The smell of warm biscuits and fried hash browns wafted through the air of the bustling fast-food joint. A middle-class family of six stood at the counter, trying to order breakfast. The children ran amuck and terrorized the establishment's other patrons, as you would expect. The youngest, a tawny blonde little girl with bright green eyes, stared fixedly at Atom as he waited patiently for the circus to get out of his way.

Atom smiled at the little girl. She was a cutie. He liked kids. Which was a good thing because no matter where he went in public, if there was a child there, it would stare at him. When he’d been younger, this fact had creeped him out. But kids were fun to goof off with, something Atom was especially good at. He might as well accept that he had whatever it was that two-year-old’s found fascinating. 

He looked around to see if anyone was paying attention, then looked back at the little girl. He made a little ball of light and began to foolishly chase it with his hands as he tried to snatch it out of the air. The girl giggled. Her mom turned around to see what her daughter was laughing at and saw Atom standing there calmly.

The woman took Atom in and began to blush furiously. Atom gave her a knowing wink. He was aware of how mortals reacted to Ascendants. It couldn’t be helped. A body reborn in anima was perfected. It was altered at the level of a person's genetic code. Within a few years of being in the Mage realms, your facial features would smooth out, becoming more refined, more symmetrical, and overall, more attractive. This took time and did not happen overnight.

You would be a superior version of your race by the end of this transformation. This perfection tugged at the primal part of your race. The pack nature born from survival instincts that had long existed before sapient civilization.  The need to breed and submit to the strong.

This wasn’t a false beauty like you would find on the big screen. It was the type of attraction that would cause cartoon style traffic accidents as you crossed the street. People would stop what they were doing in a stomach flipping stare. Awed, by your very presence. There was a reason that many worlds considered Ascendants gods.

After achieving Unity, you gain complete control of your appearance, allowing you to tone down the perfection. Atom had done just that, of course, but he guessed he had missed the mark this time. He wasn’t supposed to be back on his home plane without permission from the Arbitrator halo freaks. The process was annoying, and why did he need to ask permission to stop in for a bite? It was a stupid rule, so he broke it quite often. He just had to be careful not to attract the local guardian, if there even was one.

One of the exciting things about his home plane was that the time passed much more slowly here. According to standard planar time, Atom had officially ascended a little over a thousand years ago. Yet here on Earth, only a single year had passed since his departure. This in itself was not too odd. All planes had their own flow of time. But he knew for a fact that the infant planes, those yet to discover anima, were supposed to run at a much faster rate. So, when Atom came back for the first time, he was expecting to find the Jetsons or some type of post-apocalypse wasteland. Instead, Atom found time had barely passed. This was something that Atom knew wasn’t right.

Atom’s mastery of the law of time was absolute. It obeyed him completely. His knowledge and understanding were without question. But his home plane cared little about his mastery. It did whatever it wanted. When he stepped foot on this Plane, not only did time not run faster but was synchronized with the planar time. Thus, any time spent here was equal to the standard planar time. This was highly suspicious.

A plane shouldn’t synchronize with another plane when someone outside comes in. All planes had a set flow of time. While some pockets in its cosmos ran faster or slower relative to other pockets, once you got close enough to the gravitational well in those pockets, said individual would sync with its flow of time. The outside Plane should not sync with you as well.

Time and its ever-present twin were intriguing subjects to study. Take, for instance, planes or different universes. All planes are equal, this is a fact, but not all planes are equal in size. The smaller the Plane, the slower time would run. This makes sense. If all universes are equal in mass, then a smaller universe would have a slower time flow. An entire plane's gravity would be concentrated, thus having a much stronger hold on the latticework of space-time.

If you stepped outside the planes, there was no time at all. Outside the firmament of a plane, the edge of the universe, if you will, things like mass did not exist. Not even light existed. The Void was not like the vacuum of space. It was nothingness.

Space was actually a tangible substance. It was a medium through which matter could travel. Even photons needed the framework of space to travel. Without this framework, they cannot move, and thus they cannot get excited and produce their shininess. Without mass, gravity cannot exist. Sufficient gravity can bend space-time but also, without gravity, the space-time framework cannot stably exist.

Think of it this way. Space and time go hand in hand. You need space to travel, and the movement of matter through space creates time. Together they create a vast network that spider-webbed out across an entire universe. This network needs to be anchored down to be experienced. Thus, if there are no anchors, then time and space cannot exert their effect on anything. But life forms were made up of matter, and that matter had a mass. So, no matter where you went, even if it was infinitesimally small, you stabilized space-time, your perception of it anyway.

