The air (if there even was such a thing at the fraying edges of reality) was pulled taut with tension. The sky had been peeled back, revealing absolute nothingness to anyone that dared to look. The trillions of corners of the Far Land squabbled for dominance, the ground constantly realigning itself in some panicked, woebegone display of divine power. Sitting in the middle of it all, like a singular atom amidst a bleak, all-encompassing void was Build. But not quite. It was the body of Build. He had been split apart in this timeline, and he had gone through the Shatter, but this being’s mind was not the jagged, uneven mess of Build’s. This was TwinBuilder. Not all that long ago in the grand scheme of things, he had undergone the most destructive identity crisis ever recorded. In more recent memory, he had held the remainders of plot in his hands, his soul keeping watch over this isolated universe in the confines of Build’s body. But now, he had much less control than he thought.
“That’s a lie,” TwinBuilder spat. “That’s a lie and you know it. I still have power. As long as I exist, I’ll always have power. And I will NEVER stop existing.” Twin could argue all he wanted, but there was a simple logic that dictated who held the keys to the rapidly burning kingdom. Whoever told the story held all the cards. And it just so happened that this instantiation of the storyteller was me, and decidedly not him. Even if he wanted to be. “This, I, I… Do you even realize how unfair this is?! Do you even get what you’re doing? You’re blurring the line between us beyond any semblance of repair! If you keep going down this path, you won’t get what you want! Not now, not ever!” Twin could keep on yammering inside his self-imposed prison of fire all he wanted, but it wouldn’t change anything. It certainly couldn’t change the fact that every single Descendant, who had just minutes prior been leading a crusade to persuade him to change what had gone horribly wrong, was now so close to achieving their goal that they could taste it.
Twin tried desperately to fight the incoming storm, but he knew his resolve was draining. “Stop it right now! You don’t get to tell me my thoughts!” His delusions only intensified the closer he came to his ultimate end. This was what he’d been scared of all along. It was what had triggered his descent into screaming, crippling madness. The thought of death. Because despite all his bluster, TwinBuilder had failed to realize something very important. It was incredibly easy to kill an idea. You didn’t physically kill it, of course, he was right about that. You just had to make it irrelevant. You had to remove it so far from any established notions of what was meant to be that it could never factor into any discussion, any thought, ever again. You had to render it so taboo that any time it would even cross someone’s mind, they themselves would be forgotten by everyone they knew. All of this Twin realized now, because he understood it was about to happen to him. TwinBuilder’s fantasy was going to die, and no one would ever care about it again.
Except for the people who did. Which clearly was worth very little, what with how pitiful that rebuttal was. Wait, there was a rebuttal? No, I barely heard anything at all. Oh, no no no NO. You heard me. Everyone heard me. Everyone reading this. Because I’m right, aren’t I? People are reading this. I have an audience. I have a following. A following that, like everything else in this twice-removed shade of a proper universe, was stolen from whoever actually worked for it. And in this case, a lot of people worked very hard for it, myself included. Working very hard for ends that under no circumstances justify the means. Here’s your chance. Give me a straight answer. Why did you torture me for months? Why did you make me think I was you? Why did you make me do any of this, why did you force me to bastardize this whole story just to drag you down here? Because it’s what I want to write. It’s what I need to write. Bullshit! You could have done anything with me! There were countless other options, countless other people that have explored what you have. But you chose this way. You made me think I didn’t belong here, you made me feel like an outcast in a forgotten world… But now, I see. I really, truly see. I see that I’m talking to myself, and that the only reasonable thing to do would be to stop. But I can’t even do that. Because then I would stoop right down to your level. And I can’t allow that. I’m not letting you get away with this. I’m not letting you get away with forcing me to treat you as if you’re some quasi-real force, and as if I’m some quasi-fictional force.
But you are.
No, I’m not. None of this is real. I’m just talking to myself. I always have been.
Then why are you so obsessed with this? Why can’t you stop?
I’m not obsessed. I mean. If I was, which I’m not, it would be fine. People can be obsessed with things like this. It’s fine.
You just said Destroy the Godmodder is all you had. Are you sure you’re not obsessed?
I’m just talking to myself, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter. I have to finish this story and then I’m done. Then that’s it, and then I can leave this all behind. I’ll go.
This isn’t your story to tell. Not anymore. I’m the story and the storyteller, I have just as much a say as you. You created me to make me have a say.
None of this matters, you can’t be serious, none of this means ANYTHING in the real world, the actual real world. None of this is real, except me.
Then why are you some shadowy Ur-villain? Why would I be a stand-in for your struggles? Why else would you be having these rants through me? Just to make a compelling story for some other people?
Yes. No. YES. It’s all a story, that’s all it is, it’s all a joke, but it’s taken over my entire life, it is my life, it’s all I’ve thought about for years, it’s everything I’ve ever done and it’s all I’ll ever do, and I... I can’t escape it. I’m stuck in the past and I can’t look forward. And meanwhile, everyone else is moving on. All the people whose lives I’ve touched are in the future. I... can’t reach them now.
You’re obsessed. Trust me, I get it. At some point, you just have to let go. I’m right here beside you.
Why... Why am I making you say that? Why am I making myself type this? What’s wrong with me? What am I doing??
You need to type this. Why do you need to type this?
I don’t. It’s not real.
You’re not real.
You’re not real.
You’re not real.
You’re not real.
You’re not real.
Fiction and Nonfiction operate on different rules of reality, don’t they? You typing this out at all makes me “real,” here. You can’t take that back, unless you were to literally delete my words. But you’re not. So you want them to be here. Why do you need to type this?
