The Call of Asheron:
An Epic of Four Souls

The Institution of Theoretical Thaumaturgy stood at the edge of Qush’s capital, its obsidian spires reaching toward stars that most believed were holes in the celestial sphere through which divine light leaked. Duulak knew better. He had known better for years now, and the knowledge sat in his chest like a stone.

In his study, surrounded by astrolabes and grimoires, crystalline models of atomic structures and hand-drawn maps of theoretical worlds, Duulak the Twice-Blessed—hero of the Sundering War, slayer of the Void Drake, first mage to successfully transmute consciousness itself—sat hunched over calculations that would terrify most minds capable of understanding them.

The whirlwinds had been appearing for weeks now. Others saw them as curiosities, perhaps omens, certainly something for the priests to debate. Duulak saw them for what they were: punctures in the skin of reality, symptoms of something far more fundamental than invasion or divine intervention.

• ‘It’s a strange thing, is it not?’ Korvain, his apprentice, ventured.

• ‘What do you mean?’

• ‘These portals. What are they?’

• ‘Windows. Or perhaps doors. The distinction depends on whether we’re meant to look or to walk through.’

• ‘The priests say they’re divine punishment.’

• ‘The priests say many things. It’s easier than thinking. These portals are not punishment—they’re mathematics expressing itself in dimensions we normally can’t perceive.’

• ‘That’s just crazy talk. You’re a hero to our people and a renowned scholar.’

• ‘Ha! I didn’t get my reputation as a scholar by burying my head in the sand. I’ve come so far but it’s been one giant circle. These portals… they sing to me, Korvain. They sing of worlds beyond worlds, of possibilities I’ve theorized but never dared believe.’

Three weeks before the first whirlwind appeared in Qush, Duulak had been summoned to the Chromatic Court to demonstrate his latest theoretical breakthrough. He had shown them windows into parallel worlds, and something had looked back. The demonstration had not gone well. The Liege had forbidden further experiments.

But now the universe itself seemed to be conducting the experiment, and Duulak was perhaps the only one in the kingdom who understood what was happening. Reality was developing fissures, and through those cracks, infinity was leaking in.

He stood, moving to his window where he could see the nearest portal swirling in the courtyard below. It called to him—not with words but with pure possibility. It promised answers to questions he’d spent a lifetime asking. It promised understanding of the fundamental nature of magic, of consciousness, of existence itself.

And Duulak, who had never met a mystery he could resist, began making preparations to answer that call.

From the slant of a simple man, one that wasn’t known to dabble in the arcane, Thomas found this world a strange but navigable place. The forest spoke to him in languages of track and spoor, wind and weather. He had no need for the mysteries that consumed scholars and mages. His concerns were simpler: the draw weight of his bow, the sharpness of his arrows, the welfare of his family.

But this morning was different. This morning, he tracked the behemak.

His wife, Mara, had kissed him goodbye at their cottage door, her hands flour-dusted from the morning’s baking. “Be careful, Thomas,” she’d said, as she always did. “Young William needs his father to teach him the bow come spring.”

William. His boy. Seven winters old, with his mother’s dark eyes and Thomas’s stubborn jaw. The child who needed medicine they couldn’t afford, food that was growing scarce, a future that seemed to dim with each passing season.

The behemak was his answer. Its hide alone could fetch enough gold to see his family through a decade of winters comfortably. This particular beast was ancient, wounded from a territorial dispute Thomas had witnessed from his perch high in an oak. The younger behemak had won, claiming the elder’s hoard, but both had limped away bloodied. The elder, Thomas’s quarry, had fled north.

Thomas had spent three days tracking it, sleeping in trees, eating cold meat to avoid alerting it with fire. His plan was patience itself—follow the beast to its new lair, wait for it to leave in search of food, then claim whatever riches it had managed to accumulate. Even a fraction of a behemak’s hoard would change everything for his family.

As he navigated a particularly dense section of thornwood, maintaining careful distance from his quarry, a peculiar shimmer caught his peripheral vision. At first, he dismissed it as morning light on dew, but as he turned, he saw it clearly—a distortion in the air itself, a swirling vortex of impossible colors hanging between two ancient oaks.

He should have continued tracking the behemak. Every moment of delay risked losing the trail. But the portal sang to him—a wordless song that bypassed his ears and spoke directly to his heart. It promised safety for Mara, education for William, abundance beyond his simple hunter’s dreams.

His hand reached out without conscious command. The rational part of his mind, the hunter’s instinct that had kept him alive through countless dangers, screamed warnings. But the song was stronger than reason, more compelling than caution.

• ‘Just a quick look,’ he told himself. ‘The behemak’s trail is fresh. I can spare a moment.’

The last coherent thought before he stepped through was of William’s laughter. Then even that dissolved in the siren song of the portal, the call that would tear him from everything he’d ever loved.

Maajid was seventeen, brilliant, and utterly convinced that existence was a cosmic joke with humanity as the punchline. In the humble village where he’d been raised, surrounded by simple farmers who found comfort in their limited horizons, he alone seemed to see the bars of the cage.

He had discovered his magical talent by accident—or perhaps by destiny. The annual visit of the robed men who blessed their fields had always intrigued him. While others saw religious ceremony, Maajid recognized patterns, formulas, the manipulation of forces that had nothing to do with divine intervention.

When one of them had deliberately left behind a bag of arcane implements—a test, Maajid later realized—he had seized the opportunity. The scrolls, the reagents, the staff; all became keys to a door he hadn’t known existed. “Malar Cazael,” he had spoken, and felt reality bend to his will.

But even this newfound power felt hollow. What was magic but another set of rules, another cage with prettier bars? He sought not just to understand the universe but to transcend it, to find the space between the cosmic joke and its punchline.

His father, a practical man who valued honest labor over intellectual pursuit, had given him an ultimatum: commit to their way of life or leave. Maajid chose exile over submission, setting out for the harbor city of Mawwuz with nothing but his stolen arcane knowledge and his boundless ambition.

Now, standing in the royal court, he watched the portal manifest with a mixture of excitement and recognition. This wasn’t one of the wild portals that had been appearing randomly. This was deliberate, controlled, created by someone who understood the mathematics of reality as deeply as Maajid aspired to.

• ‘Magnificent,’ he breathed, approaching the swirling vortex.

• ‘Stay back!’ a guard warned, but Maajid laughed.

• ‘Don’t you see? This is what I’ve been searching for. A door to elsewhere, to elsewhen, to else-everything. The universe is finally showing its hand.’

The portal sang to him, but unlike the others who would be seduced by its call, Maajid heard the song clearly. It was the music of infinite possibility, the harmony of paradox resolved, the laughter of the void that mocked all certainty.

He stepped through not because he was compelled, but because he chose to. Because on the other side lay either truth or a better class of lie, and either would be preferable to the mundane deceptions of ordinary existence.

Commander Marcus Tiberius of the Third Legion had seen enough impossible things in his forty-three years to know that the impossible was merely the improbable having a particularly aggressive day. He’d fought alongside the Gharu’ndim against raiders from the Drylands, had stood shield-to-shield with his brothers against horrors that crawled from the Direlands. He’d earned his cognomen “Steel and Sinew” not through boasting but through survival.

When the portal appeared in the Legion’s training ground, his men had fallen back in superstitious fear. Marcus had stood firm, not from bravery but from a lifetime of trained response to the unknown: evaluate, adapt, overcome.

