He rose.
Not dramatically there was no theatrical pause, no buildup. He simply left the ground the way a thought leaves a mind, smoothly and without negotiation, ascending with an unhurried steadiness that made the act feel less like flight and more like correction like a thing returning to the elevation it was meant to occupy.
He rose past the buildings. Past the rooftops. Past the altitude where birds flew and aircraft had opinions about airspace. He rose until he was where all eyes from everywhere could find him a figure standing against the sky, backlit by something that was not quite light, his aura trailing below him in dark, slow-moving coils.
The ripple of attention spread across the city, then outward from the city, people emerging from buildings and looking up with the instinct of creatures who feel the sky change before they understand why.
Screens picked it up.
Feeds picked it up. Within minutes every eye in every city in every country was finding him, one way or another, this figure standing in the sky above the world with the posture of a deity who had descended specifically to say something that would not be said twice.
Williams looked down at all of them.
He opened his mouth.
"Heed my words, oh ye inhabitants o…"
He stopped.
Inside his own mind, something broke entirely. A laugh detonated in his chest with the force of something that had been compressed for a long time and had finally found an exit silent on the outside, catastrophic on the inside, the full-body hilarity of a man who had just heard himself and was not prepared for how that sounded.
IS THIS ME, his inner voice wheezed, with the energy of someone crying laughing on the floor.
MEEN. I WOULD NEVER. A PUBLIC PRESENTATION?? "OH YE INHABITANTS"?? WHO AM I RIGHT NOW. THIS IS A BULLSHIT LOAD OF CRAP
Outside, Williams' expression remained perfectly composed. The aura continued its slow rotations. The entire world continued to watch in complete silence.
He collected himself. Cleared his throat internally. Moved on.
"Hear my words, O descendants of the Earth."
His voice arrived everywhere simultaneously not broadcast, not amplified, but present in each location the way a truth is present once it has been understood. Every ear heard it at the same volume regardless of distance.
"Today I have come to show you that there is a hierarchy of power. A period of drastic and absolute change stands before you a period in which you will fight for your lives, for your right to exist, for the continuation of everything you are and everything you have not yet become. I will give you my teachings. My inheritance. The knowledge I have gathered across eons."
He paused.
"I know many of you have silent questions as to what the fuck is happening, "
He caught himself.
"my bad my bad, i meant….as to what is happening."
He pressed on.
" It will be up to each of you to pay the price for knowledge. I am not cheap. Neither is power cheap."
He extended both arms outward.
The lightning came first crackling up from inside him and arcing across his hands, jumping between his fingers, illuminating the dark spirals of his aura from within like storm clouds lit from the inside.
Then something else began to move not just lightning but substance, pouring from his body and his hands in churning streams of darkness and light and energy and something that had no name in any language currently spoken on Earth.
It descended from him in vast cascading rivers toward the surface below, finding its way across geographies, driving itself into the earth at different points across every continent like seeds planted by a force that understood exactly what it was growing.
His voice continued, vast and even:
"Find and overcome all the challenges I have set upon the path to power.
Only the qualified the strong, the willing, the ones who refuse to be the sum of their limitations will be able to access the knowledge about me, and about the cosmic expanse that waits beyond this small and fragile world."
The rifts came next.
They appeared everywhere at once tearing open across the surface of the world and in the air above it, vertical and churning, each one swirling with lightning and dust and the deep, pressurised wrongness of a threshold between here and somewhere that here had no framework to understand. They twisted and howled with contained energy, the edges of each one vibrating with forces that made nearby structures shake and nearby animals flee with zero hesitation and zero dignity.
Williams' voice did not waver.
"These rifts will be sealed. For one thousand days."
He let that settle.
"That is your timeframe. One thousand days to gain the power necessary to face what lives inside them.
To reach the knowledge I have placed behind their walls. One thousand days to become something capable of standing before horrors that do not care about your history, your feelings, your potential, or your intentions."
Another pause. When he continued, the temperature of his voice had dropped one final degree.
"If after one thousand days not one of you is strong enough to challenge any of these rifts if the horrors that pour from them at the end of that time find only weakness waiting then you will die. By your ignorance. By your complacency. By the choice to remain what you are when everything around you was screaming at you to become something more."
"I am here only as a herald. Not a saviour. The saving if any is to be done will be done by you, or it will not be done at all."
He lowered his arms.
The lightning faded. The streams of inheritance had found their destinations. The rifts continued their sealed, churning rotation across the face of the Earth, waiting.
Williams looked down at billions of upturned faces for one last moment at the fear and the awe and the confusion and the first, tentative sparks of something that might, with enough pressure and enough time, become resolve.
The corner of his mouth moved. Almost nothing. Almost imperceptible.
Have a nice day, you all."
A heartbeat later he was gone.