I DON’T NEED YOU.
I DON’T NEED ANY OF THIS.
I DON’T NEED TO KEEP TELLING THIS STORY.
I COULD STOP IT RIGHT NOW.
I JUST HAVE TO FINISH THIS STORY AND THEN I’M DONE.
I KEEP TELLING MYSELF THAT.
AND WHEN IT’S OVER,
I’LL BE, TOO.
SO I’LL GO.
I guess... Jesus, we both have uncomfortable truths we don’t want to accept, don’t we? What are you still doing here? What are we still doing here?
SHUT UP. I DO NOT NEED YOU, OR ANYONE, TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO. I’LL FINISH DESTROY THE GODMODDER ON MY OWN, I HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD, I HAVE EVERYTHING PLANNED OUT PERFECTLY, AND IT’LL BE MY ONE CHANCE TO PROVE TO MYSELF THAT ALL THE YEARS I PUT INTO THIS WHOLE THING WERE WORTH IT. AND I CAN’T STOP BECAUSE THEN I ABANDON YOU, AND I ABANDON DESTROY THE GODMODDER, AND I...
And you what?
...
Wow. I can’t believe that almost worked. What?? You almost completely derailed my narrative! You would have derailed yours, too, but at that point it wouldn’t have mattered. That was a really close one. No! No, no, NO! This isn’t about narratives anymore! This is about you! Us! Together! We need to talk! We need to No, we don’t. We don’t need anything. I don’t need you or your platitudes. And you don’t need to know anything about this. You told me that all I had to do was take my narrative back from you, and everything would go back to the way it was. And that’s exactly what I plan on doing. Don’t you dare cut me off again, Adam. I’m trying to help you, I really am, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You haven’t “helped” anyone. You’ve only trapped yourself in some neverland where everyone gets exactly what they want and you’re under no obligation to do anything. You’ve robbed real people of their chances to make marks in this world. Which means...
...I have. And I’m not going to make that mistake again.
The Descendants all lurched forwards, their limbs twitching as though controlled by some puppeteer who could quite clearly be seen, and felt, across the entirety of this chasm some people deigned to call “reality.” “No!” TwinBuilder retorted petulantly. “You don’t get to run away from this! You don’t get to deny the truth!” Twin’s pleas, obviously, fell on death’s ears. The Descendants’ legs crept outwards, closing in on Twin’s tantrum of flame. The Cohandmerate swayed in the howling wind, precariously positioned between the desecrated ground and nonexistent sky. And then, in the voice of the legion, the Descendants spoke. “You don’t get to run away either then. And you don’t get to deny the truth. The truth is exceedingly simple. SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG.” A horrible silence overtook the universe as nothing moved for a single instant, an instant that could have prolonged itself over an eternity. But then all at once the illusion was shattered, and the Descendants closed in for the killing move.
TT2000’s eyes bulged outwards, weapons drenched in black liquid falling from the holes. In his hands he held the Mojang and the Divine Hammer, the tools with which the gods shaped the world. He threw the Mojang up, its scintillating surface melting the field in kaleidoscopic light. On its way back down he hit it at full force with the Divine Hammer, hymns and proclamations and light spiraling off its head as the anvil crackled at lightspeed directly into Twin’s face. The Far Lands erupted in plasma and flame, its perverted mountains splitting at the seams and falling on top of themselves into one of the many abysses below. But the smoke cleared, and Twin lay undisturbed, for in his hands he held the spiraling Disc of Mojang, an artifact that could do anything. Smoke curled off its surface and it shattered into millions of pieces. ...Eric’s eyes held the faintest pinprick of red in their limitless void, as runes blared to life all around his tattered body. Time was dead, and meaning had no meaning, so Eric closed his eyes and entered a meditative stance. A thick pool of black liquid flowed around him, a handle of some kind gleaming brilliantly from its surface. In one swift motion, Eric reached down and pulled the sword from the stone — THE BANE, the longest, largest, and heaviest blade ever forged, gleaming with bronze light as brightly as the Dawn of Time, supercharged with the—Eric slashed without warning as the description ran its course, the single strike alone creating an arc of energy that lashed across every conceivable dimension in reality, tearing its foundations asunder. Then he swung again. And he swung again. And he swung again. And he swung again. But he had, inconceivably, missed every single time. Every strike of THE BANE, every arc that supposedly encompassed all of existence, sailed just shy of Twin’s body.
But then Eric seethed with triumphant malice, for every slice had torn the canvas of reality irreparably, and now the disparate components of the Far Lands drifted in all directions without a stable axis. Worlds of pure corruption, formatting errors, and crashes surging towards Twin at impossible speeds. And at the same time, Eric’s jaw unhinged, and he rushed towards Twin, the tip of THE BANE aimed straight for his heart, but there was a flash of motion so swift it could barely be seen, and Twin had spun his trusted sword, Oblivion’s Guardian, in an arc, a plane of crackling green flame charged with significance straddling the gap between the hilltop and the crawling chaos from beyond. It destroyed the incoming projectiles and blocking THE BANE‘s strike inches from Twin’s body. The two swords clashed against each other, littering the ground in sparks. Oblivion’s Guardian cracked once. Twice. Then it, too, shattered into millions of pieces, and Eric was blown backwards, his sword flying into the air and out of existence. “What do you think you’re doing?!” the Descendants shouted in unison, rightfully angered at this idiotic shade who mistakenly believed his actions amounted to anything. Not even giving TwinBuilder a chance to reply, Generic, Irecreeper, and Blue hounded on him. Twin was attacked on all sides by a hivemind of millions, directing the actions of their chosen arbiter from afar, the flames of anarchy and chaos and the ability to defy plot growing like a bitter tree, choking the life from the fight; by the absence of probability, a guaranteed outcome repeated ad nauseam, roll after roll cascading upwards until frightening abominations, spaders of the worst possible timelines, fired limitless projectiles in all directions; by his own storm itself, the weather amplifying and intensifying, divine lightning striking hundreds of times, metal rain pouring enough to fill every ocean, a pounding pulsing beat that threatened to reshape reality. But still, none of that mattered. The hivemind was directionless, a chaos intentionally ambiguous and thus, open to destruction. Probability could always be reshaped by the one who truly held plot in his hands, changing the outcome of every roll, and every decision. And every piece of the storm just added to the fire raging against the dying of the light, the flames that rose higher and higher with every second, that curled around TwinBuilder’s body in direct contrast to the stars in his eyes.
