This is both an underwhelming day and an overwhelming day. I thought tiredly.
Hurrying ahead of me, Seer was eager to complete Sune's request to retrieve her fang. Unaware it was just a deflection—a way to remove us from the board.
Passing an open doorway down the hall, I glimpsed what had to be a giant echidna slumbering inside a room of living ink. The Fourth Hand of the Traveler—Dominator of Observation, Ventu. Just like the stories. Massive, warm-looking, strangely gentle for something that watched the weave of existence.
"This must be Taul's room." Reaching the end of the corridor, Seer peeked around the corner and saw a faint outline in the dim glow.
Before following, I glanced across the hall to another chamber—untouched. Empty. Was that meant to belong to the Right Hand? Why wasn't he present like the others? The Traveler left his lieutenants scattered like forgotten chess pieces.
Seer elbowed me sharply, eyes signaling me to speak.
Sighing, I stepped forward. "Uh, hello. Sune said her favorite fang was taken by you."
The black shape at the room's center stirred—barely acknowledging us—then returned its attention to whatever unseen ritual or task occupied it.
Seer elbowed me again. "That's not how you address a Holy Spirit!"
"It's just a spiritual construct," I muttered. "Born from the Kralscell of Sentience. It's not holy."
Seer made a displeased noise—half-pout, half-growl. "You speak as if you understand things you're not even permitted to know."
"My lord?" The black spirit spoke, eyes suddenly vacant, looking not at us but through us.
And then—something spread.
[aspect: taken devourer — take the world]
An aura bled through the castle. Not a pressure. Not a light. A presence. Like the sudden recollection of a dream you never had, and the certainty it still happened.
"The Lord is back!" Sune's voice rang out with glee and manic with reverence. She streaked past, grabbed me and Seer, and in an instant we were crashing through the throne room doors, skidding across the carpet. She vanished like breath fading on a mirror.
"So you two are the culmination of the [Witch Queen's] plans."
The voice descended—not from above, but from all around. Hollow. Curious. Full of delighted, deranged calculation. "Sorry about Sune—she's never helpful when I'm away.Taul? Useless too. He sulks without me."
I scanned the throne room. There was no throne.
Only absence. Only that pulsing non-place the castle was stitched around.
Then thunder clapped. Not sound. Not weather. Intent.
Golden light exploded upward, searing the ceiling with divine afterbirth. The chamber flooded with blinding radiance. Silver roots coiled like serpents through pillars, unfurling in fractal patterns that shouldn't have been able to move. Logic folded. Time bent its spine.
I couldn't see him.
He was light—but not made of it. He was beneath it. Like something wearing illumination as a skin. And behind that light—something vast and motionless watched me.
His gaze was the idea of erasure.
A single blink would rewrite me from ever having lived.
This wasn't divinity. Gods were characters in a cosmic script. The Traveler was the blank page the script feared being written on. Not supreme—adjacent to supremacy. Not omniscient—interwoven with the concept of knowledge's limit.
He didn't pretend to be benevolent. Didn't posture as a tyrant. He was entropy given leisure. A contradiction choosing its next contradiction.
"My liege."
Ahead of us, the three ink-spirits dropped to their knees, their forms flickering as though caught between dimensions. They bowed toward the source of the light—where a black knight stood, sword like a monolith strapped to his back, cloak stirring in still air.
"We have waited for your return. We served faithfully while you unraveled what was beyond us."
"How polite." The Traveler spoke, voice textured with subtle mockery.
Then he turned his gaze—truly turned it—and it landed on me and Seer like a weightless catastrophe.
I felt the wrongness instantly. Like being rewritten, in real-time, by an author that had forgotten what I was supposed to be.
It wasn't godhood. It was deeper. It was the coding error in the lattice of reality. The unrendered corner of a dream. The Traveler wasn't divine.
He was the failure point where the divine buckled.
"Let's change the scenery," he said, casual and absolute. "Light shows like this are too... digestible."
With a snap of his fingers, thunder howled again. Reality screeched, and the world peeled away like wet paint.
The blinding hall vanished.
In its place: a castle, half-submerged between dimension. Ruined. Silver roots tore through stone like memory erupting from bone. The air fractured with screeches of glitching phenomena. Not sound. Not sensation. Misunderstanding made manifest.
