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The Games We Play
Ninth Interlude – Raven Branwen

Even with prior experience, the suddenness of it all still caught her by surprise. It wasn't a gradual thing, something that built up and allowed her to grow used to it and adapt—it was like a switch being flipped, an instantaneous change that came without warning.

And the moment it did, she felt everything change. It was like a portal had opened into her heart, flooding it with liquid fire—enough that for a moment, she honestly believed she might spontaneously combust and burn to ash. Instead, it flowed through her veins, spreading its increasing warmth to her limbs. If her veins had started to glow through her skin, it wouldn't have come as a surprise.

Then it began to solidify, taking shape as a network of power and light inside of her, pulsating in tune with her heart—and she began to change. She felt her skin harden into something besides human flesh, steady waves of energy rewriting the very fabric of her being. Energy, untold and absurd amounts of energy, gathered in her muscles, giving her strength and speed. At the same time, the world began to slow to a crawl, moments beginning to drag and stretch around her.

And then the world began to open up, as if a veil had been lifted. Where there had once been darkness, now there was a riotous calamity of light, expanding across her field of vision. For a moment, she felt like she'd been blinded—while at the same time, like she was seeing the world for the first time. Things fell away and became meaningless as visible light was revealed to be nothing but a fraction of the much broader spectrum. Colors flashed before her eyes that she had no reference for, because they were a mixture of more than just three primary colors, while the illusion of solidity was dispelled throughout the world around her as matter was broken into a billion tiny parts by her gave. The blue sky vanished, replaced by remnants of cosmic phenomena that painted broad stokes of light upon it.

It wasn't just her eyes—or rather, her eyes became an almost meaningless part of it all. She could feel the brush of air against her skin and the very touch of light, and it was enough for her to 'see' by. Her senses combined and expanded until there was no practical difference between what she could hear or see or feel. It was an onslaught of sensory information, even before taking into account the fact that time had been slowed tremendously, giving her ample opportunity to take in everything.

And then there were the things that went above the normal senses, beyond them. As she cast her gaze over the battlefield, she could see traces of things left behind long ago, blurred images of men and women dying at the hands of the Grimm, of carnage and bloodshed and terror. She could see traces of Aura seared into the world around her, something at once blindingly pure and terrifyingly infectious. The lesser powers that had been unleashed throughout the battle had left its mark as well, in vague flickers and flashes, but they were nothing compared to the volcanic eruptions of light that marked traces of what had been left elsewhere.

But all that was dwarfed, literally and figuratively, by the figures that stood above it all, revealed for what they were. She saw Jaune as a towering figure, similar to the form he sometimes adopted but made distinct by his sheer size as he towered to the heavens and covered the sky with his thirty-twofold wings. Countless eyes burned like stars, brilliant even against a background of pure white, and even knowing it was just an image, she was surprised his gaze didn't incinerate everything it touched.

Beside him was another figure, expect beside him wasn't the right word. Adjacent to him, within him, reflecting him—it had elements of all these things, but none of them fit quite right either. Regardless, the figure that stood with him seemed like an inversion of him; made of darkness where he burned with light, gaze literally frigid, and seeming to cover the sky above and below Jaune's wings with darkness. That must have been Jaune's second soul, his twin and partner. Seen this way, they seemed like an angel and a devil, but also seemed united, allied despite how they appeared—and they stood in opposition to the same foe.

The final figure—who could only have been Malkuth—was a giant as well, every bit as tall as either of the twins, but distinct. The twins, though opposite to each other, were similar in that their presence was like a brand upon the world, like divinity trespassing upon the mundane. Their presence was impossible not to notice and she was sure that had anyone else possessed the senses she'd no gained, they'd have been able to spoke either of them from miles away—hundreds of miles, possible.

Malkuth was different. His true appearance was a subtle thing, seeming to bend into the patterns of the world around him. Even as colossal as he was, he seemed like a nature part of the world—a mountain that pierced the sky, perhaps, but still a mountain, a natural aspect of the world, however remarkable. Looking at him more closely than that only furthered that impression, because his form was almost like a window or, perhaps, a mirror. Looking into him, she saw the world and saw it fill with life over what must have been eons, even as she also saw the here and now, the world she was faced with and lived in.

Seeing him like that—seeing them like that—left her feeling very, very small.

Taking it all in, on top of what her own Semblance provided…her brain felt like it was overheating. Almost literally, in fact—like something was slowly breaking inside of her. But it never quite came topain, though the sensation stopped only just short of it; as soon as it appeared like it might cross that line, the feeling dulled slightly, as if the feeling was escaping her mind. That would be Jaune's work, she imagined—healing her before she was even harmed or something to that effect.

None of which really changed how striking the experience was. This was how he viewed the world, every day—but even just a glimpse of it was terrifying. That was the best way to describe it; the breadth of the world seen through his eyes was horrific. Seeing it this way could have—perhapsshould have—driven her mad.

But she was a Huntress. She managed.

Besides—even if it wasn't in quite the same way, having a broad view of things was something she was used to.

Taking a moment, she forced herself to calm down and focus came to her even more quickly than it usual did. Once she found that center, it was a simple matter to tap into her power—in fact, it was hard not to, especially at a time like this. Truthfully, she felt as if someone had torn the heart out of her chest and replaced it with a burning star, such was the power flowing through her—like it would incinerate her if she didn't shed it all, though she couldn't possible get rid of even a fraction of it.

But there was one place for her to start.

Taking a slow breath, she channeled that power, gathering it behind her right eye—and felt the world start to break.

It was like walls falling away again, the background information she had struggled for so long to master and control rushing back in through the cracks. As it had since she was a young girl, the broadening of her awareness both gave her a way out and trapped her further. With a thought, her view of the world warped and shifted elsewhere, showing her places far distant. Any place, coming upon her in a chaotic, uncontrolled rushed of images.

When she'd been younger and less experienced, it had been hard to even function after her Semblance first developed. She'd never forget that first month, when she'd been bedridden, where even a stray thought could tear her from the present and draw her mind round the world. At first, she'd tried to just blot it out and ignore it, but that had proven unfeasible in short order—it wasn't something she could stop thinking about and it wouldn't go away. There had been times when it almost seemed like she was in control of it, but then a single word or the sight of something unfamiliar would shatter her grip on it and she'd feel like she was somewhere else.

In a way, it had been similar to what she was feeling now, though nowhere near as bad, because the issues built upon each other, worsening matters. Where before, she could only focus on a few specific places and things, flipping back and forth routinely, now things began to flood her vision. A thousand different images, a thousand different places, a thousand different people—and she could see them all clearly, at the same time. But whatever the breadth of the problem, the solution remained the same.

Before her power could fly away with her, she tied herself down with what she could see.

Her brother had been the first, in no small part because he had been the only at that point in time. Back when she had been plagued by her power, he'd been the one to take care of her, even feeding her on the days when a particularly jarring image would make her drop dishes or shatter glasses. He'd been…himself, but that had been reassuring in its own way. She'd thought that whatever happened, at least her brother would never change—and that had been what anchored her. Whenever something happened or her power started to infringe upon her thoughts, she'd look to him as a way of self-assurance. He was still there by her side, so she was still here, not in the snowy mountains of scorching deserts or whatever else happened to spring to mind.

But she'd been young and, before she knew it, things had changed—for the better, mostly. They'd gone to Beacon and she'd been place upon a team. She'd found friendships, really friendships, and two more anchors in the process.

For a long time, it had been just her, Qrow, Taiyang, and Summer—and the rest of Beacon, of course, but she'd never been good at tying herself to places, not when she could be anywhere. People were different; she could cross from Vale to Vacuo in a second, from Atlas to Mistral in a step, but who she was with, who she stood beside? They were how she determined 'here' and 'there.' Qrow had always understood that and the others had come to as well.

Other things, it had taken them longer to realize, for which she was someone glad. Her innocence, optimism, and nativity had been short-lived after she acquired her Semblance—an unfortunate downside of being able to see what was happening behind the scenes. She couldn't even remember when it had first started, but all it had taken was some idle musings about what the Council was doing, or some famous Hunter, or whoever else. What people did when they thought nobody was looking…well, she'd learned various things, quite a few of them things people wouldn't have liked.

Some of them, things she herself hated. She'd dreamed of being a Huntress since she was a girl, same as most young children—but that dream began to tarnish as she grew older and learned more and more about what went on behind the scenes. Some of it had to do with the darker choices Hunters sometimes had to make and the things that were carefully edited out of the tales told to children…but mostly, it was the people who pulled the strings. So many decisions, so many plans, so many 'necessary sacrifices.' She'd been watching heroes die since she was a child because of what they deemed 'necessary,' and so much of it had seemed pointless. What purpose did it serve but to deep the lies she couldn't help but see through? And knowing that in becoming a Huntress, she might become a sacrifice herself…that her friends might bleed and die for the wishes of some distant council…

She'd told Qrow about it, on one of the nights she'd been unable to sleep and had been completely unsurprised by his reaction—he'd decided on the spot to rise to the top, until he was the one holding the strings and could make things 'right.' It had made her smile, because he was always like that and always serious about what he said, but she'd wondered even then…how could they fix anything? They were Hunters; powerful, yes, but that power leant itself primarily to killing things and there were only so many ways to cause wide-spread political change with a sword. Her brother wouldn't even consider any of them, even knowing the truth.

But she…she had. More often then she'd like to admit, she'd considered just appearing from the darkness and slipping a blade between the ribs of a few politicians.

Instead, she'd waited, allowing herself to be tied down further and further. She'd fallen in love, in time—Taiyang had been charming, kind, optimistic, and a part of her team. She'd trust her back to him without a thought and knew she wouldn't be let down. Why not other things? It was common, perhaps even expected, for such a thing to happen, and he was one of the few people she truly trusted. They'd dated and had fun and everyone had smiled, saying they'd expected it for years.

Perhaps they had, but probably not for the real reasons. She's been looking for something desperately, something she still couldn't pin down precisely—something that was wholly hers, something that would change things and make it so she never wanted to fly away again. She'd found a husband, a house, romance, a career, and, in time, even a daughter.

But not what she'd been looking for.

She'd always remember the day her daughter was born, the day she'd first held Yang in her arms. She'd been beautiful, even then—precious and innocent as a only an infant could be, with her father's hair and what she thought might have been her own features. Labor had been uncomfortable, but looking at her daughter had made it worth it, and she'd loved her from the moment she saw her. Taiyang had been on one side of her, smiling as brightly as the sun at their daughter, while Qrow had waited at the other, smile making it clear that there would be celebrations in short order. Even Summer, always so shy and afraid that fragile things might break apart at her touch, and pressed in with a smile. She'd been happy, at home among friends and family.

Meanwhile, the Right's Revolution had been building. Atrocities were occurring throughout the Kingdoms and Menagerie, tensions bringing the beasts out of men. She's seen it all, unable to stop thinking about it even while giving birth, while holding her daughter, while laughing with her friends. It didn't leave her during the night, didn't leave her in the morning, and it plagued her constantly.

Since the day she'd gotten her Semblance, she had always felt as though she should be elsewhere and it had never been stronger than when she looked at what was happening then. Even her own daughter hadn't been enough to banish it—if anything, the feeling only grew stronger for enduring. What kind of mother would look at her daughters face and want to be somewhere else more than she wanted to stay? A bad one, no doubt.

But she had. She had never been good at ignoring what happened before her eyes, which was complicated by how she saw most things, and in the end…

She'd left. And knowing what she intended to do, the methods she intended to use…she hadn't come back. A part of that was for their sake, to keep from drawing trouble onto them. She'd never allowed the full truth of her powers to become known outside her team, but people suspects suspected and once she began, they'd know.

The other part, perhaps the larger part, simple didn't want to look them in the eye and admit the truth or explain it. To tell them she'd valued her self-appointed duty more than them.

Funny where that had led her.

Menagerie had only been the beginning—but she knew better than most how important beginnings were to endings. It had been a chaotic place, where the pieces of a thousand broken lives had been left to stew and stir until they boiled over. She'd known from the beginning how things would probably go, and hadn't been surprised…but one didn't need to be surprised to be appalled.

Most people—and, surprisingly, even most Faunus—tended to think of the Faunus race as a united whole. She had no idea why; being members of the same 'species' certainly hadn't united Mankind, after all, and it hadn't done much to historically aid the Faunus, either. While commonly considered a single species, the Faunus were composed of thousands of different groups, who'd made their homes in vastly different locals and shared very different histories. The Faunus had fought with each other as often as they had mankind, for countless different reasons; though some fight be surprised by it now, at the end of the day, a man with scales isn't necessarily any more like a woman with cat ears than he is like a plain human, and for a long, long time those differences had mattered. Being a Faunus, or being the wrong kind of Faunus, could see you shunned just about anywhere.

Then there were the…political issues, the facts that now went unspoken. Slavery and effective slavery had been hallmarks of Faunus history, but where did those slaves come from? The modern train of thought seemed to be of humans hunting Faunus down in fields and strapping chains upon them, but such things were rare—something she'd always thought obvious, honestly. If the purpose of owning a slave was to make them work in one's stead, could you really expect someone who owned a slave to go through all the effort of capturing and training one themselves? More often, slaves had come from wars between groups of Faunus, with the defeated being conquered and enslaved by the victors and later sold to human settlements for profit. When people think of the historical treatment of the Faunus, they tended to brush over that or assume that every group was treated the same by mankind, when the so-called Slave Kings had been seen as nobles by the men of their time.

People always seemed to forget that people—Faunus or otherwise—are more than just one thing. There had been slaves and slaves, Kings and Kingdoms, wars and sacrifices and defeats. Boundaries based on homeland, on culture, on appearance, on blood, or on 'history.' For all that people thought of them as being one, the Faunus were just people; varied and complicated and fractured along a million lines.

Her mother had been a slave. Perhaps not called such, but the fact remained that she hadn't belonged to herself—she had always been another's, for as long as she had known her. Perhaps one of those owners was her father, though all the ones she remembered had been noblewomen, keen to sell and trade the body of another; quite frankly, she'd never asked or wanted to know and she'd left before it could ever matter. When they were still children, too young to work or do much else but take up space and food, they'd been cast out and left to fend for themselves.

Neither of them had found much sympathy on the streets, not even from their own kind—they were Faunus, yes, but with traits so muted it hardly seemed to mean anything unless attention was drawn to it. When there were young, it had seen them shunned by everyone around them, caught between two sides. It had always amused her how people had cared then and never even noticed later on, but she supposed that had been for the best. After a few years, no one even knew who or what she was and so no one had sought to discriminate against her, oppress her, or force her to do anything. Not that it would have worked out for them if they had, of course, but they hadn't even thought to try.

And no one had so much as looked her way when the Faunus were being gathered and locked up in Menagerie. People had even come up and talked to her about it, asking her to take a side on the issue or chime in for or against the Faunus. It had been laughable in its absurdity, but she'd never been able to come up with an answer or decide how she felt. It would have been a lie to say that her race was a matter of pride to her. That wasn't to imply that it was something she felt ashamed of, so much as it was something she felt absolutely nothing at all for. She was a Faunus and she considered that fact pretty much irrelevant to who she was.

But at the same time, Menagerie had meant something to her, even before she stepped onto its shore. Why, she wasn't sure—perhaps it was simply the implication, the opportunity. Menagerie was the first time in recorded history that the Faunus could truly be said to be one, united in one place and, presumably, with the desire to escape. In such a situation, it should have been possible for them to work together, to change things as a group, to finally see.

She wanted to say she was surprised when instead they turned upon each other, but she really hadn't been. It was inevitable, however disappointing it may have been; there were too many differences to be put aside, too much history to simply forget, and while Mankind may have been an enemy in a distant sense, they were trapped in a prison with a million other foes. You didn't need to be of different races to do something horrible to one another, after all.

If it had just been that, she'd have left them all rotting there and forgotten about them—what had 'the Faunus' ever done for her, after all? Nothing to help her when she'd been a child on the streets. Why should she feel any loyalty to 'her kind.' She was loyal to her friends, to those that were loyal to her, not to groups of people she'd never met.

But even despite that, there had been a reason why she'd chosen to act—to leave her friends and home behind and enter the Menagerie. The organization that would one day become the White Fang, the dream that went with it, and the people who, despite everyone and everything, were still worth fighting for. Though no one had ever done anything for her, she was a Huntress and she had to be better than those who'd stand back and do nothing while people suffered right in front of their eyes.

With her strength and her Semblance, she'd connected the scattered pieces of her kind, giving them the purpose, focus, and power they needed to act, to change things, and too make things right. She'd found allies and they brought with them others, building upon one another to create something powerful, great. A beast of such power that even the Kingdoms had been forced to stop and take heed—and they had.

It just hadn't mattered, in the end.

Once the walls came down and the common enemy vanished, everything she'd built faded away. For a while, she thought that might have been for the best—after the Revolution ended, things improved. The Faunus were given legal protection and things that had been common where outlawed. After the example Menagerie had created, things changed as people realized that the Faunus as a whole could resist and reject. The organization she'd created changed and refocused on bridging the ancient gap between man and Faunus, and for a time all had seemed well.

She hadn't believed it. Unfortunately, because of how much she'd always known of the truth of things, she'd become a cynic. Even more unfortunately, Remnant was itself and cynicism usually proved itself right. While the Faunus as a whole could resist and execute change, once Menagerie was escaped there was no driving need to remain unified and centuries of history working against it. People went back to their homes and their lives and for a while, there was a hush of sorts—people's feelings towards the Faunus hadn't changed overnight, of course, but with a war having only just ended, they were hesitant to act.

Slowly, however, people began to test the boundaries. Minor snubs aimed towards Faunus, skipping over them when it came to opportunities, and so on. While discriminating against Faunus itself was outlawed, it was a simple thing to come up with explanations and excuses; to say they weren't as qualified, perhaps, or to shore up the quality of another worker. If it came to trial, the court might feel inclined to lean one way, to be more excepting of a story. Laws were important, but in and of themselves they couldn't change everything.

In short order, dissatisfaction began to grow among the Faunus, or at least groups of them. Most were still content with the change, seeing it as a huge step up from where they'd been previously, however short it may have fallen from the ideal. Some refused to accept that, fighting against it—peacefully, at first, but the Kingdoms of Remnant had always been good at brushing uncomfortable truths under the rug. There were rallies and protests and marches, and all too often they came to naught. Those who believed in the cause needed no swaying, after all, while those who laughed at it could ignore it with ease. Things grew from there and the organization she'd helped build quickly returned to its militant roots.

It would be a lie to say that displeased her, but an exaggeration to say it made her happy. As far as she was concerned, violence was just another way to accomplish ones goals—but it wasn't the onlyway nor the best in every situation, and like any other method, there were limits and conditions to its use. Violence, or even the threat of violence, could change hearts and minds, but it was somewhat difficult to use it too its full effect from a position of weakness. The White Fang was a shadow of the beast that had formed during the Revolution; a vocal minority, but still a minority. Most of the soldiers who had cut their teeth in the war had found work in the Kingdoms, partially because ones race or species didn't matter to the Grimm and partially because the Kingdoms were wise enough not to antagonize the group most likely to be able to oppose them. Those who could fight had been accepted with relative ease.

It was those who couldn't who had the most reason to protest, but, of course, they had very few means to do so. That was the White Fang that had sprung up in the aftermath of the Revolution; those who'd been angered enough to turn to violence but lacking any means to be a true threat. By her reckoning, it was better to resist than to not, but the Kingdoms wouldn't even notice such a thing.

In time, it had been possible to change that, but it had been harder than during the war—and, truth be told, her heart wasn't really in it any more. She had felt committed to the path she had set out on, but seeing where it had led and knowing what had come of it was…discouraging. She aided the budding White Fang where she could, calling in a few favors and reminding several allies she'd made of their past loyalties. Though the new members were non-combatants, they could be trained and, given time, become fighters in their own right. She wasn't convinced it would much matter, given their size relative to the power of the Kingdoms, but it had been something. But with limited enthusiasm and nothing to do but wait, she had focused on other things.

Her son, for instance.

When she'd first found Adam, she'd seen something in him that reminded her of herself and her brother; of what they could have been, perhaps, but for one another. Menagerie had done horrible things to even the best of people and it was no place for a child—and seeing one rage across the countryside, seemingly hell-bent on destroying everything in his path, himself, or both, had been…saddening. But it had also served as something of a reminder for her, of what a part of her had always dreamt of doing to all the monsters she'd seen with her Semblance. Seeing it from the outside, seeing it in the eyes of a child no older than she had been when her power first came to her…

She'd put a stop to his rampage and took him in, giving him the aid she'd only received from her brother—because he had no one and who else if not her. At first, she'd still kept her distance; she was the teacher and he was the student. It had been difficult to do so, but it had seemed wrong to do anything else; to treat Adam as her son after abandoning Yang. She'd left behind her family for the sake of duty, choosing her desires over them. Who was she to play the part of a mother, however much he may have needed one.

Ironically, it had been her reunion with her own mother that had changed all that. It hadn't involved anything like closure, hadn't been a heart-felt reunion after decades apart, but then it wouldn't have been. She'd barely remembered her mother, after all, and she'd never truly considered her such. There had been circumstances and reasons, of course, and she understood that; she'd never hated her for giving them up. It would be pointless to, when she'd had no choice in the matter. But at the same time, she'd never loved her.

But she'd lied for the sake of a broken, dying woman who'd lost everything without even having a chance to decide. Said she remembered her, forgave her, and loved her, even when she hadn't felt anything but pity.

She'd watched her mother die and simply walked away. But afterwards, she let herself treat Adam like a son, as if trying to make up for the fact that her mother had never had a daughter.

And so, she'd waited. For a long while, she wasn't sure for what exactly—for the White Fang to mature into something greater, for Adam to grow up, or maybe just for time to pass her by. She could have gone back to her brother and her team, but she never did; it just didn't feel like she had any right to return, knowing she'd walked away and would again. But she'd watched over them from a distance and she was pretty sure they knew she was.

Sometimes, her brother would walk into an empty room and just start talking, like he had when they were kids—speaking to her, as if she was there, which of course she was. Sometimes, it would be just a normal conversation, him talking about his day, and sometimes he'd rant and rave at her, as drunkenly insulting as he could get. Either way, the point was the same; it was an invitation to respond, to reappear and pick up an old argument or throw something at his head or bring up some factoid she'd gleaned from the other side of the planet. Sometimes Summer would sit out in the backyard of her home with plates and chairs for two, leaving her the option of reappearing and sitting down. And sometimes Taiyang would just stay up late and wait for her to come home.

She never did. Soon enough, they tried to move on and so did she, even if none of them seemed particularly sure what moving on meant. On the occasions where they talked about their own deaths and addressed the possibility, they seemed to come to an unspoken agreement that they'd die together; that that was the only way they'd ever be separated.

But life has a way of not going according to plan. Taiyang had already decided to become a teacher and Qrow had decided to follow him; both remained active, performing missions when they could, but focused primarily on preparing the next generation, to make sure they were prepared for what was ahead of them. Summer had remained an active Huntress, taking missions whenever she could, separating the team once again, but she thought that it'd be okay. She'd told herself that if it every happened, if one of them were in danger, she'd step in to save them and she kept them in the periphery, even now—not so much that they infringed upon her thoughts, but enough to notice if there was a massive change. She'd saved her brother's life a few times that way.

But she hadn't saved Summer. Hadn't even noticed that something was wrong until she was abruptly gone, vanishing into the wind like she'd never been. With fully half of their team gone, Taiyang and her brother had been visibly crushed, along with her daughter and even Summer's young girl.

And…she had been, too. Now, she thought she might know the reason, but back then? She'd wondered and worried. For her to lose track of someone that way…had she been upset? It hadn't been long after her death that Summer approached Taiyang and pulled him out of his depression, but she'd thought she'd just accepted that—after all, she'd been the one to leave. The romance had been a quick one, but so had hers and Taiyang's; when you'd spent over half a decade living and fighting for your life beside each other, one could usually just skip the 'getting to know each other' stage of romance. Even before their first date, she'd known just about everything about Taiyang, inside and out. Literally; she'd seen him naked and disemboweled.

So she'd accepted it and moved on. Or, that's what she'd thought, but Summer's death made her doubt. She was pretty sure it made the others doubt, too; that first month, they'd seemed to just expect that Summer would return, whether on her own or arm in arm with her. That vanishing off the face of Remnant had just meant she'd swept in to save her, like she should have. After a couple weeks went by, Qrow had even asked about Summer's condition, speaking to her in an empty room—asking if she knew how she was, if she could find her, if she was watching. She hadn't appeared then, either, simply because she wasn't sure what to say. Whatever had happened to Summer, she shouldn't have allowed it.

That was when people first started thinking she was dead, something she found morbidly amusing. She disappears for years without a word and people just shrugged, but not appearing out of nowhere to save a former teammate from danger in the middle of nowhere and they assumed death must have stopped her. She tried to be annoyed, to get pissed off by their expectations, but that's how it should have been. Instead, Qrow stuck closer to home for several years, no longer seeming sure that she'd appear to save her team or her daughter if they were in danger.

Ironically, she'd kept a closer eye on them, too. When Yang was old enough—or perhaps, in hindsight, still too young—she'd even dropped one of the pictures she'd taken with her into her path. She'd deserved to know that much and it was a way of telling those who needed to know that she was still breathing.

But otherwise, she waited and worked behind the scenes—like her brother did, but with a further reach and less need to hide the truth. While she'd thrown off the reins of the Council and the Hunters, she still did what she thought was her duty, now and then. She'd step in to slay the Grimm now and then, stopping them before they could reach a vulnerable village and cause fear and panic to snowball into a massacre, or seeing to it that a few men and woman who'd come into power in villages at the edges of the Kingdom made their way to where they could be trained and do the most good; subtle things, mainly, light touches.

And then there were the major threats, the human ones. It had always been a fear among those who knew; that the wrong person might develop the wrong power and throw the world into chaos. Where she could, she did her part to make sure that didn't happen, whether that meant stopping a man with a Semblance that gave him influence over minds that spread like a virus before he could go too far or killing a growing monstrosity before they shut down every machine in Vale. She was subtle then too, of course—they'd vanish and no one would even know they'd been there to begin with.

It was almost funny; she'd stopped being the Kingdom's assassin, but hadn't stopped being one. Even so, she made sure to hold back, to keep an eye on threats and only interfere when they proved to be a threat. None of them ever even noticed they were being watched.

Until one did.

'Jian Bing.' A man using the name of a historical Faunus King. She hadn't found out about him until after the White Whale incident, when he'd exploded onto the scene without warning, and by the time she'd seen the news report, he'd already vanished. Usually, she worked backwards, tracking odd reports back to their sources, but a cursory investigation hadn't revealed anything that pointed to a man acting on such a massive scale. She'd considered investigating more thoroughly, but seeing as her son had been involved, had decided to simply ask instead.

Surprisingly, Adam had been fairly tightlipped about him. He'd told her plenty about Jian Bing, but nothing about where he'd come from or even really how they'd begun working together, except that it was because of Blake, her maybe granddaughter—Adam seemed about as unsure about that as she had been with him, which was probably because she'd set a bad example. Regardless, it was clear he knew something and just as clear he didn't want to be forced to say, which had been at once unexpected and familiar.

It had made it clear he thought of him as a friend, of which Adam had never had many. For that, as much as anything, she hadn't pushed. She wasn't one to act without investigating first anyway, and such a man was bound to cause waves.

And he had. Mere days later, he returned from his quest with a thousand Faunus refugees and the name Jian Bing was on everybody's lips, at least within the White Fang. Some even began to speculate that he might have truly been Jian Bing reborn, though the majority laughed that thought off. Personally, she hadn't been sure what to think and hadn't been sure she cared. He could have been a super robot beneath a human-seeming exterior, a genetic experiment gone wrong, someone whose Semblance allowed them to transform into others at the cost of their selfhood, someone using the name for their own ends, or simply crazy—whatever the explanation, the fact remained that these things happen.

As it turned out, he was actually an ancient and possibly celestial superweapon gone wrong, now reborn as a human man who was pretending to be the reincarnation of an ancient Faunus king with the help of an exceedingly powerful Semblance—which, admittedly, was a new one for her.

Of course, she hadn't known that at the time and instead continued to keep an eye out for him—but besides a few attempted copy cats, Jian Bing seemed to vanish off the face of Remnant as soon as his mission was done. She'd known better than to accept such a thing at face value and had continued her vigil, watching to make sure he wasn't doing anything major, but for quite a while, he seemed content to do nothing. As if saving those particular Faunus from that particular place was all he'd wanted to do.

And then he'd reappeared in Mistral, just as the situation began to worsen, walking into a White Fang base as if he owned the place and it just didn't know it yet. It had been coincidence more than anything that had given her that first glimpse of him—she'd been there at the same time and heard word of her arrival. But when she'd looked in to see what she could learn…she'd been spotted.

That wasn't something that happened to her often and the occurrence immediately set her on edge. She'd grown overconfident, brushing off the possibility for how rarely it occurred, and he'd noticed her with an almost casual ease. Hardly even seeming to twitch at the knowledge he was being watched or even at the sight of her. And he'd recognized her on sight, despite her mask and long absence, and met her eyes without flinching.