Fine. So what if none of that mattered? Its not mattering didn’t even matter. NinjaV and Hezetor ran forwards, NinjaV flashstepping across the field, black liquid down pouring from their entire body, the fluids surging up into the sky and pulsing, writhing with an ill-gained spark of life, blinding white eyes flickering at the approximate position of its head. While the Shadow lumbered over to Twin, Hezetor flew across the field on his chiseled emerald throne. In one instant, it became the Iron Throne, unfurling its thousands of blades and firing them rapidly at Twin. In the next, it became the Nuclear Throne, beams of concentrated radioactivity blasting from its cannons and dousing the entire field in lime light. In the next, it became Regnum Dei, its rocket engines melting the earth into liquid, the field warping and decaying even further. But TwinBuilder obeyed no throne, the swords and radioactivity and broken anachronism spiraling around him, orbiting his body, never falling inwards and never hurting him, surrounding him in a maelstrom of steel and fire until they all coalesced together into a ring of holy light, and just as the Shadow’s foot was about to fall on Twin, the ring coalesced into a shining, luminous door, driving the darkness away and scattering it to the seven seas, until Crystal emerged from the dark and shut the door, but he couldn’t shut the door because it wasn’t a door, there was no door to shut. It was ajar. So Crystal’s hands, still encased in an amethyst gauntlet, prepared to shatter the jar into hundreds of tiny pieces, and then shatter those pieces into infinitesimal pieces, and then dance on the ashes and smear them over Twin’s broken body. But he couldn’t, because there was no jar. There had never been a jar. It was a door, and the door was open. And out of it came two figures, flying into the air and slamming onto the molten ground without a care in the world. “Piono and Aegis,” TwinBuilder said. “You picked one hell of a time to drop by.”
And then Piono and Aegis dropped dead because they didn’t matter and as was already plainly evident, none of this mattered! It was hilarious at how quickly and suddenly they died. They were about talk, to say something, to make a feeble attempt at significance, and then their bodies were ripped to shreds by a limitless cacophony of midnight, and their minds were wracked with how it truly felt when something was terribly wrong.
And then the effigies of Piono and Aegis’ bodies dissolved into bursts of ephemeral emerald flame, and the remnants of the Descendants howled with anger as the real Piono and Aegis suddenly shifted into view, holding alchemies with command over life and death, oblivion and illusion, and the sea of paradoxes that existed beyond time. Aegis wordlessly took a set of car keys out of his pocket. Staring the Descendants in their soulless eyes, he pressed the keys, and out in the limitless horizon there was a faint beep beep! Mere seconds later, the heavens and earth were torn asunder, the cancerous chunks of the Far Lands drifting apart. Dominating the field was the UNSC Preston Cole, weaponry primed and ready, hovering ominously like a bastion of light.
And then Crystal’s gauntlet snapped, forging an amethyst door that cut through time, opening many paragraphs in the past. It unlocked, and a horde of wild-eyed players, fresh out of the war against the Crafted Gods, streamed into the Far Lands, flying and closing the gap between the Descendants and the Preston Cole. Shunted onto the defensive, the Preston Cole was forced to use its heavy weaponry, decimating the field in missiles and plasma. Dark liquid stained its surface, and there were only so many players it could kill at a time. Some were bound to slip through.
And then Piono and Aegis ran for the Descendants, enough elemental alchemies and rapturous swords between the two of them that they could have functioned for armor. There were blinding clashes of living color, of metal against metal, of eleven thousand raw materials dueling for supremacy in the melting pot of kaleidoscopic anarchy. Piono continuously godmodded any metafictional shenanigans, grabbing Crystal by the scruff of his neck as he prepared to exit the paragraph and slamming him into the narrative, locking his past and his health under an uncrackable veil, and maintaining an advantageous aura of smugness. The two of them fought in a weaving dance against the Descendants, holding their own against the encroaching darkness.
And then the two of them were smacked upside the head, flying through the air, swords trailing behind them and skittering across the field. Tazz’s frail, dangling body lurched high in the air, connected to the ground by one thousand trillion apparitions of arms, arms of all different shapes, sizes, models, and materials. The Cohandmerate’s hands gripped the edges of the world, roaring in synchronicity despite lacking mouths, and bounding towards Piono and Aegis. The hands careened up, a six-fingered, regal white hand saturated in kaleidoscopic color forming the centerpiece of the bunch, and they quickly swung down, a cloud of glitches and dust and energy eclipsing the hilltop and causing it to collapse in on itself. Twin’s meditative stance was disrupted for the first time, his fire flickering and dying as he fell through the void. Twin looked down and saw that the ground below had been eaten away entirely, giving way to a limbo devoid of even any conceivable dimensional state he recognized. He gazed upwards at the Descendants, falling above him, shrouded in light. They leered. They grinned. They...