At the origin of every Plane is a massive super black hole, or at least that is what earth scientists thought. In actuality, they were only partially correct. What's actually there is an unfathomable dense core left behind by the act of creation of said Plane. This core was not the leftover bits of a star collapsing in on itself. It was the primordial origin of the universe. 

A creation core was like a firecracker wrapped in a balloon. Its activation would blast its outer shell out, inflating the balloon inside the Void. Thus, you have the four-year-old explanation of the Big Bang, a known fact amongst the higher planes.

If the scientist of Earth, with their decades of education and experience studying the universe, were to hear that the act of creation was an acme bomb wrapped in space plastic. Atom would be positive it would cause them to cough up blood.

With all that said, black holes were still a thing. This wasn't to say stars didn't collapse and sometimes created galactic nuclei. They did, and those nuclei stabilized the center of a galaxy with their gravitational force. This was a natural phenomenon that happened to expand the size of a plane. More anchors were needed to be created for expansion to stay stable.

The primordial core served as the source and prime anchor for space-time. It was also the source of the Feed. How the Feed worked and how it connected all the planes was a juicy secret that Atom really wanted to know. He suspected it had something to do with a mesh network and primordial light.

Nothing escaped the gravitational well of the core, not even light, just like Earth's theoretical black hole. The light being trapped by the gravitational force was like a halo that surrounded the core, the event horizon, if you will. If the core’s halo was absorbing all the knowledge in a plane, did that mean you could theoretically read the history of a plane? It would explain many things if that turned out to be the case.

The Feed knows all. If you can tap into the Feed with unfettered access, you could potentially learn anything going on in any plane, at any time, past or present. But are all planes connected to the Feed? This question brings Atoms original thought full circle. Was his baby home plane linked to the Feed?

He obviously knew how to get to his home plane. It was something he innately knew how to do. It was like a compass needle pointing home that worked no matter where it was. It even worked in the Void, albeit not exactly straightforward. There was no space in the Void, so any form of directions was strange.

That wasn’t where the oddities ended. Take the guardian of his home plane. Atom had never met the this guardian. He didn’t even know if it was a man or woman. Was there even one here?

Then there were the deities. That one was a big surprise for him. Most of the deities from his Plane existed in one form or another out amongst the Planes. While he had never met these famous beings in person, their existence outside his Plane could not be denied. Take the rainbow frost or the bifröst. It wasn’t the bridge talked about in Norse mythology, but you could use it to traverse the Planes and was most certainly made of rainbow light. 

The similarities were usually like that, though. Everything was close but not the same. It had really hit home when he found Sanskrit scrawled in a dudgeon he was crawling.

Even the attention that Dory gave him was odd. On the surface, he was powerful and a good tool for the Council to wield if they needed it. There were plenty of other Mantles that could do those jobs just as well. Some much older than him. The oddities were too much. It had driven him mad thinking about it a few hundred years ago, which had sent him into his hermit hood. He’d been like a tweaker four days gone on meth, hunting for secrets in the mirror. Jumping at shadows as he broke into locked areas of the Feed.

He’d wanted to ask people about it. But Atom had been primarily a loner in the beginning. He hadn’t really thought about his home Plane or spoken about his thoughts on the matter to anyone while he was out tearing up the Planes like a cowboy. By the time he started putting the pieces together, it had just been him and Tess. There was the other factor of his advancement to deal with at the time, as well.

Plus, why would Ascendants be interested in places that were off-limits to even the Mantles? Going to baby planes was a big no-no. It was general rule number one.

Once ascendants gained enough power to traverse the Feed, one of the bird-brained Arbitrators would find you and give you the dos and don’ts. You did not mess with the infant lower planes. You could visit, with permission, but you could not influence. You just didn’t do it. He had been dispatched more than once to handle such matters in his early days of gaining his seat on the Council. There were no second chances at that stage of power. You followed the rules, or you became space dust. You wouldn’t survive. The Council would come down on you like the hand of God and smite you out of existence.

You could not escape. No matter where you went, the Council would know. Technically you could always go out into the Void, but that would not end well for you unless you were at the peak of Ascendancy. Even then, it was a coin flip laced with pure chaos on whether you made it back alive or not. Atom was exponentially more powerful than back then, and he still wouldn’t go. He certainly wouldn’t ever chance it again.