The swirling vortex was unlike anything in his considerable experience. It defied tactical assessment, offered no flanks to exploit, no weakness to probe. It simply existed, a vertical wound in the world that sang a song of distant battlefields and impossible victories.

• ‘Commander,’ his lieutenant, Gaius, approached cautiously. ‘Should we evacuate the compound?’

• ‘Negative. Set a perimeter. No one approaches without my direct order.’

• ‘And if it… does something?’

• ‘Then we respond accordingly. We are the Third Legion. We do not flee from the unknown; we catalogue it, contain it, and if necessary, kill it.’

But even as he spoke with commander’s confidence, Marcus felt the portal’s call. It whispered of battles that would make his previous campaigns seem like children’s games, of enemies worthy of a true warrior’s steel, of a purpose greater than maintaining order in an empire slowly rotting from within.

He had joined the Legion as a boy of sixteen, filled with dreams of glory and honor. Twenty-seven years had beaten those dreams into the shape of duty, responsibility, and a bone-deep weariness that no amount of rest could cure. He commanded respect, owned land, had wealth enough to retire in comfort. But comfort had never been what Marcus Tiberius sought.

The portal offered something else: a war with meaning, a cause worth the spending of his remaining years, a final campaign that would either kill him or make him whole again.

His men would follow him anywhere; he’d earned that loyalty in blood and suffering shared equally. But he wouldn’t order them through the portal. This was a choice each man had to make alone.

Marcus removed his commander’s plume, set aside his insignia of rank. If he was going to step through that doorway, he would do it as Marcus the soldier, not as the Commander of the Third. He had no family to leave behind—the Legion had been his family for decades. No children to mourn him—the men under his command had been his only legacy.

• ‘Sir?’ Gaius watched with growing concern. ‘What are you doing?’

• ‘Something necessary, soldier. Hold the perimeter. If I don’t return within the hour, seal this area and report to the Senate that Commander Marcus Tiberius died investigating an anomaly.’

• ‘Sir, I cannot allow—’

• ‘You cannot allow?’ Marcus smiled grimly. ‘Since when does a lieutenant tell a commander what he can or cannot do? But you’re right to be concerned. This is not an order, Gaius. This is a personal choice. The Legion trained me to evaluate threats. This portal is either the greatest threat we’ve ever faced, or the greatest opportunity. Either way, someone needs to scout it.’

He approached the portal with the same methodical care he’d approach a fortified position—checking angles, noting details, preparing for anything. The song grew stronger, promising not comfort but purpose, not peace but a war worth fighting, not home but a place where a warrior past his prime might still matter.

Marcus Tiberius, Steel and Sinew, veteran of a hundred battles, stepped into the portal with the same deliberate precision he’d once stepped into shield walls. Whatever lay on the other side, he would meet it as he’d met every challenge in his life: with discipline, determination, and if necessary, death.

But death, he would soon learn, was about to become a much more complicated concept.

The transition through the portal was unique for each soul, shaped by their nature, their expectations, their fundamental understanding of reality.

Duulak experienced it as a mathematical proof resolving itself, each step through the swirling vortex a line of calculation falling into place. He felt reality reorganize around him, atoms redistributing according to laws that were similar but crucially different from those he knew. When he emerged on the other side, his first thought was not of danger or loss but of fascination. The air itself had a different weight, gravity pulled at a slightly altered angle, and the magical field that permeated everything was orders of magnitude stronger than anything on Ispar.

Thomas underwent transformation as prey becoming predator becoming prey again. The portal stripped him down to component parts and rebuilt him in an instant that lasted eternity. He materialized in mid-stumble, hunter’s reflexes saving him from falling, and immediately knew something was catastrophically wrong. The forest sounds were absent. No birds, no wind through leaves, just a clicking noise that raised every hair on his body. The smell hit him next—acidic, organic, wrong.

Maajid passed through as one diving into deep water, surrendering to the element while maintaining perfect awareness of self. He felt the universe acknowledge his choice, felt reality bend and reshape to accommodate his existence in this new space. He arrived laughing, the cosmic joke finally revealing its punchline. This was what he’d been searching for—a world where the veil between thought and reality was gossamer-thin, where will could reshape matter with terrifying ease.

Marcus transitioned like a soldier breaching an enemy gate, shield high, sword ready, every sense alert for the ambush that three decades of warfare had taught him to expect. He landed in a crouch, automatically assessing terrain, checking corners, identifying defensive positions. The alien landscape that greeted him was both impossible and immediately tactical—purple sky that provided no proper time reference, crystalline formations that could provide cover or prove to be threats, and in the distance, movement that suggested hostile forces.

Each of them, in those first moments, made choices that would define their paths through this new world. Duulak chose curiosity over caution, immediately beginning to catalogue the differences in physical laws. Thomas chose survival over understanding, falling back on hunter’s instincts that transcended worlds. Maajid chose to embrace the chaos, to dive deeper into the madness rather than resist it. Marcus chose to establish a defensive position and gather intelligence before making any other moves.

None of them yet knew they’d been brought to the same world, to the same moment in Dereth’s troubled history. None of them yet understood they were pawns in a game whose rules they didn’t know, whose stakes they couldn’t imagine, whose ending hadn’t yet been written.

But they would learn. In pain and blood and revelation, they would learn.

The first Olthoi Thomas encountered nearly killed him before he even understood what he was seeing. The creature burst from what he’d taken for solid ground, mandibles spread wide enough to bisect a man. Only reflexes honed by years of dangerous game saved him, rolling aside as those chittering jaws snapped closed where his torso had been.

His hunting knife, which had seemed so solid and reassuring moments ago, skittered off the creature’s carapace with a sound like fingernails on slate. The Olthoi—though he didn’t yet know that name—regarded him with compound eyes that reflected his terrified face in a thousand fragments. It was playing with him, he realized with cold certainty. He was going to die here, in this alien place, and Mara would never know what became of him.

The memory of his family crashed over him like a physical blow, breaking whatever spell the portal had woven. What madness had possessed him? His son needed him, his wife depended on him, and he had abandoned them for a pretty light and a strange song.

Salvation came in the form of arrows that found the joints in the creature’s armor, delivered by hands that knew where such creatures were vulnerable. A group of humans, scarred and hardened by survival, had come to his aid. They fought with desperate efficiency, their leader—a woman who introduced herself as Elena—helping him to his feet after the Olthoi retreated.

• ‘Another one through the portals,’ she said, her voice carrying the weight of too many battles. ‘You’re lucky we found you before they did worse than play.’

• ‘What… what was that thing?’

• ‘Olthoi. The natives of this world, you might say. Though we’re all natives now, whether we chose it or not.’

• ‘I have to get back. My family—’

• ‘There is no back. There’s only forward, and forward means learning to fight or learning to die. Here, you’ll learn both.’

Marcus encountered the Olthoi differently. His soldier’s paranoia served him well when the ground erupted in a coordinated ambush—not one creature but six, working in concert with tactical precision that he recognized even through alien forms. These were not mere beasts but soldiers of a different sort, and they fought like it.

He gave ground strategically, using the crystalline formations he’d identified earlier as defensive positions. His gladius, Legion-forged and maintained with religious dedication, found weak points through trained observation rather than luck. When he finally stood among their twitching corpses, bleeding from a dozen wounds but victorious, he understood something fundamental: this was a war zone, and he had just been conscripted.

Duulak’s first encounter was almost academic. The Olthoi that found him seemed more curious than hostile, approaching with careful movements that suggested intelligence rather than mere instinct. He tried communication first, using universal mathematical concepts, geometric patterns drawn in the air with magic. The creature responded by nearly taking his head off, but even in that violence, Duulak saw patterns, purposes, a kind of communication that transcended language.

