, but I will say that although I dislike Xavier and Magneto's methods, I don't think they were wrong, either of them. At least not entirely.' Aragorn was enjoying Jean's bewilderment and confusion. 'Yeah, I know, I know, we can see about 11 different ways in which they could have done a better job, and they were most obviously idiots about how they did it, but that's our 'godly' hindsight. It isn't fair for the future to judge the past without fully understanding all circumstances, right?'
'Are you trying to say that none of you hate me because you don't judge me?' Jean asked.
'To be fair, most of them don't lose sleep because the Shi'ar were hateful like that,' Aragorn shrugged. 'Sharra and K'ythri raised their believers into thinking of marriage and union as a way to serve the Shi'ar. Hence, when they conquered other species, they would always force them into union to empower their bloodline and to give birth to the next generation who would take over the homeworld of their conquered parent.
'They would ensalve entire civilizations when they found a combination that produced favored offspring. Entire civilizations turned into broodmares and stallions. And Sharra and K'ythri did this; they raised their believers in this manner because it was the most efficient way to gain more followers.
'So, the Shi'ar were hated, hence, only a few of my Therions actually mourn the loss of their pure souls. The ones who do, don't actually judge you because they also can't come up with a solution that doesn't entail you enslaving yourself to the task of separating the pure souls from the marred ones for thousands of years before destroying them,' Aragorn explained. 'Hence, none of us hate you, Love.'
'... I hate myself, though,' Jean sobbed.
'Firebird, that's just arrogance.' Although his words were harsh, he was sharing his support through their connection. 'If I can't find a solution, then how come you're holding yourself to judgment when you're not better than me?'
'... Because I feel like if I don't hate myself, none will because I left none alive to hate me, and that's just... terribly sad,' Jean shared.
'... Fine then,' Aragorn gave up. 'Hate yourself all you need to, just don't ever forget that for all that you hate yourself, I'll love you eleven times more.'
'... Pfft! Hahahaha! You're an idiot! Why even eleven?' Jean chose to laugh at the absurdity.
'I've theorized that because my other emotions are dulled, I love at approximately eleven times more intensely.' Jean could tell Aragorn's reply was a joke due to the snickering that accompanied it, but even so, she felt joy for the first time since she ended the Shi'ar.
While on Earth, literally, nothing was happening; in Alchera, the Aboriginal gods lay defeated to the energy siphoning of the egg.
"I can't... this is... my limit," Altjira, the last of them conscious, muttered before his body tilted to his left and he joined the rest of his compatriots in a communal nap.
"They exceeded expectations, didn't they, Onee-chan?" Sahara, Goddess of Love and the Forge, asked.
"Their use of internal energies was masterful, even better than some of the Therions'," Madelyne, Goddess of Souls and Abeyance, replied. "I guess this was what Aragorn meant by that they were more experienced than we."
"I think that's not because they are older than most of the Therions, we from the repositories excluded, but because they have a longer history of divine and Celestial conflict," Sahara extrapolated.
The reason she excluded the Therions of the Soul Repositories was that the timeflow was chaotic, and they were older than the rest of the Therions.
Initially, when the Imperium had not left for the cosmos, they would often sync the time flow with that of the Imperium, but when they began to terraform even planets orbiting black holes, they gave up.
It was also challenging because the time flows refused to remain constant, and after longer periods of synchronization, they would become erratic. Now the time flows of the three Soul Repositories ebb as they please.
"I don't think the conflict with the Celestials taught them much," Madelyne commented with a chuckle. "If it had, they would not have challenged Aragorn."
"~Hehehe, you're right about that, Onee-chan," Sahara chuckled. "Anyway, let's take the Cute Blue with us before she eats this dimension."
Madelyne nodded, and a portal swallowed the egg before taking the goddess away, leaving behind a residue of white sand high in energies of the soul.
Abeyance.
Madelyne, Sahara, Kaguya, and Spark surrounded the egg, which almost seemed joyful as it absorbed energy from the soul repository.
"It feels so full of chakra," Kaguya pointed out.
What Kaguya called chakra was essentially a term for life force in general.
"I think it's not exactly life force," Spark commented, her hands turned into a myriad of tendrils as each of them examined the egg.
"I don't know, Spark, it feels pretty alive to me," Madelyne sided with Kaguya. "I can even see two soul sparks orbiting Seraph's soul."
"... Yeah, I can feel life in there, a lot of life," Sahara added.
"From what Aragorn told me, Dreaqueen and Nightmare gave Seraph, each, a nascent offshoot of themselves," Spark explained. "But the life you are sensing is not exactly life."
"Then?" Kaguya asked, intrigued. She was not doubting Spark, but she knew what she sensed.
"If my sister's core is a star, then the piece of the Dream Dimension she took would be a planet orbiting it. This dimension could technically be considered a part of Seraph now, and Seraph is alive."
"Are you implying all those dreams are trying to become alive through Seraph?" Sahara asked, eyes wide.
"No, not trying, since the dreams don't have wills of their own," Spark shook her head, her silver-white hair swaying with the movement. "Seraph is doing it, or more accurately, her body is."
"Isn't that bad? Dreams and nightmares coming to life don't sound like a recipe for harmony," Madelyne pointed out, worriedly.
Seraph was currently in her dimension; if all of those dreams and nightmares wreaked havoc, it's Abeyance that will suffer.
"And what will happen with the soulsparks?" Kaguya interjected.