All in all. The Planes was one scary-ass place. While he had a lot of hang-ups on certain things. He enjoyed the crap out of his life.

“Next,” the cashier called out.

Atom walked forward, letting his nerd thoughts dissipate.

“What can I get for you?” Said a female teen behind the register.

“Hmm, I’ll take two coffees, two double gravies, a side of sausage, three hash browns, and one-hundred and forty-seven sausage biscuits, add tomato, please. The biscuits are to-go, the rest is for here.”

The teenager stared at him with her mouth partially open. “I, uh, uhm, give me a second?”

“Of course, take your time. I have nowhere to be at the moment,” Atom said with an encouraging smile.

The cashier called over a manager to get Atom’s rather large and abrupt order filled. After a few moments and a couple of polite questions, he was handed his breakfast. The cashier would bring him the to-go order when it was ready.

Making his way to the booth they picked earlier, he found Tess relaxing, flicking through a tablet. She was the picture of a modern rockstar college girl with her normal undercut and shaved lines. Her hair was purple, but it was so dark that it could almost be mistaken for black. She had changed it and let it grow out to her chin.

Atom couldn’t help but stare at her perfection. Punk rocker hair, baggy shirt, and shorts so short that you could get a peep of her firm butt. If the shirt didn’t cover it, that is. He loved it.

She caught him looking but ignored him. He could tell she was pleased even if she wanted to be mad at him right now. He sat down and slid a double biscuit and gravy to her along with one of the coffees.

“You really shouldn’t have that out in this Plane. It can be tracked here. There isn’t enough ambient flux in anima to hide the use,” Atom said. His tone was chiding but leaning closer to disinterest. He cared, and yet he didn’t care whether someone knew he was here.

Tess clicked her tongue and made to put the thing to her side. It disappeared into Atom’s inventory. She had her own ways of storing items, but they were not as secure as his inventory. As far as he knew, they were impossible to steal from.

“Well, what were you looking at?” Atom enquired as he took a big bite of delicious gravy.

Tess kicked him under the table, “Don’t pretend like you didn’t see the dorm room just get broken into by a group of upperclassmen.”

Swallowing down his food, he complained, “And what do you want me to do about it?”

“You did this to her. Actually, one could say that it is your fault that almost every bad thing to happen in her life over the last year was your fault.”

Atom frowned at Tess and aggressively bit off a piece of hash brown. He said nothing to counter her words. He knew that it was sort of his fault. But so, what? He couldn’t change what happened. He’d done right by her afterward. She was going to be an Ascendant, eventually. That wasn’t even mentioning the Holder thing. In the next hundred or so years, she would be an absolute terror in the Planes. She was already a monster on paper. She just needed to Ascend to see it.

“I’m not going to babysit her. Besides this stuff happens all the time in those Academies. She must have offended someone or didn’t give the right family face, yada yada. You know how those people are Tess.” Atom said dismissively as he dipped a hash brown into some gravy.

Tess snorted at his words as she crumbled up her biscuit and slathered it with white sausage gravy. “That isn’t the point Atom. You always do this. Why do you think your other holders are hunting you down so vigorously instead of staying put and growing in power slowly? It’s because you throw them to the wolves and rarely help them. You refuse to speak with them and when you do, the stuff you tell them is made up BS from a country obsessed with cartoons—,”

Atom cut her off. She had gone too far this time, “Don’t you dare, Tess! Don’t you dare blaspheme like that! You watch or read them just as much as I do, probably even more than me if truth be told.”

She shrugged, picking up her fork, “Your point is?” She eyed him. Brow beating him into submission with her dominant yet incomprehensible female logic.

He glared at her, and she glared back while shoveling bits of gravy and biscuit into her mouth. He caved like a house of cards in a gust of wind.

“Fine, but I’m not helping unless her life is in true danger,” Atom said, pulling out the tablet again.

He swiped through a few screens and selected Layla’s name under the HACK tab. She was one of his followers and possessed an artifact of his creation. The HACK was one of his recent creations. It was rather powerful and thus needed a mighty soul to use appropriately. Layla was a long time away from accessing its full suite of abilities or understanding exactly what it was. Either way, he created it so he could find it. This tablet could give him a video feed of the area where his artifact was.