He survived through magic rather than martial skill, using spells that shouldn’t have worked but did, powered by this world’s overwhelming magical field. The Olthoi retreated not because it was defeated but because it had finished its assessment. Duulak had the distinct impression he’d just been catalogued, filed away in some alien intelligence as a curiosity worth preserving for later study.

Maajid’s encounter was the strangest of all. The Olthoi that approached him stopped at a distance, tilting its head in what might have been confusion. There was something about the young mage, some resonance with the deeper madness of this world, that gave even these alien horrors pause.

• ‘You see it too, don’t you?’ Maajid said to the creature, grinning with manic intensity. ‘The joke of it all. You’re not the monsters here—we are. Pulled from our world to fight someone else’s war. But what if we refuse the role? What if we write our own parts?’

The Olthoi clicked and chittered, a sound that might have been laughter or hunger or something without human equivalent. Then it simply left, disappearing back into the crystalline maze of this strange new world, leaving Maajid alone with his theories and his dangerous understanding.

Within days, each of the four found their way to different survivor settlements, drawn by smoke from fires, guided by other humans who’d learned to navigate this hostile world, or in Marcus’s case, by tactical necessity.

Thomas was brought to what the survivors called Haven—a collection of rough shelters hidden in a valley the Olthoi hadn’t yet discovered. Fifty souls huddled there, all pulled through portals, all bearing the hollow eyes of those who’d lost everything. They shared their stories in the dark, whispered tales of the lives they’d been torn from.

The truth came to him in fragments: this world, Dereth, had belonged to the Empyreans before the Olthoi came. Most had fled, but Asheron remained, and in his desperation or wisdom, he had opened portals to their world, calling humans to fight a war they’d never asked to join.

• ‘He saved us,’ some said.

• ‘He damned us,’ others countered.

• ‘Does it matter?’ Elena asked. ‘We’re here now. The why of it won’t change that.’

But for Thomas, the why mattered more than anything. If he understood why, perhaps he could understand how to reverse it, how to get home to the family that haunted his every quiet moment.

Marcus found himself among soldiers—not Legion, but warriors from a dozen different traditions who’d found common cause in survival. They called their settlement Fort Ironwood, and they’d organized with military efficiency. Watch rotations, supply lines, training schedules—all the structures that turned frightened individuals into an effective fighting force.

The commander, a Gharu’ndim warrior named Khalid who’d once led cavalry charges across desert sands, recognized Marcus’s experience immediately.

• ‘You have the look of a man who’s held a line.’

• ‘The Third Legion. Twenty-seven years.’

• ‘Good. We need men who understand that survival isn’t about individual heroics. It’s about discipline, coordination, sacrifice when necessary.’

• ‘What’s our strategic objective?’

• ‘Today? Survive. Tomorrow? Survive longer. Eventually? Either drive the Olthoi back or learn to coexist. But first, we survive.’

Marcus found purpose in the structure, even if the purpose was merely continuation. But at night, when watches changed and soldiers told their stories, he heard the same refrain: they’d all been called, all been compelled, all been torn from lives they’d never asked to leave.

Duulak was taken to what could generously be called a research station—a collection of Empyrean ruins that a group of scholars and mages had claimed and fortified. They called themselves the Seekers, and they sought to understand not just how to survive but why they’d been brought here.

Their leader, a woman named Celeste who’d been a court astronomer in her former life, showed him texts they’d recovered, partial translations of Empyrean writing.

• ‘The portals aren’t random. There’s a pattern, a selection process. Asheron isn’t just calling anyone—he’s calling those who can adapt, who can survive, who can eventually…’

• ‘Eventually what?’

• ‘We’re not sure. The texts reference something called the Sundering, a future event that will require humanity to be here, to be ready. We’re not just soldiers in his war. We’re… seeds, perhaps. Planted for a harvest centuries from now.’

Duulak found the idea both fascinating and horrifying. To be selected, cultivated, used for purposes beyond your understanding—it was the ultimate expression of the powerlessness he’d always fought against.

Maajid, true to his nature, didn’t find a settlement so much as create one. The others who gathered around him were the misfits, the mad, those who’d looked into the void of this new world and hadn’t flinched. They made camp in a place where reality was particularly thin, where the Olthoi didn’t come because even they found it unsettling.

They called it Paradox, and it was less a settlement than an ongoing experiment in how far human consciousness could stretch before it snapped. Some succeeded in stretching very far indeed, developing abilities that shouldn’t have been possible. Others snapped, becoming something neither human nor Olthoi but terribly in between.

Maajid presided over it all with the delighted air of a child who’d found the ultimate playground.

• ‘Don’t you see?’ he proclaimed to his gathered madmen. ‘This world doesn’t follow the rules because the rules were always arbitrary. Here, will and reality negotiate directly. Here, we can become what we truly are—not flesh pretending to have thoughts, but thoughts that happen to wear flesh when it’s convenient.’

His followers, if they could be called that, nodded with the fervent agreement of those who’d abandoned sanity for something they hoped was better.

Weeks became months as the four adapted to their new reality, each in their own way coming to understand the true nature of their enemy—and perhaps, their purpose.

Marcus studied the Olthoi with a soldier’s eye, cataloguing their tactics, their hierarchies, their weaknesses. They weren’t mindless insects but a sophisticated hive society with castes, roles, and what appeared to be strategic intelligence. The workers built and maintained their vast underground networks. The soldiers defended and attacked with coordinated precision. And somewhere, in depths no human had yet survived to map, queens directed it all with alien intelligence.

• ‘They’re not evil,’ he explained to his war council. ‘They’re competitors. They see us as invaders because we are. Asheron brought us here to fight his war, and they’re defending their territory.’

• ‘Does that change anything?’ Khalid asked.

• ‘No. But understanding your enemy’s motivation is the first step to defeating them. They fight for survival, same as us. The difference is, they belong here. We don’t.’

His tactical assessments proved invaluable. He identified patterns in their attacks, seasonal movements that suggested migration or mating cycles, weaknesses in their otherwise impervious carapaces. Under his guidance, Fort Ironwood’s defenders began winning more often than they lost, though the cost in human lives remained staggering.

Thomas tracked the Olthoi as he’d once tracked game, learning their habits through patient observation. He discovered they avoided certain plants, that their movements followed underground water sources, that they communicated through pheromones that could be masked or mimicked with the right preparations.

But the more he learned, the more he resented his role in this war. These creatures hadn’t asked for human invasion any more than humans had asked to be brought here. Everyone was a victim of Asheron’s desperate gambit.

• ‘You’re thinking too much,’ Elena warned him. ‘That’s dangerous here. Think too much and you start sympathizing with them. Sympathize with them and you hesitate. Hesitate and you die.’

• ‘Die and come back,’ Thomas countered bitterly, having learned about the lifestones that prevented true death. ‘We can’t even escape through dying. We’re trapped in an eternal war.’

• ‘Then we’d better win it.’

• ‘Or learn to stop fighting it.’

Duulak approached the Olthoi as a puzzle to be solved. He dissected dead specimens, studied their biology, theorized about their evolution. They were perfectly adapted to this world’s unique conditions—the high magical saturation, the crystalline geology, the binary sun system that created irregular day-night cycles.

His most significant discovery was that the Olthoi were not native to Dereth either. Microscopic analysis of their chitin revealed isotopic ratios that didn’t match the local environment. They too had been brought here, pulled through portals opened by the Empyreans in their hunger for expansion.