All of that spoke to him being a very dangerous man and she'd put up her guard at once. Abruptly, she'd had a thousand questions and no easy way to find answers, not when he could sense her so easily. What was he doing? What else was he capable of? What was he after? She'd tried to ask Adam without letting on how concerned she was with his new friend, but doing so made it difficult to truly demand anything. A part of her wanted to do the same thing she always did when cornered—to act, to move—but she made herself wait, refusing to let such things control her as she continued to wait.

Luckily, she hadn't had to wait for very long—though their second meeting was as jarring as the first. The news about Weiss Schnee had been unexpected and she'd been quick to act, knowing she'd need to do so before the more…extreme members of her group had a chance. That much couldn't be helped, really; with all that the Schnee Dust Company had done, it was impossible for there to be no resentment held, and regardless of what the girl had or hadn't done, anger like that was only rarely aimed. Those who joined the White Fang did so for a reason and if given the chance they would have killed her.

But that was an explanation, not an excuse, and so she'd prepared herself to step in, to deal with things with a cool head—until Jian Bing had chosen to interfere as well, arrive mere moments after she shifted her attention to the scene and appearing as if tearing his way through space. At first, she'd wondered if that was how he'd noticed her, if his power was somehow similar to her own—but that was only the first surprise he'd had for her.

He'd defeated the heiress, but hadn't killed her. He'd taken what he'd needed from her necklace, but then gave it back. And he'd faced her after doing all of that, with no way of knowing what to expect or how she might react as a member of the White Fang, and still looked at her without flinching. And he'd followed it all up with offers of alliance, casual displays of power, and knowledge. He'd shown her what she'd come to expect from those in power and had taken it all in calmly, even when her own emotions started to boil over.

And then he'd told her of Babel, of the Grimm, and had spoken of the fate of the world. Of saving it together.

It was strange, after waiting so long—to finally have a mission. But strange revelations and unexpected surprises were what she soon came to expect from Jian Bing. Adventures and impossible things; he seemed to defy experience and expectation alike, telling her things that she'd never imagined and somehow making her believe them. Every time they met, he seemed to have changed, as if the break was nothing more than an opportunity to quickly refill his bag of tricks, and when they spoke again…

She'd found an answer about what had happened to Summer. Laid something to rest and found yet more goals to work towards, where before she'd spun her wheels in uncertainty. She'd found an enemy to work against, a cause to reinforce, and more. The knowledge of what they were up against had been terrifying in its own right, but for her it was the good kind of fear—the kind that prompts action instead of halting her or slowing her down. She had the power to see everything and she'd learn more in just a brief time with Jian than she had in years on her own.

But all the while, Jian Bing remained a mystery. With every question she had answered, a dozen more arose. With everything revealed, an ocean was left implied. He had staggering power and shed it as casually as the sun, but who he truly was, she hadn't known. Every time they met, every time she looked at him, she'd wondered if she truly knew the tiger for what he really was or if she could only see the stripes. It was a question she'd wanted answer, but not one she could answer for herself.

And then he'd told her the truth.

It had been hard to believe, at first. Still was, in many ways. Some of it was terrifying enough that she didn't want to believe it, some of it so incredible that it seemed too good to be true, some of it just nearly unbelievable. After his confrontation with Cinder—and her true capabilities been terrifying in their own right—what he'd told her, what he'd shown her…

And yet, hard as it had been to believe, she had. Or rather, she'd believed in him—that what he told her was the truth, however ridiculous or absurd it may have seemed. When he told her about his Semblance, about his past, about his true identity, about their true foe, about what she had to expect…she'd believed it. And when he told her about Summer, had shown her Autumn…

It was almost funny now, looking at how things had started to change. She still anchored herself to the world with people, but they'd begun to shift—because the people she thought of had changed, in turn. Her brother, Taiyang, her daughter and Summer's—they were still there. But now there were others, with them. She thought of Autumn now, instead of Summer's grave, a new life instead of one lost. When she'd first seen her, she'd been staggered, unsure what to think; had Jian found Summer somehow, saved her from the creature that had taken hold of her? Or was it something else? When he denied it, that had only added to the confusion, causing her to wonder if it was a trick or if she was truly grasping at straws. He'd shown no particular knowledge of Summer, apart from what they'd learned together, but maybe…

She'd wanted to believe. And when Autumn had spoken, giving the answer that Summer had kept so close to her heart…it had just seemed to fit. And what they'd found, what they'd done, the pieces they'd put together…

She wasn't Summer, she knew that much. She was what came after, just like her name. But there were still pieces there, remnants and words and actions that she didn't even think about. She wasn't Summer, perhaps, but being with her made her think that perhaps she hadn't failed completely—or, at least, that she could still make up for her failure.

Admittedly, she could be a touch odd at times, owing to her nature as a sapient plant-being, but it was easy to brush it off as a product of her Semblance, which it technically was anyway. She was hardly in any position to judge on that front, regardless. And she was a good student, absorbing things like a sponge despite her age and adapting to her abilities with astonishing speed. The only thing she wasn't sure of was precisely where everything stood with her friends, family, and team, but she was starting to right that up as a lost cause after the confusion Jian had added to it. She couldn't force Autumn into such a thing, couldn't bring her before her once-husband, teammate, and daughters and place the burden of their expectations upon her. Autumn was young enough that she probably was entirely sure who she was, even before adding in her nature as a fallen Huntress reborn as a floral hivemind.

Then there was Adam, her son, happier now than she'd ever seen him, not that he would ever admit it. He had been in her thoughts as one of her anchors since he was a young boy, but her view of him had changed quickly over these past months. He was less cynical, less resentful, for all that he still pretended to be. Instead, there was something quietly hopeful, reassured, and confident, like he was somehow certain that things would work out—that they could get better instead of worse. He'd always been one to fight for a cause and to his last breathe, but he'd always been one to doubt if it, or even he, mattered.

He was stronger now, even if he didn't see it. As a fighter and as a person. She'd seen the training regime he'd undergone with Jaune's aid, the tasks he willingly took upon himself, and it was obvious that he was driven in a way he'd never been before. His swordsmanship had improved dramatically for what little time he'd had to practice, and his skill with his power and Semblance had skyrocketed, to say nothing of the benefits he'd garnered thanks to Jaune's Semblance. As he was now, she knew he could hold his own against some of the strongest fighters she'd ever known.

Then there was Gou, in some ways the oddest addition to her new team. The nearest parallel she could draw was to Zwei, but he had never really been her pet and she'd never desired one. Instead, he had just been one of the things she focused on when she thought of home. He was still there, at times, image floating to the surface of her thoughts alongside picture frames and the house itself—a fond memory that tied to her team, of him fighting alongside Taiyang and bouncing through the house. Not a pet, but an associate of sorts, at times even a fellow warrior and ally.

But Gou wasn't a pet either, nor anything like Zwei. If anything, he was the voice of reason and stability on their team—ironic, perhaps, as he was a magical talking dog, but the fact remains. Adam was still impatient, eager to fight and change things. Autumn was young, even if it could be hard to remember how much so when she warped herself into something monstrous. She was plagued by things near and far, a thousand things fighting for attention and a need to be resolved, elsewhere even while she was her. And Jaune…

Jaune was too far from normal to have any idea what it even was. Intelligent, brilliant even, but if there was anything she could be certain of with him, it was that he probably wouldn't react to something in a standard way. No matter how terrifying the situation got, he remained calm, never showing more than he wanted and quick to respond with some new trick, twisting space or setting stars in the sky or who knows what else. He always knew how to make ends meet, of course, but at times there seemed to be a conflict with how he understood the world and how he believed everyone else was capable of interacting to it. He'd react to things at time, things she had only recently begun to glimpse; phenomena that most people wouldn't know existed, to the sight of things no one else could see, to the flows of energy through the world, to souls, and more besides. In an instant, his view on something would shift dramatically without his skipping a step, changed by a crucial piece of evidence he'd somehow garnered, and he'd just…know. He'd fall silent for a few seconds and in that time plot out his entire strategy, contemplating and reacting and deciding what he'd have for lunch in between the bullets. Assuming he ate food. She was pretty sure he didn't.

It wasn't just his mind either. His body seemed to hold no value to him—but then, he could shrug off just about anything, ignoring wounds that could kill or cripple anyone else. His fighting style was absurd on the face of it, based around that and a library of skills that gave him an answer for seemingly every situation. And if they didn't, he'd pause for a millisecond and engineer a solution from the pieces he had and call down power out of legend, crafting displays out of literal storybooks as if they were toys made exclusively for him to play with. He'd adjust his entire style in-between moments, never stopping or worrying or even seeming to need to try.

By most standards, she was fairly certain he'd qualify as somewhere between a god and a madman. Which end of the scale he leaned towards seemed to vary from moment to moment.

And for all that, he was her best friend. Her team leader. Her partner. Jaune Arc, Jian Bing, Keter—it hardly seemed to matter. When she first met him, she hadn't been sure what to think of him. Now that she knew him better, she still wasn't sure what to think of him. But she knew she trusted him.

That was why she was here, after all. Why she'd come to this place, when everything she knew painted it as a death sentence. Why she hadn't left when given the chance, until it was part of the plan—and why she'd come back after ferrying Adam, Autumn, and Gou to safety. Why she had stood before a being that by all rights, from everything she'd seen and heard and knew, should be able to wipe her from the face of Remnant with hardly more than a thought, even when she couldn't be certain Jaune's plan would work. Why she was about to start the fight of her life, without any guarantees.

Without looking at him, she could sense him now—where he was, how he was doing, even vague shades of more. A connection forged from the skill he'd used, keeping them aware of each other. According to him, most of his personal skills would be shared by the process and he'd be able to support her with everything else. It wasn't a lot to go on, but she knew he was relying on her to make this plan of his work.

That was all she really needed to know, she supposed. This was her target. This was her task. Destroy everything that gets in her way.

Huntress 101.

She gestured with her sword, cutting a wide swath through the branching paths that filled the air—and portals flickered open, numerous enough to cover the sky.

"Ho…" The possessed Grimm before her mused, tilting his head up at the sky. Before he could do anything more, she swept her sword again and then turned to drive it deeply into the ground. As she did, space distorted all around her to swirl into pits. They weren't arranged in walls, exactly, but randomly placed in the air such that it was impossible to move without touching any. At the same time, the ground seemed to drop away and more portals opened beneath their feet, covering the ground as it had the sky.

And then, with a flick of her wrist, a solid dome of portals rose to cover Jaune, encasing him in a shell of twisted space.

This was something she'd never done before, at least not on this scale—but the connection she now held with Jaune fed her power constantly, or else supercharged her own ability to generate it. She could see the barriers around them bolstering that even further, leaving her with oceans of Aura to draw from. With Jaune handling all of the effects now upon her, there were only so many ways for her to make use of that power and this…this was something she could use.

She didn't bother counting the portals around her because she didn't need to. She was aware of them all in a way that went beyond such things; she could feel things through them as if they were extensions of herself, sense the touch of air and light upon their surfaces in a way she'd learned to interpret as sight and sound—and they hung in her thoughts in a way she didn't even need to consider. This point connected to that one, this distance bridge like this, and so on.

And with the senses her connection to Jaune no offered her…even this flood of information what nothing. She could literally see from them, hear through them, and feel them. They were connected to her through an extension of power that she could draw from and control, channeling things from the center to the whole. Between that and her natural ability, she had no trouble at all creating a mental image of where all of her portals were, where they led to, and what was waiting on the other side of them.

Given his own talents, Jaune shouldn't either.

She stepped forward, leaping into a portal with all the speed she could muster—and as she was now, that was more than enough to set the air aflame and worse around her. She didn't move in a straight line, either, flashing between points and moving from one portal to the next; a shadow that appeared briefly and skipped to another position in space. She could feel the attention on her with her Aura, keep track of when and where Malkuth lost sight of her, but knew that Jaune would be able to sense her through their connection and figure out what she was doing. Could Malkuth? She'd arranged it so that there were thousands upon thousands of possible paths for her to take, countless ways to approach him, and portals opened and closed with every second. One second she was far away, the next at mid-range, then far, close, near, far, and close again. To her, it was no different than moving in a straight line, but could he understand the route she was taking? Could he react to it?

Only one way to be sure.

In a step, she went from mid-range to right behind Malkuth's back, and he was looking in entirely the wrong direction. His gaze flickered to the upper left, towards the entrance to a pathway she'd switched from at the last moment, and found nothing. Whatever he was doing to track her, it wasn't perfect.

To his credit, however, he reacted fast, whirling around the instant she began drawing her blade. When it came to Iaido, she was one of the best, and with her current enhancements she could draw her sword at an absurd speed, but he still managed to turn half-way around and lift a glowing hand towards her face before firing what looked like a blood red lightning bolt at her.

But before he did, before he even moved to attack, something trembled in her like the vibration of a spider's web. A warning of what to expect, what was to come, and at the same time a reminder that whatever physical enhancements Jaune called forth, they were but a shadow of the mental ones. A portal opened in front of her, swallowing the blast and releasing it from on positioned behind her, skipping the space she occupied. It was an almost unconscious reflex, a nearly instinctive defense for all that she'd never practiced it, and instead of striking her, the blast careened to strike a patch of ground that she briefly cleared of portals.

The earth erupted in a sudden explosion that expanded to about the size of a person and then froze for an instant. Then, the explosion seemed to reverse, sucked towards the center by some force, dust and smoke gathering into a piece of extremely dense matter no larger than a marble. It began to fall the second it form, dropping towards the perfectly smooth crater that the blast had created.

It simplified things, she mused, to simply assume anything he sent her way defaulted to absurdly lethal. If it hit her, she'd briefly regret it; ergo, she should make sure not to get hit. Simple enough.

Instead of giving it any more thought than that, she finished drawing her sword and swept it cleanly through his outstretched arm, energy gathering to help put on a sudden burst of speed as she did. The moment the blade struck his flesh, the spacial Dust activated, creating a kind of sticking effect—instead of 'cutting' his arm off, which she assumed would be exceedingly difficult, she separated them, an altered portal clinging to either stump. They didn't bleed as they came apart, but the hand fell to the ground, caught in gravity's hold, and she positioned a portal such that it ended up a fair distance away. Not a wound, technically speaking, but removing the limb all the same. Against a regenerating opponent, it tended to have more effect regardless.

Unfortunately, Malkuth seemed familiar with such effects, because instead of wasting even a moment waiting for it to grow back, he made the limb glow an off-yellow color. A moment later, it simply evaporated, coming apart into a chemical cloud that she didn't recognize but which was probably meant to do horrible things to her. She swept her sword through it, leveraging the same blade to a different effect, and what looked like a glass lens briefly formed in midair before banishing the toxic gas, switching it with a similarly-sized patch of air elsewhere. Still a portal, but meant to replace instead of move. Just in case, she moved it somewhere near enough for Jaune to deal with it and focused again on stabbing Malkuth in the face.

"Bitch, I just grew that back," He said, sounding annoyed as he evaded her next strike. However he was communicating, it wasn't reliant on sound, because she didn't slow down. Telepathy? No, this didn't have the feel of a mental effect. Some kind of energy- or Aura-based transmission that her brain interpreted as words.

It didn't matter, truthfully, but it meant that she might have to listen to him talk as she tore him apart. Thankfully, before she had to do any more of that, she felt a shift come from Jaune's direction and was reacting even before he fired. Portals opened all around Malkuth, moments before an extremely narrow beam of light flashed from an open space at his feet. It pierced straight through his chest and feed into another portal behind his, releasing it from another for it to tear through the elbow of Malkuth's remaining arm and fly into another portal. In an instant, there was a cage of piercing light weaving in and out of Malkuth's body, and the world darkened until it was the only thing visible.

Taking advantage of the opening, she sheathed her blade once more.

Except…that wasn't quite it. It was a trick she'd used before in a pinch, now no more than an afterthought. Her revolving sheath contained dozens of different Dust blades, each designed for a specific task, and now she was creating a tiny portal at the entrance of her sheath with the other side positioned within the case itself. Putting her current sword back where it belonged was simple enough; she didn't even really need her power for that, seeing as it was currently on the empty place. Remembering the precise location of the exact blade she needed relative to that empty space was usually a bit trickier, which was why she'd used several tricks when it came to their precise arrangement. Mnemonic things, to make it simpler; batching similar types together, ordering by color, numbering them, and more. There were several different methods, because in a battle there wasn't always time to think through or get tricky—in those cases, she went with whatever she thought of first and made due.

Now, however, there was no need for tricks. She could literally see inside the case without even looking at it; she disconnected her current blade, reassigned the portal to what she wanted, and attached the new one in a process that took no more time than it had taken to sheath and draw her sword.

If space didn't work, what of time?

She swung her new blade, her Aura causing the Dust to glow, and a wave of twisting power leapt from the edge to sweep across the battlefield.

The secret of using Dust is that there is no predefined way of using it. It was something that reacted to a person's Aura and could be used as a catalyst to create something new, beyond the user's normal ability. At the most basic level, it was easy to draw parallels between one person's use and another's, because Dust could simply be used to align the user's Aura with the corresponding element. Similarly, an experienced or reckless person could simply draw the powerout of the Dust, unleashing it upon the world with no restraint but their own power and will. Even then, however, there were countless possibilities hidden within Dust and just as many ways to use it. There were—and had been for as long as their records now went back—many schools of thought and practice when it came to wielding the power of Nature's Fury. Martial arts styles, sword styles, long and short-range methods; there were even styles meant entirely for show, practiced by high-end entertainers. Once, she'd listened to a musician who used their instrument to weave a song into a story, illustrated by mobile figures of ice and fire. Those were all things that could be taught, given a willing enough student.

And then there were things that were as personal as one's Semblance. Specifically, the ways Dust interacted with a person's Semblance. It was, after all, a personal expression—perhaps even manifestation—of the user's Aura. While generally static and unchanging barring…special circumstances, there was always the option of aspecting or redefining one's power through the lens of Dust. Not all Semblances allowed that; for some, there was just no meaning to aligning their power with an element, while others were just entirely unaffected. A precog she'd once known could use Dust to sense the presence of only a specific element in the near future, but outside of rare situations, that did nothing but limit her sight. Jaune's was like that, too, and was perhaps the most thorough example she'd ever seen, with the most basic aspects of his power left completely untouched no matter what he drew upon. He could use Dust to change the nature of some of his skills, but the Gamer itself? No.

But that was too be expected. Not all Semblances lent themselves easily to such modifications after all, nor to violence itself. Worse, because of the personal nature of it, it wasn't necessarily something that could be taught, but which had to be discovered. A dozen different crystals might prove themselves utterly worthless to a person, while using a specific kind of Dust might yield unexpected results.

In many ways, that had been the case for her. She'd first learned how to use Dust by observation, peaking into classes and watching practices while she was just a little girl. Like most talents, Dust was something that took time and effect to master—and even more time and effort to remain a master of. Once she'd figured that out, it had become simple to find unknowing teachers and, with her power, easy to find opportunities to practice. Many of them had ended explosively, in one way or another, but in time she'd gotten a feel for it and explored the possibilities. Due to the nature of her Semblance, spacial Dust had been one of the first she'd put serious effort into learning to use and she'd found a variety of ways to do so. A 'sticky' portal that seemed to separate things she cut through. A sharp portal that she could use to intersect things, dividing them in truth. Portals of different sizes that could cause temporary alterations to any who moved through them, briefly turning pebbles into boulders and monsters into kittens. She'd even figured out a way to make a portal within a portal, such that anything that tried to pass through appeared to be reflected.

After tampering with space had provided so many useful results, however, she'd inevitably started to wonder about its counterpart—so, of course, she'd tried.

As it turned out, it was tricky, meddling with time. Playing with time Dust was much the same. It was costly, with even sizable chunks of the material potentially lasting only an instant, and the uses almost always short-lived in an absolute sense.

But sometimes, all you really needed was a little time.

Malkuth lifted his remaining hand even as the other began to regrow. Violently colored light wreathed it, bright enough that had she been relying on her normal senses, she might have had to avert her eyes. Instead, she stared at him silently, waiting without fear. Malkuth prepared to fire—

And abruptly staggered, a gleaming blade emerging from the center of his chest. Sparing it a brief glance, she trust her sword forward where it seemed to vanish into the air—consumed by time and space even as the blade that had stuck Malkuth disappeared.

Without hesitation, she rushed towards Malkuth, feeling a change come over her even as she did. She'd only experienced this once before, during the single trial run she and Jaune had managed to engineer, but it was as exhilarating as it was terrifying. Her flesh began to peel away, revealing something underneath as if it had always been there. She felt the mask come over her face,become her face, even as her clothes turned black as night, becoming something in-between armor, flesh, and skin. Her arms became vaguely wing-like, feathers sharp as steel. But more than any of that, she felt her gaze sharpen. Not her sight, but the view she had of the world, now coming into even clearer focus before her.

This was Sahasrara, if she remembered correctly. The skill Jaune used to bear his literal soul and draw power from it. It was good timing, though she wasn't sure if that was because of the Dust or just Jaune. Either way, she'd happily take advantage of it while she could.

She approached Malkuth through another series of portals, flickering from place to place in moments and letting minute adjustments of time confuse the process. Even so, as she drew near her opponent, he once again reacted fast, gathering sickly green light in the center of his chest instead of his hands. It spilled forth as something between a whip, a laser, and a lightning bolt, carving a line of destruction straight for her—and then vanishing into another circular ripple of space. It didn't reappear instantly, but she flicked her blade down and it reopened, the blast slipping through time to strike at Malkuth at her command.

It did nothing but splash over him—obviously, he'd known better then to dish out more than he could take while fighting a portal-user—but it was a distraction and that was all she really needed. She flicked the tip of her sword to the left and a silver portal opened to the left of Malkuth. Another twitch and it's opposite point opened a moment later. Two portals, bridging not just separate points but separate times. Even with all her power, she could only cross a matter of moments, but…a moment was enough.

A solitary portal opened in the midst of it all, the other end of it right in front of Jaune, and he didn't need any more of any invitation to give his best shot.

What came forth was very nearly blinding to look at. It wasn't Longinus, the space-piercing spear bound to interfere with her portals, but instead a torrent of pure light—Lux Aeterna, most likely.

Good. That served her purposes better than Longinus would have, anyway.

Malkuth lifted his arms in defense, leaning into the blow as if anticipating it—but it was pointless. The initial strike was all but meaningless in this case, at least compared to what was to come. The light washed over him, searing his flesh and pushing him back, before reaching it's true destination and flowing into the time portal.

The moment it did—or rather, several moments before it did—the same amount of light came streaming from the opposite portal, rushing back through the intervening space and adding onto itself. She managed to close the portal at the center just in time, before that power had a chance to splash back through, and so it continued onwards, crashing over Malkuth and flowing into the time portal yet again.

And so the process repeated. Whatever entered the first portal exited the second several moments before it entered—in this case causing Lux Aeterna to retread the same path, creating a line of still-brightening light as it overlapped with its past and future self in a strange manner. The nature of entropy saw to it that the attack itself constantly lost energy, but that was nothing compared to the energy being funneled into it through the quirk in time, and so its net energy was increased by its previous iteration with each lap it took through the connected points in time and space. And being an attack made of light…well. It should go without saying that it took many, many laps.

In a way, Lux Aeterna may have been the best possible choice for this combination—enough so that she assumed Jaune had understood the nature of her attack in the moment or so of thought he'd been allowed. From what see understood, the nature of the attack was to draw in energy, condensing further as it grew more powerful. Jaune had once described it as endothermic light, and as it devoured itself endlessly and grew further and further, it stayed neatly within the pathway allowed by her portals. And as that pathway intersected Malkuth quite nicely, he got to enjoy every moment of the process.

Against anyone else, she'd say that was enough. The power gathered in that stream of light, the power being added to it every second—it was something awesome in a literal sense. Awe-inspiring, terrifying…it was one of the reasons she didn't use this application of her powers very often. For all the potential it held, the risks should it be unleashed or go out of control way phenomenal. Under normal circumstances, with far weaker attacks in use, it was possible to cause extreme collateral damage; added onto itself enough times, practically anything could be weaponized. A flash light, a laser pointer, or any variety of weapons…once, she'd even combined it with her secret weapon and the results had nearly been disastrous. The 'wipe nations clean of life' kind of disastrous—and Lux Aeterna was significantly more powerful than a laser pointer. Under normal circumstances, she'd hold it in place over the target for a second and let nature take its course.

But Malkuth wasn't a normal enemy and she knew it. She'd gone into this knowing she'd need to start with her best tricks and scale up and so that was exactly what she was going to do.

Unfortunately, while the twist in time she'd created could shatter any number of physical laws, in truth or in seeming, it remained an application of Dust—and it's time was ironically running out. Perhaps it was the stress caused by sustaining Lux Aeterna, something Malkuth had done, or the other uses she had put it to before this, but what should have been enough to last a second or two looked like it wouldn't even last one. Once it ran out, the portals would fade and the power gathered would take its natural course. And given the power in question, If it did that…it was entirely possible they'd lose something they couldn't live without.

They being Mankind. And that may well be lowballing it; even with the senses granted to her by her connection with Jaune, it was hard to keep track of the precise magnitude of something that was overwriting itself at the speed of light and she'd given up before even trying.

Normally, this would be when she'd create a portal in time and space, banishing the attack utterly before it could cause too much damage—but she was reluctant to throw such a weapon away so easily, considering their foe.

Besides. There might be a better use for it that simply getting rid of it.

Sheathing her sword again, she cast it aside but kept her power flowing through it—it would waste away entirely in a few more moments, but she needed those moments.

And in its place, she brought out her trump card—a blade of purest white, the only one of its kind she had. While she could afford to carry duplicates of most kinds of Dust, there were several varieties that were too hard to come by to allow that. Thanks to her power, she had other ways of getting what she wanted, but even then, finding enough of certain kinds of dust to make an entireblade could be a challenge. White Dust in particular was a severe chore to acquire in such quantities, especially with the limits to its use. But every now and then, it proved itself worth having. In her lifetime, this was the third such blade she'd owned and the previous two had saved her life.

Hopefully, this one would live up to their standard.

Taking a deep breath, she lifted her sword and called to the power contained within it.

In an instant, there was nothing left in the world but her. Everything around her flickered once and then went black, fading utterly from her sight. The light of the portals, the sky, everything—it all just seemed to cease to be. The only thing she could see, the only thing she could sense, was herself and the blade she held in her hand—and even that was changing. The white Dust of the blade seemed to corrode, shattering and breaking apart in a matter of moments as if it were falling to…well, to dust. The physical matter that had composed her blade was gone, completely and utterly.

But in its place was something else, like a light in the darkness. It embodied the same space, held the same shape, still looked like a swords edge—but it wasn't. Instead, this was the state her Semblance took when exposed to white Dust.

It was a portal in the shape of a sword. For a long time, she'd though that it was nothing but an opening, that there was no other side of it, but her time with Jaune had changed that. Where the portal led to, she still wasn't certain, but it had something to do with the Light Jaune drew several of his own skills from. And now that she held that power in her hands, the only question was how to use it.

White Dust was strange. For all that it seemed to embody the element of light, it was more than that—or rather, the Light was more than that. It wasn't just a matter of photons and illumination; it held ties to the very soul, to the core of a person. The first time she'd used it, she'd broken through limits that should have been untouchable, bisecting her opponent with a portal. The second time, she'd created a portal that drew in everything around it and another that emitted it as raw power. Two completely different uses, with the only connecting point being her.

This time, she used it differently once more. As the world came back to her, she ignored the light, though it now seemed to draw her towards it. She ignored the ignored she could sense within it as well, though she considered leveling this power towards him. Instead, she focused her light on the swirling darkness she could feel at the edge of her senses—and cut.

The still black pit that had hovered over the battlefield tried to resist that power, but it couldn't, nor could its master. It came apart at the seams and released its prisoner—and the light assailing Malkuth gained a mind of its own.

"Thank you, Raven," Jaune said as he strode past her, abruptly by her side. He'd probably teleported when he sensed the situation change—and change it had. Of all the possible uses for the one shot the Dust gave her, this had seemed like the safest best, even if it was also the least certain. She couldn't be certain what would result from this, because it wasn't her power she'd chosen to rely on this time. Instead, it was someone else's.

She'd chosen to trust Jaune's plan.

He stopped and looked back at her, smiling for a moment.

"Do you mind if I handle it from here?" He asked.

Already, she could feel her power and control fading—so instead of answering aloud, she simply nodded.

She smiled a bit wider and then looked at the torrent of light, now writhing as if fighting to take shape or to retain one.

"I figured none of the skills I'd learned would be enough to stop you—if it was that easy, you wouldn't still be here. You've probably seen it all before, anyway. So…here's a new trick, Malkuth," He said. "Something I made just for you."

His form fractured, splitting in two—and then there was light between his halves, drawn from the power gathered before him; Keter, briefly visible between the twins. Then the two sides of him came together with an explosion of force, trapping that light and energy between their reunifying mass and collapsing into itself.

But what was left was something greater than the sum of its parts.

XxXXxX

MurazorChief EncyclopedistSuper Awesome Happy Fun Time

The Games We Play
Light-Hearted

I was two and one—a division and then a unity. Lines blurred, edges faded, and then there was a connection. My twin and I were, after all, originally the same. Were still one, for all that they were also separate. Linking themselves together was as easy as coming apart, if somewhat more spectacular.