Layla popped up on the screen, and Atom went back to eating his breakfast. She looked half-dead but was sitting calmly in the lotus position, meditating. Atom thought this was hilarious. You didn’t need to sit this way to meditate, but Atom thought it looked cool. So, of course, his followers would sit like the great Gautama while they pondered the mysteries of the universe.

“Looks like Argo is giving her a good thrashing.” Atom commented mildly.

Tess scoffed, “I’m sure you didn’t tell her anything and she is doing everything wrong.”

“You know why babe. You don’t have to be so prissy all the time. Am I not doing what you asked?”

Tess ignored him as she ate and watched the screen. Atom sighed internally and did the same. He could tell these people were weak. Barely neophytes if he had his guess. He’d need to see their medallions to know for sure. They didn’t have any on them. There were tiny invisible threads attached to them like spider silk. They ran off into the ether. Atom flexed his power and mentally traced the threads back to the Cellini district.

“What’s that sly vixen up to? Why would she send a group of shades after our little heroines? Weak ones, but still shades.

Shades were assassins commonly used on Nexus. They had a skill used on them to hide their presence like a shadow. It was a type of mental aura, a trick quickly defended against if you were aware of it and on the lookout for it. But as a mortal, you didn’t have the advantages of a presence, which made it quite effective at the Academy student power level.

Tess’s scrunched up her nose in concentration. Her eyes temporarily went prismatic as she accessed the Feed. They flickered back to normal, and she swallowed her food before saying, “Layla made a play for dominance over the cohort in the common room of the dorm. I think. It feels odd though.”

Tess explained what went down, and Atom was surprised by Layla’s ruthlessness. He was slightly impressed. It was a bold move, one that he wholeheartedly approved of. Sometimes you need to show people the gap. It helped them understand their place. Unfortunately, Layla didn’t have the supportive foundation the others did, so her actions were dangerous.

He’d taken in the twins and the little heir to shore up that problem for her, but they were still in the slice. Also, they all needed time to grow their foundations. While Atom was confident that his methods would put them ahead of everyone else, the elder families, the sectarians, and the corpies had depth at the Academies. Multiple generations at every rank from Neophyte up. All there to support and propel their members through to graduation. This was no small matter.

Atom watched as the kids came in to play with Layla. They made it partially down the hall before Layla opened the door to her room. She delivered a speech that Atom rated at a six out of ten. It wasn’t bad for her first hero monologue. A little violent, but he saw the potential there.

The fight went about how he expected. She made a mistake and was quickly overwhelmed. He thought about the conflict and realized that she needed something to help her equalize situations like this. Layla needed a weapon.

“With a weapon she might have even forced a retreat in this situation. I think I might need to take the kids to the vault and give them some weapon seeds. What do you think Tess?” Atom enquired. They both watched Layla get trussed up like a pig and thrown into a sack.

Tess looked at him before a big smile split her face. She reached over to cup his face. Her soft hand sent a flushing warmth rolling down his spine. “That would be perfect, dear. I’d feel a lot better knowing they had some protection. Since you are going to be so hands-off, this would be a suitable trade-off.”

Tess pulled her hand back in excitement, and Atom inwardly sighed at the loss the warmth. It was progress, though, and he’d take what he could get. He was desperately in love with his partner. To be at odds with her was to be at odds with his heart. She balanced him and kept him on his toes.

“Ohhh!” Tess squealed in joy. She had a mischievous look on her face.

Atom was curious what idea she had, “What did you come up with?”

“I know the perfect weapon.” Tess said with bright eyes. Her eye color was not static. It would shift rapidly with her mood or desire.

“Oh, which one are you thinking.” He rubbed his chin in thought, “She favored hanbòs, I believe. Not exactly the best weapon for every situation.”

He wasn’t sure what seed would suit her best. There were other factors to consider. Her current realm. She was still mortal. If the seed was too powerful, the burden on her foundation would hold her back, if not outright cripple her. Then there were the Academy rules to consider as well. He very well couldn’t give her a weapon of mass destruction. He had a few she could use that might grow to be that strong. Usually, you kept a weapon till you outgrew it. The power gap between realms as you climbed was too vast.