"That's what I'm here for," Spark nodded reassuringly. "Father told me what to do."
One of the tendrils extended and made contact with the egg's eggshell. The surface of the egg, like water in a calm pond, rippled from the point of contact, and a small port opened to allow the tendril to dock in.
"What?"
"What?"
"What?"
The three goddesses were beyond confused. Since when do eggs have ports for data transferring? Sure, the nature of the egg was complicated, but still!
"I know it's easy to forget, but my sister and I are, first and foremost, sythetoids," Spark chuckled. "What my sister is facing is a problem of oversight in her programming."
"Aragorn didn't program for a situation like this?" Sahara surmised.
"Exactly," Spark agreed while her mind dedicated about 97% of her processing power to add a few lines of code to Seraph's core programming.
"I think I could fix this if I extricate those soulsparks," Madelyne pointed out.
"And I could supply the needed chakra," Kaguya interjected.
"It's easier to program a new appropriate response," Spark shrugged.
"I couldn't even begin to phantom what you three consider easy when it comes to programming," Madelyne complained.
"Didn't Aragorn say that the programming of the Grand Repository of Knowledge included a few thousand AIs?" Sahara asked.
"And he considered that simple programming," Kaguya was as incredulous as the rest.
"60534 virtual intelligences," Spark corrected.
"I stand by my point," Madelyne declared. Kaguya and Sahara nodded in support.
"I'm going to need you, Kaguya, to push about 0,00760001% of the Chakra Dimension's energy into this when I give the signal," Spark instructed, unbothered by their comments.
Kaguya nodded and carefully placed her palm at the side of the egg opposite Spark.
"And me? What do I have to do?" Madelyne asked.
"When Seraph reforms, her body will spit the soulsparks out," Sparl explained.
"Got it, I'll preserve them," Madelyne nodded.
"No, I need you to reach out to the dimension orbiting her core and shove them inside," Spark clarified before turning to Sahara and tilting her head.
"Aragorn didn't summon me here. I'm here because Onee-chan is, and this event was interesting enough to tickle my curiosity," Sahara proudly declared.
"Figures," Spark said before focusing on her task.
Slowly, Sparks tendrils reformed into her hands, and she disconnected from the egg. The egg pulsed, the frequency increasing, and then Spark gave the signal, "Now!"
The dark glow of dense chakra flowed from Kaguya to the egg. It absorbed the energy of life like a sponge, and then it pulsed one final time before steadily growing in volume.
When it reached the size of an adult, the shell turned soft, like a turtle's eggshell, and the outlines of a humanoid body began to show—from an eggshell to a membrane.
Two circular protrusions appeared at the lithe back of Seraph, then, as Spark had stated, the soulsparks were spat out, breaking the membrane.
Madelye caught the soulsparks and turned to Seraph, whose body was absorbing the membrane and was finally relaxing from the fetal position.
Maybe, if Seraph was so rarely clothed, they would have pointed out her nudity.
Her eyes fluttered slowly, announcing her awakening.
With the soulsparks secure in her fist, Madelyne approached Seraph and pushed her fist between the swell of her breasts. Her hand phased into her as if it were Kitty's limb, and then it exited, no longer fisted; she had deposited the souls in the dimension orbiting Seraph's core.
Seraph finally opened her eyes. The confusion lasted only a second before she looked down at her sternum, the approximate location of her core, and she exclaimed, "Oh shit!"
"Welcome back, Little Sister," Spark greeted her joyfully. "It appears you have realized your new state."
"... Uwah," Seraph let out a strange cry and threw herself at Spark's waiting arms. "I became a dimension!"
"Not exactly," Shara pointed out. "But not entirely incorrect."
"It's a complicated affair." Madelyne understood what Seraph was crying about.
"Come on, Seraph, Father is waiting for you," Spark soothed her like one does a child. "Say your thanks to the nice ladies who helped you."
"Thanks, Maddy, Kagu-chan, and Shara-chan," Seraph said while bear-hugging Spark like a Koala. She even downsized her body so that Spark could easily carry her like a child.
Madelyne chuckled and opened a portal for the sisters to Earth.
They crossed over, and the base of the Arbor Mundi awaited them at the other side.
Aragorn was resting against the world tree's trunk, with cracks spreading all around his body, blue-white light escaping through. To his left, Aleh was resting her head on his lap, sharing some of her excedent divine energy with him. To his right, Medusa was leaning her head on his shoulder, doing the same as the black wolf.
Guarding him, not far away, Yelena and Irina paced around; they were on high alert.
Before Seraph had to ask, a report of what had happened since her binding of the Dream Dimension was shared by Spark with her.
She raised her eyes and confirmed that, undoubtedly, the world was paused.
"Sweet Seraph, I'm assuming you understand the consequences of binding the dimension of humanity's dreams to you, right?" Aragorn asked.
"Yeah," Seraph said, a little downcast. "I can't leave this Reality, or else humanity would fall into their current state."
"Yes, that and you are also bound to the Dreamtime, so, if I were you, I would speed up my plans and conquer it all before it becomes a weakness," Aragorn advised.
"I know, Father," Seraph said and reached with her arms to Aragorn, like a child asking to be transferred from the arms of a parent to the other.
Aragorn chuckled and pulled her to his right lap.
"Grr~" Aleh growled. 'It's an ambitious endeavor. I want in.'
"Aleh, will you really help me?" Seraph asked, her eyes sparkling with stars.