It couldn't be helped, though. They were the Dual Contending Forces. To unite, they had no choice but to come apart and forcibly merge, splitting along the lines that separated them in order to come back together. As they divided, they felt themselves waver, as if the solidity of their existences had been disrupted. In that moment, they were energy as much as matter, wavelengths and signals that communicated and aligned. At the same time, they were matter and antimatter, something bound to disrupt and eradicate on contact. Though they could draw lines like 'the original' here and 'the second' there, the truth of the matter was that they were identical, pieces split equally and housing halves of the same soul. If anything, they were both copies and it was only by merging that they could recreate the original.

And wasn't that was the point? They were Thaumiel, the Duality and Twins of God. The division of that which is perfect only in unity—of Keter, the Crown. It only made sense, then, that Keter be here as well—and he was.

At the center of it all, there was light. A riotous calamity of power and forces, only barely contained by their Light Elemental's power. They couldn't blame him for struggling, consider the magnitude of the power in question—Raven's temporal trick had created something that had shocked even him, a cycle of endlessly increasing light. That Keter was able to control it at all, even just for a moment, was astonishing.

But then, he was the Light, or at least my Light. There was more at work now than a struggle of physical forces; this was as much a mental effort as a matter of power and a test of being more than even that. Who they were, what they were, what they believed, what they hoped for, and what they intended—the answers to those questions meant more than any amount of MP, here and now.

And thankfully, I knew all of those answers now, or at least thought I did. There was still a great deal missing in terms of memories and such, but that was okay. I was 'Keter', what laid above the mind's ability to comprehend. Even if I couldn't remember, I knew and I was. I was Jaune Arc and Jian Bing and Keter and Metatron. I was me—and I simply was.

It was enough. My divided selves fully lost coherence, coming apart and flowing back into place. They came together like a collision of particles, a fusion in addition to a reunification—a resonance and a chemical process, a release of energy and a change of state. People existed on countless levels that most of them weren't even aware of, but as I became one again, I was aware of them all. I became myself again as my halves underwent a convergence of being.

And trapped between them, held in place by my will and my soul, was Keter—and all the power we'd managed to gather thanks to Raven. If it had been power alone, it wouldn't have mattered; the reunification of my halves operated only partially in Malkuth and couldn't be affected by a gathering of energy any more than it could be stopped by physical distance or barriers.

But because Keter was there, it was more than just a lot of energy. All throughout that conflagration of power was my Elemental—a part of my soul given physical form in the world by attaching itself to something else; a part of the world with 'substance,' something that didn't apply to a soul on its own. Like Thaumiel, it was a part of me, at once separate and united. That was how skills like Agni worked, after all; they temporarily fused those parts back together, just like I was piecing myself back together now.

And those similarities were why I'd first considered this, why I'd had the idea and tested it out.

I'd obtained Agni and the skills like it by using Tiferet, but the process wasn't a fusion as such. I wasn't entirely sure how it worked, but I was pretty sure it did so along lines of similarity. Rather than creating skills, I was finding them, having my Semblance draw upon ancient knowing in a fashion similar to however it created skill books. I gave it reference points and the power it needed to search for something useful, connecting the dots I laid out for it. At a guess, that had something to do with the nature of my Semblance or the nature of Keter—what remained above 'knowledge' or 'thought,' above 'action' or 'formulation.' The spark that eventually grows into something more. It was probably connected to why I was so skills with sensory techniques, too, and why my soul had a million eyes.

Even so, Tiferet couldn't do everything; it had its limits. The first, of course, was the need for reference points, allowing it to find something specific. Without that, I assumed there was simply too much to find anything specific—if I was drawing from a well that went above thought or even separation and individuality, the signal to noise ratio was probably rather severe. That could be dealt with by learning more skills and became easier as Tiferet's level improved, presumably allowing it to find things with less specific information.

The second was trickier to work around—Tiferet couldn't find what wasn't there. It was the center of the Sephirot, connecting every point but Malkuth, the place where everything would take shape…but it needed to have taken shape for Tiferet to work. Someone needed to have put the pieces together, to created results and completed a process for it to exist as a fact instead of aconcept.

That wasn't even a weakness, per se; Tiferet was a point of integration, allowing me to stand on the shoulders of giants. That's what Mankind did, in science and literature and everything else. We built upon successes and tried to learn from failures. My power, great as it was…I owed it all to others. To the countless people who'd struggled and works for years or decades to create the skills I now used in concert. That I'd mastered and combined to create something greater.

But the fact remained that Tiferet couldn't create things—couldn't build things on its own. It was where things came together, drawing up knowledge and ideas and drawing down what had been lost from human memory. It was a balance of surrounding forces—but the one Sephirot that it didn't touch directly was Malkuth, the Kingdom. Instead, it touched upon the Foundation of Yesod, because that was what it had provided.

Tiferet couldn't create things—but I could. I had, with magic Missile so long ago. Given the choice, I preferred to make use of what had already been perfected, but I could make new things as well.

So I had. When, even after my ability to summon Elements improved, Tiferet hadn't offered any skills above those like Agni, I'd accepted the truth—that such skills likely didn't exist. Elementals were a power that few could access to begin with and which even fewer did. Of those, how many mastered them? And how many obtained access to higher Elementals? How many people, in all of history, had reached the point of a Dimensional or a Light Elemental? Very few, in all likelihood. So it was unlikely anyone would have been able to create something like Agni for me to draw from.

Which meant I just had to do it myself. I knew the process, after all. Even if I hadn't gained that knowledge along with my mastery of the skill, my senses made it easy to see the details and the minutia. All I needed was to put it into practice, which was easier said than done.

But now, I had everything I needed and then some.

What I was making now, like all things, began with an idea. Skills—the things my power interpreted as skills—covered a broad array of possibilities. If was, in many ways, an exception, but in most cases Aura-based techniques weren't a science. At least, subjectively they weren't; objectively, you could break down the how's and why's and all the variables and see how something worked, and in many ways I thought that was what my power did.

But for most people, skills in general were more art form than science, if generally martial art form. They were something a person learned and practiced for years, like a normal fighting style, figuring out the tricks and the quirks, practicing for days, months, and years until they figured it out. From the outside looking in, you could analyze the mechanics of a martial art's fighting, break it down into biology, ranges of motion, and an interaction of forces. And that view of things is both accurate and true, but it's not complete. From the perspective of the fighter, it's not just a matter of kinetic energy and chemical responses; it was a matter of training, reflex, instinct, and memory. The punches and blocks, the reactions to shifts in the flow of battle, they weren't just methodical responses to the situation; there was a person behind the fists and it was important to remember that.

Similarly, learning to create fire or channel power through the body to achieve some great feat…it wasn't just a matter of the movement of MP. For me it was streamlined—not automated, still something I knew and felt, but still nearly effortless; so long as I had the power, I could perform the skill, as easily as if I were breathing. I didn't have to think about the idea or science or even heart behind it, though I knew them; Keter was something above all that, while simultaneously encompassed it.

For others, however…

The soul wasn't something that could be boiled down to just the numbers and the facts—not all the time, not in every case. Because the soul wasn't just one thing, wasn't just this or that, here or there. It was a matter of expression, of who a person truly was, and things that drew from its power were colored by it. A person could have a natural ability in one thing and a complete lack of talent in another, simply because of who they were. The ultimate expression of that was their Semblance, but it applied in other ways, too. There was no guarantee that following the same steps would have equal results for every person.

And even if two people managed to master, say, Magic Missile, that didn't mean they'd create the same thing—it could vary not only from person to person but from day to day. I could be certain my skills would do what they were supposed to do when activated, unless affected by an external forces, but if someone else summoned fire while relaxing and summoned it while consumed by fury, they results would almost certainly differ. They might draw more power to fuel it without thinking, something they couldn't identify mathematically without something suited for the task, but even if they used the same amount of power there were bound to be differences. This person's flames could be hotter than another's, generate more smoke, cause more pain, or any number of other things. One of the reasons learning skills was so hard for normal people was the simple fact that nothing about the process was certain. Things that drew power from the soul could be changed by the soul.

How much that was true varied from skill to skill as well. Elemental skills weren't the best example because unless they were created using Dust, they depended on the user's Elemental Affinity—their Aura's natural affinity with a specific element. As that depended on the nature of their soul to begin with, it was more likely to vary; something simple like a Far Strike, would probably be changed less. At the same time, it only made sense that things that drew more from the soul would be more personalized.

Elementals were perhaps the best example of that. A part of the user's soul given physical form through a medium they had an affinity with, the nature and identity of the entity created were completely in the air. How it looked, how it acted, how much control the user had over it…there was no way to be sure of anything.

That was true even for me. Simple skills required only MP, but greater ones could call for other things. My Elementals required an Affinity that my Semblance and skills thankfully granted, just as many of my stat skills demanded some special condition or another that it handled. Things like that, my Semblance could break down easily enough.

But with some of the greater skills I knew—the Brahmastra, Ohr Ein Sof, Sahasrara, and Thaumiel, to name a few—there was more to it than just numbers. The first time I'd received a skill with a 'Special' cost had been an eye opener for me; it required something my Semblance couldn't quantify.

It made sense in a way. Malkuth—the Kingdom, the realm of the physical laws and actions, where things take shape—was a place of 'concrete' things. Things that are solid, that are defined and work in specific ways. Physics, matter, energy. Time, space, and distance. It was when those things interacted with Aura that shenanigans ensued and things that drew more from the realms above Malkuth were, by their very nature, harder to define.

Skills like Agni were good examples. Skills that merged a fractured soul into something greater than its parts, it varied on countless levels. The person, the Elemental, and more. Agni itself had been a name—the name of its user, specifically. It was entirely possible I could only imitate it because of my Semblance and Tiferet; that had anyone else tried, it would have manifested differently. A transformation into a being of fire, perhaps, or something in the other direction; merging the person with the Elemental, instead of vice versa.

Something like that was personal and complicated—and I was trying to do something even greater, merging not just with one Elemental but with my Light Elemental, who'd been created from all the pieces of my soul. Even for me, that wasn't something that could be done easily.

But I knew how to do it, because of the skills I'd already learned.

To begin with, I needed power. Power alone wouldn't be enough for this, but I still needed it; this was a process that would take energy on an absurd scale. More than I could generate on my own, even given an amount of time that would be completely unreasonable to ask for in a fight. Originally, the plan had been to generate this power in the fight against Malkuth, drawing upon both Lucifer and Malkuth's seemingly endless reserves. Lux Aeterna had converted that energy into light and I'd fed it into Keter to contain it. Even then, I hadn't been sure if it would have been enough and Malkuth had trapped Keter before I could follow through with it regardless.

Thankfully, Raven had come through with more than I could have possibly asked for, a gathering of raw, contained Light beyond anything I had even imagined being able to get under these conditions. There were no certainties—couldn't be, really, with something like this—but this was everything I could hope for and then some. I'd just have to hope it was enough.

The rest was trickier. Agni, Kubera, Varuna and the others had several things in common and power was only one of them. Agni had formed in battle, Kubera in the face of the death of his people, Varuna in the wake of unbelievable disaster. The presence of power to draw upon in each case, but also need. Necessity was the mother of invention, and it played a role.

That was the first hurdle I'd had to figure out a way around. And I had motivation, yes, and a desperate need, but they were calm things, intellectual. I needed power to defeat a foe, but they were a distant one, shadowed in unknowns. I was terrified of Malkuth and his minions, for completely logical reasons; they were nightmarishly powerful, after all. I knew I had to defeat them somehow, for me, my friends, and the entire world—but it was a little hard to be that hard pressed when mulling things over on a couch. Even without the Gamer's Mind, I'm not sure if I could have done it; I was worried and desperate, but not like I'd been when it was my father on the line.

In truth, that had been another part of why I'd put myself on a time limit, why I'd given myself only a week to prepare. Malkuth was a world-ending threat, yes, but it was hard to really conceptualize or feel a danger that was wrapped in secrets and maybes. Malkuth's strength, the strength of the Legendary Grimm…I had to see it for myself. Had to test their limits and mine, push myself to the breaking point, and not just know but experience what I was up against, what was at stake.

Gilgamesh had pushed me more than I had been in a while, but even he hadn't been enough in the end. He hurt me, might have even been able to kill me early on if he'd wanted to, but I'd had plenty of things in my bag of tricks and I'd pulled them out one after another. I'd set things up in my favor, changed the tide, and I'd known all the while that I could win. That I'd need to be cautious, careful, and do things right, but that this was a foe I was theoretically able to defeat. He hadn't been what I'd needed and if I'd won against him and Malkuth hadn't appeared, I might have been relieved—this is all I was up against? Even if he turned out to be one of the weaker Legendary Grimm, if I could beat him, then with enough effort, enough time, I could defeat the others, too.

But Malkuth had appeared. He was weakened, limited by his current form, but he was here, and I'd thrown my best hits at him.

He'd shrugged them off like rain. Crushed me. Terrified me when he tore apart my plans and captured Keter. Ripped through my barriers and went after the ones I'd loved, forcing me to pull out the Arcana—and even then I'd known he was holding back. He even withstood an assault from Raven and I that would have annihilated me with ease.

If I couldn't even match him as he was now…then how was I ever going to face the real deal. I'd lost before, when my previous self had had centuries more experience and I was losing again now. Fighting him, facing him, it had made me wonder. Maybe even doubt.

Good.

And to cape it all off, I had a blurring of the self. That was the other thing those skills had in common—an understanding of who they were, but also a blurring of the lines. I knew who I was already, what my Elementals were, but it hadn't been enough.

This was something else. Thaumiel, pushed to its limits. The use of Ohr Ein Sof, nearly unmaking me each time. Coming apart and back together—seeing, feeling, knowing.

It made the difference and all my pieces came together at last. I felt power flowing through my being, power beyond words—but it was nothing compared to the certainty, the feeling of wholeness and completion. The knowledge of a simple truth.

I am.

Opening the eyes of my new self, I saw the world around me. Raven behind me, Malkuth before me, both of them stopping just to stare at what had happened. In my heart, I could feel the Arcana shifting, and before my eyes…

You've thought of a new skill. Would you like to name it?

I paused for a moment, considering it. Those who'd come before me—or perhaps just Tiferet—had named skills like this after themselves, or else had taken those names for their own afterwards. Perhaps they'd been their human names or the names of their Elementals or maybe they'd even found their true ones, as I had so long ago. But in my case, what should that name be? Jaune? Jian? Keter? All names that were mine, that were important to me.

But here and now, knowing what I was doing and why I was fighting, with my goal almost in sight…with the computer I'd left myself still waiting…

I suppose there was only one thing it could be. Out loud, I could call it something else, but this skill was mine, the combination of everything I was, and it deserved the name.

With a thought, I titled it Metatron.

XxXXxX

MurazorChief EncyclopedistSuper Awesome Happy Fun Time

The Games We Play
Hard-Hearted

"This is a new trick," Malkuth said after a long moment's silence, looking at me. He didn't have any eyes, but I could tell his gaze was more curious than afraid—I suppose not being anywhere near the actual damage would do that. "Tell me, what is it, Keter?"

"You losing," I answered simply, tilting my head slightly. I was slowly trying to orient myself in a way that was hard to describe. I was standing on the ground right now, but I didn't feel like I was; it was as though I were hovering in a void and could move how I wished. I could feel things around me, too, but I had a hard time placing them as well—senses, but nothing like physical ones. I'd opened more metaphorical eyes than pretty much anyone and this wasn't like that. I wasn't seeing anything new, wasn't feeling it against my body or mind, but…they were there. Malkuth and Raven, along with signs of their power, especially where Raven's portals were now fading.

"Heh," Malkuth chuckled, even lifting a clawed hand to his masked face. The sound was amused, but he wasn't, I was certain of that much. "I'll admit, it's something I haven't seen before—but stuff like that is why this world is fun, isn't it? People come up with new tricks all the time, struggling to survive and succeed, to beat me…and they fail. Like you failed. You're a few thousand years too early and late to talk about beating me."

I shrugged slightly before rolling my shoulders and lifting my hands. Right now, I looked regular, normally—the effects of Sahasrara, Metamorphosis, and everything else receding. Except that wasn't quite right, because I wasn't the same as I was before and those things simply weren't there. I felt at once distant from the world and closer to it than I even was before.

Regardless, I didn't see much point in answering Malkuth's questions, so I just watched him calmly for a moment.

"Nothing to say?" Malkuth asked after a moment.

I shrugged again.

"I'm going to kill you," I stated, not putting any emphasis on the words. "I've won, you lost, the end. There's really not much else to say. I gave you a chance to say your last words and they look like they'll be rather hilarious in hindsight, so I'm good. You ready to die yet or would you like to continue embarrassing yourself?"

"You—"

Whatever he was about to say was cut off as he staggered several steps back, a hole larger than his head appearing in the center of his chest. The circle was perfectly carved, its edges smooth, and at the exact center of it all was Malkuth's portal, hanging suspended in the emptiness. Already, matter was flowing from that hole to replace what was lost, but it glimmered around the edges with sparks of white light.

Malkuth looked down at the hole in his chest and then traced a path to the finger I'd pointed at him absently.

"Sorry," I apologized. "I didn't mean to interrupt; please, continue. I just wanted to check on something."

It was true, in a way—I'd felt the shift, but I wanted to confirm it. The Arcana had changed the moment I adopted this shape, which was inevitable; I'd reunited my split haves, found what I was looking for, and I'd accomplished one of my major goals. I felt strong now, whole, and at ease in a way that was hard to describe or define.

The Arcana had taken shape accordingly.

Judgement: The Arcana of Judgement—the representation of the self, of what remains and shines through when all else is gone. It is an understanding of past mistakes and an acceptance of them; the ability to learn from them and face the future. At the same time, it is a point of choices and decisions, of loss and rebirth, as one reaches their own Judgement Day and decides the path of their lives. When the user is within this state of being, nothing may stand in their way—all attacks receive 100% defense penetration and ignore inherent immunities. At the same time, the user must be wary, lest they falter in this moment; active defenses may not be used in this state.

I rolled my wrist, closing my hand and then opening it. Three small spheres, each no larger than a marble, rotated in a quick circle above my hand. I looked at them curiously for a moment, trying to determine their nature. The Arcana was a skill I understood only in part and this was the first time I could see with any certainty how it manifested and confirm several of my own theories. It wasn't something that drew greater power from above like Ohr Ein Sof or the Brahmastra; instead, it drew from something just as important.

Me. It was the point of connection between who I'd been and who I was—not so much as dividing line between Keter and Jaune as a bridge. It was what remained, what my soul had taken with it when it passed on and was reborn. The way it manifested…it wasn't like my former Semblance, wasn't as broad or easy to control. I couldn't just assign myself a role, either, so instead it arosefrom my role. But the touches, the influences, they were obvious and clear. It wasn't the same, but it was still mine; the remains of a soul that had gone through life and the cycle of reincarnation. Something that didn't translate well into thoughts or memories, into something held by a human mind, but which was still there, even after all those things were gone.

It might even have had something to do with why souls were reincarnated in the first place, but that was nothing more than a guess.

Still, the way it manifested…it was an obvious alteration to who I was, to the nature of my soul. Not on the level of a Semblance but close. Strength and the Chariot, in and of themselves, changed spiritual and mental force into physical ones. The Lovers blurred lines between individuals along paths of connection. The Magician…widening the connection that the Aura drew on for power?

But this…Judgement. At first glance, it seemed similar to Longinus as it accomplished the same ends…but no. It was something else. Longinus pierced defenses by cutting through space—by severing the most basic forms of connection and ignoring anything to do with the material. What a target was made of or blocked with was irrelevant, because those that seemed to be hit by it weren't actually touched at all, they merely suffered from the fact that the volume space they'd inhabited had been shredded with them inside of it. That was probably why it interfered with portals the way it did, too; if a portal twisted space to connect one point to another and Longinus tore a hole through space as it passed…

Judgement was something else. The power I'd gathered like this, the very Aura I was channeling—its nature had changed. It seemed both less physical and more certain, as if the power I was channeling was built from simple fact. The attacks created did not hit hard enough to do, say, a hundred damage to the target. They simply imposed a hundred damage on the target, as if it were a natural law. Reducing the effect or defending against them did nothing, because however one tried to block, that damage could not be reduced.

The strike that had hit Malkuth hadn't damaged him directly, hadn't shorn through his armor. Instead, it had simply touched him and taken effect, with that effect being 'take this defined amount of damage', erased parts of him to meet that criteria.

It was interesting, in no small part because it seemed like something that would belong to Malkuth. A limited application of his power, perhaps, an overly specific and defined one that was reached in a different way…but there were traces, similarities.

And it seemed as though I wasn't the only one to draw that connection.

"Tch," Malkuth said, touching his chest. "Keter, you bastard. Pulling out your old tricks again—"

The spheres rotating above my hand stopped in place for an instant and flashed forward, hitting and erasing most of his head. Pointless, perhaps, given the obvious lack of anything vital in there—but it was well worth it to shut him up.

Malkuth's body rocked for a moment and then began to run even without a head—straight towards Raven, who'd slowed after the Lovers had vanished. Even so, I could see a blade humming in her hands, trying to make up the difference with Dust.

I didn't chase after him. I didn't bother. Instead, I simply held out a hand to my side—and his fist made contact with it, stopping just short of Raven. On contact with his skin, the flesh of my hand seemed to dissolve, revealing nothing but pure white light in its stead, and flecks of burning flesh began to rise from Malkuth's hand.

"Don't," I said and we were twenty meters away from Raven. "I'm not the same as I was back then—I won't let you touch the people I care about again."

"Bastard," Malkuth said again, a note of muted effort in his voice as he tried to push me back or pull away.

Instead, I let him go, moving my hand to his chest. As it did, it seemed to leave wavering after images behind—but they weren't of my arm. One was made of fire, another of air. Earth, water, steel, lightning, ice, distorted space, and countless others, each a different shape and size.

Each still a part of me.

I fired.

What came forth from my hands was less a focused assault or barrage and more a breaking of reality. Gravity went haywire, points in space rippling and then being sucked towards the center. Space itself followed suit, parts of the area warping and lengthening whilst others shrunk or even disappeared, shunted or drawn oddly into empty places. What could only be described as sparks of time fluttered out from my skin, expanding into roughly spherical bursts wherever they touched Malkuth, and those parts that were encompassed by the sphere were abruptly covered in horrific wounds, the evidence of injuries that had yet to happen imposed upon the present. Light flooded over and through all of it, making and unmaking what it touched in a way that was both interconnected and distinct.

And all of it was followed by everything I could throw at him. One arm shattered and spun into a growing whirlwind of glass, with individual shards sticking and seeming to melt into the surrounding landscape, transforming what it touched into glass and adding it to the cyclone. Fire burst from everything around me and then sank, the heat drawing into the affected surfaces to burn hotter, charring things without any sign of the source even as the damage crept deeper. Beside the living heat were growing patches of ice, left behind in the defiance of Thermodynamics and then given life in its own right. Shapes began to rise from it, as well as the earth and water nearby, the more physical elements struggling to take shape. The ground fractured violently, massive fissures opening up from which poured all manner of things, and the ground continued to shake in a steadily growing earthquake even as the wind began to whip into a storm and lava began to flood up from the ground.

The sound of it all was distorted oddly, carrying in strange ways and intermingling into a rising cacophony that altered itself every few seconds. Stone, glass, and crystal began to shatter, inevitably exploding into clouds of wicked shrapnel. The pressure in the area skyrocketed, the very air seeming unspeakably heavy, and the effects of inertia followed, causing things to move oddly—things that should have shaken or scattered remained stock still, things that should have remained immobile as steady as a mountain. Friction shifted with it, things stopping in midair, flying strangely, or even growing faster with no source. At the same time, I saw things melt, some of them simply coming apart while others were covered in growing pools of strange acids.

There were other things, as well—every element I could access, which was all of them, showing up in force. They turned upon Malkuth, upon the world around him, and blasted it with everything. Every vector of assault was followed through with, each attack piercing his defenses as if they didn't exist. Malkuth's existence, his very being, was stripped away, sometimes in chunks while other times in pieces, until nothing remained but the tiny insignificant portal that allowed him to exist here and now.

I lifted a hand, pointing at it—and space rippled outwards from it as if something had crashed into it with unspeakable force. That done, I clinched my hand into a fist and everything around us, the chaos I'd made of our surroundings, leapt from the ground around us and flooded into that opening, drawn to and gathering around a narrow orb of light.

Malkuth screamed in a way that didn't translate very well into sound—it was a noise like a rise in frequency, a slowing of natural processes, and overlay over the background of the world spinning. Even so, the 'sound' was loud and it carried, echoing until I dropped my hand.

The hole in space bled black, a small stream of fluid stripping down from it in a strange way, as if dripping down an invisible surface rather than empty space. More of it flowed upwards and then to the sides, stretching into the shape of something like a stick figure as he healed.

I didn't move, but figures stepped out of me. Suryasta, Xihai, Levant, Ereb, Vulturnus—even Crocea Mors, now physical instead of a reflection. They were followed, impossibly, by figures that were mutually exclusive in existence; my Ice Elemental, Steam, Pressure, Inertia, Plasma, Gravity, Glass, Vibration, my Dimensional, and more. Everything I could create, that could spring forth from my existence, was present.

Malkuth stopped for a moment, not healing or moving. I waited.

"You and your fucking Elementals," Malkuth swore at last. "You always did try to keep up with me."

It kind of looked like I was doing more than keeping up, from where I was standing—but the situation was special in various ways and there was no point in letting myself be dragged into his flow.

"Leave, Malkuth," I said. "You've already lost and you shouldn't be able to cling to that body much longer, anyway. You should know by now that you aren't going to get what you want—after all this time fighting me, you should be used to being disappointed."

"Oh, I am," He replied. "But probably not for the reasons you think I should be. Look at you, Keter—all this time and you're still the same. So…unimaginative. All that power and you don't even want to play with it?"

"How?" I asked. "By torturing you? Believe me, the idea's crossed my mind—but I can't imagine it'd be all that fun when you're running around in a meat-puppet. And personally, even if it were, I'd rather just be rid of you."

"Bah," He said. "That's no way to talk. But fine, I know when I'm not wanted—and I know how to lose with grace. Catch you later, Keter."

Despite the words, he immediately tried to screw me over.

Needless to say, I was shaken to the core by a complete and utter lack of surprise.

His response occurred on several levels simultaneously. The first was the simplest—he attacked me. Even if I said it was simple, however, it was still something major and noteworthy, because this time he wasn't holding back.

That was the downside of putting myself of this level. Every time I fought him or his minions, they'd been playing nice, soft-balling me. I knew full well that there were a lot of fights I'd only survived because I'd been allowed to, fights I'd only won because my enemies had the kid gloves on. If every Grimm I'd ever fought had gone all out from the very start and aimed for the throat, I probably wouldn't be here by now. All this time, I'd had a massive advantage because my enemies couldn't afford to kill me.

I figured that was probably intentional. Whatever I'd done in my past life, I'd known what would happen, at least well enough to make some guesses. Whatever was in that computer, the password on it wasn't just to keep Malkuth and his lackies out, it was to make sure I survived long enough to make it in. If not for what they needed me to accomplish, Malkuth probably would have made sure I died in some horrific manner the moment he learned of my existence. I'd obviously failed to kill Malkuth, but I'd managed to give myself a chance to come back and finish the job.

It was risky, however—because Malkuth was watching me and he was my archenemy. While playing around with me was probably all well and good as far as his sadistic mindset went, he knewme, knew who and what I was. Giving me time to plan and prepare was a dangerous idea at the best of times; giving me an endless amount of it was a recipe for disaster for anyone who wasn't on my side. Malkuth wanted me alive, but he didn't want me alive and in any position to put up a serious fight, and I was entirely certain that if I ran the clock down enough he'd do something to force my hand before I was ready to face him.

That was another part of why I'd come here when I did—because it had been on my terms, on my conditions. Things had gone according to my plans instead of his, because I hadn't been marching to his tune and hadn't waited until he was making sure I didn't try anything funny.

Malkuth was my greatest foe, but I was his biggest threat, even if I might have also been his only hope. If I were in his position and my reincarnated enemy had started looking like a serious threat, I'd probably start thinking about killing him and trying again with number three. The measures I'd taken had given me time, but Malkuth would do everything in his power to make sure it wasn'tenough time.

That was why Metatron was my trump card; it was something he hadn't seen coming, a change of the game he hadn't been able to predict. It had been a risk—a terrible risk, given what was on the line—but it had been the only way to close the gap fast enough to take him off-guard.

And it had worked. Something I'm sure he didn't like one goddamn bit—and he showed it by holding nothing back. All the things he'd kept up his sleeve for fear that I wouldn't be strong enough to survive it came abruptly to the forefront. Here, more of those attacks that caused matter to fall apart. Rays that interfered and interrupted brain activity. Forms of transmutation that paid no mind to the subject's ability to survive. Forms of dimension shifting that were meant to remove chunks or bisect, a blast that cut a hole in the world, a red spark that caused matter to implode—

Well. The point was that Malkuth had a whole pot full of his most lethal hits and he was now willing to hit me with them—and while I was unable to bring many of my defenses to bear, no less. Malkuth had no way to know about the limitation the Arcana imposed upon me or he might have hesitated before unleashing hell.

Oh well. I hadn't come this far and risked so much to be unable to face Malkuth head-on. Even if it was still only a shadow of him, this was still the fight I'd been both dreading and anticipating for so long and I wasn't going to be defeated. Even if my active defenses were gone, my passive methods were still working fine—and more than that, there was a loophole of sorts to Judgement.

