01 – Deal with God

“This has to work,” the man said, wiping sweat from his brow. It had been centuries since the last time he had felt the strain from any physical activity, and the sensation was foreign to him, strange.

Ishrin. His was a name unknown to those he hadn’t already vanquished. He was known far and wide by many other names, though: the Mad Ritualist, the Genocidal, the Destroyer, the Scourge and the Plague of Worlds. He paced frantically around the large room in the heart of the tallest mountain in Eternia. His senses stretched out for yet another sweep of the whole planet, searching for something, a faint glimmer of hope, but finding nothing.

Then his eyes returned to the large circle he had drawn on the ground. Lines intersected and crossed each other in a complex, mesmerizing pattern overlayed upon the structure of the world itself. At the edges of the lines, treasures beyond imagination were laid down on rich pedestals filled with runes, carvings, glyphs and magical arrays.

The confluence of an entire universe’s worth of magical knowledge, artefacts and raw power all inside a single room, and yet Ishrin, the man responsible for the end of it all just so he could fuel one last, desperate ritual… hesitated.

“Liù, my love. I hope you are out there, somewhere, in the great darkness beyond the edge of this universe.”

A lone tear flowed silently down his face as his voice faltered for a moment. The world outside was a mirror upon which played the mournful lament for his lost wife. After she had died, the universe had soon become a landscape of pain and solitude, and his life that of a man standing on a mountain of corpses just so he could end his loneliness.

I wish I could remember your face…

The tear fell to the ground, lit by the light of the thousand crystals that powered the ritual, and its essence mixing with the carefully drawn lines of the circle and intermingled within, changing the structure, locking the destination. By design, this was the most important part of it all, the sacrifice, the everlasting intangible love that was all Ishrin could remember of his long gone partner for life.

Time had taken much from him. But no more.

“It’s time. May you return to me, my love.”

With one last word of power, Ishrin activated the ritual circle. Power flowed out from his body, a torrent of essence emptying him, the ritual greedily sucking everything it could find to power itself, demanding more, demanding power, demanding essence.

Ishrin opened himself to the flow of power. He let the ritual take it, take everything it needed. He only had one shot, this was his last act of defiance against the heavens themselves, his only hope of getting back the only thing he had ever lived for.

At least, for longer than he could remember. And in those last moments before the last of his essence left him, Ishrin realized that the ritual was not going to stop there, that it would continue to consume and expand, searching for yet more power to fuel its purpose and failing, searching more and more because it could not, would not, ever find what it was looking for.

Ishrin was older than some of the worlds out there. He had witnessed the end of stars, and the birth of new life. He had scoured those lands in search of the key that would unlock the secrets of the beyond for him, that would allow him to reach out there and take back what had been forcefully taken from him. The love of his life.

Ishrin was so old he did not even remember a time before her. But she had been gone so long, he struggled to remember a time when she was with him. All he knew of his own life was that someone, something had taken her from him. And that he wanted her back. That was all he had lived for. For longer than he could remember.

As the last mote of essence left his body, Ishrin closed his eyes, and shed a single tear.

I wish I could hear the sound of your voice one last time.

***

Failure. The word echoed in the emptiness that was existence. The only thing that was real was the mind, and Ishrin found that all his mind could contemplate was failure. He had failed.

He had done everything right and still failed.

Rage began to bubble up from the depths of his being. He had not failed in a thousand years. And yet, the one thing he needed to get right…

Ishrin’s eyes shot open and, surprisingly, he found that he could see. Before him was an endless expanse of white, and in the distance he could make out a single dark dot marring the perfect endless landscape.

A presence. A being. He could feel them, even from afar. The presence was watching him with curiosity, annoyance. And in return, Ishrin’s own annoyance grew and mixed with the rage he was feeling. He knew he was not thinking straight, but he didn’t care. The one thing he was truly living for had escaped his grasp. His mind struggled to come up with a reason why it happened. Why the ritual had failed. Why he was not hugging his sweet, sweet Liù and instead was standing here, in a land of nothing. There had to be a reason.

Before him, the presence stirred and drew closer.

He is the reason my ritual failed. He must be.

Ishrin had never felt surer about something in his whole life. The rage, finding something to be focused on, exploded outwards. For the first time in who knows how long, he was feeling something. Something more than apathy, something more than the endless boredom of a universe where life had gone extinct by his hand.