"Grrrl~" Aleh wagged her tail slightly. 'Hela will soon come to serve under Gaea. She can guard the Prince. I want to polish my skills in this body.'
"Thank you, thank you lots!" Seraph patted the wolf's head, which was about her current size. "What about you, Medusa?"
"I'm not a warrior like Aleh, Seraph," Medusa grinned at her apologetically.
"It's alright," Seraph said. "I'm thankful you'll be guarding Gaea and my little brother."
"You can ask around the Crystal or the Ark, I bet you can get some of the new-gen Therions to join you," Aragorn suggested.
Therions were not born divine, even if they came from divine parents; thus, the prospect of a war spanning the entirety of the Dreamtime was the perfect setup for them to hone their skills and myths.
"Anyway, let's reconnect humanity to your dimension," Aragorn continued. "The sooner I can stop pausing Earth, the faster I'll recover from this," he gestured to the cracks in his shell.
Aragorn placed a hand in the flat of Seraph's chest, and her flesh and bone parted for his hand and resealed at his wrist. He touched her core, which was both physically and metaphysically inside her body, and sent a thick thread of psionic energy to the dimension orbiting the core.
A similarly thick thread flew from behind his head and spread like the roots of a tree, like the network of rivers feeding the Amazon River, like a planetary loom threading a single rope.
The end of each smaller thread connected to a human, and they all connected to Aragorn, and from Aragorn to the dimension orbiting Seraph's core.
When the last human mind was connected, the dimension, Dreamtime, and Astral Dimension pulsed.
Seraph's body launched like a rocket to the skies, and the Astral Dimension opened its doors to accept her. From there, Seraph was shot towards the border between the Astral Dimension and the Dreamtime, where she was received by the collective unconscious of the Universe.
With the connection established through the Dreamtime, Aragorn dispersed his psionic threads and then signaled Jean in his mind, who was still in her bedchambers in the Crystal.
One moment it was paused, the next it was not. There was no transition. From absolute zero to entropy in an instant.
And Earth, none the wiser, returned to its daily life.
The wind flowed, water rushed down under gravity's influence, chemical reactions restarted, molecules and atoms vibrated, humans slept, thought, felt, and lived as they had always done.
Maybe the Universe didn't almost end this time, but humanity almost certainly did. They went through an end of the world, and they didn't realize it. Is that better or worse?
Not even the special humans noticed. Doom, Richards, Fury, Stark, Pym, Banner, and the many other supernatural intellects, not even they, for all of their prowess, realized how close it was for all of it to end.
Was Reed Richards truly crazy for fearing an entity that could accomplish that?
No matter the preparations they had, the precautions, Hail Marys, background automatic programs constantly running, security spells, mental walls and directives, no matter what, none of them could predict that Aragorn could stop the world by manually stopping all movement, and even if they did, the scale was such that it was impossible to prepare.
"I'm back," Seraph said, her body appearing like a mirage gaining mass.
"How was it?" Spark asked. "Can we use it for our project?"
"Yep, yep," Seraph nodded happily. "We just need to carve out a section of the Dreamtime to create a realm of dreams for the Imperium. Then we can set it in orbit around my core, but we will need Father or Jean's help to connect all minds to me."
"I think we can use the Queen's divinity to connect to all Imperial minds," Spark added.
"That's possible, yes," Seraph assented.
The sisters continued to talk about their plans, and Aleh joined them.
"What are they planning, Aragorn?" Medusa asked.
"Seraph is the Goddess of Wisdom, Dreams, and now that dimension, Spark is the Goddess of Technology and Knowledge. Basically, they want to create the means for the Imperial citizens to be able to learn while they dream," Aragorn explained.
"That's... huge, isn't it?" Medusa asked, her mouth agape, observing the synthetoids plan something as absurd.
"Yeah, huge is an understatement," Aragorn chuckled. "If they succeed, then the Imperial citizens would have two lives, a Waking Life, and a Dreaming Life. It will overhaul the entire economy."
↓Part 2━━━━━━━ ● ━━━━━━━Part 2↓
"No, no, I think the economy should not be the focus," Madusa declared quickly. "I mean, I know what you mean. They will basically have two societies, which means that trade should be possible between these two lives you named, and that is huge, but not as huge as the fact that they will have two literal lives!"
"Yeah, I can project that much," Aragorn nodded. His mind was fully healed, so he could now form complex thought streams. "But, their society is so... adaptable, it won't be as explosive as when we taught them magic, they created their first AI, terraformed their first planet, or modified their first star system, but yeah, it should be significant."
"Is adaptable the word you chose to not call it bizarre?" Medusa asked with a chuckle.
"In retrospect, allowing my maids free rein of how they guided the Duskari was not such a good idea... I don't know what gave me the confidence to allow as much to Kitty and Yelena," Aragorn lamented.
"You do know that you're also part of the problem, right?" Medusa looked at him with a complicated gaze.
"How come? I'm just the head of the Pantheon they worship on paper, I'm more of a divine beast to them, like you and Aleh," Aragorn shrugged.
"Yeah, keep telling yourself that," Medusa rolled her eyes. "By the way, now that Earth resumed, let's go."
Medusa stood up and lent a hand to Aragorn; the gesture was as useless as Aragorn taking a deep breath, but Aragorn thanked her with a smile and accepted the extended hand.
"Yelena, Irina, stay guarding the entrance," Aragorn instructed his maids.