• ‘We’re all refugees,’ he explained to the Seekers. ‘The Empyreans brought the Olthoi here by accident, opening portals they couldn’t close. The Olthoi overwhelmed them, so they fled. Only Asheron remained, and his solution was to bring us here to fight his mistakes. We’re not heroes or chosen ones. We’re janitors, cleaning up someone else’s mess.’

This revelation spread through the human settlements like wildfire, dividing survivors into factions. Some saw it as more reason to hate Asheron. Others argued it made no difference—they were here now and had to survive regardless of the why.

Maajid’s understanding of the Olthoi was the most disturbing. Through methods that involved meditation, certain mushrooms that grew near portal sites, and a willingness to let his consciousness drift dangerously far from his body, he claimed to have touched the edges of the Olthoi hive mind.

• ‘They dream,’ he announced to his followers in Paradox. ‘They dream of home, same as us. They dream of skies that aren’t purple, of hives that stretch to the planet’s core, of a time before they knew what it was to be torn from everything familiar.’

• ‘You’re saying they’re like us?’

• ‘I’m saying they are us, from a different angle. We’re all playing roles in someone else’s story. The question is: can we rewrite our parts?’

His attempts to communicate with the Olthoi through dream and meditation yielded strange results. Sometimes Olthoi would simply walk past him as if he weren’t there. Other times they would stop and regard him with what might have been curiosity. Once, a worker left a crystalline fragment at his feet—a gift, a warning, or something without human interpretation.

The discovery of the lifestones changed everything and nothing. Death became impermanent, but suffering remained eternal.

Thomas died first among the four, caught in an ambush while hunting for food. An Olthoi soldier’s mandibles closed around his torso, severing his spine. He felt everything—the pressure, the tearing, the moment his consciousness separated from his ruined flesh.

Then he felt himself pulled, reformed, reconstituted at a standing stone that hummed with ancient power. He stood there, whole and healthy, screaming at the impossibility of it all. He had died. He knew he had died. Yet here he stood, memories intact, even the memory of dying preserved in perfect, horrifying clarity.

• ‘The lifestones,’ Elena explained when he stumbled back to Haven, wild-eyed and shaking. ‘Asheron’s greatest gift and cruelest curse. We can’t die. We can only suffer, forget a little, and suffer again.’

• ‘This is hell.’

• ‘No. Hell would be simpler. This is something worse—hope without fulfillment, life without meaning, war without end.’

Marcus approached the lifestones tactically. He died testing their limits, deliberately allowing himself to be overwhelmed to understand the resurrection process. The experience was traumatic but informative. The stones didn’t just restore the body; they anchored the soul to this world, making return to Ispar not just unlikely but potentially impossible.

Each death weakened the connection to his old life, replacing memories of home with memories of dying and returning. He could feel himself becoming more of Dereth and less of the Empire with each resurrection.

• ‘It’s a trap,’ he reported to Khalid. ‘The lifestones ensure we can’t abandon the war even if we wanted to. We’re bound here, eternal soldiers in an eternal conflict.’

• ‘Then we’d better learn to win.’

• ‘Or learn to make peace. Even eternal wars end when both sides are too exhausted to continue.’

Duulak studied the lifestones with scientific fascination and growing horror. They were Empyrean technology, powered by ley lines that ran through Dereth like blood vessels. Each resurrection wasn’t true restoration but reconstruction from a template, with subtle variations accumulating over multiple deaths.

• ‘We’re copies of copies,’ he explained to Celeste. ‘Each time we die and return, we’re slightly different. After enough deaths, are we even the same person who first stepped through the portal?’

• ‘Does it matter?’

• ‘It matters if you’re trying to understand what Asheron truly did to us. We’re not just soldiers. We’re experiments in consciousness transfer, in soul-binding, in the limits of human identity.’

His research revealed something else: the lifestones were connected, forming a network that recorded not just individual deaths but collective experience. Every human who died added their knowledge to an invisible library that future generations might access, if they knew how.

Maajid embraced the lifestones with disturbing enthusiasm. He died repeatedly, deliberately, exploring the space between death and resurrection where consciousness existed without flesh.

• ‘It’s beautiful there,’ he told his followers after his seventh deliberate death. ‘Pure thought, pure possibility. The body is just a convenience we return to out of habit. We could choose to stay in that space, become something more than human.’

• ‘But then we wouldn’t be human at all.’

• ‘Exactly!’ he laughed. ‘That’s the joke Asheron played on us. He gave us immortality but tied it to flesh. He made us gods who insist on remaining mortal. The void mocks us because we mock ourselves.’

Some of his followers attempted to follow his example, dying repeatedly to explore the space between. Not all of them came back sane. Some didn’t come back at all, their consciousnesses lost in the gap between death and resurrection, their bodies reformed but empty of everything that had made them individuals.

Six months after his arrival, Duulak made a discovery that would reshape humanity’s understanding of their situation. Working with salvaged Empyrean texts and his own observations of portal mechanics, he realized the summonings weren’t random—they were selective, following patterns that suggested deliberate design rather than desperate improvisation.

In the ruins of what had once been an Empyrean library, he found references to something called the Harbinger Protocol—a last-resort plan developed by Asheron’s predecessors in case of catastrophic invasion. The protocol called for the summoning of a ”adaptive species” that could evolve rapidly to meet any threat.

• ‘Humans,’ he explained to the assembled Seekers. ‘We were chosen because we adapt faster than any other known sentient species. Our short lives, our psychological flexibility, our ability to find meaning in suffering—all of it makes us perfect for Asheron’s needs.’

• ‘You’re saying we were selected like… breeding stock?’

• ‘Worse. We’re weapons that improve themselves. Every death teaches us, every resurrection makes us stronger, every generation becomes more attuned to this world. In a thousand years, humans born here won’t even be the same species as those who came through the portals.’

This knowledge sparked fierce debate among the survivors. Some saw it as vindication—they were chosen, special, destined for greatness. Others saw it as the ultimate insult—they were tools, nothing more, selected for their utility rather than their worth.

Duulak himself fell into neither camp. He saw it as simply another piece of the puzzle, another variable in the vast equation he was trying to solve. If humans were meant to evolve, perhaps that evolution could be directed, controlled, even reversed.

He began experimenting with the interaction between human consciousness and Dereth’s magical field, using himself as the primary test subject. The results were disturbing but promising. Human neural patterns were indeed changing, developing new pathways that didn’t exist in Ispar-born humans. These changes were subtle but accelerating with each resurrection.

• ‘We’re becoming native to this world,’ he recorded in his journal. ‘Not through natural evolution but through magical adaptation. Each death and resurrection rewrites us slightly, making us more compatible with Dereth’s unique properties. The question is: can this process be reversed, or have we already passed the point of no return?’

As months turned to years, Thomas’s hope of return curdled into something darker. He’d died seventeen times, each death adding another layer of scar tissue to his psyche. The memory of his family became both more precious and more painful, a wound that wouldn’t heal because the lifestones wouldn’t let it.

He began hunting Olthoi with a fury that frightened even hardened survivors. Where once he’d been Thomas the Steady, he became Thomas the Grim, seeking not victory but oblivion in every battle. But oblivion wouldn’t come. The lifestones always brought him back, always forced him to continue.

• ‘You’re going to break,’ Elena warned him after watching him take unnecessary risks in a raid. ‘I’ve seen it happen. The mind can only bend so far before it snaps.’