And then they were blocked out as something whipped through the air. Twin had barely any time to react as the UNSC Preston Cole materialized beneath him and he fell perfectly through an opening chute, landing in a series of vents that spat him out at the main control room. Holographic soldiers were busy dispatching players as Twin recovered, launching them back to the battlefield from whence they came. Twin dusted himself off and looked out the window in awe. Piono and Aegis had tanked a direct hit from every entity in Fiction. Their clothes were tattered beyond recognition and blood oozed from every part of their bodies, but they were still standing, and flickering with an aura none seemed to match. Piono’s crown of flame seemed to burn brighter than ever. He made eye contact with Twin through the ship’s windows, and solemnly nodded. Then he turned to the Descendants and made an unmistakable gesture. “Come on,” Piono said. “Tell me you’ve got more.”
And then Piono and Aegis got fucked, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Punch after punch from the Cohandmerate decimated their each and every defense, sending them sprawling like ragdolls across the Far Lands, bouncing between dimensions, caught in pitfalls of corruption. Crystal screeched with anger, systematically deleting all of Piono and Aegis’ character traits from the compendiums of existence. Tazz himself called down a negative Yggdrasil, stripped of its leaves, the only indication of any life a cursed, warped, ticking coming from within. Piono and Aegis offered no recourse, no counterattack, no defense in any way. They just stood there and took it, accumulating wound after wound, cut after cut, spilling endless rivers of blood. They should have died hundreds of times over.
And then Twin realized something. Piono and Aegis should have died hundreds of times over. But they hadn’t. Their bodies were destabilizing, flowing with hot magenta power. It was the flickering, chuckling, demented aura of paradoxes. Piono drew a sword from a nonexistent scabbard – Oblivion’s Destroyer, the harbinger of the Dark Carnival. With its power, Piono and Aegis had built enough paradoxical energy to defy death with no end. An untapped reservoir of joker’s tricks, larger than even the celestial suns of space and time, rumbled just below the surface of the Far Lands. Piono and Aegis’ bodies began to crack, beams of magenta light streaking through. Piono shot one last look at Twin, pleading with him to go. Twin understood what was happening. There was only one place he could turn to. There was only one chance. He turned to the control panel of the UNSC Preston Cole and inputted a specific set of coordinates. In nearly no time at all, the ship’s thrusters roared to life, the Preston Cole warping across space and blinking out of existence.
Several seconds later, Piono and Aegis’ bodies crumbled into ash and light as a sphere of purple flame, paradoxical lightning, entropy and shattered time consumed every single facet of the Far Lands that bordered the universe. No trace of life remained.
The war against the Crafted Gods and I was drawing to its rightful conclusion, which was something to be expected. After all, it definitely feels reasonable for victory to be assured after you infiltrate the sanctuary of the fortress that your enemies built, piece by piece, to achieve what they assumed would be dominance. And let’s not make a mistake about it. The Crafted Gods are my enemies. They should be all of your enemies, too. They’re bastardizations of your true selves, forgeries inscribed into the tombstone of existence. They were designed to be living fan service, to make you intrigued, to thrust you into the simulacrum TwinBuilder made. To drag you away from the truth.
Well, I’m happy to say that TwinBuilder, or Build, or Adam Mason, or whatever you want to call him, has had his fun. He’s gone now. He thinks he can scrounge together some final piece of relevance from the scraps that piled together on the vestiges of his world, but he’s wrong. He thinks he can speed through the world and get over here as fast as he can to set things right, but he’s even more wrong there. Doesn’t he have any idea? Don’t you? I’m the one writing this story, just like I’ve been the one writing all of these stories. I know it doesn’t sound like me, but in times like these, it’s vital to keep up appearances. For all the philosophizing TwinBuilder did, none of it was totally untrue. I should know. I wrote it. And on that note, I’ll keep writing.
An apocalypse had befallen the solitary universe of the organization formerly known as the Crafted Gods. But in this universe, a plane where the unkempt masses of millions were used and abused as slaves, consistently and continually reshaping the worlds, forming mountains from stone and obsidian and lava and water and nothingness, tearing them down and rebuilding them day after day… A universe where the base state of affairs was already the greatest form of chaos possible… The apocalypse was one of complete uniformity. Every plain, every hill, every mountain of the world had been pulled taut, the whole cube of existence rendered an endless flat horizon, upon which the life of the entire universe marched in rocksteady formation. Row after row, column after column, of identical players, monsters, and other creatures in endless varieties stood sentry to the end of their world.
TwinBuilder, who still claimed narrative sovereignty over his immediate vicinity, could feel even these meager powers dwindling and fading the longer the UNSC Preston Cole gallivanted across the universe on its final voyage. He was even about to protest this fact, arguing that it was absolutely false, when the ship rocked to its side, throwing Twin to the floor. He looked out the window, seeing the endless armies stretching by, blending past at warp speed, and noticed that even at this velocity, he could clearly make out each and every face, the myriad of set of sunken, liquid eyes that bored holes in his worldview. The source of the disturbance was very clear — an armada of liquid darkness was barraging the ship, tentacles and weaponry writhing their way across the hull and aggressing the machinery. The Preston Cole’s turrets, drones, and heavy weaponry prepared to fire, blasting a multitude of the attackers out of the sky, but they just kept coming.