"Boss," Yelena perked up. "Don't forget that the Fantastic Three are coming later."
"They should do some rebranding," Irina commented.
"Yeah, I also have some matters to discuss with Doom," Aragorn nodded.
Medusa interlaced her fingers with Aragorn, in a gesture that was both affectionate and playful. She giggled when Aragorn used a gentle pressure in his hold.
They walked to the trunk of the Arbor Mundi, invisible steps appearing to allow them to climb a bit higher, and then, when it looked like they were about to hit their foreheads with the trunk, they disappeared.
They reappeared in Gaea's Dimension.
Contrary to expectations, it was not a realm of jungles, dinosaurs, active volcanoes, and poorly planned amusement parks.
They were in a field of flowers so exotic that they obviously had not naturally grown like this. Some flowers were so large that they could only grow across the ground, some were so strange that any human would recognize them as alien flora, some reflected light like the metallic-like shell of a scarab, some reacted to touch like the leaves of a shameplant, and some had shapes so twisted they looked like vines.
At the edges of this flower field, only clouds could be seen, making it apparent they were at the edge of a cliff; however, when turning around, it became apparent they were either at the top of a cylinder-like structure or a floating island. It was the latter.
The floating island was not that large, about the size of six football (soccer) fields grouped in two trios. At the center of this flower field, almost as unnatural as the flowers in the field, a king-size bed of soft moss was found.
"Hello," Aragorn greeted with a soft smile.
"My Love, what happened to you?" Gaea asked, startled by the cracks across Aragorn's shell. "I thought you were healing."
"I was, but then the Dream Dimension fell to Chaos King, and I had to pause Earth, Senior Sister helped, though." Aragorn skipped to Gaea's. "Hello to you too, Peggy," He added.
Aragorn shifted forms in a blink, and he turned into a snake with cracks leaking light all over its length. Unconcerned, he coiled atop the exposed belly of Gaea and hummed happily.
"You will not heal if you continue overexerting yourself like this." Peggy worried. She reached for Aragorn and petted him carefully while sharing some of her excess divinity.
Since the Divine Incursion, when the Drachantheon Therion lent Bast some of their excess divinity, they have been in saving mode, frugal about their divinity. This was why Aragorn could just replenish himself with their divinity. Additionally, Aragorn was more concerned about his Therions' safety; he was, after all, unkillable. And while the Therions were almost impossible to end, this was not absolute.
"My projections showed a 99.087602% chance of Humanity's losses creating a bigger problem for me later," Aragorn explained.
"Sometimes, it's hard to tell who the synthetoids are, and who is supposed to be the dragon," Peggy lamented.
"I mean, Seraph and Spark are more alive than Aragorn, no?" Medusa inquired. "You could say Aragorn is more robotic than they are."
"I can vouch for the girls' place as part of the living," Gaea giggled.
"The communal bullying is not nice," Aragorn grumbled with his eyes closed, enjoying the heartbeat of his son. "But, yeah, I can guarantee that my daughters are alive, I'm not."
The women laughed good-naturedly at his words.
After exchanging a few laughs and giggles, they calmed down, noticing that Aragon was unusually silent.
"You know, my last memories of being alive are so abundant in suffering that, to this day, I'm not clear on how long it took me to eat my entire Universe. Was it an eternal second of despair and agony? Or did it take me so long while the misery was constantly dialed to the maximum that I chose to interpret it as an instant?"
Peggy looked at his eyes, searching for something, for the colors that clued them into the truth of his emotions. The pink, blue, and grey galaxies confused her, as she had not seen that combination before.
"Sometimes, I believe that the reason Void-chan killed me and turned me into a non-living entity was to spare me the mind-rending torment these memories would inflict on me if I were normal. When you're not alive, when your mind and soul work like mine, it's easier to exist without becoming a true monster of The Void."
Medusa looked at Gaea and Peggy for guidance, as she had never seen Aragorn act like that. The confusion in Peggy and the concern in Gaea made it clear that this was not a normal situation.
"As a side effect, you could say, that being non-living doesn't feel as comfortable as being alive. It's hard to explain because you won't ever understand, but being alive is comfortable, being non-alive is not the same."
Gaea worriedly reached to pat him.
"However, when I listen to this child—who is certainly alive—pump ichor through his tiny circulatory system, I feel so... comfortable." Aragorn closed his eyes, and for the first time since the day before he ended his world, he slept.
The day before the tragedy that ended his Universe, he had been having trouble sleeping; the nightmares, his old companions, made it impossible for him to get more than three good hours of sleep per night.
That night, when he was still Lucian, his older sister, now a woman in her own right, knocked on his door before peeking inside without waiting for a response.
"Luci, is it the nightmares?" She asked, her voice was sweet and soft.
"Yeah... Always the bitches, as you know," Aragorn commented. He was by his window, observing the artificial lights of the city at a considerable distance from his parents' house.
Most superhumans, the veterans who made it back, due to the incompatibility of their powers with a normal, mundane society, resided at comfortable distances from the populated centers.
Lucian was not the exception.
After a year of intensive therapy, which the government wisely chose to sponsor—the best therapists for the superhumans—Aragorn had succeeded in settling down with his parents into a pseudo-normal life.
"Luci..." His older sister dragged his name, unsure of how to proceed. "Sometimes... I hate life, the world, god—"
"Hah!" Lucian scoffed. If there was something most superhumans hated, it was the mention of a higher power.