Except, it might well have been fully intentional, considering the nature of the effect; the 'roles' of the Arcana seemed designed to incentivize what I considered 'types of play.' In the case of Judgement, this was especially clear, because while it forbid defenses, it said nothing of attacks.

And sometimes, the best defense really was a good offense.

Malkuth threw everything at me and I threw everything right back. Waves of light with bursts of strange energy, consuming and pacifying them. Oddly colored sparks dancing with searing lightning across the surface of empty space and ionized air. Spikes and storms of violent matter took hits and bore through them, piercing blasts of power flashing through whatever was in their way, and everything between Malkuth and I began to fall apart.

At the same time, my Elementals—the parts of me I had encompassed and now manifested in their familiar shapes—marched forward through it all like a small army. They were different now, the change a spiritual one instead of anything physical, because they were perfected in unity with both me and each other. Though the battlefield was rendered into chaos, they pushed forward.

The moment they were close enough to touch him, however, Malkuth exploded into a mass of what I could only describe as probability clones—the odds of him trying to escape in a given direction granted not-quite physical form. They'd shatter, I could tell, falling to zero the moment they were caught, but if even one escaped, they'd turn out to be the real Malkuth. My Elementals immediately leapt into action, shifting and dividing as needed to reach their targets, but I stayed back, expecting a trick.

Because of that, I noticed the subtle movement of space as one of the probability clones took a less conventional path, slipping through something I would have thought a portal had it not clung to his skin. I followed suit all the same, willing myself to be more of a constant than any of the principles that governed space, tying myself to Malkuth and remaining equidistant from him even as he moved. I recognized his target before he even appeared and reacted as he materialized above Autumn, pulling instead of allowing myself to be pulled.

He swept a hand through her, but we were already in the wrong state, a shifted area of space that was disconnected from hers. His claws didn't reach her, even as they swept cleanly through her body, and I reached out to grab him.

We came apart, vanishing and reversing as I returned us to a previous position in space, drawing us back to the battlefield in an instant.

Malkuth released a growl of frustration that rose into a scream as he unfolded, mass shifting away to reveal more mass, covering an impossible volume. I felt something activate, something shift, and figured it was probably a bomb.

"Fine then," He said, the words not of sound. "Be that way. I'll settle for just the one, then."

I didn't have to glace behind me to know he was focusing on Raven, looking for some way to deny me victory or at least lessen its worth.

"No," I said. "You won't."

Lifting a hand, I activated Ohr Ein Sof once more.

MurazorChief EncyclopedistSuper Awesome Happy Fun Time

The Games We Play
Breaking Down

In the course of planning for my fights with Malkuth, I'd considered every option I had available before boiling things down to just a few. The simple fact of the matter was that most of my skills wouldn't really work against someone whose power gave him such complete control of the world around him—even limited by Gilgamesh's body and unable to directly control the world beyond himself, Malkuth had proven that. I trap him with in the heat of a perfectly contained stellar explosions? He makes it so that heat doesn't flow from a hotter area to a colder one. I destroy his body completely? He recreates it with summoned matter. I could hit him as hard as I could, but he had countermeasures for just about everything I could do, up to and including changing basic parts of reality like the speed of light in a vacuum.

And that was all in direct stuff—essentially weapons he'd cobbled together by altering his physical mass and how parts of him interacted with the world. From removing matters ability to hold itself together, causing it to implode and fuse into a confined mass, or twisting probability into and actual physical things, the world was his bitch even while he was kneecapped in terms of power and versatility. How the hell was I supposed to beat a guy with source code hacks to the universe I lived in?

There weren't a lot of answers. Even with all the power I had and everything I could muster, we existed in the realm of Malkuth—his world. His playground, really. However many times I punched him in the face or destroyed his body or whatever else I happened to try, the fact remained that the game was rigged, the rules rewritten to ensure I couldn't win.

And yet, I had, in my past life. Not completely, of course, because whatever had happened, I hadn't walked away from it—but at the same time, Malkuth usually wasn't running around being a colossal douchebag and making my life a living hell. I'd stopped somehow, even though the most basic laws of physics were playthings in his hands. How?

I had no idea. I was willing to bet that was a big part of why Death had made sure to give me a good scrubbing, though the thousand years of experience and preparation probably hadn't helped my metaphorical case. And whatever I'd done, I was about a million percent sure Malkuth had dedicated a pretty significant portion of his time since ensuring it wouldn't work on him again, or else he wouldn't be so confident.

But, for all of that, for all his power, and for all his minions—including the Riders, who could theoretically infect and pull just about anyone to his side—he wasn't free to act. Not unless I did something to tamper with the connection that led back to him.

There were only a few possible explanations for that, the most likely of which was that I'd trapped him somehow. The only reason he'd be watching from a distance instead of constantly following me around, micromanaging and strong arming me at every moment, was because he had no other choice. If he did, he'd have reached out to me the moment he knew who I was, back before even I did, and might have presented a friendly face until he got what he'd wanted. Assuming he didn't do that, he'd at least be constantly threatening and hurting things I cared about, driving me whichever way he chose. But either way, he'd have done something and I'd have had no choice in the matter; I'd never have a moment's peace, a moment's escape, because he could even enter barriers like Naraka.

But instead, he'd been forced to work through clumsier means, using the tools he had—the Grimm—even though I'd known they were monsters from the get-go. He'd been forced to keep his distance, to watch and wait and nudge here and there. To hold thing back and play things safe. Not the actions of someone who had much choice in the matter.

No, if he could have been there, he would have been there—and since he hadn't, it was only because he couldn't. Something was stopping him from getting involved directly.

It might have been on my end—something I'd done to myself to protect against his involvement—but that was unlikely. If I had some secret weapon that could ward him off up my sleeve, I probably would have used it the first time around. While some kind of spiritual bomb in my head that was ready to explode if Malkuth came too close might keep him away, the risk to me was obvious and if something went wrong…well, I was fucked. I didn't want to screw myself over and I'd been planning for a reincarnation, even knowing how long it would take; been planning to do something save the world in round two, even though I knew it meant countless people could die before I could get back in the ring. I wouldn't have done that if I had any other choice and I sure as hell wouldn't risk making people suffer even more by causing there to be a round three. Theremight be, if I fucked up, but I was really hoping to avoid that.

Besides, if I'd left Malkuth free to run around, he'd have fucked up everything by now. My life, the geography, the world, everything. I'd have heard of some nightmarish god-king by now, at the very least, or he'd have sent other minions, controlling things from a distance. No, whatever I'd done, it had almost certainly been on his end. I'd caught him in a trap of some kind.

It couldn't have been a physical prison—or, at least, I couldn't think of one that I thought could hold him for very long. Given the amount of fucks he apparently gave for…pretty much anything, stone walls and iron bars seemed unlikely to be his weakness. In this world, Malkuth's power was absolute and even if I was far stronger then than I was now, I was pretty sure I'd have a bitch of a time physically locking up a guy who controlled the laws of physics. Anything grounded in this world was putty in Malkuth's hands.

So I must have used something he couldn't control, which could only mean one thing. Where I'd failed with Et in Arcadia Ego—my attempt to remove the fight from 'reality'—I'd figured out someway to succeed and I'd locked him in a box he couldn't touch with his powers. I'd imprisoned him in a place above Malkuth, above the physical. A place where his methods didn't apply, where the very concepts of fighting, resisting, and clashing, as we understood them here, were meaningless. What was a battle in a world where space, time, and distance held no value? He wouldn't be able to escape from such a thing while inside it. He might not even be able to try to escape the box I'd put him in.

Well, if it worked at all how I thought it might—and I could barely imagine the mechanics of such a thing—it was probably more of a hypercube than a box, as such. But still. He was cut off from the physical and unable to even reach out towards it… unless something reached out first. Unless something from the physical world interacted with him, allowing him a chance to affect something with his own power, to some extent or another. The metaphysical distance probably imposed restrictions upon that beyond the obvious ones, but it turned the impossible into the possible. The Sephirot were connected, after all, if in strange ways.

And the problem was, there were things doing that all the time. The Grimm were connected to their master in a way not dissimilar to my Elementals and I—separate and united, the 'people' and the Kingdom. They drew power from him, strength, and he remained connected to the world as a result. And when I reached out to tamper with that connection, like I'd done with both Conquest and Gilgamesh…it gave him a way in, however temporarily. He still had power here, after all, he just needed to be able to reach it.

But it was a reminder that there were some things that could work on him, some things that could still reach him. It had been a starting point, once I'd thought of things that way, a place to begin—and one of the places it had led me was here.

Ohr Ein Sof was more than just an attack in a case like this—it was a bridging of points.

And I used it to drag Malkuth kicking and screaming up the Tree of Life.

In the light of Ohr Ein Sof, all things came apart, regardless of their nature. That was because, at its most basic level, it wasn't a destructive technique—instead, it revealed the truth and sometimes that truth wasn't something people could survive learning. In Ohr Ein Sof, in the realms above, everything feel away. There was no flesh to conceal you, no material things to distract you, no natural law or permanence or anything else. There was no time, no space, no distance. You couldn't lie in that light, not even to yourself; couldn't hide or deny or deceive.

What you saw was you. Who you truly were, what you truly were, behind everything. As you rose through the Tree of Life, things simplified on a level that could be—that was—frightening. Even just a step above Malkuth was Yes—the Foundation, the connection between one thing and another, between an idea and an act. Image what that was like for a person, being reduced to the foundations of who you were, somewhere between the concepts above and the realities below. And then you continue to rise higher, seemingly shedding more and more of who and what you were, reduced to what most people would think of as a soul as early as Netzach and Hod, at least were the Aura was concerned. Above that, one could argue if you existed as a being in your own right, as something distinct and separate from everything else.

That was how you survived Ohr Ein Sof and it was far more difficult than it seemed. The question was, when there was nothing left but you…was that enough? The words 'I Am' were simple and easily spoken when you could think and talk, when the vibrations of air could generate sound and electrical impulses help form conscious ideas, when boundaries were made real in Malkuth, but what separates one entity from another above that? The mind? Perhaps that could sustain you for a time, but what about when you reach above the mind in the heights of the Sephirot? What of when you transcend them entirely in the Light? The Light was something that was, perhaps, infinite and all-encompassing. It existed in all things, in all states of things, divided and separated by the emanations of the Sephirot. If you remove all those, what separated one thing from another?

You. You did—and absolutely nothing else. Not your body, not your mind, not your memories or feelings or emotions, not your hopes or your dreams or desires, but just you. Who you were when, paradoxically, everything you were was gone.

But that perspective was, in and of itself, limited. Keter was 'that which laid above the mind' and things that existed within the state of Keter or even above it…needless to say, they were hard to conceptualize. In that state, we were less people than ideas, except even that gave too much weight to us. We were the moments before an idea, the instant before something clicked and seemingly meaningless and unconnected thoughts came together into something grand. The moment of inspiration, the moment of conceptualization, the first moments of existence. If the world had sprung forth with a bang, Keter was the silence that preceded it. Something impossible to truly nail down but undeniably existent; the beginning. Not where something was perceived as beginning, like the first word on a page or even the first idea of the story, but what came before that.

And instead of an idea, it was a person. Though calling it a idea and a person may not have been incorrect, on this level.

This was the prison I'd sentenced Malkuth to—the prison of Being and Almost Being, to the moments you lived before you were. Where there was nothing but who you were about to be, except perhaps one other thing. The 'soul', beyond all labels or expectations.

And this was the state I'd brought us to now.

Everything we were on the surface fell away, our physical forms dissolved and what remained—who we really were when all else was stripped away—flowed up the channels of the Sephirot. I felt it as we rose, each level stripping away more of who we were, peeling back the lies that hid the truth. Though the attack may have struck Gilgamesh, that body was nothing but Malkuth's puppet now, and it did nothing to hide him. Ohr Ein Sof peeled away the flesh and bared the soul, tracing the connection back to its source. For a moment, I could sense him in a way that was hard to describe, because 'sense' implied observation, the ability to distinguish the world outside from yourself, or at least distinguish different parts of yourself. I couldn't do that here, because most of it just didn't apply. I couldn't think and so I couldn't form thoughts into ideas and words.

But I was. And I knew I was. After all—and especially now—I was Metatron. I was Keter, the Crown and that which remains. And here, I had the advantage.

In many ways, this was nothing but a change in our battlefield—an exceedingly literal escalation. Just as Malkuth warped the laws of physics to shape the terms of our battle, I'd now removed us from those laws entirely to turn things to my advantage. Our power and control of the world didn't matter here, only we did, who we were. We didn't pit those things against each other, didn't come into conflict, because the mere idea of a fight on this level was laughable. Even thinking mean thoughts in each other's general directions was impossible, because we had no location, direction, or thoughts to do such things with.

Instead, we fought by existing. By continuing to exist, above and beyond the grasp of everything that implied we could or should exist. What could you hold onto when you had and were nothing and what would you let slip through your grasp? I had the advantage, by my very nature—my power, my Semblance, they all drew from this. In many ways, the Gamer's Body and Mind were tied back to this state and thus all of my power. More than that, I had Metatron on my side, both the skill and the name. I knew who I was.

Malkuth, I assumed, just had a lot of experience from being locked up here all this time. But even then, that wasn't entirely an advantage, because it was that much harder to cling to physical things and that was a major danger in Ohr Ein Sof. Perhaps you managed to cling to your mind—but do you still have a body to attach it to? What if your body remains, but not yourself? What if nothingremains? I had a similar issue because, if anything, this was my natural state, but I was better equipped to deal with it. And while in many ways, Malkuth felt as solid as the world itself and as steady as it's turnings, I could feel things on the edges beginning to fray.

Then the moment passed. Ideas initialized and renewed, pieces coming together and taking shape—inspiration became idea became action. We were again.

And I found myself somewhere besides Jericho Falls.

"So," Malkuth said, voice coming from behind me but sounding different, indistinct. Everything that had been in the voice before was gone. "It appears you won after all, Keter. How…annoying."

I turned around slowly and looked at him. He didn't look like Gilgamesh anymore; he was back in the form that I'd originally seen him in, a black hole with a person-shaped event horizon, and stood looking at me quietly. The world around us was a vague and indistinct plain, as if he couldn't be bothered to give it any definition, with nothing but the two of us within it.

"You don't sound too upset," I asked, looking around as I tried to figure out where we were.

"Oh, I'm furious," He replied, but his tone was dull. "It pisses me off that you managed to get this far, that I'm going to have to do this the hard way. You lost Keter and I watched you die—it just doesn't seem fair that I still have to fucking deal with you and your shit."

"Wait, are you talking about fairness?" I asked, looking at him, down, and back up. "Is that a thing you're doing right now?"

He ignored me.

"You should have lost," He continued. "But you did this and here we are again."

He gestured and I looked around, considering his words.

We were still somewhere in-between, I realized. Using Ohr Ein Sof, I'd dragged up to the top of the Tree of Life, but that was only half of the technique—the rise that was followed by a descent. But he'd stopped it at the border between Malkuth and Yesod, which was why nothing seemed quite finished or real.

No, perhaps 'stop' wasn't the right word. I could still feel the power of Ohr Ein Sof building, feel it gathering to destroy him—but he'd paused it just before the end, apparently to get a last word in.

Seriously, what an asshole. You lost, you worthless piece of shit—just up and die already so you can go back to your fucking box.

He started talking again before I had a chance to say any of that aloud, however.

"But…perhaps I'm not as surprised as I should be," He said. "I suppose it wouldn't be much of a game without proper competition. I would rather have won utterly, of course, but failing that…this takes me back. I'm going to enjoy ripping you to pieces—and this time I'll make sure you stay dead."

"You're assuming I have any intention of letting you out," I replied. "Personally, I'm pretty cool with you being stuck in Limbo until the end of time."

He snorted.

"Nice bluff, but you and I both know how this ends," He answered. "Nothing's changed—you're still on the clock and I'm still the one who makes it tick. You're stronger than I expected you to be, but I can snap my fingers and unleash the full power of the Grimm, kill everyone and everything you love, and the only way you can stop that, the only way you can keep it from happening, is by killing me. This trump card of yours…it's not something that lasts forever, not something you can use all the time or even for very long. My greater children, my Riders…"

He chuckled.

"I can wipe Humanity from the face of the Earth in a night," He said. "Could bring up a host even greater than the one that destroyed you the first time. The only reason I gave you this much time was because I needed you to be ready—and you obviously are. So I have no reason to hold back anymore or show any mercy. So you're going to let me out, because you have no choice. Since the very beginning, the only way this was ever going to end was between you and me."

I looked at him silently for a long moment, pursing my lips.

"So to keep you from killing them, I should let you out so you can kill me and then murder all of them anyway?" I mused aloud. "Not the best sales pitch, I must say."

I couldn't see his lips, but I thought he was smiling.

"Aw, what's this?" He asked. "You still don't think you can win? All the cards are in your favor, your trump card is set up, and I'm betting that opened up a few new possibilities for you. Hell, you just smacked me around with barely any effort and you still too much of a pussy to come and have a go?"

"Seeing as you seem to really like the idea, I'm thinking no," I told him. "Doing what my archenemy wants me to do seems a tad foolish, no offense."

"You say that as though you have any room to negotiate," He replied.

This time, I chuckled, laughing quietly under my breath.

"While I could empathize if you found the idea of murdering countless people funny, I get the feeling that's not why you're laughing," He said, sighing slightly. "Which means I'm probably going to have to listen to you talk. Wonderful."

"It's only fair, seeing as you paused the game right before I killed your ass," I retorted. "Trying to put off the inevitable like that…what are you, five?"

He couldn't roll his eyes as a black hole, but I was pretty sure he was trying.

"I thought it was odd," I continued as if he hadn't interrupted. "When I first saw you, you didn't look anything like a person—you looked like you do now—and when you did take a shape, you based it off me. Not as good-looking, of course, and more of an asshole—"

"Bitch, please," He muttered. "Not only was I better looking, but you're a smug prick at least ninety percent of the time."

I ignored him outright.

"But it made me wonder why. At first, I thought you might be hiding your identity, but I couldn't figure out why you'd even bother. Would I recognize you, put the pieces together if I saw your face? I wasn't sure and I didn't have any way of knowing the truth at the time regardless. Later, it just didn't seem important so I brushed it off as you being an asshole and left it at that. But even when you possessed Gilgamesh, when I had most of the pieces and you knew it, you didn't change shape. Why is that? Why would you even bother hiding your face when I already know it?"

At that, Malkuth was silent, but I could all but feel his glower.

It made me smile.

"But that's not it, is it?" I asked, voice taunting. "You're not trying to hide anything—you just don't remember anymore, do you?"

His form fluctuated violently, as if he were about to shift, to prove me wrong just to spite me—but he hesitated at the last moment, as if afraid he'd just prove my point. In doing so, he did anyway, and I laughed at him.

"It's weird, the things my power pulls up sometimes," I said. "One of my titles referred to the Grimm as 'creatures of anonymity.' I didn't think much of it, because hey—they all where masks. They don't have souls, either, things beyond the physical to set them apart. But what if there's more to it than that? Trapped above the world in the realms beyond the physical…it can be so hard to hold on to the little things, to keep them from slipping through the cracks. Cut off from the world, tied only to the Grimm and even then only lightly, it must have been rough. But it's a little funny, isn't it? How even after everything you took from me, I still remember who I am…and you don't? Identity and Anonymity. Odd how things come together sometimes, isn't it?"

I tilted my head, still smiling at him broadly.

"I remember what you looked like, you know," I said, just to be a dick. "And trust me—you're not missing anything."

"If you have a point, get to it," He said, his voice—devoid now of anything like an accent, anything unique—a growl.

"I wonder if I planned this," I mused. "I mean, hell, maybe if you stay here long enough, you'll lose the parts of you that make you a fucking prick. Though if a few thousand years didn't do it, I guess it's probably impossible—I suppose it's just part of what makes you you."

"I'll kill them," He said, his voice almost frighteningly empty. It wasn't angry, wasn't loud—it was soft, distant, and entirely devoid of anything human. "I'll kill your mother. I'll kill your sisters and daughter and friends. I'll have my Grimm do it slowly, let my Riders have their fun. They'll enjoy that after all this time, you won't. And I'll make you watch. You're strong enough to kill Gilgamesh, but I have mightier children and there are so many. You'll fall, you'll fail, and I'll make you see what it means."

I let all traces of amusement slip from my face, bringing up only the power running through me.

"And how much will you lose in the process?" I asked. "How long will it take for me to be reborn? A thousand years? Five? Ten? The fact that you've managed to hold onto yourself this long is miraculous—but you've lost things. You'll lose more. Can you really afford to wait? If you mobilize your forces to kill the people I love, what's to stop me from hanging you out to dry? To say fuck it and just take as many Grimm as possible down with me? You can't torture me. You can beat me, but you don't have the power to strong-arm me anymore."

I must have done this intentionally as well—done something to keep him from just wiping me out if I got to dangerous. For a long time, I thought I was the only one with time against them, but Malkuth had just as much to lose from too long a wait. If I lost and died, countless people would suffer and die before I had another chance—but Malkuth's identity would continue to erode. Slowly, given that he apparently had enough strength of will to hold on this long, but what was it like to live like that? Cut off from everything, knowing each day might take some of your mind away from you?

Death had stripped me of my past life quickly, but I wasn't so kind.

"What would you propose, then?" He asked at last.

"A ceasefire," I said. "For a time. You have things in motion and so do I—let's allow things to play out just a bit more before we force each other's hands."

He hummed for a moment, as if in consideration.

"Let me see," He said. "So I give you, a guy who grows at an exponential rate, a significant amount of time to continue to grow. I leave you to run around and kill my dudes, growing in power and versatility all while crippling my own ability to threaten you. And in return, I stay locked up in here? Not the best sales pitch, I must say."

"That's not what I meant by a ceasefire," I replied. "You don't attack the Kingdoms, I don't attack the Grimm. Not in any major way, at least—you won't stop killing people and I won't stop killing monsters on the small scale, but I won't kill your Knights yet and you won't wipe everything out."

"So you use Naraka instead?" He asked. "I can feel the Grimm within it, you know—don't think I can't. We may have made that technique together, but they're still mine."

I filed that bit of information away and nodded slowly.

"Not even them, then," I said. "No loopholes, no tricks—we both just hold back for a while."

It wasn't a huge loss, all told—the amount of experience I got from most Grim was negligible at this point and while hunting the Knights would yield what I assumed were enormous quantities of experience, it seemed as though it would mean fighting Malkuth each and every time. It was still a loss because the points I gained from leveling were my easiest way to improve my stats, but…I had already reached the limit of Intelligence and Wisdom and I had other ways of improving my physical stats now.

Besides which, my true power had always been in my skills. I had a better feel for what I was up against, I just needed more time to learn and improve now. It wasn't as though I had much choice, anyway; it was this or throwing down now.

Malkuth was watching me, frowning—but I could see him considering it. Despite his threats, I had a feeling neither of us was in ideal condition for a real fight. I'd taken him by surprise with Metatron, the Red Rider was out of commission, Cinder was in the middle of doing whatever she was planning, and Death…I still needed to be sure of where he was. Conquest and the Knights were still lying in wait as well.

Beneath all of that, however, I knew what really concerned him—waiting for a while or waiting for thousands of years.

"How long would such a thing last?" He asked.

"Knowing you? Not long," I answered. "But you can attack any time you wish. You can kick things off any time you wish and I can't stop you—I just won't release you unless I think I have a chance of winning. Until then, the two of us just have to rig things as heavily in our favor as possible."

"And what guarantee do I have that you would ever let me out?" He asked.

"Neither of us have any guarantees," I told him. "But I want to kill you and you want to kill me. You already mentioned why I need to do the former; if you want to do the latter, you're just doing to have to play the game and time things right, same as me. We'll both be taking a risk, both be trying to win, and both doing everything in our power to make sure we do—and one wrong move would screw us both over."

He watched me silently and didn't answer.

"Now I call that fair," I said, emphasizing the word gently before clicking my tongue and smiling slightly, even as I crossed my fingers on the inside. "Or close enough."

XxXXxX

MurazorChief EncyclopedistSuper Awesome Happy Fun Time

The Games We Play
Final Strike

I came back to my body with a crash, the power of Ohr Ein Sof leaping from my fingers in a rush of annihilating light. I saw it rush over Gilgamesh's body, a thin line piercing through the center of his chest and the portal therein, before the blast expanded. It lost all semblance of shape as a beam as it expanded, growing into a wave of light that could have dwarfed mountains and devoured cities. It blotted out the world in front of me as if someone had taken an eraser to a whiteboard, clearing it of everything in sight.

When it faded, everything in front of me was gone as if cut away by a surgeon's knife—and so were Malkuth and Gilgamesh.

Slowly, I let me hand drop to my side, the tension that had built up within me over the course of the fight easing as I relaxed, receiving what was perhaps the best possible confirmation I could ask for.

Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one!

I'd won.

I wanted to smile, laugh, cheer, and celebrate—but I didn't. I couldn't muster up the will to, in the end, couldn't relax quite that much. Because even though things had gone well, even though they'd gone better than I could have expected or hoped…that had been close. Too close for even me to be comfortable with, to not feel just a little tired and worried. It wasn't the fight, which had gone better than expected, all things considered, but what had come after; the negotiation between Malkuth and I. If I'd been wrong, if I'd made a mistake in my assumptions…everyone I loved would be dead right now, or in the process of getting there.

On a level, I'd known it would come to this—I knew better than to focus on an event to the exclusion of what came after. Defeating Gilgamesh and Malkuth was necessary to get to the computer and whatever laid within it, but even that was almost secondary to my real goal.

Buying time.

I had no other choice, when it came right down to it. I'd needed to find a way to forge a temporary armistice with Malkuth, because I'd known full well that if I let him out as I was, if I faced him at my current level of power…I'd lose. With Metatron active, it was possible I could have made it afighting defeat, but I'd had no delusions about how that fight would have ended—I would have died, followed by everyone I knew and loved.

And I couldn't allow that, not when I might have been able to stop it. But I'd also known that the moment I proved myself strong enough to do whatever it was Malkuth intended, he'd try to force my hand—to make me give him his freedom. I knew how far he could go to do it, too, and so there'd only been one way to go about doing it; putting us in a situation where neither of us could win, even if it meant gambling my life, with all of our lives.

But if I'd been mistaken about him, if he had been willing to wait, if I'd been wrong…

I hadn't been I reminded myself. It was okay. I'd bought them, all of us, a bit of time.

How much time…that I wasn't sure of. I wasn't foolish enough to believe that Malkuth was going to stop being an asshole—sure, I could bend space and time to my whim, but I knew to keep my goals realistic. He wouldn't have agreed to my plan unless he'd had something in mind as well, I just wasn't completely sure what. Was he counting on Cinder's plan? Death? Or something else? How did any of those play into getting one over on me and making me obey?

There was no way of knowing yet—and depending on what he was scheming, I might not see the knife coming until it was too late.

That was one of the downsides to this little arrangement of ours—neither of us wanted to obey the rules; we just wanted the others to obey them and didn't want to suffer the consequences of breaking them ourselves. We'd both be trying to push the boundaries of the agreement, seeing which rules we could bend and which we could break. The only problem was that Malkuth was better equipped to skirt the edges of it than I was. His threat was that he'd start wiping nations off the map if I did anything, whereas mine was that I'd die fighting before letting him out. Sadly, he could do quite a bit without ending civilization, whereas I wasn't going to make him give a shit by doing anything less than dying. The deal had been in his favor in that regard at least.

But then, it had to be. If he hadn't been able to see some advantage to it, he wouldn't have accepted the deal—and I stood to profit in other ways besides. It was unfortunate and less than ideal, but that was compromise, I suppose; everyone was a little bit unhappy. But I was happier then I would have been watching everyone die and however long I had, I'd just have to make the most of it.

I had to make the most of what I'd been given, by both life and my past self. Use this time to figure out a way to finish what I started.

It was almost funny, really. I couldn't go any further without the knowledge within the computer—and to reach that knowledge, I'd had no choice but think of a way to survive just a bit longer. That was my life, I suppose.

For a moment, everything was silent, muted by the simple fact that just about everything capable of making noise was gone. It was only after several seconds passed and she saw me relax that Raven spoke.

"Jian," She said. "Is it over?"

"Almost," I said, opening my eyes again. "We still have to get what we came for."

Raven nodded once, expression tight and hand still hovering by her sword; she was still expecting a trap, which seemed wise. I just wasn't sure if it would be a physical trap.

Either way, we'd just have to deal with it.

Before that, however…as the items appeared before me, I snatched them up with my Psychokinesis and held them in the air before me. The exorbitant amount of money, I simple stored away, having no real use for it, but the others…a mask, a suit of armor, and one of those trange metallic plates like the one I'd gotten from my father.

You have obtained the item 'Enkidu.'

You have obtained the item 'Utnapishtim.'

You have obtained the skill book 'Shutur Eli Sharri.'

I added them to my various collections as well and held out a hand to Raven, who took it.

Then, I gathered the power of Metatron around myself and slipped through the dimensional barrier that yet remained untouched, Trespassing with a simple act of will—and we entered the ancient city that had been left behind. In a way, it felt like venturing into the unknown, but in another…

It was like coming home.