But seed-grade weapons and armor grew with the user. They weren’t scarce, but they were costly. Beggaring even small kingdoms and Ascendants below the True realm. Each one was unique. It took the combined effort of master elemental smiths and soul trinket artisans to create a seed weapon or armor set. Instead, they would go to their death rather than letting go of the pieces without proper compensation. They would even go so far as to buy seeds out on the market if they were too cheaply priced. Atom understood why since he had mastered both professions. The cost to make them was substantial in both materials and its crafters.

Atom snatched up the tablet and stared fixedly at the scene. The group of shades had just passed the barrier to the inner campus. This wasn’t surprising, though. There had been something there at the edge right before they had passed through. He wasn’t sure what it was. A pair of eyes in the darkness, maybe, that's what his perfect memory told him anyway. It was only a flicker accompanied by a strong sense of danger when it took notice of his watching. He rewound the video, but this time, as they passed, it was not there.

“What did you see?” Tess asked in a worried tone.

He watched threw a few more times, but whatever it had been had managed to prevent itself from being discovered and recorded.

“I’m not sure. I saw something but they disappeared. They even managed to erase themselves from the recording.” Atom said as he set the tablet back down and let the screen play on.

“Another player or our mystery killer?”

Atom frowned, “It could be either. I’d go right now and check out the scene if I thought it would do any good. Anything that can erase recorded footage from this thing isn’t going to leave behind traces.”

“Should I report it to Dory?”

Atom jerked his gaze to Tess, shocked. Tess knew better than to say her name here.

“Report what to me?” Came a familiar singsong voice.

Atom’s spine stiffened as Dory walked up to their booth. Her mismatched eyes were full of glee as she watched Atom and Tess squirm. She was in almost the exact same get-up that Tess was in. An overly large slightly faded t-shirt with Greek letters on the pocket. Her brown, black, and platinum blonde hair was push back with a wide headband. The two could have walked out of a Communications 101 class and no one would have suspected a thing. It made Atoms insides run cold as he thought about her flawless assimilation of the local customs.

Atom suspected that Dory would know if her name had been said. He had been slowly starting to feel something similar, like a nat at the edge of his mind that wouldn’t go away. But he was still far below her in power.

Dory was an old monster straight out of the nightmares of old monsters. She and her crew were out taming the primal beginnings of the Planes and creating wonders before anyone even knew there were other planes to play in. And why wouldn’t she be able to hear her name mentioned in another freaking universe. Of course she could.

He glared at Tess, who looked away, shamelessly refusing to meet his eyes. Atom was positive she had done that on purpose. Tess didn’t make mistakes.

“Scooch over Tess, honey. I’m starving. Oh, what are you guys watching? Is it a thriller? I love those. They are always exciting, don’t y’all think.” Dory’s accent was flawless. A picture-perfect southern bell as she prattled on like she hadn’t just caught them red-handed on an infant plane without permission.

Where had she even gotten the tray or the clothes for that matter? She had probably stolen it from someone. Why did that even matter? Atom needed to pull himself together. Her appearance had shaken him to his core.

“Don’t look so glum little Atom. Did you think I didn’t know you came here? You should know better. But now that y’all drawn my attention here. It’s going to cost you two crazy kids. Oh, that one is going to leave mark.”

Atom was confused by her words. He turned his attention to the tablet again as a singular figure ruthlessly took care of the shades that had been running off with Layla in a sack. The figure was in all black garb, just like the squad, but Atom could sense the medallion on his person. He was a Prime.

Atom didn’t know the kid. There were very few Prime rank students at the Academy. That was because very few made it that far in their education. The ranks went Neophyte, initiate, Adept, Practicus, and Prime. You could graduate at Practicus, thus gaining the honorary status of Master. Most took this path as they had other obligations, which was mostly true. The real reason Atom suspected most didn’t go for Prime rank was the danger level.

The trials for Prime rank increased in difficulty exponentially. The honors and the gift from the Academy were substantial. Back in the golden days, this was the only way to graduate, but as time passed, even the faculty of NAA saw that the death and failure rate was too high. Instead of lowering their standards, they made it into this world's equivalent to a death march, raised tuition, raised the rewards to astronomical levels, and gave the little heirs of families an out. They created the Practicus rank for early graduation.

It was a good trade-off. The Academy still honored its creed to cultivate genuine talent while satisfying the ones who funded the school. Since they basically turned Prime rank into an almost guaranteed pathway to death. No one felt shame by taking the easy way out for graduation.