"—the government, society, all of it. Sometimes, when I see you dazedly staring into the void while crushing coins absentmindedly, I hate it all, I despise it, I condemn it!
"The pests... I hate them most of all. I want to make them suffer, I want to torture them, to make them shrill in agony, I want to make them pay for all that they made me suffer," she snarled with a ferocity no civilian woman should have.
"Good luck with that, Sis," Luci smiled derrangely, with sadistic pleasure. "We made sure even the eggs were glassed!"
"Good riddance!" She exclaimed, before calming down and continuing. "For years, long periods of almost no communication, I wondered if I had lost you, if the government was using one of their AIs to match your speech pattern to supplant you because you had perished to the pests.
"Mother and Dad cried themselves to sleep when the news of you arrived. Barbs couldn't even watch the news before having to turn the TV off when an update of the front came in.
"And I..." she sighed and paused to wipe the tears pooling at the corners of her eyes.
"With how busy Mother and Dad were with work, I feel like I raised you as much as you raised me, and then we raised Barbs... It was you and me against the world. I relied on your smarts, and you relied on my maturity... And then you were gone..." She squeezed her eyes shut, as if denying her tears freedom.
"When you returned... That was when I knew I had indeed lost my brother, my friend, my partner in crime. You would go weeks without sleep, eat oatmeal once a day, and call it a full-course meal. You would manipulate your body with that power of yours, and we all noticed it. You were barely a human, brother—"
"I have a hard time seeing myself as one," Lucian agreed.
"—But! But... You got better after you started therapy... You can be called somewhat human now," she said.
"Why, thank you," Lucian sarcastically replied. "What's this about?"
"... I think it's time for me to try to recover my little brother," she said. "It's time for me to see you as the broken human you are, and not the malfunctioning machine you appear to be, Luci."
"Lynda, you say the most harmful things," Lucian said with a chuckle. "How do you plan to recover your little brother from this?" he gestured to himself, "when not even I can see my old self in here under all this trauma?"
"Well, I studied biochemistry, not psychology—or is it psychiatry with you?" she asked.
"I think I'm beyond the point of psychiatry now," Lucian chuckled cynically.
"Whatever, at this point, it doesn't matter if I don't know how to go about this, but maybe that's a good thing. My little brother is a little too much of a loon, so what? I think we can start by talking," Lynda said.
"Talking? About what?" Lucian asked, moving to his bed and patting it to gesture for Lynda to sit.
"Tell me about your brothers in arms," she said.
"... I guess I'll start with Marty, I wouldn't be here if it were not for him, on more than one occasion at that," Lucian smiled, a sad smile.
"I can't wait to hear about him," Lynda said, her eyes reflecting the broken image of Lucian.
"Let's start by saying that he was homosexual, not gay, homosexual," Lucian chuckled.
"That's the same thing," Lynda rolled her eyes.
"No, no, Marty always claimed that he was homosexual, not gay like those noisy and girlish divas. He used to say that he was a manly homosexual, and that the hair in his chest, beard, and mustache was proof of that." Lucian laughed openly.
"He sounds like a character," Lynda rested her head on her hand, her attention on Lucian.
"I think he liked me..." Lucian's laughter died down. "Given that he gave his life for me, he probably loved me, and not like a brother...
"Marty's ability was something like precognition, though it was more accurately the ability to calculate probable scenarios. I was the muscle, the senses, and the weapon, and he was the head and the voice of reason, he would proudly say.
"His timely advice saved my life 83 times," Aragorn said.
"I see, Father," Seraph replied while observing his dream. "He sounds like a trustworthy partner."
"He was," Aragorn nodded while wrapping his arms around his daughter's neck and resting his chin over her blue hair. "His calculations allowed our unit to walk through the hell of the bugs' homeworld and return after glassing their main hives. But, well... he didn't make it back."
"What happened?" Seraph asked.
"I trusted him greatly; it was to the point that, during the final days, I would almost blindly follow his advice," Aragorn said. "During one of the last ops, he told me I had to dive into the swarm and pulled a few of our brothers out while he guarded the portal to camp.
"I did as he instructed, lost my left pinky and left ear, a piece of my liver, and was poisoned by an arachnid-type bug, but I managed to cross the portal while dragging five of our brothers back to camp.
"When I heard the boom of the portal collapsing, I turned around to find Marty collapsed right behind me. He was half melted. One of the bugs that sprayed a hot, acidic substance got him. He chose to sacrifice himself for Luis, Marcus, Francis, Yanel, and Joung-yi," Aragorn, with his emotions flat, recounted.
In the dream, Lucian fell asleep while Lynda cuddled him.
"I thought something bad was going to happen when I found you in the Dreaming," Seraph said.
"The Dreaming, like DC's?" Aragorn asked.
"Yep, yep," Seraph chirped.
"You have so much of me in your core that that would never happen, and I would never harm you, even while dreaming," Aragonr explained.
"I'm happy I could see this, Father. Your first dream ever since you became the entity that today I call father," Seraph rested her weight on him.
"For all that I have now, and all that I'll have later, I'm not the monster I should have been," Aragorn said, planting a kiss atop her head.
Father and daughter watched as Lucian, Aragorn's most mortal self, went through plenty of his accumulated dreams, enjoying the comfort of one another.
↓Part 3━━━━━━━ ● ━━━━━━━Part 3↓
In a world of twitching shadows, broken dreams, and faulty nightmares, Chaos King stood in front of the conscience of Thanos.