He'd reshaped everything on a whim. No effort. No ritual. Just thought.
"You should be able to see me now."
We looked up. And saw him.
The Traveler sat—not upon a throne, but atop a broken pillar like it had always meant to hold him. One ankle rested across his knee. Stillness wrapped around him like a crown. His presence had gravity.
He wore formal clothes—dressed for function, not show. A magenta beanie snug atop his head, too casual, too intentional in its absurdity. He looked like an explorer. Or something that remembered being human, but only abstractly.
His silver eyes met mine—emptiness curved into shape, filled with layered reflections of things that should not see themselves.
Seer fell to her knees. Not from fear. From awe. Controlled, fanatical awe.
"This is proof," she whispered. "Not belief. Not hope. He is the fulcrum between cause and consequence."
I said nothing. Just trying not to unravel my sanity as i felt my mind splinter from the metaphysical weight of this beings presence.
The ink-spirits had vanished. It was only us and him now.
"...Can I ask why you brought us here?" I said at last, numb.
He tilted his head, resting his face on his knuckles. Curious. Not bored—just amused by time itself.
"What makes you think I summoned you?" He smiled without warmth. "I just came to pick up a couple kids who helped me out while I was gone. I was dealing with something personal. To me, it resolved moments ago. If I'd had the time to play god during that, maybe I'd dare call myself omnipotent."
"You're not the reason we were pulled here?" My voice came out too thin. Even Seer was blinking, shaken.
"Not in the slightest." His false smile widened—an expression like a cracked algorithm trying to perform sincerity. "I'm guessing this diverges from the script your teacher gave you. She didn't plan for me to return now. To disrupt the sequence. But I'm feeling... generous. So let's make this easy."
Outside the crumbling windows, green lightning tore through warped dimensions. Screaming geometry twisted in its wake.
The Traveler glanced at it. "Oh, she's furious." The grin he wore was now a weapon. "Tell me what you want." He leaned forward and the ruin shivered. "I'll give you tests," he said softly. "Tests that match the shape of your desire."
Not wasting a moment, Seer stepped forward with fearless devotion.
"Please," she said, her voice trembling with restrained awe. "Bless me with your power. Let me become your emanator."
Atop the broken pillar, the Traveler tilted his head. "Why do you seek power?"
A strange question, given that he could read her every thought with ease. Yet he asked it aloud—as if to hear her truth forged in voice, not mind.
"I want to think of myself as closer to you than anyone else," she confessed, the words tumbling out like petals in a storm. "All I want... is to carry a piece of you in my heart, forever."
She sounded like a lovesick fool. But in her eyes, there was conviction—like faith held together by longing and obsession.
"Eh. Sure. You pass." With a flick of his finger, a strand of glitching light—woven from silver and gold—shot from his hand. It curled through the air, folding into a small star that embedded itself into Seer's chest. The light spilled through her like a flood. Her body shimmered.
And then, in a bolt of golden lightning, she vanished.
I staggered back. For a moment, I thought he'd killed her. But the traces left behind told a different story. He hadn't destroyed her. He'd banished her—ejected her from this dimensional space with casual precision.
"Your turn, Cayden." The Traveler looked at me. Not with his eyes—through them. He saw everything. Every secret. Every thread of my existence unraveled under that gaze.
I tried to ask something else. Tried to choose my words carefully. Instead, I said, "Why did you just give Seer her request like that? It's... not very godlike."
Grinning like a lunatic, the Traveler leapt from his perch. He landed without a sound, then began to walk toward me, every step too light for how heavy his presence felt.
"You already know the answer," he said. "You're the one who's resolved to die for a future you won't live to see. A future that won't exist in any ordinary sense."
"How do you—"
He clapped his hands and the world shattered. Suddenly I stood at a divide—between two worlds. Between two dying men.
To my left: a silver knight, bleeding out onto a pile of trash bags, cradling a worn book as though it were scripture.
To my right: a broken version of myself, desperate and hollow-eyed, a bullet exploding through his chest.
"These," the Traveler said, now walking the fault-line between realities, "are the futures you've been building toward. One who tried to be a hero. One who failed. Both are necessary for the world I come from. For the friend who gave me a reason to exist."