The boy looked down at Layla’s sack for a long moment. Atom suspected he was deciding what to do with her. He wasn’t sure if he should step in. Primes were either about to break into the Mage realm or already had. It was a requirement to obtain the rank. A safety precaution given the difficulty of the trials. Atom could tell the boy had recently broken through to the Mage realm. His aura was smooth like a winter mountain lake. A clear sign he had reached Harmony rank.

Harmony was a pseudo rank in the Mage realm. It was deemed pseudo because technically it was part of the process to touch a path. How could one harmonize with a path if they were themselves not in balance. The Mage realm itself really shouldn’t be considered a realm but there was a qualitative and quantitative change in their power once someone touched a path. People enjoyed there badges of honor and enough individuals became stuck at this junction so it was eventually adopted.

If a person made it to this stage of power then their odds of succeeding to climb higher were good, but they were not outstanding. Around one in fifty could not touch a path and step into the Saint rank. Only one in a thousand could achieve Unity with their chosen path, thus gaining the full title of Ascendant.

The person had to break through all three mortal shells. This didn’t automatically break you out of the mortal realm. To reach the Mage realm was to bring the body, the mind, and the soul into harmony. Which was where the origins of the ranks name stemmed from. It sounded easy on paper, Atom had done it almost instantaneously after breaking the last shell. But he could see where people could get stuck. Shallow foundations was usually the main issue.

Dory looked at Atom, eyeing the screen, “Don’t worry. Ash’s little disciple is a good kid. He’ll take her back to her dorm.”

“Ash is back?” Atom said, shocked.

Alocasia Ash was the headmaster of the Nexus Academy. According to the reports he had received, she had left several years ago to break through a bottleneck.

Dory took a big bite of a chicken biscuit and started speaking with her mouth full, “Mmmhmm, came back today. Gods this is great.”

Dory closed her eyes as she chewed, “I can see why you always come here.”

“Did she break through?” Tess asked as she stole one of Atoms hash browns. The traitor talking to Dory like they were old friends.

Dory nodded her head, “Yep. I found her and gave her that last little push she needed. I was getting tired of doing her admission duties. Too much bowing and scraping.”

“I’m sure it was bothersome,” Atom quipped.

Dory chewed on her meal with her mouth open. Smacking loudly. It was like the woman knew exactly what would drive him mad.

She finished chewing, picked up her fountain drink, and took a long pull on the straw, never breaking eye contact with Atom.

Setting the drink down, she said, “You are currently on my shit list kid. Don’t try me.”

Her southern draw was too good. This whole situation was starting to get to him. He knew he was in trouble, yet the woman was here having breakfast with Tess and him like nothing was amiss. How was this okay.

“You got jelly on your face.” Atom said, mostly to be petty. She was obviously going to leverage something else over his head and force him to do something he didn’t want to do. Much less be a part of.

Dory wiped the jelly off with her hand. She looked at Atom and Tess seriously.

“It’s about time you too were rained in. Brought into the fold and brought up to speed. I’ve let you galivant out in the wild long enough. You were forced into an odd position when your grandfather left his legacy to you. It normally takes millennia to reach the levels of power you're currently at. As you know by now this isn’t normal. This should be clear when you broke through the Origin realm into the Divine realm. Or should a say, the Madness realm.”

She gave Atom a knowing grin and continued, “The price for power is high and the Divine realm is a difficult one to come to grip with, huh. The understanding that comes even kills some. You know I once watched someone spontaneously combust after they broke through? It was just too much for them. But most do what you did.”

She waved her hand off to the side. “They hole themselves up and go crazy as they try to figure out if what they discovered is truly real. It’s really the only way.”

Atom's thoughts were racing as Dory basically told him she had been watching him for the better part of a thousand years. Maybe not all the time but certainly more than he was comfortable thinking about. She also knew about his grandfather. That made some sense given the old man's actual past, which he hadn’t found out about until after taking the Mantle.

The man truly had been an unfathomable genius at shirking responsibility. Going so far as to shamelessly pass it on to his ignorant grandson. Atom wasn't even mad about it. He'd had a choice, and the old malingering catfish had said it would be fun, but perilous. What he wouldn't give to speak to him again. He missed that man fiercely.

Atom thumped his head back against the booth a few times before looking at Dory, resigning himself, “Just get to the point, Dory. You clearly want something. You know why I’ve intentionally avoided being in the public eye.”