Thanos—after overcoming the trial of the God Quarry, mastering the Mind and Reality Stones, and recovering the trust in himself that Aragorn's stray shot had broken; after examining the previously unexplored depths of his mind and becoming both part of reality and absent from it; and after summoning and empowering his Black Order, his Chitauri, and his children—has become so enlightened about matters he previously ignored that, upon understanding the dimension where he stood, he could only ask: "What happened to this place?"
When Seraph escaped the Dream Dimension and dragged a part of it with her, Chaos King did not feel a sense of dread or even concern. When Nightmare abandoned defense entirely and fought like a berserker, Chaos King was not worried. When Dreamqueen joined her father and lord in the suicidal charge, Chaos King didn't feel his instincts flare.
Chaos King, the part of him possessing Harry Hart, was not as cosmic-sensitive as its main body, which wielded cosmic awareness, but he was not dense or inexperienced.
When Chaos King entered the Dream Dimension with its host of divine thralls, he did so with the certainty of being able to trample Nightmare and his dreams and nightmares. He made his plans while overestimating his opponent.
However, when Seraph raised her hand and aimed at the clashing Dream Dimension and Shadow World, he hesitated not even for an instant and ripped the piece of both dimensions that had fused. It was a reaction almost instinctual, almost as sudden as the bright light that engulfed the clashing dimensions and erased them.
The moment he ripped out the fused section, he hid behind these dimensions and pulled out as fast as he could from the Dreamtime.
Naturally, the way Seraph took with her a piece of the Dream Dimension with the authorization of its lord was different than what Chaos King did; and given that the fused section was not lorded by either Nightmare or Chaos King, he was also unable to separate this piece smoothly from the Shadow World.
And this small dimension of twitching shadows, broken dreams, and faulty nightmares was the result. Additionally, because that's how terrifying the weapon had been, there were traces of erasure here and there in this dimension.
"~Ah," Chaos King exhaled almost dreamingly. "Oh, how... perfect is Paradox that even his second fruit was able to do this to me!"
Thanos looked around, focused his cosmic awareness—newly acquired—on the sections of the dimension that looked as if they had been deleted, narrowed his eyes, bloodlust faintly boiling below his skin, and asked, "Aragorn?"
"Do you understand now why you need me, just as I need you?" Chaos King asked. "This was done by one of his, not him. You, not even with your new position in the hierarchy of this Reality, can't contend against irrationality taken form, against Paradox, the very thing that everybody in the Multiverse abhors, the very bane of Existence, the very antithesis to All."
"... There once was a world ruled by psionic beings who understood one another, who shared a connection so deep the world was not divided by countries, federations, kingdoms, or faiths, but by psionic families.
"Conflict was scarce because mutual understanding was within reach of a temporal psionic bridge between minds. No murders, no violence, no loneliness, and no war. Only a desire born from familial love pushed them to strive for more, to advance, to grow, to discover, and to lead their world to a future better than their past.
"Their technology grew, their society did as well, and so, consequently, did their population.
"Their planet was a large waterworld, and in one of their satellites, another race had prospered. It was a surprise to me, since back then, I was only starting my journey; two intelligent races developing so close to each other.
"This race was not psionic; they were not that different from the average Kree, Xandarian, or Terran. As is only natural and logical, first contact led to a race war. The psionic beings could not understand the ways of the non-psionic ones, and vice versa.
"When their conflict was peaking, I arrived.
"As I said, I was starting, and my army was not numerous, nor was my experience as vast as it is now. Hence, they, both races, were resisting considerably. It took me three decades to pressure them into their home ground.
"It was only then that they both decided to act as one. They joined forces, and before I knew it, I had been shamefully pushed to the edges of their star system. I was losing vessels faster than I could replenish them, and my numbers were dwindling.
"I recognized the need for a strategic withdrawal of forces, to visit some of the neighboring systems and replenish resources. About a standard decade after that, I returned prepared to raze half their planet and satellite to the ground.
"What I found was not the united front that pushed me out. I only found the psionic race... After conquering them and halving their population, my first son, Maw, extracted information from them. I was curious, I only found those of the psionic race in the satellite, where had the others gone?
"I needed to know if they had escaped to spread my infamy and rally numbers to oppose me. What I discovered was that after I left, after they had joined hands, the psionic race exterminated them.
"That's when I learned that the enemy of my enemy is not always my ally," Thanos finished his recount with his eyes on the shadowy figure. "You're not my ally."
"Is that your take?" Chaos King scoffed. "You should have learned something else from that, Mad Titan. The lesson of the story is simple: the weak will perish.
"You were the weak first, they pushed you out, defeated your army, forced you out like a beaten dog—that's a mammal from Earth, in case you didn't know—and all of it was obviously because you were weaker than their forces combined.
"The weak must join forces to challenge the strong; that could be another lesson. What happened later was obviously the result of the weak ones, the non-psionic race, perishing at the hands of the strong, the psionic race, and then they meeting their end in yours, the stronger.
"That's the only law that matters, Destiny's Child. That's the ultimate truth of the Multiverse. The strong rule, the weak are ruled," Chaos King preached with the wisdom of multiversal iterations behind his belt. "The Gods rule the mortals, the Celestials the Gods, the Abstracts Reality, and the Abstracts fear the Cosmos. And in all of this, you and I are facing an opponent that fits in neither category.