I knew instantly. "Thorn."
The Traveler nodded once, then he stomped. The fault-line between realities shattered. And the scene changed again—now a memory. Sathuna. Teaching me. Sculpting me. Explaining the plan.
"You know," the Traveler said, watching from the sideline like a man revisiting an old joke, "I'm the one who pointed you out to her. You would've died in that forest. Just a throwaway child eaten by obscurity. She needed something anomalous. A variable that didn't belong. A messenger that could slip past causality. One who was never meant to exist. I didn't expect you to choose this path freely."
"You said it yourself," I replied, quietly. "Without her, I'd be dead."
"True. But think about it." He stepped closer, eyes flickering. "She could've turned you into a mindless puppet. Groomed you into a loyal machine. I've done it before. It's easy—simple psychological conditioning. I could do it right now with a thought."
He paused—his stare suddenly threatening, godlike.
Yet he scoffed, turning away. "But I won't. Sathuna's too sentimental to break people like that, so she uses magic to pretend she's in control. Me? I get bored. Watching people follow orders without struggle—it's lifeless."
He tapped an invisible wall. Cracks split across reality. A new vision erupted.
Seer Qilin.
Ben Lakes.
Arthur Moonleaf.
The three children of prophecy. All of them raised their hands against me. Trying and killing me with success before i fell into the inverted waterfall.
"This is your fate," the Traveler said. "A quiet death. Uncelebrated. Unfinished. And in dying, you'll set off a cascade of armageddons." He stared at me longer than he needed to. Then, he laughed quietly. "Now that i think about it. It will be just like a Kralscell's end."
"...Just like a Kralscell?" The word hung there like ash in my mouth. Me? A Kralscell?
Kralscells were apexes. Endings given form. Deified by some, cursed by all. Each one a cosmic weapon of annihilation and madness—driven by the raw fuel of Aether. They weren't heroes. They were unwilling calamities.
And me?
I'd accepted my fate a long time ago. That I was nothing but a pawn. A piece moved by hands I couldn't see, on a board I didn't understand. I'd accepted it because maybe—just maybe—dying meant I'd meant something.
But now... If I end up like them—discarded, reviled, forgotten—then what was the point of being born into this rigged game at all?
"Exactly," the Traveler whispered. "That's why I gave Seer her wish and cast her away. She's boring. This version, anyway. The one from my original timeline? The future your death will create one day. Now she was fun. A girl who worships faith, but lives as a heretic. A demon more human than the humans. A lone star trying to outshine the void." He paused and turned to me."You, Cayden? You're boring too. But I want to see if I can make you shine before the curtain drops. Just once."
With a lazy flick of his hand, he conjured a coin. One side: golden amber, etched with a horizon. The other: polished silver, with a desperate hand reaching through the metal.
"Let's flip a coin."
His form began to rupture. Glitching. Warping. Tentacles of silver root bursting from his flesh. His face twisted—too many eyes, too much insane joy.
"Gold: I give you the paracausal energy you crave Silver: I kill you, and erase everything Sathuna and I built. Just to keep myself entertained."
I couldn't even scream. His transformation broke logic itself. His joy was predatory—a child pulling wings from reality.
"And here. We. Go."
He flipped the coin. It spun skyward, light flashing, impossible to follow.
Time slowed as the weight of everything dawned on me.
Behind the coin—his monstrous form loomed, haloed in broken dimensions.
My mind screamed. Is this really what I want? To die nameless? To let this cosmic circus swallow me whole? Do I want to be the dead fish dragged along the stream of destiny? Do I even believe in this war? Or am I just playing out someone else's sick design without properly knowing my worth?
The coin began to fall. It glittered as it passed my eye. One side gleamed gold—hope. The other shimmered silver—doom.
And the Traveler? He was ready to kill me. For fun. For narrative tension.
My heart snapped and I reached out. Grabbing the coin mid-fall. Stopping fate in its descent.
The world froze. Returning me and the Traveler back into the ruined castle lost between dimensions.
The Traveler's grin broke wide as his eldritch form condensed back into a human body. And for the first time—he looked truly interested. No longer smiling like a madman but observing me like an invested reader of a story.