She was right about the price of the Divine realm. It was not an easy one to deal with. He needed to break through to the next realm to fix the issue but to fix the problem was to accept the price. Atom had searched for workarounds, but he knew there weren't any.

The initial madness was gone, but his progress had been stalled hundreds of years now. He was still under the pressure of the price. Something he wasn’t willing to pay.

“You know if you just gave in, you would have probably already broken through.” Atom tried to protest, but she waved him off. “I’m well aware of the burden. The holder requirement exists for a reason Atom. If you embraced it instead of hiding, you wouldn’t have this much trouble. But that’s not what I’m here about.”

Dory pulled out a memory crystal from thin air and handed it to Atom. He looked at it suspiciously. These were typically used to keep events accurate to the user's memory. They couldn’t be tampered with, and it was one of the few ways to pass knowledge along without the Feed gaining access to it. Most people didn’t know about the Feed, so they didn’t realize its actual value. It was commonly used to help pupils gain insight into their master’s thoughts and feelings while performing arts, or in the higher-grade crystals, passing on inheritances.

This one was a divine supreme grade. This type of memory crystal was used to store memories that held greater truths. Memories that could kill an ascendant if they were not ready with the power, they truths held. No doubt, Dory had supreme-grade memory crystals that cost millions of credits, just laying around like pieces of trash. She was Dory, after all.

“What’s in it?”

Dory wiggled her eyebrows mischievously, “It is full of truths Atom. Secrets so big that they would cause widespread panic across every Plane. Truths about what the Councils real duties are. Truths about why the war with the enemy came to the relatively peaceful stalemate it is at. The truth behind the destruction of an entire plane.”

Atom had the strong impulse to throw the crystal away and run back to his safe house. Go into Defcon one and destroy anything that came within a galaxy of his domain. He did not want these truths. They were too heavy. There was too much responsibility attached to them. Shackles that would tie him to the Council too tightly. It burned in his hand like the sun. He wanted to crush it and be damned at the costs. 

Atom needed to calm down. He felt his wrist start to burn and looked down to see that his power was beginning to overload the safety net that the artifact provided. If the buffers failed, he would kill hundreds of thousands of people in the blink of an eye. It would be like a nuke went off, leaving this city a wasteland of smoking glass and his version of radiation. He didn’t think Dory would let that happen, but she shouldn’t have to. He was better than this.

Suppressing himself, he looked at Dory with hard eyes, “I don’t want this, Dory.”

She slapped the table and laughed like he had just told the funniest joke.

“Look, don’t look. I don’t care. But you will be coming with me. I need your help and you don’t have a choice in the matter. It’s time to grow up Atom. If you want to continue to act like a child, then do it on your own time. Now take me to facility forty-two. We are going to need that toy you have stored there.”

He gave no outwards sign that she has said something significant. But Atom’s stomach flipped in panic. He should deny what she was talking about and leave. Dory instantly saw through him and shook her head in mirth.

She tapped her wrist, “We are on the clock kiddo. You need to be back before physical conditioning, don’t you? Stop pretending and let’s go.”

Atom went pale at the words. She knew everything. Did he even have secrets? Why was he even surprised at this point? But planes. There was only one thing in F-42. It was a contingency plan he had created after his time in the Void.

He looked down at the crystal. What was in this thing that would require something on that scale? He stuck it to his forehead reluctantly.

A being the size of a skyscraper ripped through the fabric of reality. Its whole body was white like the purest snow. It had a humanoid shape and two sets of angelic golden wings of energy sprouting out its back. The face of the being was heart-rending in its perfect beauty. It lacked eyes, and only a flawless human-like mouth could be seen. The aura the being gave off was divine in nature. Its pressure urged you to bow down and worship it as your new god.

It looked towards Atom. It smiled, and the facade of its divine nature shimmered. A monstrosity born from the very depths of madness stood in its place. Its very existence was an offense to the nature of ordered reality. It did not belong inside a plane. It should not be capable of gaining access to a Plane.

This one was a true-blooded angelic type. A being wrought from the madness of leftover primal forces mixing after the act of creation. The residual anima and chaos of the void intermingling to create both madness and otherworldly beauty. The planes repelled these things by their very nature. Atom’s heart squeezed tight in anxiety. He had feared this exact possibility.

The thing flicked its hand towards the solar system's sun. Atom could not sense the energy at all but he could feel the space around it’s finger tips screaming in agony. This power wasn’t supposed to be here. It’s use and presence scarred the very framework of space.