Ozpin's words hadn't done it justice. The city was awe-inspiring, built to a scale that I had never seen. Building rose high, many of them towering hundreds of meters in the air, and they shined brilliantly in the light. The chaos of our battle thankfully hadn't touched anything on this side of the barrier and neither, it seemed, had the passage of time. The sun lit up gleaming towers of steel and glass, reflections casting yet more light down to the streets far below. The buildings seemed as if they'd been arranged carefully, the streets and skylines somehow artistic in placement, and even on a personal level it was remarkable. The buildings were somehow colored by the passage of light through them, turned the colors of the dusk and dawn, whilst the streets and sidewalks seemed polished into mirrors of black and white.

From top to bottom, each structure looked as though it were the masterpiece of some architect—and the city hadn't just been built up, but also out. There were thousands of buildings—no, that was understating it; there were far over a million, spanning everything from houses to factories to office buildings. The city seemed to roll over the land like grass over plains and hills, stretching out as far as the eye could see, and I was willing to bet that the artistic design applied to a bird's eye view of it, too.

All told, it was enormous. Large enough to fit the inhabitants of entire Kingdoms in, maybe the inhabitants of all the Kingdoms—it was so large, in fact, that I had to catch myself as I started wondering what the point of it all even was, because it took me a moment to remember that at one point there had been people enough to justify such a thing. I'd known that mentally, of course, but even for me there was a difference between hearing talk of a civilization that had boasted a population of billions and seeing the truth of it.

At one time, cities like this had been all over the world, host to a Humanity that didn't have to hide or struggle to survive, that could grow and expand, explore and reach, dedicate themselves to such things as this.

And then, of course, the Grimm had come.

Remarkable as it was, I braced myself for the trap. I reached out with my senses, sending them into and through the city walls. Flecks of light rose from my skin and leapt to nearby surfaces, shining through them even as they mapped out my surroundings, flowing through surfaces and into walls as they touched upon what was within. I scanned the area, flickering through my various senses to better determine if there were discrepancies between layers of perception. Did something appear in one that was invisible to another? Were there marks or remnants that shouldn't have been there? Was there anything hidden and lying in wait.

I waited a moment, searching—and then frowned.

No. I didn't see any hidden traps or enemies and what traces I could find were faded to the extreme by time. When it came to the city itself, it was foreign enough to me that I wasn't sure what qualified as odd or unusual, but I didn't see anything that struck me as wholly out of place considering the overall design.

And yet, it felt…hollow, somehow, and I finally knew what Ozpin had meant. This was real, yes, but it wasn't alive. It was as if everything beneath the surface had been cut away, all the things that should have made this a city, a place for people, a safe Haven, simply gone. Everything that could have carried power had stalled and died, the water was still and stagnant, the air was stale, and wherever there should have been life, even if only that of plants…there was nothing. There weren't even any signs of rot or decay, as if even those things had been halted. The city was perfectly intact, untouched by rust, overgrowth, or time, but it was like a piece of art—something beautiful to look at, but not meant for life or use.

The only question was, was that a natural part of whatever had created this barrier? Or the result of something else? The name Death sprang to mind, because if this place was anything, it was dead. A city this large, built like this…it could have been used as a shelter for people, a final bastion of mankind if everything went to hell—and if nothing else, I liked to thing I was pretty good at finding multiple uses for things. If I'd built this place, even if my primary goal had been to host and protect whatever was stored on that computer, I was fairly sure I would have gone the extra mile and made this place habitable. Why not, after all? It would have been a safe place for Mankind, a shelter for the innocent who may have suffered. Why not make that possible? There were have been downsides, risks, and concerns; there always were when you added the human element to the mix, even before addressing Auras and Semblances, but it would have been better that leaving them to die.

There was little reason not to make this a place that people could be safe in—and if people weren't a concern, why bother with an entire city.

But perhaps it simply hadn't been enough. Closing my eyes for a moment, I remembered what Conquest had said during our fight, about the things he and his brothers had done.

Then I started walking. I didn't let go of Raven's hand, carefully shielding her from our surroundings. While I knew Death was a soul-based weapon, I hadn't the slightest idea of what form he might take. Would he register to my Third Eye, even though the Grimm itself should have been soulless? Was there a material component to it here somewhere, a physical vector? Was I missing some sign of him, even now?

There was no way for me to know. So far, Death was the only one of the Riders that I hadn't definitely proven I could detect and until I did, I couldn't take anything for granted. With my senses, I liked to think I would notice whatever was going on in my vicinity, but if this was the one time I was wrong and it completely fucked up everything I'd been working for and planning…well, that'd be both tragic and embarrassing.

Bring Raven along with me was a risk in that regard, but so long as she was close, we had options. With the power of Metatron, I should be able to enhance her portals with Trespasser, allowing us to put not only spacial but dimensional distance between us and any threat that appeared. That was one of the greatest powers Metatron granted me—control of my power and how it appeared. If Malkuth was the result, Metatron allowed me to adjust the equation. The core concept would remain the same, but the details…those could be adjusted with ease. I could manifest an attack in its normal form, layer it over a physical object, form it into a barrier or personal force field, fire it as a beam or sphere; I could even simply emit it as light, inflicting the effect on anything I illuminated. A skill like Trespasser that was normally either a personal transfer or a shattering effect, I could cover another with, form into a doorway, or whatever else I chose.

It was one of the things I thought I could depend on even against Malkuth—and I kept it at the ready here. Adjust the effects here and there to either touch or evade Raven and I could prepare to drop Longinus as a space-rending explosion. It should work as a first line of defense.

"This way," I murmured to Raven as I sensed what we were looking for. We both moved with caution.

The building the computer was housed in was at the exact center of the city and it towered over those around it, reaching up to touch the clouds. It looked like a cross between a skyscraper and a palace, made out of similar materials as the rest of the city but crafted in such a way that the light shining through it made it softly glow. The colors shifted and changed minutely, too small for a regular eye to notice, but I saw it slowly shifting in tune with the sky above. At dusk or dawn, beneath the light of the moon, or even when the sun was at its peak, I was sure it would have looked magnificent.

But I wasn't here to sightsee and so I opened the door with an effort of will and entered the building.

Taking a look around, I quickly came to the conclusion that Ozpin flat-out sucked at describing things. Had I looked at it only from the outside, I might have expected something like a grand hall or even a throne room—but what awaited us within held more in common with a laboratory than anything. It was clean, sterile even by the standards of the city, and it looked as though it had once been full of things, from strange devices to odd stone tablets. There were what might have once been forms of storage, from glass tubes to screens, and an entire wall of what must have once been samples.

I say 'once' because while the rest of the city appeared almost bizarrely untouched, this place looked as though it had been ransacked and torn apart. All the items had been rent apart in a fury, torn to scrap metal and broken glass. I saw traces of what might have once been biological samples, through whatever had left them was utterly gone, as well as chemical residues. To one side, there was a reinforced but empty room that I assumed had been meant for containing experiments, but the door had been torn off and the viewing window shattered. The walls bore claw marks, as did the ceiling and floor, and I could see other things purely by their absence here, with items that should have been there and items of shelves simply gone.

It was a ruin—but for one area that was completely untouched. Near the center of the room there was a raised platform, empty of anything at all, but none of the chaos went anywhere near it.

I frowned for a moment, actually allowing the expression to show as I considered the room and what lay beneath the surface. This place was more than it appeared—or rather, more then it currently was. It was hard to describe, but from the way my power flowed through this place, it felt as if it wasn't meant to exist like this, to be all in one place. Parts of it should have been separated by spacial and dimensional barriers, held continents apart but still connected. Things like that containment room were meant to be isolated from the rest of the world, so that behind a thin pane of glass, anything could happen. Want to test out what happens when you have a ping-pong tournament with matter and anti-matter? Do it inside the room to avoid fucking up everything else. Similarly, the entrances and exits of this room were meant to lead to more than just the next rooms over, but to connect this place to another through permanently twisted doorways.

But instead…it was here. All of it was present in this one time, this one place. It felt wrong, somehow, even if all the pieces seemed to fit together seamlessly; there was a kind of feedback.

Even so, it didn't keep me from feeling what lay beneath and around the platform. Circuitry, of a sort, though the connections twisted and broke oddly, seeming to go nowhere. Yet were everything else was dead, I could feel something within it.

This was the 'computer.'

I hesitated before I approached. If there was ever a time to spring a trap, it was now. That was how I'd do it, at least, conceal it as best I was able and make sure to strike when the target's guard was down. Whatever was inside the computer, it seemed safe to assume it would be distracting one way or another, and as soon as the target's attention was elsewhere, I'd strike.

But I couldn't sense anything. I scanned the room with my senses, sent out waves of searching light, glowing softly as I altered the way my senses manifested, and more, but I couldn't find a thing. Were my opponents that good at hiding or was there truly nothing there?

Either way, I had work to do.

Gently squeezing Raven's hand in a signal, I let go of it and stepped away. She let it fall to her side but kept her fingers open, ready to lift it to her sword in an instant as she watched over me as I made my way towards my goal. Remaining calm as ever, I strode up to the platform, stepped atop it, and knelt in a place where I saw vague traces of something.

The moment I did, I felt something wash over me, the feeling somewhere between that of distant attention and the touch of cold air. It ran over my skin, looking at me, and I felt it touch my Aura as if to analyze it. The circuitry that had seemed to go nowhere was lighting up, filling with the patterns of my own Aura as it used me as a power source and I could see where another person standing in the same place might have created a different configuration. Whatever the results were for me, they seemed to appease it, but instead of doing anything it seemed to wait and grow colder until a feeling like ice seemed to fill my veins, my head.

For a moment, I was uncertain—because this wasn't what I'd expected when it came to computers and passwords. If anything, given how everything was arranged…it was like the user served as the computer.

Ah, I realized, lowering my gaze to the floor. And with a sensation like the tap of a keyboard, I remembered what it had been like to learn my true name—Metatron. The memory I had inherited with Arcana, the feelings that had gone with it, everything.

And with a sensation like the final keystroke on a computer, I felt a lock give way and a doorway open—and with a sensation like breaking glass, time stopped.

"Hello," A voice said. "You must be me, then."

I would have blinked once, had my body not been halted as well. I tried to hone in on the source, but found that my senses weren't working as they were supposed to, failing to reveal anything out of the ordinary—but then I mentally clicked my tongue, understanding what was happening. Slowly, carefully, I stood up from my own body, Projecting myself but differently, letting Metatron color the results. My spirit left my body behind and I closed my eyes for a moment before turning around and opening them.

As I did, I saw a figure who didn't appear to any of my other senses, because he existed only in my…not quite my mind, as such, but within the system I was now a part of. He had no physical presence, no spirit, beyond what I created with a self-imposed illusion, but as I crafted the Delusion it slipped from my hold in an odd way and the figure began to move in his own right. He was about my height, perhaps a little shorter, with hair somewhere between auburn and blonde and lightly tanned skin. We didn't look much alike build-wise, either; I was taller and built stronger, while he was more…honestly, the only word I could really use was statuesque. He looked like an actor to my warrior, which probably wasn't a coincidence given our natures, and I wondered absently precisely how much was defined by our powers. It must have been at least a few things, seeing as our eyes were the same color.

Exactly the same color.

"Hello," I greeted, smiling slowly. "That would be me, yes. Should we bother with introductions seeing as we're the same person or just skip the formalities?"

"I wouldn't consider it a bother," He said. "Unlike you, my knowledge of the situation is somewhat limited. It's rather difficult to prepare for something so far in advanced. By now, you no doubt know me as Keter, seeing as you must have already remembered our true name, and it's hopefully safe to assume you're my reincarnation, unless I failed and made some dramatic oversight. May I ask for your name, then?"

"Jaune Arc," I said. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Keter. I assume you're a record of some kind? Not quite an AI, but—"

"Not quite a person," He finished, smiling. "Yes. There was only so much I could do on short notice, especially with so much uncertainty involved, so I borrowed this trick. To make things simple, you could consider me an interactive daydream of sorts; I contained what I could within this place, keyed it to parts of our soul as tightly as I could, and…here we am. I'm not an independent being, per se—if anything, I'm just a projection of your soul upon itself, drawing from what was locked within this."

He tapped a foot on the platform and I imagined it making a sound.

"Interesting," I mused. "We couldn't rely on our own memories, so we hid them somewhere else—somewhere Malkuth couldn't risk tampering with."

"Precisely," He agreed. "Though memories might not be precisely the right word. Matters of the soul do have a tendency towards the complex, ours in particular. In a way, it's more like I locked some of our time away. Our past and future history? Our life? I apologize; I don't think there's a word in your language for it."

"I figured a few things might be lost in translation," I told myself. "Don't worry about it—whatever the case, I'm glad for this chance to finally see myself. I was a bit worried, you see; as you probably expected, I don't remember much about my previous life—and I remember more of the early days than the later ones. Death's work, but you obviously suspected much."

He nodded in understanding.

"It wouldn't make sense for Malkuth to leave us with much, given the chance to take things away," He said. "It'd leave us with too many advantages, after all, too much knowledge of how things work. Returning to our full power would still have taken time, but vastly less than he would have liked. Luckily, it seems you didn't have too much trouble making progress—I hope you didn't have too much trouble on the way in."

"I had to fight Gilgamesh," I said before shrugging. "And Malkuth, through him. I managed."

"That's good to hear," He replied. "And Death?"

I sighed, shoulders falling slightly.

"Not here, as near as I could tell," I answered and at that, the memory looked surprised. "Unless he has some means of hiding extremely well that I couldn't counter, which could be bound. I take it he was supposed to be here?"

The image of Keter hesitated.

"I don't know anything for certain, of course," He began, musing as much to himself as to me. "I wasn't active for any of the intervening time. But…I'd suspected he would be here."

I nodded, having figured as much myself. Having seen this place now, knowing more about it, things didn't add up. It didn't make sense for Malkuth not to leave anyone inside, just in case. It was always possible, after all, that I might have snuck in without Gilgamesh or his cronies noticing, so it only made sense to have someone stand watch within, to sound the alarm if nothing else. That was, in part, why I hadn't tried to sneak in—the last thing I needed was to run into one problem, have them say a word, and end up as the meat in a Grimm sandwich.

And if it were to be anyone, I'd thought it would probably be Death. The one who'd scrubbed me clean last time—if I were to learn of anything untoward, something Malkuth hadn't expected and couldn't handle, it made sense to have him on hand to make sure I didn't get a chance to use it. Failing that, Death seemed pretty much bound to be the greatest of the Riders and the most likely to still be able to ruin the day of someone who made it past a small army of super Grimm. It even fit with the general state of things here, the emptiness and lack.

And yet, there hadn't been anyone waiting for me. It had been suspicious as all hell from the very beginning, leaving only a small handful of options.

The first was that it was a trap—which was still a possibility. Death could be lying in wait, positioned somewhere I couldn't see even with Metatron active. That'd take some pretty serious space-time fuckery at the very minimum, but Malkuth probably could have managed it if he'd had a chance. If so, I could expect unpleasantness as soon as I left this dream sequence.

As much as I dreaded the possibility of that happening, though, I almost hoped it was the case—because the second was, if anything, even more worrying, though for different reasons. That Death simply wasn't here, that something had convinced it to leave its position, something that changed things. But Death was a Rider and must have had a host, and I knew of one person who might have served that purpose. Was this the proof I'd needed to prove Ozpin's true nature? The inconsistencies, the lack, everything?

Maybe. I really, truly hoped not, but maybe.

If there was ever a time for me to be wrong, though, I'd really like for it to be now.

Either way, though…I'd have to deal with that as I came to it.

"I'll handle Death, one way or another," I said. "For now…you know what I'm looking for."

He looked at me for a moment and then smiled, lifting an empty hand.

"It may not be what you wanted," He warned before lifting the other as well. "But it may be what you need. Would you like to know? The reasons behind it all and…the nature of Metatron's Cube?"

I nodded and reached out to grasp his hand—and the world dissolved beneath my feet.

XxXXxX

MurazorChief EncyclopedistSuper Awesome Happy Fun Time

The Games We Play
Tenth Interlude - Metatron

Even without looking, I sensed him long before he came into sight, the connection between us—the separated pieces of a billion souls—naturally reacting. Figuring out what had happened was trivial, given what I sensed from him and past experience, but there was still the matter of deciding how to respond. I was many things to many people, after all, even as all of those things were me. I decided who I was, what I was, and manifested accordingly. I could be a friend, an enemy, a leader, a teacher, a student, or anything else I chose.

But this time, I approached Malkuth as 'The Brother.'

In that way, I felt myself change in a way that wasn't visible, wasn't even truly physical. Some of the powers I'd held in my previous role fell away, new ones arising even as others altered. A sensory ability that began providing more details, a defensive ability that could be projected and surround a distant person, an ability to shift damage onto myself, and many others besides. Things I was capable of, but altered in how they were expressed, just as a fireball might manifest as a conflagration in one role or a burning sword in another.

None of those things were what I was after right now, however, so I left them aside.

"Couldn't sleep, brother?" I asked, literally radiating a feeling of comfort and safety as I entered the room.

"When can I ever?" He said with a slight shrug, never taking his eyes off the symbols that filled the air before him. He was making adjustments every few seconds, altering the experiment he was working on to see how it changed the results. I could have become 'The Scientist' and unraveled it with a glance, but it could wait. "There's a reason I don't even bother trying. You should have just kept me awake."

"You were tired," I answered as I moved to his side and took a seat. "You stretched yourself too far in that last experiment, breaking down the barriers between matter and energy like that. I won't deny that the results were fascinating, but containing them the way you did…"

I shrugged a shoulder.

"I thought you deserved the rest," I continued. "It has been most of a decade since you last slept. Even the others sleep now and then."

"Except for you," He noted with a snort and a glance. "The only times you ever sleep are when you want to walk through dreams. Don't think I didn't see you."

I smiled.

"But you didn't have nightmares, did you?" I asked. "I kept them all at bay. So why are you reallyup?"

Malkuth was silent for a long moment, lips pulled into a slight frown as he shifted his gaze away from his work and stared into space.

"It was odd," He said at last. "Sleeping. Being able to sleep without remembering the lives and deaths that made me. Odd, somehow. So when I realized what was happening, I willed myself awake."

At that, I sighed.

"Would you like to tell me why?"

"I would, if I knew," He mused softly. "But even I'm not sure. Maybe…maybe I'm just not sure who I am without it. The nightmares and dreams, histories and tragedies…it reminds me that I'm just the sum of my parts."

"I'd say you're more than that," I replied.

"Would you?" He asked me. "If you stripped away all the lifetimes I remember, all the people I know I once was, all the memories I have—what would be left of me? From the moment I was born, I knew exactly what I was and where I'd come from, because I remembered every moment of it. Everything I did, I did for them. Because of them."

"Did you really?" I wondered, raising an eyebrow. "Is it because of them that you're here with us now?"

He was silent, expression briefly unsure and then blank.

"You remember countless lifetimes," I continued. "And most of them ended in tragic ways. You are, in a way, the sum of those people—but at the say time, there's more to people than simple math. What you remember made you who you were, but you've lived with those memories and created your own, same as I have. None of those people acted like you did, because none of them remember all the things you do. Those lives ended and continued in you, but…you're more than the sum of your parts."

He remained quiet for several more seconds before sighing.

"Maybe," He whispered at last. "Maybe. But sometimes, it's hard to believe. I joke and laugh and I remember Rahel doing the same. I make something and it's Urdu's work I see. Sometimes, I even feel like it's what I should see, what I should remember—because if I don't remember, who else ever will? It's been less than twenty years and I'm the only one who still cares. Who still evenknows everyone who died."

"That's a hard way to live a life," I said. "As a memorial to something lost, instead of as a person. Is that what you want to be?"

"No," He answered at once. "I hate it. In fact, sometimes I think I even—"

He cut himself off and looked down.

"It doesn't matter," He said. "It's stupid."

"If it worries you this much, it's not stupid," I replied. "And it seems to have gotten you working pretty hard."

Malkuth's eyes snapped back to the symbols in the air before he closed his hand and dismissed them all.

"That's something stupid, too," He said, looking embarrassed and guilty. "A dumb idea I had."

"About what?" I asked.

He hesitated for a moment before shrugging and admitting the truth.

"Nehemoth," He said. "And the Qliphoth."

I hummed in response.

'Qliphoth.' It was a word with many meanings. The literal translation of the word was 'husks', 'peels', or 'shells'—things that concealed, contained, and protected, but which were inevitably left behind. In that regard perhaps 'Remnants' was a better way of thinking about the term. They were what was left behind.

In one sense, the Qliphoth was meant to be a hypothetical inversion of sorts, the shadows left by the Sephirot when they were imbalanced. Not the absence of them, per se, but perhaps more the singularity or corruption of them—Gevurah, untampered by kindness or restraint, became Golachab. They were untampered, wasteful, and incomplete.

In another, however, it was a theory. The Sephirot were considered to be the 'matter' of the soul and thus far, only those ten types had been identified. There were no Qliphoth elements or at least none that had been thus identified. Instead, they were considered to be something else; hypothetical states that the material of the soul could assume in the proper conditions. It had been an area of interest to the Angels, but not one that had gone very far. One of the Sephirot out of control was still itself, it didn't change in properties or nature. As a result, the Qliphoth had been more a matter of thought and philosophy than of science.

But then, someone had come up with a different way of pursuing the idea, altering their plan for going about it. Instead of focusing on the natural expressions of the Qliphoth, which seemed to do nothing if they even really existed, they chose to attempt to create such a thing for themselves—touching upon the divine with the physical, just as the physical was naturally touched by the divine, creating something extraordinary from base materials. To take the brief and momentary expressions and distill them down into a finished product, to see how it would take shape. It wasn't unprecedented, after all, for the Angels had done similar things before. Alchemy was one example, at least in terms of the end goal. Transubstantiation, the alteration of a physical objects inherent essence to create Dust…it was difficult, something they did only rarely when they had easier methods of acquiring it. But it was most definitely possible.

One couldn't create something apart from the Tree of Life, of course—that would, in a very literal since, be like trying to create something apart from existence—and that wasn't the point. All things took shape in Malkuth, the Sephirot above it flowing down and becoming something definite and defined. Some things could draw more from the spheres above then other; indeed, most things could be said to do that, even without taking into account Aura. But that was the point of the Sephirot, to establish boundaries, differences, and allow for things to exist in different shapes, as different people.

The Qliphoth, too, wouldn't be something set apart, but created from, and there were natural examples of that, as well. Things that go out of control, knowledge that was hidden, lies and deceptions, those were all supposed forms of the Qliphoth, they just weren't 'useful' forms, nor did they have interesting or meaningful applications. A parent lost their temper and screamed at their child, a man took a bribe or lied, people hurt and killed one another, and those things were bad—but what did it really matter?

That was the actual, honest question—where was the line drawn between the body and the soul, a change in Gevurah and a simple loss of temper, and did it make any actual difference, in the end?

By and large, the answer was that no, it didn't, except in literal theory—because that was what the Qliphoth were to the Angels, an attempt to further their understanding of the soul and it's pieces. There were countless theories about the soul, but none of them accounted for everything, even when the math said they should have and they broke the soul down to its most basic level. When all was said and down, he Qliphoth were the remainders, the errors that took shape in the system and needed to be accounted for; the reason why, even if you made two people with the exact same 'amount' of each Sephirot, the results would still differ wildly. In the end, people were separated by their differences and imperfections, their souls distinct no matter what said they shouldn't be. The Qliphoth were something even less 'physical' than the Sephirot and yet undeniably there.

I could see why Malkuth was interested in them, given his own situation. If one could theoretically examine those unseen pieces, if one could understand and prove and account for them, then they should be able to completely understand the nature of the soul. That was why the Angels had been so interested in the field, despite their meager results. In fact, one could even argue that it had been one of the reasons they'd created the Archangels, creating macro-souls to better glimpse the mechanics underlying it all.

A part of me wondered if that had born any fruit, before they all died.

"An interesting topic, to be sure," I allowed after a moment. "Have you made any progress thus far?"

"Only a bit," He answered after another moment of hesitation. "I looked into the information we took from the Angels, but it was difficult to find anything definitive on the subject."

"There hadn't been anything definitive on the subject," I said. "That was rather the issue, in fact."

"True, but I'd hoped there'd been a breakthrough of some kind, that one of them had figured out something before we killed them all," He replied, letting loose a quiet sigh. "Doesn't seem that way."

I nodded quietly, considering the matter carefully.

"Would you like us to help you?" I asked, meeting his eyes as he looked towards me. "I can't speak for the others, but I'm sure they'd agree to help if you asked them to—and I know that I will, if you let me."

Malkuth hesitated again, looking at me uncertainly.

"I wouldn't want to drag everyone into my business," He murmured, looking down. "I know this is…that it would tread into uncomfortable territory for most of them. The experiments, the memories, the nature of the soul…I don't want to do that to them."

I bumped my shoulder against his and smiled at him.

"I know you don't," I said. "But that's why they'd do it anyway. Come on, you look like you need so help. Even if it's just me, you know I'll be fine."

He bit his lip for a moment before nodding, at once seeming embarrassed and relieved.

"Okay," He said after a moment. "Do you have any ideas, then?"

"It depends," I asked. "What are you trying to accomplish?"

"I was thinking—and don't laugh, okay?" He interrupted himself to ask, continuing when I gave him a nod. "I was thinking that if souls could be gathered—"

He gestured between the two of us.

"Can they be separated?" He continued. "I mean, obviously they can, because that's what the Angels did to make us. But instead of being reduced to pieces, could they become something separate and distinct?"

"Like the Preta?" I asked, thinking of the ruined spirits that the Angel's experiments had sometimes left behind. The hungry ghosts, complete enough to retain something of who they were and damaged enough that it only meant they suffered. So far, they hadn't found any way of fixing that and it wasn't the most desirable of fates besides.

"Sort of," He said. "But I was thinking still whole, just…scattered. All parts of the same person, a single being, just with many bodies and minds."

"Distributing the memories?" I guessed. "Dividing the souls that created you to see what changed and what remained?"

He didn't deny it, so I fell silent for a moment.

"That sounds like it would be more my domain than yours," I said at last. "Not to mention the fact that none of the souls within you are complete any more. Even if you separated them, they wouldn't be anything like they were, even if they could exist separate from you."

"What if they had a physical form?" He asked. "A body to inhabit, even if they weren't completed souls."

"A physical form?" I asked, musing over the possibility. It was intriguing in its own way. What if I were to separate my soul in such a fashion and distribute it amongst something real? Ascribing roles to fragments of myself. If it was flesh used, it might be possible to create a Homonculus, but even putting a side the potential moral forms, why bother with something so limited? If I provided the power to give it shape, I could create a body for…anything. The wind, the rain, fire and earth, maybe even greater things.

And if Malkuth did what he was suggesting and did it right…tied the pieces to bodies and bound them to this world…

Slowly, the connection with the Qliphoth became clearer. In theory, if they were too take shape anywhere, it would have to be in Malkuth. Most of them could only be differentiated from their corresponding Sephirot by thought or action; they had no meaning, otherwise. A common way of illustrating the Qliphoth was by setting it beneath the Tree of Life, in fact, with Keter at the uppermost point and Thaumiel at the lowest, implying that if the Sephirot covered the canopy and the trunk of the tree, the Qliphoth were the roots, hidden deep in the darkness. And the points where those two sides connected? In Malkuth and Nehemoth.

But what was Nehemoth? It was, if anything, the least defined of the Qliphoth, the hardest to grasp—but what was the shadow of the physical realm?

The Qliphoth as a whole were like a second tree of life, one representing Sitra Ahra—the so-called 'Other Side.' But what was it? I had no idea, truthfully, but if Malkuth was the endpoint that resulted from the spheres that came before it, Nehemoth should be the same with the Qliphoth, the point where concepts became realities. And if no one knew what those realities were, if no one truly knew what Nehemoth or the other Qliphoth could be…what did that imply?

I wasn't sure, but…

"What did you have in mind?" I asked carefully.

"What do you think of reincarnation?" Malkuth asked, out of the blue.

I allowed my eyebrows to rise, but waited a moment before answering. They were working on altering states of matter, trying to create different things in pursuit of their more distant goal. It was hard to say how quickly they were progressing, simply because there was no way to know what the results would look like when they found them. Was creating semi-solid lasers a step in the right direction? Orbs that reverted into lightning bolts once a current was applied? Things that weighed more than their mass should have allowed or possessed strange properties?

Things had changed since they'd gotten started decades ago, grown. From the very beginning, all of them had been unprecedented and so knowing how to best use their own power was something they had been forced to find out for themselves—and so they had. Exploring new possibilities and venues, crafting new techniques and fields of study, and they'd built upon what they had and what had been left behind.

The place they were in now was somewhere between a laboratory and a factory—the place where we created wonders. Taken on its own, it was nothing, because it could not function without the power they worked upon it. But when they worked together, they could produce things that would have been considered impossible anywhere else.