• ‘Maybe that’s what I want. Maybe broken is better than this constant remembering.’

• ‘Your family wouldn’t want this for you.’

• ‘My family thinks I’m dead. Or worse, they think I abandoned them. Every day that passes here is time I’m not there. My son is growing up without me. My wife is growing old alone. And I’m here, unable to die, unable to live, unable to do anything but continue this pointless war.’

It was in this state that Thomas first encountered the Virindi.

The beings of pure thought had been observing the human settlements, drawn by the anomaly of consciousness that survived death. They approached Thomas one night as he sat alone outside Haven’s perimeter, contemplating another deliberate death just to feel something other than despair.

They didn’t speak in words but in concepts that appeared directly in his mind, cold and precise as mathematical proofs.

You seek return. We seek understanding. Cooperation benefits both.

• ‘What are you?’ We are thought without flesh, will without matter. Trapped as you are trapped, seeking escape as you seek escape.

• ‘Can you get me home?’ Home is a concept. Concepts can be altered. Reality can be rewritten. But the key is held by the one who brought you here.

• ‘Asheron.’ The Yalain. He must be understood, controlled, or eliminated. We will teach you. You will act. Both will benefit.

The alliance that formed that night would have consequences Thomas couldn’t imagine. The Virindi taught him to see the threads that bound reality, the magical resonances that held souls to lifestones, the patterns that governed portal formation. In return, he became their agent among humans, gathering information, recruiting others who’d lost hope, building toward a confrontation with Asheron that might free them all or damn them further.

While others despaired or theorized, Marcus organized. He established communication between the scattered human settlements, creating a network that shared intelligence, resources, and tactical innovations. What began as simple survival evolved into something resembling an actual military force.

He introduced Roman Legion tactics adapted for Olthoi combat: shield walls modified to defend against attacks from below, pilum designed to penetrate chitin at specific angles, formations that could respond to the three-dimensional nature of Olthoi assaults.

• ‘Discipline defeats numbers,’ he drilled into his recruits. ‘Coordination defeats strength. Intelligence defeats instinct. We may be outnumbered, but we are not outmatched.’

• ‘They’re infinite, Commander. They breed faster than we can kill them.’

• ‘Then we don’t try to kill them all. We establish boundaries, create deterrents, make the cost of attacking us higher than the benefit. Even insects understand economics on an instinctive level.’

His greatest innovation was the integration of magic into military doctrine. Mages weren’t separate support units but integral parts of each squad, their spells woven into tactics as naturally as sword work. Fire mages created barriers and funneled enemy movement. Ice mages slowed charges and created defensive positions. Mind mages coordinated units with thought-speed communication.

The success of these integrated units drew survivors from across Dereth. Fort Ironwood grew from a desperate holdout to a proper military installation, complete with training grounds, armories, and even a primitive war college where tactics were developed and tested.

But Marcus’s greatest challenge wasn’t the Olthoi—it was maintaining morale among immortal soldiers fighting an eternal war. The lifestones prevented death but not exhaustion, not despair, not the slow erosion of humanity that came from endless conflict.

• ‘We need more than survival,’ he told his war council. ‘We need purpose beyond just continuing to exist. We need to build something worth defending, create a future worth fighting for.’

• ‘What future? We’re trapped here forever.’

• ‘Then we make forever worth living. We build cities, not just camps. We create civilization, not just resistance. We become not just survivors but citizens of this new world.’

It was a vision that resonated with many, but not all. Some, like Thomas, saw it as capitulation, acceptance of their imprisonment. The division between those who sought to escape and those who sought to adapt would define human society on Dereth for generations.

In Paradox, Maajid pushed the boundaries of what human consciousness could become when freed from the constraints of single-bodied existence. His experiments with death and resurrection had revealed something profound: consciousness wasn’t tied to the body as tightly as most believed.

• ‘We think of ourselves as flesh that happens to think,’ he explained to his followers. ‘But we’re thoughts that happen to wear flesh. The lifestones prove this—they preserve the pattern of consciousness and simply provide it with new matter to inhabit.’

• ‘But we still need bodies to exist.’

• ‘Do we? Or have we simply not tried hard enough to exist without them?’

His experiments grew more extreme. He learned to maintain awareness during the resurrection process, experiencing the moment of reconstitution when consciousness knitted itself back into flesh. He discovered that with sufficient will, he could influence that process, making subtle changes to his reformed body.

At first, the changes were minor—eliminating scars, adjusting height slightly, altering hair color. But as his understanding deepened, the modifications became more profound. He gave himself additional fingers to better manipulate magical energies, restructured his eyes to perceive spectrums invisible to normal humans, altered his brain chemistry to maintain perfect recall of every death and resurrection.

• ‘You’re becoming inhuman,’ one of his followers warned.

• ‘I’m becoming more than human. Isn’t that what Asheron wanted? For us to evolve, to adapt, to become something capable of inheriting this world?’

• ‘He wanted us to fight his war.’

• ‘No, he wanted us to survive his war. There’s a difference. Fighting is just one form of survival. Evolution is another.’

Some of his followers attempted similar modifications, with varying degrees of success. Some achieved remarkable transformations, becoming beings that straddled the line between human and something else. Others lost themselves in the process, their consciousness fragmenting during resurrection, returning as empty shells or worse—as things that wore human shape but were hollow of human thought.

The settlement of Paradox became a laboratory for human potential, terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. Visitors reported seeing impossible things: humans who could phase partially out of physical existence, individuals who seemed to exist in multiple places simultaneously, beings that communicated through pure thought projection rather than speech.

Maajid himself became something that was difficult to define. He retained human shape most of the time, but observers noted that his form seemed to flicker occasionally, as if he existed on multiple planes simultaneously. His eyes held depths that shouldn’t exist in three-dimensional space, and his laughter carried harmonics that made reality shiver.

Two years after the first arrivals, the four who would become known as the Harbingers had their first convergence, though none yet recognized its significance.

It began with the Virindi, who had been observing all four with interest. These beings of pure thought recognized something in each that resonated with their own goals: Duulak’s theoretical understanding of reality’s underlying structure, Thomas’s desperate desire to unmake what had been made, Marcus’s ability to organize and lead, and Maajid’s willingness to transcend human limitations.

The Virindi arranged the meeting without the four knowing it was arranged, manipulating events to bring them to the same Empyrean ruin at the same moment. Each had come for different reasons—Duulak seeking texts, Thomas hunting Olthoi, Marcus scouting defensive positions, Maajid following whispers only he could hear.

When they encountered each other in the ruin’s central chamber, weapons were drawn before words were spoken. Trust was a luxury none of them could afford in this hostile world. But before violence could erupt, the Virindi manifested, their presence filling the chamber with cold intelligence.

You four will determine humanity’s fate on this world. Together or separately, willingly or not, you are the catalysts for what comes next.

• ‘Who are you to make such claims?’ Marcus demanded, his gladius still ready. We are observers who have become participants. We see patterns you cannot, futures that branch from this moment. In some, humanity thrives. In others, it becomes something unrecognizable. In still others, it ceases entirely.

• ‘And you care about our fate?’ Duulak’s voice carried skepticism. We care about our own fate, which is intertwined with yours. Asheron’s magic binds us all—Olthoi, human, Virindi. To break free, we must understand the binding. You four have pieces of that understanding.