Rage.

He watched carefully as the small dot in the distance grew into the shape of a person. How long the process took, he could not say. But he studied it, he tracked its movements, and he gathered himself. He felt for the power of his old world, and the power responded. The passage of time had long escaped his grasp, his mind too vast to really count the seconds of his existence, and in this land of pure unadulterated whiteness there were no external points of reference he could use.

But the rage only grew. The power behind Ishrin was that of a whole universe, gathered in one single attack.

“You!” Ishrin snarled when the shadow was close enough that it could hear him. “How dare you? You ruined everything!”

And he attacked. A beam of pure destruction struck out from his outstretched hands, a dazzling and terrible power capable of ending entire galaxies. It arced through the air of this strange white space, tearing through reality itself, distorting the image of the man behind with its oppressive weight.

The man blurred. There was a loud explosion, and Ishrin was sent flying. The air exploded when the beam collided with something, and the realm of white was awash with a myriad of colors and lights. The air felt heavy. It burned. The roar of the collision was deafening.

Then, Ishrin clearly heard a sound cutting above all the cacophony of their battle. The snap of fingers. After it was gone, all sound was as well and no more could be heard. All traces of his attacks were gone. All the energy, gone. He could not even feel the familiar weight of his old universe behind his actions anymore. As if the universe itself was now… gone. Missing, snapped away by a power so much greater it was frightening.

The silence lasted only seconds, but the realization of who Ishrin was standing before made those seconds feel like entire minutes. The rage, a flimsy and uncaring friend by necessity, was nowhere to be found now, and Ishrin was left alone to his own devices, able to think, able to realize the grave mistake.

Eventually he found himself face to face with the man. A man who was… clapping his hands. He did not understand what was happening, but the man spoke as if the attack meant nothing to him, as if the whole thing had fazed him so little he was not even annoyed anymore, just amused.

“Well, congratulations!” The man said with a bright, radiant smile on his face. A smile that did not reach his eyes. The amusement slowly turned into calculating coldness.

“W-what? Who are you?” Ishrin stammered. He found that, in the face of true inescapable power, his words failed him.

Then a searing pain took him. His body convulsed, and he found himself unable to even scream as all his muscles seized and tore, as his bones snapped and his blood boiled away. Bit by bit, his body was ground to dust by a force he could not even see, and Ishrin was both inside himself experiencing the excruciating pain and an outside observer, watching himself die.

It was over even more suddenly than it began.

The man, who had been watching him impassively, smiled again. “I said, congratulations! Name’s Albert. Pleasure to meet you, I’m literally god.”

Ishrin bit his lips and the first five things that came to mind died before he could utter the words. He didn’t want to experience whatever it was that this strange deity had done to him again.

If before he was only rationally aware of just how insignificant he was before Albert, now he knew from experience. And experience was a strong motivator.

“Where am I?”

Albert shrugged. “You called it the Beyond. Let’s go with that, why not? See,” he pointed a finger in Ishrin’s face. “Somehow you managed to Grey Goo an entire planet, which was already dead mind you, with a fucking ritual! Do you know how insane that sounds? Not to mention how utterly bothersome it is to clean that up! Isn’t that right, Jeff?”

The man looked behind himself, and for a moment there was silence. Then Albert’s face fell, and a hint of sadness could be seen, for the shortest of moments. A shadow of an emotion passed through his features too fast to Ishrin to read, but he tensed all the same, his very gut fearing an explosive reaction. Albert was clearly not stable, and that made him dangerous. You could not reason with mentally ill people.

“Oh,” he said in the end. “I still do that, don’t I? But Jeff is long dead. You understand me, Ishrin, don’t you?”

Once again did the smile that did not reach the eyes.

“In any case, you’re here and you almost fucked up a whole universe that I oh-so-painstakingly put together. What do you say to that?”

“I was… looking for my wife.” Ishrin replied.

Ishrin died again. He died a death that somehow managed to be even slower and more agonizing than the last.

“Right, so ambitious. Was it worth doing all that for her? Let’s see…” Albert said, monotone. “This woman here, right?”

An image of a woman appeared floating in the air above Albert’s palm. Ishrin’s mind might have grown too old to recall his wife’s features in detail, but his heart had not. Upon seeing her, he felt like he was about to faint. His vision became blurry, but he beat back the tears out of sheer force of will.