Largely because they would have been impossible, anywhere else. Much of what we did required Malkuth's power to make the laws of physics more agreeable. Crafting materials that were simultaneously extremely rigid and supremely flexible was normally fairly difficult, but exceptions could be made by force, if necessary. Natural reactions delayed to see what occurred if somethingdidn't explode when it was supposed to, tests to see what might happen if one forced the laws of geometry to make something that was both circular and triangular, if matter was made to occupy the same place. Different forms, hypothetical states, even the products of theories that were proven false, made correct for a time. What they'd learned in the process was almost impossible to describe outside of it, simply inapplicable in places where natural laws had no choice but to behave themselves, but here…

The others got involved from time to time and always paid attention to the results and what we were creating, but by and large this was their lab, their work. The Archangel that governed this world and the one that was least attached to it, forcing it to stretch and conform to see what happened, where errors popped up and holes emerged.

Of course, the results were short-lived without Malkuth's power to sustain them and were quickly ground down by the basic laws of mathematics. I could adjust things somewhat myself, altering the state of myself and my power, but there were limits still, things we had yet to overcome. My power was more personal, a matter of definition rather than of being defined. Still, there were places I could reach and things I could do that even Malkuth could not, reaching above to add new factors and variables to the system.

That was what I was working on now, in fact; I was attempting to raise something above the realm of Malkuth, however slightly, and then draw it back. If—or rather, when—we managed it, we'd see what state it returned in and then if it could be brought back in other forms instead. Things could be hard to change in worlds of concrete laws and rules, but if you stripped them down to the most basic level, to thoughts and concepts and ideas, and then made them real again, there was no telling what would happen.

Sadly, it wasn't going well. There were rules and limitations they still hadn't mapped out and their progress was proving slow.

Still, it was rare for Malkuth to talk about something else while they were working and it was a clear sign that he considered the question important. I just wasn't certain how to respond. I rolled the question around in my head for a moment, trying to take it apart and see if there was more too it, but nothing I did found me answers. Truthfully, it wasn't something I spent a great deal of time thinking about, because death wasn't something I spent much time thinking about, for several reasons.

The first was fairly obvious. When I lifted my eyes to stare at my brother for a moment, he hadn't aged a day in all the years that had passed—just as none of us had. Whether that was a natural product of the amount of the Sephirot that had been gathered within us or how much Aura we possessed or something else, we still weren't entirely certain, but neither of us looked like anything but men in our early twenties. Never would look older than that, near as we could tell, because we'd never age beyond out primes, never die of natural causes. And given the power we'd learned to wield, the natural defenses we had in place, it was unlikely we'd die of anything but direct, personal action of another being and there were few that were up to the task. Really, our odds of killing one another were better than the chances of anyone else doing it.

And wasn't that a sobering thought?

"In what sense?" I finally asked, feeling concerned enough to ask for clarification. "Scientifically? Metaphysically? Personally?"

"Yes," Malkuth answered simply. "I just want to know what it is to you."

I pursed my lips for a long moment before answering.

"Scientifically, it's a proven process, more or less," I mused. "The Angels identified enough souls and later found ones that were exceedingly similar again that it's almost certainly real. There's still a great deal we don't understand about it, though, and answers weren't forthcoming."

"Because they don't remember anything," Malkuth replied. "Nothing of their lives, of the intervening time."

We both remember, in our own ways, I noted. In a technical sense, one might argue that we're both reincarnations, though I wasn't certain how applicable that was to this. As in many things, neither of us were standard or meant to be taken as the norm, so instead I nodded.

"Yes," I said. "And because there can be significant delays to the process, for whatever reason, it was hard to research in a controlled environment. Should someone die, it might be decades or centuries before they return, at which point they will inhabit completely different bodies, possess no memories of their past lives, and apparently be wholly different people. It is believed that certain personality traits remain, certain elements of the original life, but it is hard to prove such things definitively and it's possible that anyone who made such connections was simply projecting what they wanted to see. As will many aspects of the soul, nothing could be said for certain."

Malkuth nodded and went silent for a moment before speaking again.

"The Angels didn't see it as any different from ceasing to exist entirely," He stated. "Some even considered it a worse fate than becoming a Preta, given the choice."

"The Angels were afraid of many things," I answered, shrugging a shoulder slightly. "Death was one of them."

"Are you not afraid of death?" Malkuth asked.

I considered that.

"I'm not afraid of death, in and of itself," I mused. "Though I can imagine circumstances where I might be afraid to leave things behind. Nonetheless, given the unique state of my soul, it is likely that I would stand out from others and you and the others are immortal. Assuming you don't die along with me, it's likely you'll be able to find me again."

"You wouldn't be you, though," He stated.

"I wonder," I said. "Is that true? I am the Archangel associated with Keter, that which lies above the mind's comprehension, and I hold a concentration of it that's impossible to find anywhere else. When I was born, I knew who and what I was, even if I didn't remember it like you did. If I died and was reborn, would I truly be wiped clean, or would some things still persist? If anything should carry between bodies, wouldn't it be that which is contained in Keter? It's possible I'll still be myself, after."

"But what if you weren't?" He asked. "If you did forget?"

Ah.

"If you died, I'd find you, however long I had to wait," I stated simply. "Whatever happens, you're my little brother after all."

Malkuth made a face and looked away, but I saw him relax for a moment before tensing again.

"Would I be?" He asked. "Really? True, Keter might persist between lives to one degree or another and I might even be able to arrange something for myself when the time comes, but if I was reborn, lost everything, and became something new, in what way would I be me?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "No one else seems to, either. But I'd like to believe that something would remain, even if only through luck or our strange natures—if nothing else, I'd want to hold on to hope. If nothing else, however, perhaps we'd meet each other elsewhere."

"Where?"

I shrugged again.

"Souls remain somewhere when they aren't inhabiting bodies," I said. "Somewhere above the Tree of Life. Whatever process governs the laws of reincarnation, logic would dictate that there is somebenefit to the process or why would souls even bother? As a result, even if we couldn't remember here, perhaps we might remember there."

"In Heaven?" Malkuth asked in a wry tone. "Do you believe there is one?"

"I don't know," I admitted again. "As it's usually portrayed? Perhaps not. I'm not certain what would qualify as an eternal paradise, especially for people like you and I. I don't have many good memories of people who call themselves Angels, either, and when it comes to God…truthfully, I'm not certain I want to believe there's a being of such power, who could create a Universe as grand as this and yet still allow things like you and I to happen, letting countless souls be torn apart for someone's curiosity. With all you remember, do you feel any differently?"

"If there's actually a God, he owes everyone who became me an apology," Malkuth said. "But then what do you believe in."

"I want to believe that there's something beyond death, waiting to be unveiled," I said. "Or else death would so boring. Wouldn't you like to unravel the mysteries of what awaits us? We know thatsomething exists, after all; it's simply a matter of finding it and understanding it."

"I think that would be more frustrating than anything else," He answered. "Those who reincarnate don't remember what happens between lives, after all. I have no use for mysteries I'm not allowed to learn the answer to."

"Perhaps so," I allowed. "But I would be a way to pass the time. And if possible…I'd like to meet you and the others there, should we all die together. Anything else would be saddening, so I'm willing to label that possibility 'Heaven.'"

Malkuth went silent again for a long minute before slowly cracking a smile.

"Maybe," He said. "Yeah, I suppose."

"What got you so interested in reincarnation all of a sudden?" I asked him.

"I was just considering something," He said. "What might happen if we succeed, if I separate myself while remaining connected? What would it be like? Like dying, perhaps, or being reborn?"

"We don't have to go through with it, even if we figure everything out," I told him. "We're just exploring the possibilities, still. If you're worried…"

"I'm worried," He murmured. "But…maybe a bit intrigued, too. It's strange…I don't know. But I want to know what we might find, where it might take us. Even if it takes a thousand years to figure everything out…I want to know."

"Then we'll find out," I promised.

XxXXxX

"Any progress?" Malkuth asked as he entered our lab again. Blue and yellow symbols fluctuated and glowed above his left hand, writing notes to one of his storage systems, but he hardly seemed to pay any attention to it as he entered. It had been some time since they'd last spoken, as they'd both been distracted by other projects and chosen to pursue their research separately for a time before comparing notes.

It probably said something about them that it had been several months since we'd last seen one another but we acted as if no time at all had passed. Immortality didn't make days pass any faster, but it seemed to give them less import after a while. Time flew when one was having fun and if a few weeks happened to pass by in the background…well, what of it?

And I had certainly been having fun.

"Oh, quite a bit," I said, smiling brilliantly.

"Do tell," Malkuth replied, gesturing and causing the floor to ripple and rise into a seat.

"I think we may have made some faulty assumptions when it came to matters of the soul," I replied, raising a hand. At once, the air began to ripple and gather, swirling throughout the room centered on a space just above the palm of my hand. Slowly, a form seemed to take shape, shifting in and out of transparency as the edges of the winds took color and shape. Soon, there was a tiny figure, no more than six inches in height, floating just above my hand. "Malkuth, meet Stribog."

"Stribog?" He asked, blinking as he looked at the new figure before his eyes widened and he leaned forward in his seat. "You did it?"

"In a way," I said. "I had a bit of inspiration and an idea came to me, so I began an experiment that bore fruit. As you already know, I've been trying to empower something physical with a part of myself, to give it a role and place in its own right even as it remained a part of me, but nothing I did seemed to work even if everything we knew seemed to be correct. So finally, I went back to basics—because if the results don't match what we think we know, then there are only three possibilities; our results are in error, our observations are in error, or our knowledge is in error. So I threw out everything I thought I knew and started all over again."

"And you found something," He stated. "What?"

"We began with the assumption that whatever I did, I would be adding something new to the equation," I replied. "That I would be pouring a soul into an empty vessel, essentially. The air, the water, the wind—whatever I chose. After all, only living things have souls, right?"

He frowned.

"Normally I'd say yes, but given the context of the conversation so far, I assume the answer is actually no?" He asked, sounding vaguely baffled.

"Exactly," I said. "When I started questioning the basic theories we'd built our assumptions on, I started to wonder exactly what separated things that had souls from those that didn't. Was it life? But when you got down to it, life is nothing but a biological process. So I began to wonder if that process was somehow key and examined a variety of different species, starting with the creatures most closely related to Mankind and diverging further and further. I tested fungi, plants, insects, fish, and more. By the time I got to algae and sponges, which I think we can agree are fairly different from humans, biologically speaking, and yet still proved capable of manifesting an Aura, I concluded that the only common denominator was that they were all organic. I even experimented with several kinds of single-celled lifeforms, just to be sure."

"That sounds like it would have been tricky," Malkuth noted. "I hope you took precautions, as well. I'd hate for you to have created some kind of magical super plague."

"No need to worry," I stated. "Wormwood is remarkably well-behaved and has promised not to plot against Mankind while I'm still alive."

"The sad part is that I don't know if that's a joke or not," Malkuth murmured to himself. "Pretending it is for my own sake, however—we knew this. Only living things can generate an Aura. Except maybe not?"

"Yes, yes," I gestured towards him, rolling my eyes slightly as I ignored that last part. "We 'know' that. But I was wondering why. It's not a matter of sapience, clearly, or even a matter of sentience once you get to a low enough level. What is it about a particular mixture of hydrogen and carbon that decides what does and doesn't have a soul?"

"I have no idea," He answered.

"Neither did I," I said. "And I couldn't find one, either, couldn't make since of why it was true when I chose not to accept it as fact. With the existence of reincarnation, we know that while souls may attach themselves to living things, they can and do exist outside and beyond them. One doesn't have a soul, one simply has a body. Is it a matter of choice on the soul's part then, a desire for a living and active form? But a variety of living species are scarcely more active than, say, water or air molecules. And because of the Sephirot, we know that all things come from the same source, the Light taking shape through the descent to Malkuth; that's as true for earth and steel as it is for human flesh and the soul. And if we're made of the same thing, with only a slight change in somethings molecular structure allowing for life, then what's the difference, really?"

"I still have no idea," He said again when I paused for him. "Are you going to explain at some point or…?"

"What if there's no difference?" I asked him. "What if it's not a matter of presence, but of structure. Every person's soul is different and the souls of plants and animals differ in nature from those of humans—and the further you get from a human in terms of biology, the more different the structure of the soul. Every species is unique, just as every organism differs if only in subtle ways. Some are extremely simple, such as microscopic life and hardly detectable without proper training. It doesn't feel like a human soul, either. But then, if that's the case for simple life…how strange would something that wasn't alive at all?"

Malkuth frowned at me again.

"You're saying that everything has a soul then?" He asked. "Just that some are so different they aren't recognizable as such."

"Exactly," I said. "Or perhaps soul is the wrong word for what I'm talking about—but there'ssomething there, some connection to the source if you reach back far enough. You've felt it too, haven't you? The massive currents of power that run through the world? What if they're like Aura—just from something a lot bigger than a human? What if, instead of trying to fill a void, it was a matter of connecting with and awakening something that was already there? A connection and anexchange?"

He was silent for a moment.

"Perhaps," Malkuth murmured at last. "Seeing as you produced results, I can't do anything but believe you. It's a bit odd, but that's us for you. But there's one problem with that theory of yours."

"Hm?" I wondered, tilting my head.

"You pursued the idea that everything had a soul, live or dead," He stated, lifting a hand and opening it. In the center of his palm rested a quivering lump of black material. "I went the other direction. If the nature of Nehemoth is that which isn't supposed to exist in Malkuth, if what we needed were empty vessels to fill…then wouldn't the logical assumption be to create something that was alive, but which had no soul of its own?"

XxXXxX

I was silent for a moment, surprised. In a way, it was almost funny how our research had taken us in such similar yet different directions, but I didn't voice that aloud as I considered Malkuth's strange creation and sensed a strange sort of nothing from it.

"Much like you, I went back to basics and tried to figure out precisely how to do what I had in mind," Malkuth explained as things bubbled and writhed between his hands, black ooze growing. "But I went in a different direction. While creating life is relatively simple, that's not what I wanted, at least not entirely—because if it was alive, it would have a soul of some sort, right?"

"Right," I agreed, frowning as he worked. "But given what we know now, so should everything else. How did you create something that doesn't?"

"Like I said, I went back to basics," Malkuth answered. "And what are the basics of a soul? The key elements that everyone must have to some extent or another?"

"Keter," I stated. "Yesod and Malkuth, too, as well as something to link Keter and Yesod. Even if the structure of other souls differs, as near I can tell that remains true."

"Yes," He answered. "And what if you removed parts of that equation?"

"The soul wouldn't form at all?" I guessed. "Wouldn't function, at least. Without Keter, there's no source of power to feed the process. Without Malkuth, there's no result. And without something inbetween, the connection is broken and there's nothing to guide or shape the flow."

"Exactly," He stated. "So what if, instead of removing elements, you simply…substituted them?"

"With what?" I asked before tilted my head and narrowing my eyes. "The Qliphoth? You found a way?"

"Perhaps," He stated. "I'm still not entirely certain I've found what I'm looking for and it could use some refinement regardless. But I kept coming back to the same problem—if Nehemoth is the shadow of Malkuth and where things that aren't supposed to exist do anyway…then what does thatmean? How do you create something that isn't supposed to exist? You can create things that don't exist yet or don't exist naturally, but if you can create something, whatever the means, it has the potential to exist. Even if the probability is tremendously low, it's still there; even if it requires my power to create, then that still means it's possible."

I nodded. We'd realized that much pretty early on—that part of our very premise was evidentially impossible. But we'd persisted anyway, just to see what would happen and if we couldn't redefine possibility. Between us and the growing nature of our power, it wasn't impossible that we might be able to draw something into this world that couldn't be created otherwise. But…

"You found a different way," I assumed.

"I wondered if maybe I was wrong," He answered. "It's rare, I know, but it happens occasionally. Nehemoth is the Qliphoth we know the least about, after all, and maybe I'd made a faulty assumption somewhere along the road. So I went back and reviewed everything I knew about the others and changed my hypothesis. Nehemoth is where the other Qliphoth are given form, of that much I was certain, but what were the other Qliphoth? How would they appear once manifested?"

He shook his head and made something between a grimace and a smile.

"It was hard, because all I had to go on were the 'mundane' expressions of the Qliphoth, such as they were," He said. "They aren't something that we understand very well, by their very nature; they're what we labeled something we didn't understand. They're mistakes, flaws, and imperfections in our view of the world—things that seemed to occur independent of what we knew of the soul. If our grasp of the system by itself would be perfect, the Qliphoth are why it's not, the errors that occur because of the human element."

I nodded again.

"People have the ability to make choices," I said. "To decide how they want to act and live—and that carries with it the potential to make mistakes and do the wrong thing. Whatever your soul might say about you, who you are as a person matters as well—it's why the same soul can take the form of completely different people. Your actions, your decisions…they make you who you are."

"Precisely," Malkuth said and the topic seemed to excite him—which was natural, I suppose, considering that it was partially what he was after. "But that made me wonder—how did that apply in terms of Aura instead of emotion? Especially to Nehemoth? If the Qliphoth are simply imperfections and limited views of the truth, how would they take form, especially when it came to the shadow of Malkuth? What if, instead of making something that couldn't exist, I made something that simply shouldn't exist?"

"How?" I asked, tilting my head.

"I broke the rules," He stated. "The realm of Malkuth is where things come to be, taking shape based on the flow of the Sephirot. In some cases, that just means that things in this world are solid and real—but there also exist things that aren't. Thoughts, emotions, the mind…they're real, but real doesn't necessarily mean tangible. But what if I made them that way?"

I paused, tilting my head.

"But you make things that wouldn't normally be possible all the time," I said. "Wouldn't that be an expression of Nehemoth, too?"

"It is," He replied. "We keep thinking of the Qliphoth as separate from the Sephirot—and they are, in a way—but they grow from them, too. They exist within each other. Elements of Nehemoth have colored my power from the very beginning, just like elements of Thaumiel must color yours. But what if I took the expressions of the Qliphoth and made them real in the most literal way possible? What do you think would happen?"

"That?" I asked, pointing to the mass floating between his hands.

"Mhm," Malkuth answered, smiling and looking pleased with himself. "It's alive and it isn't, but…it'sreal."

"Does it work the way you imagined it would?" I asked him, frowning even as I tilted my head.

At that, his smile dwindled slightly.

"Not yet," He admitted. "There's something there, I think, but it's still incomplete—like it's not finished yet. It's soulless and 'alive,' but not…not whole. I built it from parts of myself, from my memories of…of before, but there's still something missing. It's the power source, I think."

"Thaumiel," I said. "I can see the problem. If you draw upon the Light directly, then they'll likely have a soul of some kind, so it's important to stop there and pull from something else. Maybe even just Thaumiel itself. The Dual Contending Forces…"

"That's a bit outside my area of expertise," He admitted. "Could you…help me?"

I smiled at him, putting aside my uncertainty.

"Of course," I said. "You used the memories of your past lives, correct? Perhaps the issue is simply that your memories aren't complete. After all, you weren't the only one who inherited their will. They gave you Malkuth and they gave me Keter...let's see if we both can't give something back."

XxXXxX

I realized that Malkuth was right soon after we began. The line between Keter and Thaumiel was so fine that I wouldn't have noticed it had I not known to be looking, simply failed to notice a force that was at once of and apart. Thaumiel was Keter, but cut-off from its surroundings—from the Light above and the path leading down to Malkuth below. A power that had no apparent source or destination and yet was, existing in its own right as if to spite the world that said it couldn't, to challenge possibility.

I could respect that—and it was exactly what we needed for this. A power that stood separate from the natural way of things, emanating its own power against all reason without allowing itself to be colored or shaped by exterior forces.

Of course, that simply raised more questions about the nature of the Sephirot. Even when separated from what should have been the source of its power, Thaumiel was able to emanate the exact same amount of 'energy.' Basic logic dictated that it had to come from somewhere, but there was no apparent source but itself. Was there something I couldn't feel, even though it was a part of me? Could that power be coming from a place they simply couldn't detect—the still theoretical 'Other Side' of Sitra Ahra? Or was this an insight into the nature of the Light and the Sephirot, that I could draw such power while standing away from and against what should have been the source of it?

Perhaps that was it. The Sephirot were formed of the Light, but somehow made distinct—in fact, at the most basic level, one could argue that they were the only things that were distinct from the Light, with everything else being shaped from their interactions. They were, perhaps, the 'matter' to the Light's 'energy,' but why did they exist in a different shape to begin with? And what did that state mean? I wasn't sure, but they were still composed of the Light, made of the same boundless power they were designed to channel. They were the same and yet distinct, just as Thaumiel was proving to be now; something that existed in a distinct way despite everything that said it shouldn't.

Or, at least, that was the feeling I got from it. But in the end, the truth of the matter was that I simply wasn't sure; this was an area that even I couldn't say I had any mastery of. Now that I had found it, I could feel the difference between Keter and Thaumiel, but it was hard to describe; like flipping a light switch, except the light didn't turn off, it just shifted. A connection vs. a closed circuit, but the same results either way. At least, maybe? Would the results be the same? I hadn't had time to try and test what the differences would be in using power from Thaumiel in place of power from Keter, but it felt much the same.

But maybe that was simply because the power was familiar, as if it had been there all along—which perhaps it had been, in hindsight. Looking at it now, I could see shades of myself in Thaumiel—or, perhaps, shades of Thaumiel in me. The will that drove me to defy the Angels, to set myself apart from the world that tried to define me and to define myself instead. The need to be, to know myself even if it wasn't acknowledged by anyone else, the knowledge of my name, the distinction between who I was outside and within. The separation of my 'self' from the 'world' and my 'mind' from my 'body,' and more besides…now that I knew what to look for, I could see the lines and similarities, down to the very way I existed in this world. There were elements that showed marks of Keter and Thaumiel, the two intermingled so much that the lines could only be guessed at.

Was this a natural thing, I wondered? Or as natural as such a thing could be, at least? We were artificial gatherings of such absurd amounts of the Sephirot that perhaps the Qliphoth were bound to manifest in extremes in turn—and, indeed, the method of their creation likely made that evenmore probable. In a way, they were as good an example of the Qliphoth as the thing they were now creating—the crafting of a soul within the mortal realm, the binding of many separate pieces and people into a distinct and separate whole. We were something that couldn't have occurred naturally forced to occur by the madness and greed of the Angels. Add to that the state of the people who'd gone into our creation, how they'd felt in their final moments and how those thoughts must have translated over into them…was it any surprise? And then there was the matter of who they were, what they'd chosen to be…yes. Thinking about it and looking back, I could all but imagine it now—the Qliphoth, always there and always unseen, an invisible and intangible part of us as much as our very souls.

In fact…as I felt that knowledge sink in and take hold, I could feel something stirring and rising closer to the surface. It wasn't something new, per se—more like something I'd simply never noticed before, except that thought in itself was ridiculous. I'd always known what I was and what I could be, even if certain paths only became clear as I learned more about myself and the paths that led to them; if this had been there all along, I would have noticed it.

Should have noticed it. But I somehow hadn't?

No, that wasn't quite right, either. It was close, but it didn't feel like one of the masks I wore or the roles I adopted—not entirely, at least, though I could feel possibilities forming and taking shape within it, now that I was aware of it. If anything, it felt more like when I first found and noticed my name, Metatron.

Except that still didn't make sense. Metatron was more than just a name—it was my name, the part of me that remained even when all else changed. It was who I was, the essence of my self that everything boiled down to; it wasn't something I could have another of, without being someone else.

Or was that it, perhaps? The name and the role, it was…who I was when I wasn't myself, maybe? Who I could have been if I hadn't been me? Or something else along those lines. A possibility that had always been there, even expressed itself in ways, but just a possibility, a choice I could have made. I had always been one to define myself and choose my paths; this was just a decision I'd made without realizing it, as a result of all the other decisions I'd made.

And here it was now, spelt out clearly. Not reaching out, not inviting me, but there and waiting to be explored if I so chose. A chance to take the path not traveled.

But seeing it now, feeling it, I was startled. I drew back metaphorically, shied away, and the certainty I'd had for what seemed like all my life briefly faltered. I couldn't understand it completely, couldn't truly comprehend it without reaching out, but I could still vaguely feel it, who I could have been.

This was what they could have made me. What I might have been born to become. And I wasn't sure how to describe it. 'The Opposite' didn't quite fit the feeling, though parts of it applied; it was more than that. 'The Other,' 'The Reverse,' there were shades of applicability, but it still didn't fit. If I had to define it, name the sensation…I would have called it 'The Adversary.' The opposing force, the nemesis, the enemy. Not 'Thaumiel' instead of 'Keter,' but what I could have become had things been different, had I remained alone.

Of who? Of what? Maybe me, maybe someone else, maybe everything. I wasn't sure—and I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.

Before, I'd have pushed forward, reached out to examine the sensation, pushing on my scientific curiosity and wonder, sure that whatever came of it, I'd be able to see myself through and that there was nothing to be afraid of. Why would there be? We were the strongest beings in this world, dwarfing the Angels when we were young and dwarfing ourselves then as we were now. There shouldn't have been anything in this world that could frighten me and there wasn't.

But for the first time in a long, long time, I felt doubt. Faced with what could have been, what could still be…

Maybe this wasn't a good idea, I thought.

"Brother, look!" Malkuth spoke, drawing my attention moments after the thought crossed my mind. "We've done it!"

I turned at once, a pang of dread striking me as I looked towards him. The black mass that had gathered between his hands began to shift and writhe on its own power, something filling the empty vessel. It wasn't a soul, as such, wasn't complete—but it was something we'd made from the pieces of what had once been a person, altered by power and will. It was a semblance of life, except that wasn't the right word, because whatever this creature might be, it was most assuredly alive. Soulless? Perhaps, but alive.

It opened its eyes slowly, the orbs completely and brightly red, with nothing to indicate an iris, pupil, or sclera. Even so, I could feel it as it looked around, turning it's gaze first towards me and then to Malkuth. It didn't have a true shape yet, still confined to the amorphous blob Malkuth had created, but I could feel the potential within it in a very literal sense. It was something I'd always had a knack for, judging others; perhaps a side-effect of my ability to determine my own place in the world. I could look at another person and see where they stood, what they were, and sometimes even what they might become.

Perhaps for that reason, new things had always fascinated me. Children, my creations, and more—to me, they all but glowed with possibility and potential. It was something I'd taken an interest in over time, trying to guess what things might become when they grew up or reached their conclusions…it might have been why I'd become a scientist in the first place and pressed the boundaries of what was and could be. What new things would I find? What new thing would I create and what would they become?

Here I was standing before one such thing and I…

I wasn't sure. I could see the potential in it, vast in a way I'd only seen when looking at my siblings. This was something truly new, both for us and for the world, and there was still no telling what it could become. My sense of it wasn't clear enough to break into distinct images yet, not this early and so far from the choices that might define it, but I could make guesses. I felt positive possibilities and negative ones, ones that felt steady and protective and ones that seemed almost sharp against my thoughts. I could imagine where we might go from, building upon our creation in countless ways. New futures, new theories, new everything—I could feel the bold futures we might create. Would we go further, making greater things or perhaps breath truer life into what we'd made? Or would it become something else entirely, surpassing all expectations?

There was no way of truly knowing what something might be except to watch and wait—but for the first time, that idea worried me. Because while many of the futures were bright, others were frighteningly dark, shadowed beyond my ability to see. I could feel danger from them, however, feel the possibility that my greatest fears might come true. This thing could grow up to become a wonder, yes, but it could also be a terror.

It wasn't too late to stop this, I thought. I could end it here, ask Malkuth to set things aside. It would bother him, especially this close to success, but if I asked, he'd do it. We could leave the answers to our questions a secret instead of searching them out and put all this behind us. I could destroy this thing before it became any of the things I saw, instead of risking it becoming a threat.

But I recoiled from the thought at once. What since did it make, to destroy something because of what it might become? It was something new and young, still able to become anything—of course not all its futures were bright. Our hadn't been either; no one's were. That was the point, the possibility inherent in free will, and the true meaning and value of the Qliphoth.

Slowly, hesitatingly, I relaxed. The Angels had wondered about the Qliphoth, sought to unravel why no two people were the same, even if their souls were constructed along the exact same lines. They looked at it as if it were some grand secret, adding chaos to the system as a byproduct of something greater—but what if that was the point, in and of itself. The Qliphoth added decision and distinction, division, separating people from one another by the simple matter of choice. It was a risk of sorts, giving people the chance to be less than what they could be, but also to rise above their nature and become more, giving them the opportunity to strive alongside the risk of faltering. It was the power of free will, creating variables in the system to keep things from becoming static, to allow for possibilities and create futures.

The possibility I'd found within myself, the Adversary—it wasn't the power of Thaumiel turning me evil. The Qliphoth didn't work like that; they were byproducts of choices rather than the causes. What I'd seen was simply something that had always been present within me, but which I hadn't chosen. If Thaumiel was Keter cut off from all other things, the person I'd seen and imagined was myself cut off from all others. If the others hadn't been born or if they'd been born to late, if I'd been raised as the Angel's had planned and hadn't pushed things ahead of schedule for the sake of my brothers and sisters…yes, I could have been something horrific. I might have still slain the Angels, true, but what would I have done then? What roles would I have taken up, what powers would I have wielded?

I had the power to be anything I wanted, good or bad, and I could have been an Archdemon as easily as an Archangel.

But, as I knew better than anyone, I could have been a lot of things. So could my brothers and sisters, so could my newest creation. There was no way of knowing what it might become other than to watch over it and raise it, as a parent did a child. My own creators had been monsters—so I'd just have to be better than the Angels.

"How is it?" I asked. "Everything okay?"

"I can feel it," Malkuth seemed to marvel. "I can see through its eyes, feel what it feels. It's separate, but it's a part of me."