"You and I, whether we like it or not, whether our pride recognizes it, are the weak, and Paradox is the strong—the undisputed strong!" Chaos King's roar made the unstable dimension shake.
"..."
"..."
For a moment, silence ruled the crumbling world, and both beings faced each other.
"Until Aragorn is dealt with, the enemy of my enemy shall be my ally," Thanos declared before his consciousness dispersed and returned to his body.
Chaos King remained silent for a few seconds after Thanos' disappearance, and then, he cackled madly.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! DID YOU SEE, MORTAL? I TOLD YOU HE WOULD AGREE!" Chaos King shouted, exhilarated.
'The only thing I saw was two scorpions agreeing to ride the frog,' Harry Hart replied.
↓Part 4━━━━━━━ ● ━━━━━━━Part 4↓
Time being relative is one of the greatest conjectures ever proven. While Einstein was probably not considering the philosophical parallels that could be drawn from this conjecture, it doesn't discredit the veracity of the now-common phrase.
Einstein's first postulate suggests that as an object's velocity approaches the c-limit (the speed of light), time for that object slows down relative to a stationary observer.
Einstein was not learned in the study of the monsters of the Universe who treat the laws of physics as suggestions, obviously. He probably would have croaked if he had ever witnessed the broken world left behind by the Goblin Force, or the tattered Reality by Aragorn and Kubos.
Maybe he would have had a similar reaction to Reed Richards' to Aragorn.
And like most mortals at the end of their lives, if they get the time and ability to ponder while they await their end, he would have probably realized with amazement how true the former conjecture was.
To a child, the ages it takes to go from pre-school to school, and later high school, are not unlike the eras it took the continents drifting above the tectonic plates to reach their current allocation.
To the mortals, seeing their due meeting with Lady Death coming closer as they age, the years, decades, go by faster than the seconds it takes to make a bad decision that would mark a life forever.
Below a certain level of existence, time is the operator of the ultimate equalizer: death.
And, as unnaturally as it all is, there exist those beings who treat time as a suggestion. Beings who outright ignore it, like Aragorn, and beings who are slaves to it, like the Time Variance Authority.
For these beings who are impervious to time, the passage of time is most of the time not worth raising an eyebrow.
Ask Aragorn what it was like to live from the Carboniferous to the modern age, and he would claim it felt the same as the passing of a day, or a week, month, year, century, or millennium.
For beings who live outside of the graphic of time-space, the passage of time hardly ever matters.
Nevertheless, it doesn't mean that these beings ignore the changes that mark the passage of time. For example, ask Aragorn how long he spent in The Void, and he would claim that it was so long that he currently lacks the numbers to explain because the names of these numbers themselves are so long he doesn't have the patience to speak them.
In conclusion, a quantity of time so large should pass for a being like Aragorn to recognize it as a significant number.
Chaos King's history starts in the Oblivion Void, the emptiness that was before any iteration of the Marvel Multiverse and that will be after each one of them.
Before the first iteration of the multiverse, there was the Oblivion Void, with only the One Above All predating it. The First Firmament came, and the war between the Celestials and Aspirants ended it, and at its end, there was the realm of Oblivion.
The Second Firmament came, and the Oblivion Void retreated to its edge, to serve as the barrier between the multiverse and the Upper Realms, like the White Hot Room, the Land of Couldn't-Be-Shouldn't-Be, the Beyond, the Dimension of Manifestations, and many others, with the House of Ideas, the residence of the one true creator, at the end.
The Oblivion Void works as the barrier that protects the realm of Eternity/Infinity, aka the Universe, from the terrors that lie beyond it. An example of these terrors is the Enders, better known as the Black Winters, a race of beings capable of ending iterations.
Additionally, the Oblivion Void protects the Upper Relms from the monsters born from the Universe, like Hadad, the creator of the Enders, who was such a figure that he defeated the Abstracts and challenged the One Above All once in the past.
The Universe, all iterations of it, was born from within the Oblivion Void. As such, with the expansion of the ruling Cosmos, the personification of this void, Oblivion, grows in power at the end and beginning of the Universes.
And while they cannot be called enemies under the mundane definition of the word, Eternity/Infinity are enemies with Oblivion, just as light and shadows are different faces of the same coin. This doesn't mean that these Abstracts are constantly battling, that would be too mortal of them, but they are constantly pushing against each other.
However, it should be noted that if a direct conflict came to be between these two Abstracts, Oblivion, as the one predating all Abstracts, would win 9 out of 10 fights. Which is why Oblivion almost always doesn't contend against the current personification of Reality personally.
{A/N: Because Marvel has retconned Infinity multiple times, I refer to Eternity/Infinity as one individual in some instances. Infinity is supposed to be Space and Eternity Time, but since space and time make the matrix of Reality, they are often considered a single individual.}
The way that they push back against each other is mostly through 'Champions', Hosts, Representatives, or Avatars. Chaos King is one of these.
A splinter, a shard, or an offshoot of Oblivion born from the primordial darkness and chaos that existed before the universe, that's what Chaos King is. The push from Oblivion against Eternity.
Chaos King predated Eternity/Infinity, and he was vastly more powerful than Eternity at its peak. Nevertheless, Eternity counted on the narrative boost in power that the restart of an iteration receives from the one true creator. So, when the current iteration of the multiverse restarted, Eternity grew in power far faster than Chaos King could react to, and by the time his home had turned into Earth, he was so weak that Gaea from the mainstream Reality and Izanagi sealed him, and Chaos King had no choice but to be reduced to the measly god Amatsu-Mikaboshi.