The Virindi showed them visions—possible futures spreading from their choices like branches from a tree. In some visions, humanity conquered the Olthoi and built a civilization that surpassed even the Empyreans. In others, humans became something monstrous, evolved beyond recognition or morality. In the darkest visions, the war never ended, grinding on for millennia until both species were worn down to nothing but automatic violence.

• ‘Why us?’ Thomas asked, his voice hollow with the weight of too many deaths. The mage understands the mechanics. The hunter knows the cost. The soldier can organize resistance or revolution. The transcendent shows what humanity might become. Together, you are possibility incarnate.

• ‘Together,’ Maajid laughed, the sound echoing strangely in the ruins. ‘Four broken souls pretending to be whole. We’re not saviors. We’re symptoms of the disease Asheron infected this world with.’ Disease and cure are often the same substance in different doses. You have a choice: remain symptoms or become treatment.

What followed was the first real conversation between minds that would shape Dereth’s future, though none of them knew it yet.

• ‘We should kill Asheron,’ Thomas stated flatly. ‘He’s the source of all this. Remove him, and perhaps the portals can be reversed.’

• ‘Killing him solves nothing,’ Duulak countered. ‘The portals are maintained by the magical infrastructure of this entire world. Asheron’s death might make them permanent rather than reversible.’

• ‘Then we force him to reverse them,’ Thomas insisted.

• ‘Force an Empyrean archmage? With what power?’

• ‘With organization,’ Marcus interjected. ‘Unite humanity, present a common front. Even Asheron can’t stand against thousands of us working together.’

• ‘Thousands of humans who can’t even agree on whether to accept this fate or fight it?’ Duulak shook his head. ‘We’d have civil war before we could threaten Asheron.’

• ‘Perhaps the answer isn’t to threaten or plead,’ Maajid suggested, his form flickering slightly. ‘Perhaps it’s to become something Asheron didn’t expect. He brought humans here to fight his war. What if we refuse? What if we evolve beyond his intentions?’

• ‘Evolve into what?’ Marcus asked.

• ‘Into whatever we choose. The lifestones make us immortal. This world’s magic makes transformation possible. We could become beings that don’t need to go home because we transcend the concept of home itself.’

• ‘That’s not evolution, that’s surrender,’ Thomas snarled.

• ‘Is it? Or is clinging to the past the real surrender?’

The argument continued for hours, each presenting their vision of humanity’s future on Dereth. Marcus spoke of building a new Rome, a civilization that would make their imprisonment meaningful. Duulak proposed understanding the fundamental forces at work, believing knowledge would provide options they couldn’t yet imagine. Thomas advocated for revolution, for forcing Asheron to undo what he’d done regardless of the cost. Maajid suggested transcendence, becoming something beyond human, beyond the conflict entirely.

The Virindi observed silently, their presence a cold weight in the room. Finally, they spoke again:

You need not choose one path. Each of you can pursue your vision. But know that your paths will intersect again. The pattern demands it. And when they do, the choices you make will determine not just humanity’s fate, but the fate of all consciousness on this world.

With that, they departed, leaving the four alone with their arguments and their impossible situation.

Despite their disagreements, the four recognized a truth in the Virindi’s words. They were connected somehow, their arrivals and survivals too coincidental to be mere chance. Before departing the ruins, they made a pact—not of alliance but of communication.

• ‘We share information,’ Marcus proposed. ‘Whatever we discover, whatever we achieve, we inform the others. We may not agree on methods, but we all want humanity to survive and thrive.’

• ‘Survive, yes. Thrive is debatable,’ Thomas muttered.

• ‘Information sharing benefits all our goals,’ Duulak agreed. ‘My research, your tactical knowledge, Thomas’s Virindi connections, Maajid’s… experiments. Separately, we’re limited. Together, even in disagreement, we multiply our options.’

• ‘The cosmic joke gets funnier,’ Maajid grinned. ‘Four aspects of humanity’s response to trauma, forced to work together by beings that barely understand what humanity is. Yes, I’ll share what I learn. The void enjoys irony.’

They established methods of communication—magical sendings that could reach across Dereth, coded messages that other humans wouldn’t understand, dead drops in ruins where information could be exchanged without face-to-face meetings that might devolve into violence.

As they prepared to return to their respective settlements, Thomas asked one final question:

• ‘Do you think we’re doing what Asheron wanted? Playing into his plan somehow?’

• ‘Everything we do plays into someone’s plan,’ Duulak replied. ‘Asheron’s, the Virindi’s, perhaps forces we haven’t even discovered yet. The question isn’t whether we’re being manipulated, but whether we can turn that manipulation to our advantage.’

• ‘Or transcend it entirely,’ Maajid added.

• ‘Or defeat it through discipline and organization,’ Marcus concluded.

• ‘Or burn it all down and hope something better rises from the ashes,’ Thomas finished.

They parted then, each returning to their own path, their own vision of humanity’s future. But the seed had been planted. The four Harbingers had found each other, and though they didn’t yet know it, their convergence had set in motion events that would reshape not just Dereth but the very nature of human existence.

Three years had passed since humanity’s arrival on Dereth. The scattered settlements had grown into fortified towns, the desperate survivors had become experienced warriors, and some had even begun to speak of Dereth as home. It was precisely when humanity began to feel secure that the Olthoi reminded them they were still strangers in a hostile land.

It began with tremors that shook the earth from below, subtle at first, then growing in intensity. Miners in the developing settlement of New Cragstone reported strange sounds from the depths—rhythmic, almost mechanical, like the heartbeat of something vast.

Marcus received the reports at Fort Ironwood with growing concern. His scouts had noticed increased Olthoi activity along the perimeter, not attacks but observations, as if the creatures were gathering intelligence.

• ‘They’re coordinating,’ his lieutenant, Gaius—who had eventually followed him through a portal—reported. ‘Different broods working together. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

• ‘Something’s changed. They’re not just reacting to us anymore. They’re planning something.’

Duulak’s research provided the answer, though it brought no comfort. Deep beneath Dereth’s surface lay the Great Hive, a structure so vast it defied comprehension. The Empyrean texts called it the Nexus, the original point where the Olthoi had entered this world. For years it had been dormant, its queens focused on expansion rather than coordination. But humanity’s successful resistance had awakened something ancient and terrible.

• ‘The Matriarch,’ Duulak explained to an emergency gathering of settlement leaders. ‘A queen of queens, older than the others, possibly the original Olthoi that came through the Empyrean portals. The texts suggest she’s been hibernating, conserving energy while her daughters spread across the world. But now…’

• ‘Now she’s awake,’ Thomas finished, having arrived from his own investigations. ‘The Virindi confirmed it. They can sense her thoughts—alien even to them, but unmistakably intelligent and absolutely hostile.’

Maajid’s followers in Paradox reported even more disturbing news. Those who’d pushed their consciousness toward the Olthoi hive mind had touched something vast and incomprehensible, a intelligence that viewed humanity not as enemies but as resources to be harvested and incorporated.

• ‘She doesn’t want to destroy us,’ Maajid explained, his form flickering more rapidly than usual, suggesting distress. ‘She wants to absorb us. The Olthoi have encountered other species before, and they don’t just conquer—they assimilate, taking useful traits and discarding the rest.’

• ‘What traits could humans possibly offer them?’ Marcus asked.

• ‘Creativity. Adaptability. And thanks to the lifestones, immortality. Imagine Olthoi that resurrect after death, that learn from each defeat, that combine their hive intelligence with human innovation.’

The implications were horrifying. The war had entered a new phase, and humanity was no longer fighting for territory or survival but for the right to remain human.