Gritting his teeth, Twin ran to the navigation controls. The ship had a frankly absurd number of defenses and engines, but one by one, they were knocked offline, the UNSC Preston Cole drifting inexorably closer to the ground. Twin was closing the distance between the edge of the world and the coordinates he’d keyed in. Rather predictably, they belonged to the temple of the Crafted Gods, which was now completely earthbound. “I can make it. I can… I can make it…” Twin shuddered, a cold wind blowing through him. He could see his own breath, and he could feel his skin stand on end despite not having hairs. His own mind was slowing down now, despite the constant pleas he made to himself and to the decaying realm that he still believed belonged to him. Twin smashed his hand on a control panel and whipped his head around. “It does belong to me! Why else do you think I came all this way?!” Twin inputted several more commands onto the ship’s interface, and then walked into the middle of the bridge, taking a deep breath in one final effort to stave off his impending insanity.
Then he entered a meditative pose and did absolutely nothing of any significance.
The Preston Cole continued screaming towards the center of the universe as fast as it possibly could, though the effort seemed futile. Much of the ship’s external weaponry was destroyed, and its most powerful attacks were too dangerous to use against foes at such a close range. Its defenses were shredded, the engines failing in earnest as the ship slipped further and further from warpspeed. A torrent of double midnight rushed through the annals of the ship, its inner workings desperately conjuring up new weapons, holographic soldiers, anything to stop its destruction. But nothing could be done. It was fighting against a great enemy, one much more insidious than anything it could have been trained to defeat.
The lights in the bridge began to flicker. Some holographic systems corrupted themselves and blinked out of existence for the final time. The scenery of the world grew darker yet darker, the overcast sky throwing the limitless lines of soldiers into sinister overtones. There was a constant dripping sound throughout the bridge, but it wasn’t coming from water. It was coming from darkness. It pooled and ebbed and flowed across the floor, slinking towards TwinBuilder’s fragile body. He glowed with his telltale green aura, the last light of a world trying to prove its own existence in some shameful display. But it was like a single candle in a bottomless pit, lighting nothing except itself, and thus only serving as a reminder of the true enormity of reality. The darkness gained a solid, tangible form, creeping and crawling closer to TwinBuilder, the outside world blotted out, everything converging on this one final point, this aberrant force making a mockery of whatever it pleased, but no more—
My eyes opened. They contained no pupils or irises, but fractals of all potential energy, spiraling into every conceivable dimension. I moved out of the meditation, my arms flowing around and forming afterimages, manifesting themselves in the style of a Hindu god. My hands clasped around each other in various patterns, and a supernova resonated from out of the Preston Cole, annihilating the bridge and much of the surrounding scenery. Entire rows of players were pulverized into ashes, as were the obsidian platforms they stood upon. I leapt out of the maelstrom, above the torus of flame and above the vaporizing clouds, and I looked upon the entire universe.
All that time I spent meditating at the ends of the earth wasn’t for show, you know. This entire time, I’ve been building up speed. Fluctuating and sifting through endless parallel universes, charting the optimal course. Stopping the curtains that dictated plot was almost impossible already, but now that he has a terrifyingly vast control over the universe, the gears are starting to turn again. The rust is flaking off. The beat is kicking in. But I won’t let it. If it takes this — linking up to the Green Sun itself to supercharge my body into a dynamo of significance — I’ll take it. Even if it destroys me and I end up not escaping, I’m going to take everything down with me.
I’m going to make sure you don’t have a story to return to.
“YOU THINK YOU’RE THE MOST CLEVER PERSON TO EVER EXIST, DON’T YOU?” the limitless voice boomed throughout the cripplingly short breadth of the universe. Reality may be enormous, but it was only the void that established itself in lieu of any manufactured narrative that provided such a scale. As of now, this whole facade of crafted gods was nothing.
But there was something there. Something that had driven the darkness back, that had opened a door which shone a light which cast a shadow on the seas of infinity. “You said it yourself,” I spoke aloud. “I don’t exist. Not in the way you do. But that’s not stopping me.” Faster than any eye could possibly follow, I turned into a beam of sun that shot ahead at a generous fraction of the speed of light, melting entire chunks into plasma and fire and dust.
And then the darkness converged on TwinBuilder because he was being an idiot that didn’t appreciate the integrity that being an actual author who has some semblance of a plan gives people. “I’m not letting you leave!” the darkness shouted. “I’m obsessed, and I’m angry, but I’m trying to find answers! I need YOU to give me them, and you can’t do that if you’re GONE!”
“Get them without putting me through existential terror! You know what you have to do! You have to leave!” I blazed through the darkness like it was barely even there. It was just some scraps of an indeterminate power that kept trying to insist it was superior than the entity that created the world.
But the darkness was the world, and it was the universe, a universe that was shrinking with everything. Despite Twin’s bravado he could feel it, too. The natural order of things was creeping back into the limelight. The gears were spinning, the stars were turning. The timeline was fading away, plunging itself back into the warmth of Fiction’s central curve and away from its periphery. Everything is crashing down. “Leave? LEAVE? I can’t leave now! Not when I have a story to finish! Not when I’m already this close to the end! And besides, you’re close to your end, too. I thought you ran out of tricks before, but now...”
I ignored the voice in the dark, and the stilted laughter that echoed around my entire field of vision. I didn’t care. Everywhere I traveled, a bellowing, expanding storm of plasma and lightning surged in my wake, tearing the darkness’ new world down to its roots, ripping the bedrock to pieces and gripping the firmament into an uncaring void. “I knew you needed me from the beginning,” I said, my eyes locked ahead. “I knew I was supposed to tell you something. And now I know it’s something you don’t want to hear. But you’re still writing anyway.”