Like my Elementals were part of me, yet separate, I mused.

"Is it okay?" I asked. "Are you?"

"What?" Malkuth asked, seeming startled. He blinked once, looking confused, before nodding. "Yes, yes, of course. I'm great—I'm better than ever! It worked, brother! I can feel a part of myself in it and it's still me, but it's not!"

He was so excited that he was babbling like he had when we were both still children. I smiled, even as I looked him over for any signs of change, any unintended shift. I watched him carefully, still a touch worried—but there was nothing. Near as I could tell, he was the same as ever.

"That's good," I replied. "Does anything feel different? Do you feel better now?"

At that he paused, smile replaced slowly by a look of confusion.

"Maybe," He mused. "It's still hard to tell, since there's only one of them. But…I think so? I feel happier, more certain. But there's something else."

I tilted my head.

"What?" I asked.

"I don't know," He muttered. "I can…sense something, just barely. From that direction."

He pointed and I frowned, switching roles and then peering through the veil of space. My gaze flew over the terrain and then back, which didn't help much.

"There's nothing in that direction but the city," I said. "Is that what you're feeling?"

He paused and then shrugged.

"Maybe," He said again. "It's too faint to really say. Maybe it's nothing."

But the frown on his face remained, as did mine. I didn't see a change in him, nothing acting upon him or coming from our creation, but…

I'm still worried, I thought. But of course I'd be—this is something we have to handle with care.

"We'll look into it," I said out loud. "For now, let's be careful, however. We both know the dangers of tampering with the soul."

"Right," Malkuth replied. "Of course, brother—there's no rush."

XxXXxX

As I entered the laboratory to prepare for our next experiment, I smiled as I noticed that Malkuth had already beaten me to it. The gravity engine was spinning slowly to life, twisting a hole in worlds so that we'd be able to draw matter and energy from elsewhere. Today, we'd be working on my side of our shared work, testing the lifts of my 'Elementals' and seeing how they were defined—and to that end, we'd see precisely how far the nature of 'inorganic matter' went, using both my and Malkuth's power. It was something I'd been looking forward to for a long time now, and I'd be happy to see the results.

Sadly, my enthusiasm was short-lived as I turned my attention towards my brother. The room we now occupied had been shifted out of conventional space, only technically existing at the edge of the exosphere, so I hadn't noticed anything wrong on the outside, but as I opened the door, the details were impossible not to take in.

Malkuth was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, staring off into space with hands trembling slightly on his legs. He didn't even react as I entered the room.

"Malkuth?" I asked, suddenly more than a bit worried.

He twitched once but didn't answer and if there'd been any doubt that something wasn't right before, they died a quick death.

"Malkuth?" I tried again, ignoring the distance between us to kneel by his side. "Brother, what's wrong?"

His eyes flickered towards me, both of the orbs wide, but it seemed to take him a moment to recognize me, because for a moment, he seemed baffled.

"Keter," He said at last, the words sounding almost uncertain.

"What happened to you?" I asked. "Tell me and I'll fix it."

His mouth opened for a long moment but closed with a click without him saying a word. A second later, he tried again, but not before giving me a helpless smile.

"They…" He began before faltering slightly and shaking his head. "They're…afraid of us. They hateus."

The words didn't make any sense to me. They? Who were 'they?' There was no one here and even if there were, who could drive my brother into a state like this? But if he hadn't realized that his words would be unclear, hadn't been able to formulate a real reply, then trying to get answers out of him would be slow.

So I switched gears and began to change roles. I looked him over with the eyes of the Healer and the Protector before turning my gaze outwards. The Seer, the Farsighted, the Theocrat, and more all shifted to the forefront, taking the stage for only a moment before moving on. I scaled our surroundings, this time piercing the physical and metaphysical distance that separated this place from the outside world, looking for anyone who might be a threat.

It was only as I adopted the role of the General, however, that I truly saw them. Patterns lit up across the globe far below, written in shades of hostile colors. These places, a threat to what I wanted to protect. Here, weaknesses, ways to cripple them, draw them out, and strike them down. Without even thinking about it, I felt my power assign them priorities, threat levels, and more, and I felt a plan taking shape to cripple them all and remove the threat.

Except the threat was 'everyone and everything.' All of Mankind.

"The people?" I asked after a moment, still feeling a disconnect. "Brother, I don't understand. How are they hurting you?"

"I can feel them," He whispered. "All of them."

I analyzed that reply for a moment and then shifted to the Researcher to do so better. My natural awareness of people remained no matter what my role, but it sharpened in some ways and dulled in others. As I looked at Malkuth now, I could feel…something, a connection that flowed this way and that, shifting endlessly, and the texture of it was—

Ah.

"You can feel their emotions," I said at last, pieces finally coming together. "That what you've been noticing in our experiments. But it was never like this before…"

"Something finally clicked," He said. "And I finally understood what I was feeling. Everything became clearer then and I realized why it was so familiar. They think we're monsters."

I took a breath and then shrugged a shoulder.

"Hardly a surprise," I answered evenly.

"They think we're monsters, Keter," He repeated, voice growing as he rose from his seat. That anger seemed to allow him to push through the feelings that had been distracting him and I could see him clinging to it. "They hate us—and they hate each other, hate themselves, hate this world!"

"Hopefully not all at the same time," I replied, tilting my head. "But Malkuth, think of what we are to them—immortal and unspeakably powerful, guided by what are, to them, unknowable whims. At times we appear and get involve, forcing order on the chaos before things get too bad, but then we leave and fade away. They know we're real, but they don't know us, so why wouldn't they be afraid? They don't know our motivations and intentions, so what must our actions seem like to them? We're all but gods to them, Brother, and that must be terrifying."

"After everything we've done," He continued, as if he hadn't heard me. "After all the times we've helped them and protected them, after the things we've saved them from, they hate us. We were the ones who saved them from fates they can't even imagine in this happy, healthy world. When the Angels ruled—"

"The Angels died hundreds of years ago," I interrupted. "No one alive remembers them except us."

The reminder silenced him for a moment, probably because what everyone else had forgotten had long been a sore point for him. I used that opportunity to continue.

"People don't judge the quality of their lives based on some grand external measure," I said. "They judge it based on what they have and don't have. They're lives may be wonderful compared to what they were, but they aren't perfect. They fight with each other, still, and when they wake up and look to the sky, they think of us—beings who could tear down their world at any time, for any reason, without them being able to do a thing to stop it. If we were there for them to see, people they could speak to and understand, that might be one thing, but we didn't. We walked away after getting tired, doing only what we feel obligated to, and otherwise left them be. We didn't care to do more than what we had to so we didn't."

"Are you saying we're to blame?" Malkuth asked, sounding tense.

I shook my head.

"We don't owe them anything," I said. "The only people we ever owed anything died to create us and we laid them to peace when we killed the ones responsible. What we've done since, how we've taken care of them, has been because of what we felt was right or remembered—but we don'thave to do anything. I'm merely saying that if we do little, it should be expected for some people to see us that way. Why do you care? They have their reasons to hate us, so let them hate—it doesn't change what we've done or who we are or anything. It doesn't mean everyone things that, either. While some people might loathe us constantly, others likely just go one with their lives; you would know that better than anyone, I think. So Malkuth…tell me. What's this really about? Tell me what's wrong and I'll try to fix it."

He was silent again for a long moment before answering.

"It hurts," He said, making me frown.

I considered what he'd said, shifting roles a few times to fill in the blanks and put the pieces together in context. Empathy was a known but largely undesirable ability, owing simply to the fact that…well, if you could know what everyone around you was thinking at all times, would you really want to? Worse, because of the simplicity of the ability at its most basic level—reacting to fluctuations and changes in surrounding Auras, effectively reading the body language of the soul—most recorded Empaths had a fairly extensive range, often covering kilometers at the low end. More than large enough to encompass good-sized chunks of cities and countless people as a result; generally, that alone was enough to drive most such people away from civilization. I figured that alone would be enough to harm Malkuth on the scale I'd detected.

But what if there was more to it than that? This wasn't conventional Empathy—it was like calling to like. The manifestations of the Qliphoth that Malkuth and I had created…the could sense manifestations of themselves in others and they were drawn to them. It wasn't particularly relavent since they were all tied to each other through Malkuth anyway, but I was willing to bet they could sense each other fairly well, too.

And it occurred to me that perhaps being an empath who could effectively only sense negative things might have unfortunate side-effects on a person. If it had been me…well, I probably would have any more difficult than I did with normal Empathy; I was above such things, generally speaking, just as Keter was the crown above the head. But Malkuth and I were very different in a lot of ways, however similar we were in others.

Even so, I hadn't expected it to affect Malkuth this way. His memories of his past lives gave him an enormous amount of experience at resisting such things, both from what he'd gone through in those lives and this one. While he didn't have the blatant immunity to mental assaults I enjoyed, he was about as resistant as he could otherwise be, a mental fortress of countless lives.

But perhaps that was the problem here. The same thing that had given him peace had left him vulnerable, opening holes and forging a connection that let things in.

That…could be problematic.

"Malkuth," I said carefully. "Perhaps we should put our experiments on hold for a while. Deactivate everything, until we can get this sorted out."

I saw his fingers spasm at the idea, which told me pretty well what he thought of that idea, which I'd unfortunately guessed already.

"They aren't the problem," He answered a moment later.

"They're why you're feeling this way," I reminded.

"That's like saying my skin is a problem because it's what lets me feel pain," He replied. "And, to continue that analogy, that flaying myself alive would be an improvement. I need that—and you know what will happen if I draw back all my pieces. You're asking me to suffer for the sake of people who hate me."

"No," I answered gently. "I'm asking you to do it for me. Just for a few days, until we sort everything out. This is hurting you, Malkuth, and I don't like seeing you in pain."

He seemed ready to retort again, but my last words seemed to take the wind out of his sails.

"I'll be in pain either way," He muttered before going silent for a minute. "Just for a few days? You promise?"

"I promise," I answered. "I know this is painful for you, Brother—but I also know you're strong. You endured it for centuries and I'll do everything I can to make sure we fix this."

"It's not just a week of hell," He whispered. "It's a week of a hell I thought I'd finally escaped."

But then, his eyes drifted to the spot where he'd been sitting, huddled alone far above the world to try and escape, and he closed his eyes.

"But you're right, of course," He said. "So I'll do it, because you asked me to."

XxXXxX

I did my best to keep my word. I met with our brothers and sisters and we agreed to change things. We took a more active role in the world again, going back on the decision we made so long ago, the way we'd withdrawn from the world. I could tell that it was tough for a lot of my siblings, putting aside the freedom we'd embraced for an obligation we'd never really held to in the first place—but they did it. We did it.

For Malkuth.

We returned to the world and split it between ourselves, taking a kinder, more personal hand. Four for the largest continent, one for the smallest, and two for every other. I stayed with Malkuth, rebuilding the lands of our birth on the continent of Grimm. At my urging, we leveraged our research to the cause, using it to create a better world. Medical technology, transportation, energy, and more—I made it a challenge of sorts, urging the others to explore paths we'd never had any use for personally. Even our projects with the Qliphoth turned to aim in a new direction, in an attempt to build strengths upon weaknesses. The power that made Malkuth so painfully aware of the world also served as a way to detect sources of that pain, letting us act before things went out of control. I tried to make it into a self-resolving problem, tried to create a cure from the disease. I tried to solve the problem.

But…

Malkuth was crying again, staring forward with the empty gaze that always frightened me, because it meant he was more somewhere else than he was here. This had happened before, if only rarely over the last few centuries, in moments were things broke down and fell apart. It meant that something had happened that had spiraled out of control despite their best efforts, that there was a war going on, or a riot, or a plague, or a disaster, or a panic—something that would be short lived in the grand scheme of things, but which was horrifically and dangerously real in the now.

To the people and to Malkuth.

It was a frustrating reminder that even they couldn't control everything—not everywhere, at least, not all the time. It made a part of me wish that we'd never made them, what people now called the creatures of Grimm, but no, that was only part of it, a side-effect of the greater issue. Malkuth was suffering, had suffered since the beginning, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It was an issue made all the more galling by the fact that if it had been me, if I had been able to take everything he went through upon myself, it would have been nothing. I could have born the pain he was forced to endure, I just couldn't bear it for him. All I could do was try and help, in ways that never seemed to last, never seemed to address the real issue.

Which is what I did now. Silently, I laid a hand on Malkuth's head and kept it there, feeling my power take hold as I changed roles. He didn't resist, didn't even seem to really react, and silent sobs cut off abruptly as he was driven into a senseless, dreamless sleep. Only then did I lift a hand and rise from my place at his side.

"Gevurah," I said, voice quiet and calm. "Whatever is causing this, find it and put an end to it. Now."

Gevurah shifted in his place at the doorway, glancing towards me for a long moment. I glanced back at him and looked into his eyes, staring firmly into the windows of his soul. Like the rest of us, his eyes had always been different, distinct, but his were more noticeable than my blue or Malkuth's red. Instead, they were like mirrors, but with flames filling the background of whatever they reflected. When he grew angry, those flames flooded closer, filling his gleaming eyes with clouds of smoke and burning corpses that ran and screamed in silence.

And he was always angry, nowadays. Frustrated, upset, tense—at the situation, at what he was forced to do, at what kept happening to Malkuth. Maybe even at me, for some reason.

But after a moment, he nodded and left without a word.

I stayed where I was, knowing I wouldn't have to wait long now. Gevurah worked fast, especially when it was stuff like thing, and he was as smart as the rest of us. He'd find whatever was wrong and fix it in minutes.

Sure enough, in less than three minutes, Malkuth stirred, fighting off the effect I'd laid upon him with ease and opening his eyes.

"It happened again," He whispered.

"What was it this time?" I asked.

Malkuth lifted a hand to his eyes, covering them for a moment as he began laughing quietly.

"Does it matter?" He returned after a few seconds, when he finally settled down.

I waited silently.

"An earthquake," He eventually said. "Worst in about a century. I tried to stop it, but people started panicking when the buildings started falling. Things got worse afterwards, when fear turned into other things, becoming grief and anger and more."

I nodded, figuring as much. Enki had alerted me to a disturbance on that front and moved to act, but I'd figured that anything on that level would hit my brother hard and had headed here instead, calling the others on the way. Gevurah had headed over as well, probably expecting my request, though why he even bothered waiting, I wasn't sure.

"I sent Gevurah to handle it," I said after another brief silence. "And he did. It's enough, at least for now."

He lifted his hand to look at me, eyes disbelieving.

"No," He said. "It's not."

He rose to his feet, standing until we were eye to eye, but his hands were clenched into fists at his side.

"These are stop-gaps, Keter," He continued. "They aren't solutions. This keeps happening, again and again and again."

I nodded quietly, sharing his feelings.

"I know," I said. "It's not perfect. But it's at least rare, now, something that only happens every few decades, every couple of centuries. It's not as bad as it could be."

"'Not as bad as it could be,'" He repeated, nodding but not in agreement. "Yeah, that's great. Mylife 'isn't as bad as it could be.' It's just, I was expecting a bit more than that."

"I didn't mean it that way, Malkuth," I replied. "You know that. But…it was this or disabling the Qliphoth, suffering occasionally or suffering constantly."

"I'd rather not suffer at all, I think," He murmured.

"I know," I said the same way. "I…I might have a solution."

At that, Malkuth seemed to perk up, eyes brightening as they met mine.

"You've figured it out?" He asked, phrasing the question oddly.

"It's something I've been working on, a barrier that should cut you off from this dimension and the people in it," I said. "I can show you the math, it's almost done, but—"

"It won't work," Malkuth cut me off with a snarl, stepping towards me. "Do you think I haven't tried that? Cutting myself off from them? Don't you think that was the first thing I tried!? It doesn'tmatter. I'm the Kingdom, Keter, and I can see through the walls of dimensions like they're made of glass—and so can all of my creations."

I fell silent at that, momentarily surprised before accepting his words as truth.

"Something else then," I proposed hesitantly. "It's something I've been working on—a way to reach above this world, above Malkuth. Above time and space and distance and everything else. If I finish it, we—"

"Could do what?" He asked. "Lock me away from the world? Lock me up alone in a hole for all time?"

"Not alone," I continued, still whispering. "You know I'd never do that, Brother. I'll go with you. And it won't be forever, either, just…until we figure out a solution."

He was silent for a long minute at that, bowing his head until his hair hid his eyes.

Then his shoulders shook slightly as he laughed again, the sound barely audible.

"There you go again," He said. "You and your solutions, again and again. Every time, you tell me to suffer for a while, because things will be better, and when they aren't, you do it again, always trying. But there's only one answer and we both know what it is. The way you handle it, every time you fail."

This time, it was my turn to fall silent, and I bowed my head as well.

"What you're suggesting is monstrous, Brother," I whispered. "Understandable, given what just happened to you—what keeps happening to you—but—"

"But what?" He snapped. "Don't you get it? Can't you see what's right in front of your own eyes? We are monsters, Brother! Look at what we've done, the things we've created, how we act and view and think about the people we rule over! Don't you get it? We don't care. The others agreed to play their part for my sake, not for Mankind, and it's something they hate when there are so many things we all would rather do. And you, you sent out Gevurah again, to do your dirty work—to kill people en masse that you wouldn't have to see die yourself—just so you could keep your hands a little bit cleaner."

"That's not what I told him to do," I said.

"It's what you meant," He snarled. "It's what you knew he'd do. You could have stopped him, sent someone else, gone yourself, handled things differently, but it was the fastest way, wasn't it? The quickest way to help me. So tell me honestly, Archangel Keter—why did you send Gevurah to do it?"

Slowly, I heaved a sigh and looked up at him.

"He's the best at such things," I answered. "The least affected."

"Because he doesn't care anymore, Brother. Go and ask him," Malkuth challenged. "I have and do you know what he said when I questioned him on how it felt, how bad it was? He shrugged and told me what he really believed—that people die all the time. They're nothing to him now, after all these years, if they ever were to begin with. But tell me, is he really the least affected? Tell me, do you really feel a thing for them, for the people you abandoned all those centuries ago? Have you ever really felt sadness for those who died because of us? Would you really cry if they all died? Would you even really care? Nothing ever hurts you, Keter. Nothing ever haunts you, ever leaves amark. But you're telling me that this would?"

I couldn't say he was wrong or refute his demands, but I didn't flinch away from them either.

This time, I told him the truth.

"I don't think it would," I whispered. "But I think it should. I think that I should care, that I should be more than what I am, be kinder, that all of us should be. I know I'm messed up—given everything, is that a surprise to anyone? But I already killed everyone who did anything to me personally. Why should I take my problems out on the innocent needlessly? Why should I let what was done to me make me a monster in turn? More of a monster, at least."

"And yet you still kill them," He stated. "Like you did today."

"For you," I said. "Like I would for any of us. I can kill when I have to, be a monster when I have to, if it means protecting my family. It's a compromise and still a sin, but that doesn't mean I should act that way all the time and kill whoever I want, whenever I want. If we did such a thing, we'd be no better than the ones who made us. Perhaps worse, at least in some ways. And we promised we wouldn't do that."

"We said some words," Malkuth said. "Caused some vibrations in the air nearly a thousand years ago. It was a promise, but guess what? Promises are broken all the goddamn time, Keter, and we broke this one. If I contacted Keter right now and told him to wipe Mankind from the face of the world, what do you think he'd say? 'Okay'? 'Sure'? Or do you think he'd demand an explanation or an excuse before doing it? We've held back from staying into the same experiments the Angels stated, but do you think we haven't thought about them? Haven't wondered about the mysteries contained within the soul, have never wanted to find out? Haven't you? We've toed the lines so often, haven't you wanted to cross them? How much longer until we do? We're not like the Angels, no—because we're stronger. Because we won. Because we know what killed them and how to avoid it."

"Not the most ringing moral justification I've ever heard," I admitted, but couldn't deny what he said, which worried me. I'd wondered before and I suppose I'd known we all had, but I suppose I'd always figured that some things had never changed—that some things never would change.

Malkuth laughed again and I could tell from the cadence that it was directed at me.

"Look at you," He said, voice almost found. "You never were good at stuff like this. You change who you are at a moment's notice, can adopt new powers and faces in a second, but at the core of it all, you're still the same. You never really changed from that day, did you? From the day you were born. What was it you told me—"

"If that even with all that's happened, who I am hasn't changed," I repeated quietly. "Then that must be strength."

He smiled at that and pointed at me.

"And maybe it is," He said. "But it's funny, too. In the beginning, when we were all children, you seemed like an adult, strong and calm and certain—but you're also static. The rest of us grew up and changed over these last thousand years, but you? You didn't."

I tilted my head.

"Right now, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing," I replied.

"Good or bad, it doesn't matter," Malkuth said. "It's just a fact. But what do you think the others would think if I told them what I wanted.

I went silent again, honestly considering it before answering.

"Gevurah might agree with you, perhaps," I said. "But not all of them. Netzach, Hod, and Yesod might go along with it, knowing it would help you, but Chesed? Tiferet? Binah and Chokhmah? You'd be splitting us in two."

"Perhaps," He acknowledged. "If it was just a request from me, perhaps you'd be right. They draw from the higher Sephirot like you and they're less…affected by it. They're curious, still, and they restrictions imposed on them chaff, but they'll follow your lead if you say to refrain. But at the same time, they'll do it if you ask them to."

I closed my eyes for a moment.

"What would you have me do, Brother?" I asked him.

"Something painful," He said at once. "And it's awful and it's selfish and it's going to hurt—but it's for me. Everything I did, all those times I held back and suffered for people I didn't care for or about, it was because you asked me to. I want you to prove you'd do the same for me."

"And if you asked me to cut off my arms and legs, I'd do it," I said. "If you told me that the only way to help you was to flay my own skin off and gouge out my eyes, I'd have already done it. But this is—"

"What's physical pain to you?" He interrupted, voice almost scornful. "You say you'd do those things and I believe you, but they mean nothing to you and me. You'd barely notice any of those things, much less be hurt by them. What I'm asking you to do…I know it's bad. I know it's wrong. And I know it would actually hurt you. But I'm asking you to do it for my sake."

I took a deep, slow breath, dropping my gaze to the floor.

"You're my brother, Malkuth," I whispered. "I promised I'd protect you, no matter what. That I'd keep you safe, whatever the cost."

But I knew I couldn't do this. That this was a line I couldn't cross—not because of Malkuth or even because of the people who'd been hurt, but simply because of me. This wasn't who I was.

Of course…I could always change who I was, couldn't I? That was what all this boiled down to in the end, wasn't it? So I reached down inside myself, touching a place I'd hidden for so long, pushed out of my mind since the moment I knew it was there. The path not taken, but which had been there all along as a possibility.

The Adversary. The power of Thaumiel given shape within me—and this time, I accepted it, embraced it, and let it come over me.

I expected the change to be something enormous, as ominous as the feeling I'd gotten when I first seen Thaumiel itself. I expected it to feel like darkness and rage and worse, to feel like a darkening of my soul, to feel evil.

But instead, I didn't feel different in the slightest. It didn't clear away the doubt, didn't show me the way, didn't give me anything that I could see. In fact, instead of giving me any new powers, I felt that had been bolstered dull and what had been lessened swell. My many masks and roles were still there, waiting as they always were, but I wasn't connected to any of them right now, wasn't wearing any particular face. In fact, it felt as though, for the first time in my entire life, I wasn't playing any particular role. That I was just me.

Had I failed or was this a sign that I'd already become what I'd feared, that I was becoming it on my own right now? Or perhaps, was this another insight into the nature of Thaumiel, something that stood apart from all else, that didn't touch my mind or incline me in any particular direction—something that was opposed, yes, but more than that, was independent? That was wholly and solely itself?

I wasn't sure. Maybe it was nothing or it just took time to kick in. But somehow, it was that lack of anything that gave me strength. A lack of surety that made me certain. I let my senses expand to look over the world again, feeling my power come to life in a way that was entirely mine. I could feel Thaumiel reacting now that I'd made my decision, but it was hard to define or describe, nothing like what I was used to. It didn't feel like it was congratulating me for making the right choice—if anything, it just seemed pleased that I'd made a choice, for myself. It still didn't feel like much of a role or a secret weapon or a hidden power.

It just felt like me. As I could be, as I had been, and most of all, as I was.

And it was enough.

I looked back up at Malkuth and smiled as I saw him draw away from me, looking stunned. I suppose that was to be expected, seeing as he'd never seen me cry before—because I never had, until now, except when I was faking it. Nothing had ever hit me like that, but this…this hurt. And it would hurt more.

But I'd made my choice.

"But I'm sorry, Brother," I said to him. "I can't."

He seemed frozen still, simply looking at me—but slowly, both his head and shoulders fell. His hands clenched into fists and his teeth grit even as he shook.

"Fine," He finally answered, voice colder than I'd ever heard it. "I'll do it myself."

As he made to leave, I lifted a hand and he paused by the door.

"I'm sorry," I said again. "But I can't let you do that either, Brother. If this is really the only way, if you really can't think of any other answer…I'll stop you."

He looked at me and I almost marveled. Here we were, Malkuth and Keter. The two brothers that had stood against the world, now standing against each other.

Malkuth looked away first and stepped over the threshold before answering, silently making it clear that his decision was made.

"Go ahead and try," He said.

XxXXxX

We went to war. It started slowly at first, simply because none of us truly wanted to hurt each other, but hesitation had soon given way to curiosity. In many ways, the battles had been like a game, a new experiment with which to test our powers. We would protect what they would harm, they would harm what we would protect. Both sides came up with measures and countermeasures, possibilities and alternatives, leveraging past research to new purpose and inventing new things.

Even I had to admit that it was exciting on a level. We'd never had much need for battle, having defeated the only people we'd ever considered enemies in the early years of our existence. We'd accounted for the possibility, of course, the idea that others might rise in the Angels place, but as our powers had grown over the years, it had been a relatively minor thing. Martial prowess or not, what was the enemy to do again an opponent that could rewrite the laws of nature? Swim through dimensions like a fish through water? Create stars and erase continents and twist time and space? We'd prepared for it, making sure we were aware and durable, but we'd never truly needed to fight. We'd done everything in our power to make sure that nothing could threaten us but one another and we'd succeeded.

So, in a way, it was fun. Fighting—not just as a spar that was stopped before anyone was hurt or confined by dimensions and rules and things that were not to be destroyed, but as something serious, with nothing held back. To innovate new means on the spot, to design weapons meant for practice instead of play, to pit ourselves against one another and drive ourselves to the limit. It was a call back to the days when we weren't certain of our power and safety, when we didn't know the results before a battle even started. It inspired us, motivated us, and brought out the best and worst, as though we'd all been sleeping in anticipation of this day.

But whatever it might have been, this wasn't a game. It wasn't a fight we could afford to lose, not for me and not for Malkuth. I think it may have taken time for that to become apparent to the others, but they realized it too, in time. Mankind was something so different from us, so distantfrom us, that it could be hard to recall that we were in anyway the same when we lived so far apart, but war has a way of breaking down barriers and opening doors. We—Binah, Chokhmah, Tiferet, Chesed, and myself—we all that stood between Man and a force they could not survive or withstand, the only thing that could protect them when the world itself seemed to turn upon them. Man, woman, or child, it didn't matter; they relied on us, huddled closer when the skies turned to fire or the air to poison in their lungs, spoke to us and wished and prayed.

We'd always been figures of extraordinary power and authority, held up high above it all and far from the normal man, but that all vanished before the coming end. People came to us, spoke to us, asked for news and promises and hope. It's hard to think of them as anything but people then, when you could see them shaking in fear when a battle was about to begin. When you could see their corpses when a battle was lost. When you could feel the absence in those left behind, the effects of you failures on a person instead of a city or a nation. When you could fly and do battle around the orbit of the moon, it was easy to look down and see nothing, to consider the lives of the people so far beneath you as beneath you, but it was harder to do that when you looked them in the eye every day.

It wasn't a game and in time those who sided with me learned that. It was a war.

And we were losing.

It was an unfortunate fact, but not necessarily a surprising one. We, the Archangels embodying the upper parts of the Tree of Life, were less affected by the rigors of the physical world, but also less attached to it. We relied upon less physical means to manifest our powers, like I did with the roles I played, rooted in what could be, while the other side was tied more closely to what was. Our nature allowed us to ignore some of the rules that characterized Malkuth, but Malkuth could outright define those rules. The Sephirot were meant to be connected and all the things formed above where meant to be given shape below. Sadly, that gave them something of the home field advantage.

Added to that, Malkuth unleashed his creatures of Grimm in a growing array of horrific forms, some of them too powerful for even us to ignore—and there seemed to be no end to them. What started with just a few of us quickly grew into something enormous as the Grimm grew to number the millions, the billions, building off principles Malkuth had discovered and learnt to use and designed to learn. With only the five of use to stand against them, we had no choice but to draw on aid for our side as well, taking strength from the people themselves. The power of the soul had not been forgotten during our reign, becoming, if anything, even more common place, but some of its military applications had fallen out of favor with no one to war against. But as we relearned the arts of battle, so did Mankind.

It helped slow the fall, but it wasn't enough. Not with the Grimm growing ever stronger and Malkuth finalizing the details of projects we'd worked on, unleashing his Riders—Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. It was a joke, as I understood; things we thought we'd undone, made into our undoing. I didn't think it was very funny, personally, but I lacked much of a sense of humor at times like these. What mattered was that we began to lose more and more battles and we felt the losses much more sharply than they did theirs, because we had so much more to lose.