“It’s her. Liù.” He whispered, turning to face the god. He gathered himself and defiantly locked eyes with the man. “Yes, I did it to get her back. I regret nothing.”

Ishrin died again. With each death, he felt like he was losing a piece of himself. Perhaps it was true. Hard to tell.

Albert smirked. “That’s not true, is it? Listen, I’m not an evil deity. I get you! I created all this simply because I didn’t want to die when my multiverse collapsed, and I sure as hell wasn’t taking chances waiting out the end to see what was after. But just because I created a whole multiverse out of fear of death and boredom doesn’t mean I don’t care about it, capiche?”

Ishrin frowned. “What do you mean?”

This particular death was especially gruesome.

Albert rolled his eyes. “So disrespectful of your elders.” He man leaned forward. “It means that you. Owe. Me.”

Ishrin felt the weight of the statement like a physical thing. He was standing before the peak of true power, before omnipotence and omniscience, before a being that – no matter how human he looked – was utterly different and alien. Albert’s power could not be measured. Coud not be grasped or understood.

For a moment Ishrin wondered why such a being would even be bothered by his actions. But he quickly quashed that thought.

“Do you remember that time,” Albert spoke slowly, calmly, but he was pacing around the white space and his gait betrayed nervousness. Annoyance, perhaps. “There was a little ant, and it crawled on one of the peripherical lines of one your silly rituals.”

Ishrin froze.

“Compared to an ant, you are a god, aren’t you? And yet, that annoying little ant managed to blur one of the most important lines in the whole ritual. A ritual that took you three years to set up. And you were angry. So angry, in fact, that since that day there had been no more ants on the whole of Eternia, ecological consequences be damned. You follow?”

Ishrin nodded. “I understand.” Now his mind was working a bit better, and he could think. “You didn’t kill me, though.” Not permanently. “You brought me here for a reason.”

The man laughed. It was eerie and sinister. There was madness in his voice. “You think yourself wise, old, so old your mind forgets even the face of your wife. But you are just a child. I saw the end of things, Ishrin, I lived until I was the last person standing at the edge of the real beyond. There are things out there that even I cannot fathom, powers even I cannot begin to grasp. Understand this.”

“I understand.”

“Good!” The god clapped his hands again. “Now for the part where I offer you a deal. You obviously nuked your place, so no going back there of course. And sure as hell I’m not giving you your wife back for free. But,”

The man once again leaned closer, and it was as if the distance between the two didn’t matter at all.

“You get a chance to actually look for her. I will open the doors of the multiverse for you, teach you how to navigate its currents. You will be reincarnated on a backwater shitty fantasy medieval planet with this knowledge, your old knowledge and little else from your stash of materials to get you started. And you will be free.”

“I don’t understand. This is not a deal at all, this is a gift you are giving me.”

Ishrin died again. God dammit.

“Me dammit indeed,”

Ishrin’s thoughts froze.

Albert, the god, laughed. “Don’t worry. This should be the last death… if you behave yourself. Back to the point, there are certain things that I need you to do. Be a good guy. Help people in need, yes? You know, the opposite of what you became when your wife quote-unquote ‘died’. She didn’t die, and you knew that, but you still acted as if she had died. What would she say if she saw you now?”

“She… would hate me. Is this the deal? If I step out of line, you tell her the truth of what I have become?”

Ishrin died again.

“That one was a freebie. You don’t have enough fear of the divine.” Albert shrugged again. “There’s no need for me to blackmail you. After all, one cannot fake who he is. If you don’t change by the time you finally find her, then your reunion will be quite unpleasant. And disappointing, for both of you. Simple as that. You won’t become good again all of a sudden when you see her, you know? And she will know if you fake it. No, you will need to work on yourself. And that, luckily, just so happens to make your goals align with mine. Well, plus or minus a couple of circumstances I will need to engineer, trials you will need to overcome, and much more. The road you have ahead of yourself is long, harsh and it will break you if you let it. But always remember this: she is waiting for you at the end of it. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen? That you die? That too, would serve a purpose. It would tell me that I was wrong about you. But you won’t die, will you?”

“Who will you be, then, when you finally get her back?” The god asked, and the world shifted.