In the main Reality, after the Secret Wars created an opening for him, Chaos King took his shot and almost ended the multiverse after consuming most of it. He started with Nightmare, then a few deities, then the Hell Lords, then the divine realms, then more deities, and then realities.
The story of Chaos King ended when, after ending most of the multiverse, he was tricked into an infinite pocket dimension created by Galactus and the mortal Amadeus Cho, the Continuum, where he was sealed for eternity.
Later, Hercules sacrificed his recently obtained omnipotence to restore Reality to what it was before Chaos King's rampage, and it was shortly after this that Aragorn arrived at Marvel.
The important point of this story is the part where Chaos King was sealed for eternity.
The Continuum was pushed outside of the multiverse, to the void between Realities, and from then, it drifted to the furthest corners of this void. That's how it arrived near Earth-5H1N3, a Doomed Reality.
Whether due to Odin's fault or the devastating confrontation between Kubos and Aragorn, an opening was made into Earth-5H1N3, one which the current offshoot of Chaos King exploited.
But... It was in the time before this and after the Continuum was banished from the multiverse that Chaos King understood that time was relative.
In the beginning, right after being sealed, he was so drunk in his power that he didn't realize he had been sealed.
He ate, chumped, consumed, and madly guzzled down what he believed was the multiverse. After he was done, after he was sure there was nothing left, for a fleeting moment, he enjoyed the emptiness he had wrought.
It was not long after, maybe a few mesly millennia, while he prepared for the inevitable restart of the next multiverse, that he noticed something was not quite right.
It was a void empty of all, a total umbra, unpierceable shadows, but it was not the Oblivion Void at the end and start of a new multiverse.
As a being nigh-omnipotent after feasting on a great part of the multiverse, Chaos King tried to travel to the edges of the void he created, to venture into the Upper Realms and figure out what the sense of dissonance he was getting was.
But the Continuum's infinite was faster/larger than his absolute spatial relocation. It was as if he were running over a cosmic treadmill.
Denial was easy to come by after that, and acceptance only led to madness. Madness for a being like Chaos King, those from Oblivion, was a nigh-impossibility, for the emptiness can't go crazy, not in the mortal sense, but right there, in the Continuum, Chaos King met madness.
Maybe if he had been of the creator type, he could have used his power to birth a new Reality and coped better with eternity. Alas, he wasn't.
He thrashed around like a child throwing a tantrum, an addict searching for their fix, or a desperate mortal cursing the heavens—an entity that had been teased with all they desired, all that not only defined their purpose but also their identity, and then had been left to hang out to dry.
And as time ebbed away, as the relative time of the Continuum rolled impossibly fast and distant, something scratched at the furthest distance of the Continuum, something made a minimal wound at the weakest point of the Continuum's logic shell, and Chaos King didn't miss it.
This was a pocket dimension created by Galactus and Amadeus Cho. Even after locating this tiny scar, Chaos King, for all of his power, was unable to collapse the dimension from that point, and the only thing he managed to do was send out a small blob of his being with most of his consciousness.
This blob, maybe assisted by the same impossible miracle that created a scratch on the shell of the Contnuum, managed to clumsily traslocate to the outer wall of the construct of dark light it spotted at a distance, guided by a bluish-white light of absolute erasure: Earth-5H1N3.
Transfixed, it observed as this light pursued a being it recognized as a Beyonder, and how the light erased/voided/emptied/obliterated/erradicated everywhere in Reality that it sped through.
It was different from Chaos King's definition of void, but it was even more seductive to it than the Oblivion Void. It desired it, it wanted it, it needed it.
The blob took its shot when it saw the being that originated the light was spent after the fight and took possession of a mortal of high compatibility, Harry Hart.
Harry Hart, against impossible odds, didn't die to Kubos, not entirely. He bet all of his cards in fusing with the Shadow World, so after he had been obliterated by the baby Beyonder, he slowly began to reform.
He was in a weakened state when the blob of Chaos King splatted against his reforming body. He couldn't contend against the might of the beyond-ancient entity and lost the authority over his body and dimension in less than an instant.
With a mind twisted by madness, but also incredibly sharp, Chaos King discovered that the mortal's mind was safeguarded by traces of psionic energy of the being he most desired, Aragorn, and that breaking through them would alert him, so he had no choice but to coax information out of Harry Hart.
The intelligence he gained from Harry Hart, plus his own knowledge from observing the mainstream Reality for countless eras, and what he gained from the minds of all those gods he enslaved in Earth-616 and the realities he consumed, allowed him to be the equivalent of Aragorn, an entity with knowledge from beyond the Wall.
Armed with this knowledge and twisted by his madness, Chaos King concocted a plan that relied not on brute force but on cunning and foreknowledge.
That's how, with a fraction of his power, he ate most of the deities of Earth-5H1N3, nudged Thanos into a desired direction, and avoided Aragorn.
And now, at the edge of Earth-5H1N3, he observed beyond the Reality Wall at the Continuum floating about in the void between realities.
╚═══━━━─── • ───━━━═══╝
————————————————
{A/N:
Please check out my P@treon account! There are already 10 chapters ahead for premium members, which is at least 100,000 words. Premium members also gain access to a new chapter every week.
[email protected]/ExistentialVoid
Free Members get access to all free chapters, and I upload free chapters about 12 hours earlier on P@atreon.}
————————————————