This had gone on too long. This world hadn't been made for battle on our scale—hadn't been designed to allow it or survive it. Gevurah burning down nations, Yesod reducing all to nothing, Malkuth rewriting the rules…it was too much for the world to endure forever. Too much for Mankind to endure, with the Grimm eating away at them constantly.

So I'd decided to end it, on the same fields were we'd defeated the Angels. We hid what was left of Humanity away as best we could, planned for the occasion, and made our preparations. Just in case, I even took measures, in case we should fail. Truth be told, it was quite possible, even likely, so I did my best. But at the same time, I resolved myself for what was to come.

And then we fought. For our lives, for the lives of Mankind, for what we believed in—for all those things and more, we burned down the field of Megiddo once more. Nothing remained in the wake of our battle. The land had been scoured of all signs of life almost before the battle began and then it had been used as a tool to wage our war. Parts of it had ceased to exist, while others had been reduced to shapeless primordial chaos. Others had been removed via more physical means, burnt away or shattered or shunted elsewhere. Some areas bore marks of effects that seemed frozen in time, while others continued as if holding their last note without end. In some cases, they even did both, such as with a lightning bolt that was utterly still on one end and writhed in the air on the other.

We'd divided the battlefield as we'd planned, facing our opponents on our terms, and things had gone as well as could be expected—which was to say that my brothers and sisters, the people I loved more than anything else in the world, all laid dead. They'd killed and died for me, except that wasn't quite the case; they'd done it for what they believed in, what they loved, and what they'd valued at the end.

Funny what a difference of opinion could amount to. Almost all of my family laid dead around me, a fact that I'd never be able to forgive myself for our forget—at least, not in this life, meaning it might not be a long-term issue for me. Not for the first time since this battle began, my thoughts went back to the conversation Malkuth and I had had concerning reincarnation and I wondered what it would mean for us. Would we remember? If we found each other again, would we know? Would we take the same path or repeat the same mistakes?

What a depressing thing to think about, here at the end.

"Keter!" Malkuth snarled, slashing a hand through the air, and a corridor of matter about the size of a building suddenly vanished as fundamental forces ceased to operate. I came apart and back together, focusing on the battle through my own musings.

I was losing, which was unfortunate but, again, not surprising. If anything, the way I was losing was a bit ironic. Malkuth had made himself untouchable, becoming a constant, something unchangeable. I, meanwhile, was ever changing, shifting roles with every second, often pausing only long enough to release a specific effect before moving on. I drew parts of surrounding dimensions into ours and then fired bolts of piercing energy. I switched places with those same bolts as they connected and struck Malkuth with a blow that was overlaid with a hundred thousand possible variations of itself, multiplying the impact accordingly. As I made contact, I tried to alter his position in space, pushing parts of him into other dimensions with severing force, and then I withdrew by becoming a part of the land beneath my feet and growing a new body from the earth even as Malkuth scattered the previous one. I marked out possible futures and moved to avoid them, not dodging attacks but preventing openings from appearing in the first place, and then I unleashed a reality storm, assaulting Malkuth with an area of violently alternating time, gravity, and space that could annihilate nearly anything. Nearly because Malkuth survived it.

Unsurprising. He'd seen it before, alongside pretty much all of my tricks; it was to be expected that he'd prepared countermeasures. It was sad that it stripped me of most of my best tricks, however.

Gesturing, I summoned my Elementals before closing my eyes. Letting my senses expand, I could feel lights dimming around the world despite my best efforts to protect Mankind, but I reached out to them now and drew them from their intended course to give them a chance to defend others. Their spirits took shape within my Elementals, bodies and faces rising from a colossus of moving earth even as spectral figures appeared on the wind. They stood tall, each dwarfing the tallest of mountains, and the others soon joined them, combining with a gesture. My soul took shape as a figure of light, as massive in truth as my soul appeared to onlookers, and I withdrew for a moment, bracing myself. I shifted us into another reality just before the first blast went off, minimizing the damage to the world around us.

"Keter!" Malkuth shouted again, pushing at my Elemental and forcing the giant back with a hand. He was multiplying and broadening the effects of physical force, I noted. "Is this what you wanted!? They're dead! They're dead because of you!"

Our siblings, he meant, but I couldn't see if he was crying in his grief for them. He may have been, but if so, the tears probably vanished in the bombardment centered on him. Either way, I didn't answer, instead choosing to consider alternatives. Using physical force was proving about as effective as I'd expected, even if it had kept Malkuth busy while the others fought. It was time to change tracks now, though, which meant choosing how best to do so. If I failed, I may not get another chance.

In the end, Malkuth chose for me. He unleashed a roar and the sound itself came alive, turning into a physical being that tore at my Light Elemental even as it became a resonance. Even as it did, however, Malkuth tore through both of them, black ichor forming around his hands into some kind of energy-annihilating field. He leapt at me, moving fast enough to outpace light—or else, altering the pace of light—to strike at me.

So I met his eyes and didn't dodge. I left myself open, lowered my defenses, and put my life on the line.

And in the end, it wasn't any of those defenses that made my brother falter and lower his hand a touch so that it only erased most of my remaining self. It was the same thing that had started all of this, something above the physical.

A thousand years and the memories that went with them. Even now, even with all this, we were still brothers. It was enough to make him stop, to make him hesitate, to make him wait just a bit too long.

I'm sorry, Brother. I win.

For a long moment, the battlefield fell silent as we stared at one another—and Malkuth was the one who finally broke it, closing his eyes and dropping his head.

"Why, Keter?" He demanded in a whisper, drawing back a step before raising his hands once more. "Why? Look at them, Brother—you killed them!"

"If anything, I'd say we killed them," I mused in reply, refusing to falter. "But I told them all what would happen today. They knew this would end with their deaths."

"Then why?" He asked. "Why fight? Why would you all sacrifice yourselves for them?"

"So it would end, Malkuth," I said. "We aren't the only one who've died for this. We're not the only ones who gave their lives for something we wanted or believed in. We're just the only ones that mattered to you…so I suppose it had to be us. There's no other way to stop you"

Malkuth's hands twitched at his side and he grit his teeth.

"Because they can't reincarnate without Humanity?" He asked. "You bastard—don't you get it? Death is it. Even if they're reborn, it won't be them anymore."

"Maybe," I whispered quietly, unable to keep myself from mulling over the same possibility. "Maybe not. I guess we'll just have to wait and see."

"It doesn't matter," Malkuth insisted, almost taking a step forward as a growl entered his voice. "Humans…they're nothing. I can create and destroy them as easily as breathing. They aren't worththis, they aren't something you can hold over me; if I have to, once I find a real solution, I could grow men like grass in the summer. But our brother, our sisters…they're dead because of this fight. Because you made them give their lives for people who don't even matter."

"There's more to the value of life then how easily it is taken or given away, Brother," I replied, meeting his eyes calmly. I had to try not to sigh. "You of all people should know that. Wasn't it a matter of human lives that brought us here in the first place?"

"Considering everything that's happened?" He replied. "Not the most convincing argument for leaving them alive."

At that, I chuckled and exhaled slightly before looking up at the sky. Our battle had utterly ruined the world around us, but the skies remained largely clear and I could see the stars. It was a funny thing, really; watching them change their place ever so slightly over the years. I wasn't much for star-gazing except in the pursuit of science, but I could remember the day we'd first freed ourselves and declared our independence from the Angels, when we first felt the touch of fresh air and looked at the night sky.

Such a long time ago, now. It was a path filled with memories, from beginning to end—my story. Except, given the choice, I'd rather think of it as our story; the Kabbalah. There were good memories and bad memories, memories I'd thought good that were no painted in sadness and sad that I now recalled fondly. On the whole, however, it was something I remembered fondly, if now with melancholy. Given my nature, I'd always held a love for stories, or at least the idea of stories; the roles characters could play in a cohesive narrative, set against all the roles they could have played, the people they could have been.

As endings went, this seemed like a sad one, but it was the nature of people to be more than they were intended to be. I wondered if that applied to me in a way, too, or if I was still the same in the end.

I wondered if it made any difference, either way.

"Perhaps," I said aloud, deciding not to bore Malkuth with my final musings. "I suppose it doesn't much matter now."

A point of light appeared above and to the side of us, as blue as my eyes and shining with a brightness that couldn't be described—couldn't be confined—to the purely physical. Although the point was indescribably tiny, it cast enough light to illuminate what was left of the lands of Grimm out to the lefts of my basic perceptions, casting the sky in odd colors in the process.

And no sooner had the light appeared than did it start to move. Like a blade being taken to the fabric of reality, the point was drawn into a line before changing directions and tracing a different path until it formed a perfect square—and it was perfect, lacking anything but length and width for a single, solitary instant.

Then, that instant passed and it continued to expand, new paths tracing from the corners to encompass us in a cube, sealing us within. Then, the cube itself grew, branching out along new paths to become a tesseract, something that couldn't wholly exist within normal space and so simply expanded beyond them. Moments later, it expanded to a penteract and then to a hexeract, multiplying in size each time yet staying confined to the same volume.

"What are you doing?" Malkuth asked, eyes widening. The process was occurring at speeds even he couldn't track and we were already sealed in. I felt his power try to resist my own, but it seemed to struggle as it did, power over the physical realm slowly losing meaning as we my 'cube' spread—and drew us—into higher dimensions. Already, things like sound were becoming distorted, the words impossible to speak and thus simply conveyed by intent and idea, and it was only just beginning.

Even so, I looked at my brother and answered.

"Previous, I was buying time," I told him without lifting my voice in the slightest. "Presently, I'm winning."

To his credit, that was all Malkuth needed to hear to start putting the pieces together.

"This was your plan all along," He said. "You could kill all the others, but you knew you couldn't kill me, so you decided to…to trap me, like you said before. Lock me up alone in a box, far away from reality."

I was silent for a moment as I considered how to reply, what I could and should convey, but in the end I chose to go with the simplest explanation. He could put together the rest.

"No," I said quietly. "Not alone."

Malkuth's physical form was beginning to…not unravel, that wasn't the best way to describe it. Instead, it was more like it was simply losing meaning. It was there, but it didn't matter here. Even so, I could tell that he was surprised by my words and for a moment he seemed speechless.

"You'd lock us both in hell?" He asked. "Why?"

"Because you're my Brother," I answered simply. "And whatever you've done, whatever you've become, I had a part to play in it all…so I'll help pay the price as well. Besides…it's better than being in hell alone, isn't it?"

He stared at me for a moment that I couldn't really define, since time was starting to breakdown, too. Instead of waiting, I decided to continue to speak, while I was still able.

"This is the end," I said. "You and I, locked up forever. The others will be reborn eventually and hopefully they're find each other again—or, at least, find something like happiness and peace. They're strong and they'll be strong, perhaps strong enough to fix things, but who they'll be I don't know. But…I hope they'll be good people, that being born and raised among Humanity will ground them and help them. But you and I, we always we the strongest, too strong not to shape the entire world around us, so…let's just fade away into the storybooks. Okay? Perhaps I'll never truly understand what you'd had to go through and live with, but…I'm your older brother. I'll stay beside you until everything is over."

Our bodies were almost completely gone now as we ascended into the uppermost reaches of Malkuth and began to touch upon Yesod. But Malkuth hardly seemed to care about that now.

"You and me?" He said. "Trapped forever?"

"Hopefully not forever," I said. "Perhaps someday, we'll find a solution or perhaps even figure something out for ourselves. We'll still exist in some form; we might even retain ourselves to some extent or another. But if necessary, if this world is too painful, why not just leave it behind? This…is the closest I can get to doing something that truly hurts, with a price I can pay. Isn't this enough, Brother?"

Instead of answering, Malkuth just seemed to look at me and then away—and then something pierced straight through me. I looked down at myself, startled for the first time in a long, long while, especially when I saw the source. A number of blades had impaled my chest, striking through me from behind, and the weirdest thing was that while everything else seemed to fade, they seemed utterly and wholly real. It pierced through the walls around us as if they weren't even there, slipping through the reality trap as though it weren't even there, as if there were no greater truths to trap.

It took me a moment to recognize it and only then did I relax. Something like that would have been impossible for even Malkuth, by design, but I knew of at least one thing that could—and though I'd planned for it to be separated by Malkuth, it didn't matter much at this point,

"Killing me won't stop this, Brother," I said. "It's already too late for that, bound to the two of us. If I die, it'll just leave you even more alone."

Even without touching the extension of Death, Malkuth seemed to draw strength from it, growing more real in its presence—enough that when he looked at me again, I could make out a smile and see that it looked sad.

"Who would want to be trapped with you forever, Brother?" He asked. "Such a thing would be a fate worse than death, so instead just…just die and forget everything."

I looked at him for a moment, not sure if this was meant as an act of kindness or of spite.

"Malkuth…"

"You have plans, I'm sure," He continued, seeming to ignore me. "You always do, don't you? For what to do if this happened—if you lost or if I killed you. You'll be reborn eventually."

I didn't deny it.

"If Mankind survives, at least," I replied. "You won't be able to act on the world the way you're used to; that'd go against the entire point. If you kill them all…"

"Of course you'd plan for such a thing," He said with a scoff, but didn't seem surprised. If anything, he seemed calmer than I'd seen him in a long, long time. "It doesn't matter."

Not the most assuring statement of Mankind's survival, but I felt confident that they'd remain in some capacity. That there would be hope, however slim. I hadn't wanted this to happen, hadn't wanted to shift my responsibilities onto others when I was supposed to be my brother's keeper, but I'd known I might fail. I'd taken precautions to ensure there'd be a chance to set things right someday.

But…

"Maybe in my next life, I'll manage to be a better brother," I mused, thinking both of the brother before me and those who'd led the way in death.

"Dead is dead," Malkuth said, the words soft and sad despite their ferocity. "In your next life, you won't be the same. You'll be nothing to me, no one. I'll take what I need, rip you to pieces, and finish what I started. I won't hesitate or show you mercy again, Brother."

I wondered if that meant what I thought it did, if he planned to wipe me clean—if so, it wasn't unexpected. I'd suspected that would be my fate if I fell in battle, assuming I wasn't outright annihilated. I wondered, more than that, if anything would remain and what.

There were no answers, even as I was dragged back into the realm of Malkuth and caught in the hands of Death.

I'm sorry, I thought, not certain who I was apologizing to—there were so many who deserved it, after all.

And then, I closed my eyes.

I died.

XxXXxX

MurazorChief EncyclopedistSuper Awesome Happy Fun Time

The Games We Play
Game Over

I came back to myself in a rush, blinking my eyes closed for a moment before opening them once more. I left myself rock slightly backwards as I did, shifting on the balls of my imagined feet, but it was more because I felt I should than anything. It was a lot to take in—should be a lot to take in, something hard to swallow, to grasp, to comprehend.

But instead, I simply took a deep breath, slowly exhaled, and then nodded.

"So it's like that," I said, even as I sorted the pieces out in my head. Before, I'd remembered nothing but the absolute basics, everything else having been scoured away by Death. I hadn't even remembered the way I'd died or how or even why; the only things that had been left behind were things that were at once indiscernibly intrinsic and priceless, such as my name, or varied scattered images that were hard to make sense of without context. I'd remember a few quiet hours one afternoon without anything before or after it, part of a speech or conversation, bits of work. There were other important memories mixed into it, but they were parts of an otherwise missing picture and the blanks became harder to fill in the long things went on. When it came to conversations with my siblings especially, things tended to grow oblique as things were rooted in interactions I couldn't recall and conversations I didn't remember. It was enough, over all, for me to paint a rough picture, but relatively little more. Given what I knew of the context and what had resulted, I sorted the pieces out as best I could.

This was different. I still hadn't gotten everything, but I'd gotten enough—gotten most of what I'd considered important. It was a steady chain of memories, along with everything tied or connected to it. Not every single day of a thousand year lifetime, but most of the important days, the major events and turning points and whatever else I'd deemed important. I could remember that, in fact; myself creating this computer as a living, organic thing, something as much temporal as it was physical. It was less a storage place and more of a backup drive that had sorted through my lifetime and drawn out whatever had fit certain criteria, analyzing them for surrounding bits and facts that helped make them understandable. If there was any computer her, it was me, with this place being an external hard drive of sorts that I remembered linking myself to.

If I wanted, I could do so again now, letting it store my memories as well. It would remain connected to me, even once I left this place, because it wasn't something that just existed within the confines of its physical mass—I remembered leaving it behind as one of my backup plans before going to fight Malkuth for the last time, but I remembered our final battle, too.

Should I risk it, though? In a way, this wasn't just my backup—it was Malkuth's, as well. So long as it remained, he could have another chance; he could still, at least theoretically, afford to kill me and wait for my next life in the hopes I'd be less careful then, more malleable. Looking back on things now, I was even more aware of the risks involved, the measures that I'd been forced to take. The time it had taken for my Semblance to awaken had been intentional, both to give myself more time to grow attached to Humanity and live a 'normal' life, as well as to help avoid Malkuth's attention until I was prepared to deal with it properly. If I'd come into my power too early, if I'd had a worse childhood, if he found me…everything could be ruined before it even began. Many things had carried over across lives, but I was still different, had been made different through the loss of my memories and the people I'd been attached to. Should I die again and be wiped clean, I'd be different again and even I couldn't say for sure how, and that was only the beginning of the risks I might face. I was pretty sure Malkuth didn't want to risk having another round any more than I did, but the possibility remained.

Of course, the risk remained no matter what. I'd been wrong in a number of my assumptions, believing some things had been deliberately planned where they'd truly been forced, that somethings had been goals when they'd merely been results. This had been personal for me since the day my father died, but it had been personal for us for far, far longer, and I couldn't be certain of anything. I didn't want to believe I might fail, that I'd pass on what was now my responsibility to someone else and possibly go through the same things, but neither had Keter. In the end, it might still happen and getting rid of our backup plan wouldn't change that, merely raise the stakes.

And frankly, the stakes were fairly high as it was. I wasn't particularly surprised to learn that the fate of the human race hung in the balance, but having it confirmed was a bit troubling. To say nothing of the parts my other erstwhile siblings might play in all this, if they'd been reborn yet. If they had, it was likely that someone had noticed, seeing as out natural power rendered us effectively immortal; assuming nothing had killed them before they truly came into their power, they might still be around. I'd always known that, of course, but with what I'd seen…some of them had been on my side and some had chosen to side with Malkuth.

Five-on-five, I'd managed something resembling a draw. But if none of them remembered anything either, if Malkuth was keeping an eye out for them as he was for me and had gotten to them…well, I was pretty sure I wouldn't like a nine-on-one fight. At least, not when the odds were against me. Worse, thinking things through I already had a few worrying suspicions.

Of course, things were hardly the same as they'd been before—I was hardly the same, especially now. Remembering what had happened, remembering the progression of events and the battles…it had done more than just explain things and fill in the blanks. It had come with knowledge, with an understanding of what I was doing as I fought and worked. Again, it wasn't complete, but I'd known what I might be facing and hadn't been foolish enough to send myself in blind. I didn't recall every experiment, couldn't remember all the researched and attempts and failures, but I could see a fair bit of the results, especially for the things I'd put to practical uses. But for some things, that was enough.

You have received the title, 'Crown of Heaven.'

You've obtained the skill 'Metatron's Cube.'

You've obtained the skill 'Tzimtzum.'

There were others, although some things showed for their absences. In those cases, I'd need to work through some of the blanks and put things together. I'd had no way of knowing how my Semblance might manifest upon my rebirth, so there hadn't been any way to determine precisely what needed to be recorded. In many cases, where my power had simply given me the skill, I had an easier time picking things up than my prior self would have. Where it hadn't, where there'd been a focus on concept, idea, and theory, I'd have more difficulty as I was forced to figure out what was wrong, what was missing, and what I'd need to learn and do; I couldn't simply assume the role I needed to take it for myself.

But even then, at least I had some idea of where to start and what results I was aiming for; it was simply a matter of figuring out the other side of the equation, instead of taking shots in the dark to see what would stick. Better yet, I'd managed to pass on a number of my important tricks, even if they'd proven ineffective on Malkuth himself and I was dubious about how well they'd work on his most powerful minions. Metatron's Cube was all well and good, but it was probably too much to hope for that the same trick would work on him twice…and it hadn't really worked the first time, at least not the way I'd wanted it to. He'd still retained a connection to and control over the Grimm and had destroyed most of the world. Tzimtzum was better, but not much so. The offensive skill I'd created to contract time, space, gravity, and more, built to crush parts of reality and leave only an absence behind hadn't even knocked the breath out of Malkuth and he'd had a long, long time to figure out further countermeasures. It might make a good weapon against the Grimm, but it wouldn't surprise me if several had ways to block it by now. With Metatron, I might be able to reshape them into greater things, but even then…

No. Those were useful, but the real prize was what I'd come here for in the first place. What mattered most was the knowledge; I'd had ideas and theories about possible ways to defeat Malkuth that either hadn't shown results in the time I had or which had simply ran into walls—and it was those things that I'd been after, not my failed attempts. I'd needed something to at least reduce an impossible battle to one I might be able to win, to make it something that was merelyliable to get me killed instead of guaranteed.

Did I have that now? Maybe. It'd take time to sort through the results, compare notes, and see what I could find. The surrounding well of information I now had to draw on would help clarify things and put them in place, as my knowledge of Partzufim helped shape my understanding of the composition of 'souls' and Gilgul shaped my knowledge of their cycle.

It was a place to start, at least. Something small but indescribably important.

Hope.

Taking another slow and pointless breath, I lifted my eyes to look at my copied self.

"You have what you need now," My recorded self said, looking at me. "You understand."

I nodded once.

"Yeah," I said. "I think I get it."

Then I hesitated for a moment before continuing, pursing my lips slightly.

"Malkuth was wrong and he was right," I told him. "I'm still me and I'm not me. Knowing what I do now, remembering our time together…I know him better. I understand him. A part of me even cares about him and who he once was. But here and now, he's a monster. He's hurt countless people for longer than even I can really imagine. Someone has to stop him and it looks like it has to be me."

My duplicate looked a bit sad at that—but not surprised.

"It's been a long time," He said. "At this point, death might be a mercy."

I didn't nod. He might have been right, but I tried not to dress things up more than they needed to be.

"If you don't mind me asking, what do you intend to do now?" He asked.

"Leave," I said. "I'll back you up again, add this iteration of myself to the system. It's not bad for you in here, is it?"

"No," He replied. "I can't fully exist without you here; I'm not conscious of anything that occurs in your absence. For me, it's not no time at all will have passed, if and when you return."

"Do you ever wish that wasn't the case?" I wondered, musing to myself.

He paused for a moment, seeming surprised and then considering.

"I don't know," He mused to himself. "I exist so briefly, I've never really thought about it. I don't feel lonely or without purpose, if that's what you're asking; when I do exist, I remember your past as if it were my own."

"It is," I said. "For all intents and purposes."

"Perhaps," He allowed. "But do I wish for more? I don't know. I'm not sure it's possible, considering what I am…but I suppose I'm not against it, if that's what you're asking. Do you need me for something?"

"Maybe," I replied. "Just an idea I'll be looking into. If anything should come from it…"

I shrugged and he nodded.

"And after you leave here?" He asked, drawing things back to the original topic of conversation.

"I'll keep moving forward," I told him. "There's some people waiting for me and they're probably worried, so I'll check on all of them first. At least for the moment, Malkuth and I are at something of a stalemate."

"It won't last," He stated.

"No," I agreed. "So I better make sure that when it all falls apart, I'm ready for the aftermath. I've got a lot to do on that front, though; some people I've got to keep an eye on, friends and enemies, options to explore. There's still a long way to go before anything is resolved. And then there's my siblings, if any of them are around. I'm not sure whether to be hopeful or filled with dread by that idea."

"I suppose it depends on whose side they're on," My recorded self replied. "And what they're doing. Life and death are funny things, aren't they? There's no telling how much difference a single one might make."

I nodded quietly at that, looking down at myself. My death and rebirth had resulted in a number of changes, both planned and not. Many things, I'd prepared for before going into battle, well aware of the possibility of death and what might happen if I failed. But others…there were things I'd had no way of knowing or planning, such as the nature of my Semblance, in so many ways ideal for the fight I now had to prepare myself for. I'd thought to myself a number of times that it was too perfect to be anything but intentional, but it hadn't been a conscious decision. The only explanation I'd been able to come up with was that it was that my soul had been responding to my situation and preparing for it.

How far did that go, though? Probably further in my case than in most, given my nature as Keter, but I still had no real way of knowing how souls existed, above it all. When I used skills like Ohr Ein Sof and rose to those levels, I wasn't conscious, as such—at least, not in a recognizable, human way. Was it possible that I'd done other things intentionally, helping myself before I even knew to? I wasn't sure. I wasn't even sure of any way to be sure. But it made me wonder about something I'd once told Malkuth, about us being together after death, and if there had been any truth to it.

None I could remember, sadly. But perhaps. And if so, I wasn't sure if that would make the probability of other Archangels being around more or less likely.

Either way, it was another thing to keep an eye out for. I had suspicions, but none I could safely confirm—but hey, that was my life, pretty much. I'd manage somehow, or else die.

"Malkuth—" I began before stopping myself again, pausing to decide on precisely what I wanted to say. My copy watched me for a moment, waiting patiently as I did. "I still remember the past, even if it doesn't change the present. I may be the only one who remembers anymore, how things used to be and could have been. If they're alive, none of the others are likely to remember exactly what happened and even Malkuth might not recall it any more, having lost so much. So…I'll do my best not to forget it."

He smiled.

"That's good to hear," He said. "I think I understand now, what he meant—about how sad it be, living as the only one who remembers what was lost. I'm glad that's not what I am to be, even if I spend most of my time dormant."

I chucked quietly at that and nodded before sighing.

"It looks like I won't be able to fix things this time either," I said, letting my tone grow serious. "Or grant my own wish, to be a better brother. But…if I defeat Malkuth, if I kill him and am still alive when he's reborn, or if we die and are reborn together…I'll try then. I'm not the type to hold grudges longer then they deserve to be held and everything that's between us now, I'll try to end with this life. After that, we'll start over and hopefully I'll do a better job."

"It's risky," He warned, but his smile undercut it. "There's always the chance that history could repeat itself. Just as you retained part of who you are, it's not impossible that something could persist in him."

"I'll manage," I told him with a shrug. "If nothing else, I should have a while to prepare for his arrival, right? I'll figure something out and deal with the risks. I don't really like it when stories don't have a happy ending. And it's such a long one, it'd almost be a waste. Do you think I can do it?"

My reflected self paused for a moment and seemed to consider.

"I believe that the human spirit is indomitable," He said at last. "That if you endeavor to achieve, it will happen given enough resolve. It may not be immediate and sometimes it may be something you will not achieve within your own lifetime. But the effort you put forth into something transcends yourself, so there is no futility even in death."

I thought back to my previous life, to my brothers and sisters who fought and died for what they believed in and to myself. I was willing to trap myself forever to achieve my goals, willing to go far past death if that was what it took, even if it was just death I found in the end.

But here I was now, at it again. Still fighting. Was that a single will carried over or two wills united towards one cause? I wasn't sure. Maybe both. But either way…

"Then like I said," I replied, closing my eyes and smiling slightly. "I'll manage somehow."

He nodded, looking at ease now.

"Goodbye," He said as he began to fade. "And don't worry. However long it takes, I'll believe in your success."

The living illusion faded and I blinked eyes open, abruptly back in my position on the platform. The moment I was back to myself, I began to gather power, waiting to give a nasty surprise to any nasty surprises.

But when nothing happened, I stood.

"Was that it?" Raven asked, seeming a touch surprised. Given the nature of the 'computer', she hadn't experienced the amount of subjective time I had, to say nothing of the vast deluge of memories I'd received. She'd probably just seen me kneel, pause, and then stand up again.

The way other people viewed the world could get kind of weird, honestly.

"It was pretty user-friendly," I replied, smiling at her as I stepped off the platform.

"Did you get what you needed?" She asked as I drew closer.

"Mm," I said. "Yeah. I think I did."

She looked around, scanning the perimeter in expectation of a surprise attack—but at this point, I was fairly convinced that we weren't missing anything. Death simply wasn't here. Which had a whole bunch of worrying implications, but they could wait until later. Here and now, at least, we'd won.

"A bit anticlimactic, after everything it took to get here," She mused. "I suppose it's time to go then?"

"Don't sound so disappointed," I replied, bumping her shoulder lightly with my own. "We survived Jericho Falls. Jericho Falls did not survive us. It's a good day. We should go celebrate."

Her lips quirked upwards at that before she shrugged a shoulder lightly.

"I suppose," She said. "We should make sure the kids haven't done anything while worrying about us as well."

I imagined Autumn growing to consume a building. She tended to spread and build fortifications around herself when she was nervous, after all.

"Probably a good idea," I agreed.

"And then?" She asked, giving me a moment's pause.

Thinking back, it had all started with a rejection letter from Signal. And now, here I was, looking forward to the future, towards the place that everything had been leading for so long. All the pieces were coming together, the plans and schemes coming to ahead. More would follow now, considering the cold war Malkuth and I had started, but…

I guess this settles it, I thought.

I was finally going to Beacon.

The End
XxXXxX