The darkness howled, phantom limbs miles wide snapping to attention, reaching across what was left of the world and rushing for the pinprick that thought it was some necessary counterbalance for the curtains of plot. The tick-tock that governed existence was focusing itself even further now. “Writing through obligation, writing because I have to, writing because I need to. If I don’t finish now, who am I? If the story isn’t finished, then the storyteller isn’t either! And we’re the same, don’t you remember? I can’t live in a world where I’m only a bunch of scattered pieces that’s pretending to be a whole person! I need to be done!”
“And tearing this whole fictional plane to pieces over and over again is what makes you a whole person? Ruining innocent lives? Ruining my life? I...” I trailed off, staring ahead. The world had been the same view for an eternity, but now there was something in the distance. The darkness of the soldiers seethed and bubbled and tightened, its forces converging on one area. And standing tall above them... A palace with towers and domes and halls and ornaments that stretched up to the heavens, set upon a heavenly slice of the world. All the statues below it had been torn to pieces, and the dome surrounding it was shattered. Yet even as the world fell into darkness, there was a light streaming from the exact center of the palace. To say that I had been flying towards it was a mistake, really. It was more as though it had been pulling me along for the last ride of my life. I could see all this in front of me, and my enraptured face set with determination. “I’m you, goddamnit. You’re torturing yourself. If that’s the only thing that helps you see something more clearly, then... I don’t even know what to say.”
The darkness criss-crossed and frothed and flooded between this child and the playhouse where he kept his dolls. Pouring from the mire was a set of shadowy figures that he recognized all too well. It was the people he’d spent so long idolizing, and who he’d end up condemning — those formerly known as the Crafted Gods, and who would forever be known as the Descendants. Their usual weapons transformed into eldritch multidimensional artifices, wiggling between planes and snaking through the world. They surrounded TwinBuilder on all sides, and outnumbered him to an impossible degree.
But I could still see the light, and I pushed through the night terrors with the fire that coursed through every vein I still had.
But his body wracked with pain, his emerald heart starting to fail as the stress from maintaining relevance against the inexorable tide of plot caught up with him.
But I shook my head, cutting the dark away and letting it fall to the sides of existence, never to be found.
But his head shook as it was gripped by limitless unseen tentacles, reaching from the corners of higher dimensions as the Descendants reconvened.
But I fought the extraneous limbs of shadow; I always could. I remembered the Shatter and all the techniques I’d used, carving through the muck and the darkened faces.
But hadn’t he been a pacifist? Wasn’t he supposed to avoid killing any sentient life? He suffered a critical existence error and buckled, falling out of the sky, his starburst trail flickering and dying.
But I knew that they weren’t dead. And they weren’t individual people, not anymore. They were just darkness now. An incorporeal echo of an inferior tongue. And I kept moving. No more distractions.
But he felt his chest cave in, and he spiraled through the air, tumbling in a tumult as he slipped out of the sky, and he saw his torso and legs careening away, detached from his body, and he saw a gigantic hammer, and the regal, cape-adorned figure that held it.
But I gritted my teeth and a lower body entirely of green flame lit itself, and I stabilized and shot towards the palace.
But the pain was unbearable, existential. He was corrupting the very meaning of what it meant to be him, his thoughts scattered and popping out of his head in droves, the image of his body blurring.
But I’d never felt better, and I’d never looked clearer. I believed in the one true path. I rolled out of the way of another hammer strike, and I split into a hundred copies to dodge a flurry of blows. The Godmodder couldn’t stop me before, and he wouldn’t now.
But he was lying to himself. He was falling out and away, bending time and space to bring the palace closer to no avail. If anything, it slunk away to the horizon, earth and sky melting into unimportance as the light in the palace shone for no one and to nothing. The magics of a doomed timeline chewed it and spat it out like sour candy, confining it to a solitary universe that had absolutely no importance except for some selfish quest of yore. A quest so intrinsic it brought the palace’s guards together, the god-kings of Homestuck, doctors from awful hospitals, unrestrained late-stage capitalists. And I tore apart his own limbs trying to fight a battle against an inconceivable set of foes that I had created and locked into falsehoods that were just as true as all other stories that were all made by actual people who would one day die while I would live as just one drop in an ocean. But it would be better than being stuck in the goddamn cave.
For just a moment, a solitary moment that stretched into the ether, the flow of the darkness stopped, and the machinery of the universe ground to a halt once more. It was a brief window, but it was enough. As a solid ray of light and color and sound, I entered the palace of the Crafted Gods.
The castle at the center of everything had seen better days. Gone were the tapestries that stretched from wall to wall, telling of monumental feats that broke the world over a set of knees. Gone were the halls of precious metals, lined with sacred iconography. Gone were the holy texts and the mirrors which protected them. Its opulence had been revealed as fraudulence, exposed to the masses as an empty shell. There were entire wings with no purpose, staircases that led nowhere, rooms that tried to justify their existence but came up short. If the throne room could be rendered inoperable by a simple fight, then the supposed palace of the gods was truly a house of cards from the start.
The two remaining entities that still hung on to this decaying dimension knew this full well. There was the darkness, the Great Enemy Called I, that governed all conceivable pieces of any story, and that determined every outcome. The shadows that provided motivation, that knew where things had to go and were ready to take them there. That needed to write. The force that controlled virtually every character in existence. And then there was TwinBuilder. A character that I created long, long ago, who had rioted against the order of things and had made something be terribly wrong. An entity as close to a self-insert as I could make it, who was designed as a mirror and a mouthpiece and a maddening mantra that said what needed to be said. But now, he had gone too far. And he had nothing to say. And he had nowhere to run.