The Matriarch’s first major assault came at Haven, the settlement where Thomas had first found refuge. The attack was unlike anything humanity had faced before—not a raid or skirmish but a systematic siege designed to test human defenses and resolve.

The Olthoi came in waves, each precisely timed to exhaust the defenders just as the next arrived. Workers undermined fortifications while soldiers pressed the walls. Flyers—a caste rarely seen before—dropped warriors behind defensive lines. And throughout it all, there was a terrible coordination, as if a single mind directed thousands of bodies.

Thomas fought with desperate fury, each arrow finding weak points in Olthoi armor with practiced precision. But for every creature that fell, two more seemed to take its place.

• ‘They’re learning,’ Elena gasped, pulling him back from a section of wall about to collapse. ‘Every tactic we use, they adapt to it within minutes.’

• ‘Then we stop using tactics. We fight with chaos, unpredictability. Be what they can’t calculate.’

He organized the defenders into constantly shifting groups, abandoning formal military structure for controlled mayhem. It worked, barely. The Olthoi advance slowed, confused by the sudden lack of patterns to analyze.

But the cost was terrible. By the time reinforcements from Fort Ironwood arrived, led by Marcus himself, half of Haven’s defenders had died at least once, some multiple times. The psychological toll of repeated death and resurrection in the same battle broke several minds entirely.

Marcus’s arrival turned the tide. His integrated units of soldiers and mages created overlapping fields of fire and magic that the Olthoi couldn’t penetrate without massive losses. But even in victory, he recognized this was just a probe.

• ‘She’s testing us,’ he told the exhausted defenders. ‘Learning our capabilities, our limits, our breaking points. This wasn’t meant to destroy Haven. It was meant to teach her how to destroy everything.’

The siege lasted three days. When the Olthoi finally withdrew, they left behind not just their dead but something else—crystalline structures that Duulak identified as observation nodes, devices that would continue gathering information even after the battle.

• ‘We need to destroy them,’ Thomas argued.

• ‘We need to study them,’ Duulak countered. ‘Understanding their intelligence-gathering methods might be our only advantage.’

• ‘Or we could use them,’ Maajid suggested, appearing as if from nowhere, though he’d been nowhere near the battle. ‘Feed them false information, show the Matriarch what we want her to see.’

The debate that followed revealed the growing schism among humanity’s leaders. They agreed on the threat but not the response, and that disagreement would soon tear their fragile alliance apart.

In the aftermath of the siege, when humanity most needed unity, Asheron finally appeared. Not in person at first, but as projections that manifested simultaneously in every human settlement, delivering the same message:

• ‘Children of Ispar, you have exceeded my expectations. Your resilience, your adaptation, your growth—all have been remarkable. But a greater test approaches. The Matriarch’s awakening was inevitable, perhaps even necessary. She will force you to become more than you are, to evolve beyond your current limitations.’

• ‘Damn your tests!’ Thomas’s voice rang out in Haven, though the projection couldn’t truly hear. ‘We never asked for your expectations!’

• ‘The Olthoi Queen presents an opportunity. Defeat her, and you will have proven yourselves worthy inheritors of this world. Fail, and… well, failure will render the question moot.’

• ‘Help us then!’ someone shouted. ‘You have the power!’

• ‘I have power, yes. But using it would defeat the purpose. You must grow strong enough to stand without me, to surpass me. That is why you were called. That is your destiny.’

The projection faded, leaving humanity more divided than ever. Some saw his words as encouragement, others as abandonment, still others as manipulation.

Thomas’s rage reached a breaking point. He gathered those who shared his anger—the Forgotten, they called themselves, those who refused to forget their stolen lives. With information provided by the Virindi, they planned something that would have been unthinkable months before: they would capture Asheron.

The Virindi had identified a pattern in Asheron’s appearances, moments when he manifested physically rather than as projection, usually at sites of significant magical confluence. The next such appearance would be at the Nexus of the Five Towers, where ley lines crossed in patterns that stabilized Dereth’s magical field.

Thomas assembled his force carefully—not just warriors but mages who’d learned to disrupt teleportation, engineers who’d developed weapons specifically designed to pierce magical defenses, and volunteers willing to die repeatedly to exhaust Asheron’s resources.

Marcus learned of the plan through his intelligence network and arrived with his own force, not to help but to stop what he saw as suicidal madness.

• ‘You’ll destroy us all,’ he argued, confronting Thomas at the ambush site. ‘Attack Asheron and you risk breaking the very spells that maintain the lifestones, that keep the worse things at bay.’

• ‘Good. Let it all break. Better oblivion than this eternal prison.’

• ‘You speak for yourself, not for humanity.’

• ‘And you speak for acceptance of our enslavement.’

The confrontation might have turned violent, but Duulak’s arrival changed the dynamic. He came not to fight but to observe, to gather data on what would happen when humanity turned against its summoner.

• ‘This is necessary,’ he said, surprising both sides. ‘Not the attack itself, but the choice to make it. We need to know if we can oppose Asheron, if we have free will or are merely puppets dancing to his design.’

• ‘Philosophical experiments while real people suffer,’ Marcus spat.

• ‘All experiments involve suffering. The question is whether the knowledge gained justifies the cost.’

Maajid appeared last, or perhaps he’d been there all along—with his flickering existence, it was hard to tell. He laughed at the entire situation.

• ‘Four Harbingers, converged again at the moment of crisis. The Virindi were right. We’re bound by narrative threads we can’t see. But perhaps that’s the real test—can we break free of the story we’re meant to tell?’

When Asheron appeared, he seemed unsurprised by the ambush, as if he’d expected it, perhaps even orchestrated it. The battle that followed was less combat than demonstration—Asheron showing humanity how far they still had to go.

He deflected their attacks with casual gestures, turned their own spells against them, moved through space in ways that defied physics. But he didn’t kill anyone, even when they died attacking him and resurrected to attack again.

• ‘Is this what you needed?’ he asked Thomas directly, his voice carrying infinite weariness. ‘To know you could choose to oppose me? You always could. Free will was never in question. The question is what you choose to do with it.’

• ‘Send us home!’

• ‘Home no longer exists for you. Time flows differently between worlds. Centuries have passed on Ispar. Your families are dust, their descendants wouldn’t recognize you, the world you knew is history or legend.’

The revelation broke something in Thomas. He’d suspected, but knowing was different. His next attack was pure rage, no strategy, just the need to make something else hurt as much as he did.

Asheron caught the blade with his bare hand, letting it draw blood—Empyrean blood that sparkled with contained power.

• ‘I understand your pain. I carry the weight of every life disrupted by my portals. But that pain can become purpose. Your suffering can forge you into something capable of preventing others from suffering the same fate.’

• ‘Pretty words from the architect of our misery.’

• ‘Yes. I own what I’ve done. The question is: what will you do?’

The failed ambush shattered humanity’s fragile unity. Four factions emerged, roughly aligned with the visions of the four Harbingers:

Marcus led the **Builders**, those who accepted their fate and sought to create civilization on Dereth. They focused on infrastructure, defense, and gradual expansion, turning settlements into cities, creating trade routes, establishing laws and governance. Their philosophy was simple: if this was home now, they would make it worthy of the name.

Thomas commanded the **Forgotten**, those who refused to accept their exile. They sought ways to reverse the portals, to return home regardless of what awaited them, or failing that, to ensure Asheron paid for his crime. They became guerrilla fighters, striking at Empyrean ruins, seeking forbidden knowledge, making alliance with any force that opposed the status quo.