With a gesture a blade of white light tinged with red and black flew out and struck the sun. The celestial orb immediately swelled thrice in size before shrinking to a pinprick. Then it went supernova. Atom saw two blue planets in rotation around the sun.

The emotions from the memory were strong as they looked at the planets. They knew these planets were full of life. They had just discovered space travel and were in talks on forming a cooperative effort to reach further in science and the stars. A new revolution geared towards peace and prosperity that would last for ages. Possibly leading to this infant planes awakening.

The planets disintegrated in seconds, killing untold billions, and erasing the fledgling cultures out of existence. The explosion rolled over the being. The power of the nova was significant enough to kill the monster, but it did not flee.  It’s mouth parted showing thousands of needle like teeth. It never stopped smiling at Atom as it burned to ash.

It was folly to derive or associate any meaning from their actions. To do so would only give you a false understanding. They just weren’t like us. The beings of the void were madness made flesh.

This one had probably just been bored and killed an entire solar system. It didn’t care that it would die in the act. There was no deeper meaning behind its action. Or maybe there was. There was no way to tell. They did not think like the sentient life inside the planes. They were truly alien in ever sense of the word.

Whoever the being was that this memory belonged to was powerful. Extremely powerful. Why they had not acted to save the planets left Atom filled with complex emotions. He understood why but it was a hard truth to swallow. To act would have been to weaken the fabric there even further. Giving other things like this a chance to breach. Allowing it to kill itself along with the lives of the solar system was the right call. The memory was full of deep emotion and regret over the loss.

This was the exact thing Atom was trying to avoid. The responsibility to make calls like this. He didn’t want them on his soul. He didn’t want to have to weigh the lives of a planet for the lives of a galaxy.

What he wanted to do was enjoy his life with his partner and avoid this crap altogether. He pulled the crystal off his head as the memory shifted to a different scene. Atom couldn’t mentally or emotionally handle another memory like that.

He dropped the crystal into his inventory and looked up at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry Atom. I’d give you more time if I could but unfortunately too many things are happening at the same time. There are very few of us at a high enough realm to stop them. Bringing you in will save lives. I weighed that over your ignorance. This is the call I had to make.”

Atom hated Dory for this. For manipulating him with that memory. He didn’t want to let it affect him. He wanted to turn his heart to ice and walk away. But he couldn’t.

Deep down, below the blasé ruthlessness and habitual procrastination, sat a smaller version of himself. He sat with his grandpa as they watched the heroes of his childhood rise to the challenge time and time again. 

“But grandpa why don’t they run away. Won’t they get hurt by the bad guys?”

Atom’s grandfather tousled his hair and said, “Heroes don’t run kiddo. Hero’s don’t worry about getting hurt. To be a hero is to protect those around you. To have the burden of knowledge that if you fail, no one else is coming.”

Atom’s face hardened and he clinched his little fist. He looked back to the screen and said, “I’m going to be a hero someday.”

His grandfather laughed and snatched him up from the floor. “Is that so little Atom? Well, we will see.  Why don’t we worry about being a hero another day and go steal some of those turnovers your Gran is making.”

The echoes of laughter and love faded from his mind. Atom let out a huge breath as he let the complex emotions go. A thousand years and they were still as plain as day. But they served no point other than to reenforce what he already knew in his heart. He’d been trapped by the burden of knowledge. If he knew. He would have no other choice but to act. An inner truth about himself that he had tried to bury time and time again.

“Yeah, I know. I would have probably done the same,” he said letting out another deep breath.

The cashier from earlier started to bring over a few boxes full of sausage and biscuits add tomato. Setting them down on the table behind them.

Atom thanked the girl after she brought the last one. He stood up and dropped the boxes and tablet into his inventory.

“Shall we go slay a monster?”

The three shifted away to facility forty-seven.

---

 

Hovering in the shadow of a bench across from where the trio also disappeared. A pair of faintly glowing eyes shimmered into focus.

“Hoh hoh hooooh. Now this day just keeps getting more and more interesting. Who would have thought following that viewer back to its source would have led to this? I wonder where it will lead. Hmm. The little one should be fine for now, in her sack. I think I’ll piggyback,” the voice snickered darkly.

A pair of burning pink eyes with an accompanying white cheshire smile shimmered out of existence.