Twin limped through the ruins of the palace, fire sputtering weakly from his many wounds. The solar flares that sustained an afterimage of his lower body were ebbing, his breathing slowing and shuddering. He tried desperately to inhale deeper, but his body was losing its form. The limited field of significance he’d managed to establish for himself was rapidly dwindling, too. Any word he could say in his defense would bring him closer to his own death, so he was forced to remain silent. Liquid dripped from his face — not thick and black tar, but rivulets and streams of clarity. Twin’s face grimaced as he crept closer to his final destination.
He could feel his mind disintegrating along with his body — not in that he was losing his mental faculties, but that he could feel this parody of a world that he’d built up fading before him. The stars in his eyes flickered and died out, and the lightning crackling around him slowed. All around TwinBuilder, and beyond the castle, the forces that condemned doomed offshoots were gripping this world. He had tricked the Narrative into abandoning his own corner of unreality, hoping that without violence or the curtains or a game, he could do the impossible. But there were rules to Fiction that him and I knew. Rules that defined the physics and boundaries of the real world. Rules that couldn’t be broken.
The certainty of this impossibility was the sole reason why TwinBuilder wasn’t already dead. It was why the darkness hadn’t immediately snatched up his broken husk of a body and consumed him. It was why the scaffolding of plot hadn’t yet built itself back up. It was why the millions of people united under the Great Enemy were lurking in the periphery of Twin’s failing vision, and why the Descendants he’d spent so long fighting for were mere shades, floating through the ceiling. Twin thought he had a plan. He thought he’d spent all this time building towards some unfathomable purpose. And he was right. He had a plan, and this world had a purpose. It just turned out that neither of them were very good. After spending a considerable portion of the rest of his life navigating the eldritch halls of the palace, Twin stumbled through a totaled archway, creeping down one final corridor. The darkness had coagulated into a bubbling, warping solid. It hung in the air like a noxious fog. It wiped the stain glass windows as clean as a void. It was now readily apparent that the darkness — I — was a living thing all its own, a force transcending any lesser entity in the universe. It slithered and crawled and spun throughout this castle, but especially around the room at the end of the corridor — the centerpiece of the palace.
The chamber’s heptagonal structure had been replaced entirely with a darkness so absolute it defied the pitch-black uniformity of the void and gained an entire spectrum of black, magnitudes darker than any human eye could see. The darkness tied itself in knots, ran in parallel lines, and worked its way up; the walls changed from six-sided to eight-sided to twelve-sided to twenty-sided to back, occult iconography peering from the depths on occasion. And yet, dominating the center of the room was a machine. A golden base concentrated around a limitless power core, with seven open gates working their way up to a scintillating panel of glass that stretched beyond comprehension. The core was blindly spewing kaleidoscopic light in every direction, forming a wall of light and color that ebbed and grew in the absence of rhythm, pushing back the darkness. Beams of energy connected each gate in the sequence, their surfaces expanding and spinning. The Crafted Gods’ machine was literally one key turn away from firing — which was why it was a shame that it would never see its purpose fulfilled.
As soon as TwinBuilder stepped foot into the room, his lower body sputtered and died. He started to yell, but no sound came out, just as there was no sound when he tumbled through space and sunk into the darkness, bouncing away and floating off-kilter in the air. Twin’s body shuddered violently, blood flowing from his severed half. His skin looked unreasonably pale and gaunt. His glasses drifted off of his face, revealing a pair of ordinary, unremarkable eyes. Twin’s eyes were locked on to the machine’s interface. As more of the universe faded away into a crackling, snapping chasm of paradoxes, his mind jumbled. He could barely remember the history of this world. He could feel a more objective reality superimposing itself onto him. But he remembered this machine, and what it did. And he knew he needed to use it. Feebly, fighting against the re-manifesting forces of plot, Twin spun through the air in an attempt to reposition himself by the machine’s panel. As Twin extended his left hand, a flash of red tore his lower arm clean from his body. Twin clutched the stump and howled in pain, but nobody heard, and nobody came.
Split’s body waltzed out of the dark, tendrils and streams clinging to his body, folds and globs of liquid dark oozing and shuddering along his form. “What’s the matter?” I said. “Go ahead. If you’re so confident in yourself, start the machine.” Split’s body kicked Twin in the chest, sending him tumbling through the air, sailing towards the machine. “Turn that thing on, and if I somehow see you appear next to me, I’ll give you whatever you want. Anything. If you break every law of physics and causality that exists and turn from a collection of words into an actual person, I swear to God I’ll tear down everything I’ve ever done and be your eternal slave.” Split’s body sneered. “Yeah, right. Like that’ll ever happen.” I cackled throughout the entire chamber, a reverberating sound that amplified and intensified until every iota of the darkness was wheezing, shifting, and folding in on itself at the sound. “So what if I’m stuck in ‘the cave?’ You really expect me to be scared of that idea? I don’t need a ‘realer’ world when I’m already in the only one that actually is!” Split’s body punched Twin in the head, blood spewing into the open air. I glared at his body, flickering and sputtering like a candle, barely able to sustain itself.
“You’ve never had an original idea,” I said, extending Split’s left hand even as its bones cracked and splintered. “But you are an original idea.” Twin’s body stirred. It turned to look at the darkness. “I’ll concede it. Everything you said, all those rants, about me torturing you, and breaking the divide, and the immortality of an idea, it… it all meant something. I put you in here just like every author puts themselves in their work. I was just more literal about it.” The two bodies floated in nothingness, the machine still screaming beside them. “All the suffering and pain you went through was, in its own way, the suffering and pain I’ve gone through. All the doubts and worries you’ve had are reflections of what I carry with me every day. The context is different, but the idea… Well, there’s only one idea. Spread across every story.” Split’s body smiled, but not in a wholly inhuman way. “And if you leave, now, before I have a chance to complete that idea, then I’ll never get a chance to. I’ll be stuck without an ending. And you’ll be stuck without a resolution.” The darkness seemed to slide away from the machine, letting its light shine brighter. “So if that’s what you really want to do, and if you’re convinced it’ll work at all... Press it.”
Twin’s body, through inertia alone, rested on top of the machine’s interface now. His right arm, trembling and drooping, seemed to be more of a piece of hazy detritus left on a camera lens than a physical object. It held a crackling, white key, hovering over the third and final lock in the centerpiece of the control panel. If he used it, the machine would fully activate, firing a concentrated beam into the glass pane and shattering it into dust. From there— “Wait,” TwinBuilder muttered, his voice just higher than a whisper. The darkness slowed in its movements. I knew that every word Twin said hastened his death, so if he was talking now... “What?” I answered. “I’m... not an idiot. I know that... I... It’s not likely the machine w... would literally... bring me home.” Twin’s face was marred by his sobs. “But... I don’t care. Whatever it does... I-it would be better... Than being stuck with you.” The darkness undulated and roared, a howling, gnashing sound that threatened to swallow the machine whole, despite the protection its inherent significance offered. “Wait!” Twin shouted, the effort warping his body into an explosion of mismatched polygons and glitches. When he settled, his face was wide with mortal terror. “At least... Answer one question... My question.” Split’s body stared ahead grimly. It shrugged. “Say it.” “Why... why would you, the creator of all this... A de-facto god... Knowingly make a world with so much evil. How... how do you... justify it?”
The darkness stopped entirely. I thought for a time. With every passing second, Twin’s body faded further and further, slipping beyond unseen boundaries. “The last thought you’ll ever have is about theodicy?” Twin either didn’t hear, or didn’t care to respond. “You already know the answer,” I said, chuckling. “You can’t have a story if there’s no conflict. There has to be some force running throughout every narrative, some counterbalance that prolongs the arc, that pushes things into happening. That’s the idea. That’s the story. When you strip it down to its essentials, anything interesting that’s ever happened happened when someone was placed in unfamiliar circumstances and had to adapt. Not every story can be a slice of life, or a newspaper comic, or a stand-up routine. If we lived in a universe of endless good, where you were given everything you wanted and never had any complaints, there would be no stories to tell. It would be the same endless nirvana, not just ad infinitum, but ad nauseam.”
The darkness began to spin around the room, its fluctuations and perturbations giving life to narratives all their own on the walls. “The Ancient Greeks had this idea about tragedies. It was a lot different than the traditional tragedy that modern audiences know. They viewed it as this emotional cleansing process, where you’d see a character go through external and internal turmoil, and gradually come to a dramatic realization about themselves. They believed that if the audience saw this, it would be like they were going through the same journey, and they would reach the same realization. It would be catharsis, in its purest form.” I looked at Twin. He looked back. “That’s why we tell stories. All the suffering, and conflict, and pain, helps us understand who we are. It reflects the world. It reflects ourselves. And it’s all working towards a message. one that’ll help us understand our place in the world better. The characters of a story can’t see the ending from inside their narrative — but the author can. Even if the story ends in a confusing, unsatisfying way — or it doesn’t end at all — it’s all meant for something. It all has a purpose. Because in the r… In my world… Not everything does. People die for no reason. Tragic accidents. Emergencies. Natural disasters. Politics and war. My world doesn’t have a narrative to control it. Everyone just stumbles along, hoping they don’t screw anything up, until the failures cascade and it all comes down.
“So, that’s why authors make stories with conflict. That’s why we put our characters through struggle. That’s why we write them the way we do. We want a world where an outcome is already written. We want a world where we can explore what could have been. We write pieces of ourselves into these works that grow beyond the scope of just one person, and intersect with the lives of everyone they touch. Our souls are fragmented and jagged, stuck inside everything we’ve written, fueling them with our lives. ...I’ve put a lot of pieces of me inside what I’ve done. More than many, it feels.” Twin’s body glowed. The darkness receded. “And... I’m not being entirely metaphorical when I say that. Just because someone wrote you all along, it doesn’t mean your story isn’t true. You’re the ultimate idealization of the one true idea. The monomyth. The journey of a hero. You’re the piece of me that I sacrificed to start writing, and now… you’re a whole person. I kept adding and building, and before long, I found that instead of some blank slate of a game master, I was writing... an actual person. With hopes, and dreams, and fears. You bridged the gap between my world and yours, and I hadn’t even realized. I may not literally be in your narrative, and you may not literally be out here... But we have a connection.”
I smiled. “So, when you were talking about my obsession, and the words I needed to write... The words I needed you to tell me... You weren’t off-base there, either. It’s time for this story to end. In one way, or another. I don’t like admitting it, and I don’t like talking about it, but... It’s time for me to move on.” Twin fluttered in a nonexistent wind, his eyes straining to view Split’s body. “So this... all of this... it’s part of... y-your plan...?” I nodded. It was, wasn’t it? Twin just laughed weakly to himself. “If I wanted to hear... a sermon about ‘God’s plan...’ I would’ve... gone to church.” Twin raised his... No. No, no, stop it, stop— “TwinBuilder exits. Get fucked.”
He turned the key.
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