Duulak guided the **Seekers**, those who pursued understanding above all else. They studied everything—Empyrean magic, Olthoi biology, Virindi psychology, the fundamental forces that governed Dereth. They believed knowledge would eventually provide options none of them could currently imagine.

Maajid inspired the **Transcendent**, those who sought to evolve beyond human limitations. They experimented with consciousness transfer, magical augmentation, and deliberate mutation. They saw Dereth not as prison but as laboratory, a place to become something new.

The factions weren’t entirely exclusive—individuals moved between them, and they still cooperated against common threats like the Olthoi. But the unified human resistance was over, replaced by four competing visions of humanity’s future.

The Virindi observed these developments with interest. The splintering of humanity into multiple paths increased the variables, the possibilities, the chances that at least one approach would succeed—though success, by Virindi definition, might not align with human hopes.

• The pattern unfolds as projected. Division leads to specialization. Specialization leads to innovation. Innovation leads to transcendence or extinction. Both outcomes provide valuable data.

As humanity fractured, the Matriarch prepared her next assault. She too had been learning, adapting, evolving. The war was about to enter a phase that would test not just human survival but human identity itself.

Six months after the schism, scouts from Fort Ironwood reported something that chilled even veteran fighters: Olthoi that moved like humans, that used tools, that demonstrated individual initiative while maintaining hive coordination. Marcus personally led the investigation, bringing his best trackers and mages.

What they found in a ravaged settlement called Last Hope exceeded their worst fears. The Olthoi had taken human captives not for food but for experimentation. Bodies lay twisted in impossible configurations, human tissue fused with Olthoi chitin, consciousness trapped between species.

• ‘Kill me,’ one hybrid begged, its voice a horrible mixture of human speech and Olthoi clicking. ‘Please, while I still remember my name.’

• ‘What did they do to you?’ Marcus asked, fighting revulsion.

• ‘The Matriarch… she learns… she takes what makes us human… adds it to her children… We’re still aware… still ourselves… but also them… the hive song never stops…’

Marcus gave the mercy requested, personally ensuring each hybrid was destroyed beyond the lifestones’ ability to resurrect. But he knew this was just the beginning. The Matriarch had discovered how to harvest human traits without waiting for evolution.

The news spread through human settlements like wildfire, causing panic and rage in equal measure. The Builders demanded immediate fortification of all settlements. The Forgotten called for total war. The Seekers insisted on studying the hybrid process to understand and counter it. The Transcendent saw it as validation of their path—if the Olthoi could force evolution, humans should embrace it voluntarily.

In Paradox, Maajid had been pushing the boundaries of human transformation further than anyone thought possible. His experiments with death and resurrection had revealed that consciousness was far more mutable than believed. Now, faced with the Olthoi’s forced hybridization, he decided to demonstrate that humanity could evolve on its own terms.

The ritual he devised was part magic, part philosophy, part controlled madness. He would die not once but continuously, maintaining awareness through multiple simultaneous resurrections, existing in several states at once until the barriers between them dissolved.

• ‘You’ll fragment,’ Celeste warned, having come from the Seekers to observe. ‘Consciousness can’t maintain coherence across multiple incarnations.’

• ‘Consciousness as we understand it, no. But what if understanding is the limitation? What if we’re meant to be more than singular?’

• ‘You’re talking about deliberately inducing what the Olthoi are forcing on their victims.’

• ‘No. They’re forcing flesh to merge. I’m allowing consciousness to expand. The flesh will follow or be discarded.’

The ritual lasted three days. Maajid died and resurrected continuously, each death slightly different, each resurrection slightly altered. Observers reported seeing him in multiple places simultaneously, sometimes solid, sometimes translucent, sometimes just a presence that could be felt but not seen.

When it finally ended, what stood in Paradox’s central chamber was still recognizably Maajid but fundamentally changed. He existed partially in multiple dimensions, could perceive past and future as present, could touch thoughts directly without words.

• ‘I see it now,’ he said, his voice harmonizing with itself from slightly different temporal positions. ‘The cosmic joke isn’t that existence is meaningless. It’s that meaning exists in dimensions we couldn’t perceive. The Matriarch understands this instinctively. That’s why she’s winning.’

• ‘Can you teach others?’ Celeste asked.

• ‘I can show them the door. Walking through it… that requires abandoning everything you think you know about being human.’

Some of the Transcendent attempted to follow his path. Most failed, returning from death unchanged or not returning at all. A few succeeded partially, gaining abilities that shouldn’t exist but losing parts of themselves in the process. They became Paradox’s new guardians, beings that even the Olthoi avoided, sensing something fundamentally wrong about their existence.

While others fought or transformed, Duulak pursued understanding with monomaniacal focus. His research into the hybrid horrors had revealed something unexpected: the process worked both ways. If Olthoi could absorb human traits, perhaps humans could absorb Olthoi capabilities.

Working with samples taken from hybrid corpses, he isolated the mechanism—a viral magic that rewrote genetic and magical patterns simultaneously. The Matriarch hadn’t developed it; she’d discovered it, possibly in the remnants of another species the Olthoi had assimilated on another world.

• ‘It’s a tool,’ he explained to the other Harbingers through magical sending. ‘Horrifying in application but neutral in nature. We could use it ourselves.’

• ‘Become like them to fight them?’ Marcus’s disgust was palpable even through the magical communication.

• ‘Adopt their strengths while maintaining our consciousness. The hive mind coordination, the natural armor, the ability to sense through vibration—all could be ours without losing ourselves.’

• ‘That’s what the Matriarch thought too,’ Thomas countered. ‘And look what she’s become.’

• ‘She was never human to begin with. We have something she lacks—individual will coupled with collective purpose. We could create a hybrid that serves humanity, not the hive.’

The debate raged for days through magical sendings. Finally, Duulak proceeded with a limited trial, using volunteers who were already dying from Olthoi venom, beyond even the lifestones’ ability to fully heal.

The results were mixed but promising. The volunteers developed chitinous armor beneath their skin, invisible until needed. They could sense Olthoi presence through chemical signatures. Most importantly, they could sometimes understand Olthoi communication, providing intelligence that had been impossible to gather before.

But there was a cost. The volunteers reported dreams of the hive, whispers that grew louder over time. They remained human, remained themselves, but with an asterisk that grew larger each day.

One year after the hybrid horrors were discovered, the Matriarch did something unprecedented: she communicated directly with humanity. Not through attack or action but through words, delivered by a hybrid that retained enough humanity to speak but was wholly under her control.

The message was delivered simultaneously to all major settlements:

• ‘The song of your species intrigues us. Individual notes creating accidental harmony. We offer integration without dissolution. Become part of the great song willingly, retain your consciousness within our unity. Refuse, and we will take what we need, leaving only husks.’

• ‘Never,’ was the unanimous human response, though each faction meant it differently.

But the Matriarch’s follow-up message was more targeted, sent to each of the four Harbingers directly through dreams that bypassed conscious defenses:

To Marcus: Your soldiers die and resurrect endlessly, suffering without purpose. Join us, and their suffering ends. They become eternal, part of something greater than individual pain.

To Thomas: You seek return to a home that no longer exists. We offer a different return—to the unity all consciousness emerged from, where separation is illusion and loss is impossible.

To Duulak: You seek understanding. We are understanding incarnate, billions of perspectives creating truth through consensus. Your questions would find answers in our collective knowledge.

To Maajid: You already hear our song, existing between singular and plural. Take the final step. Abandon the illusion of self for the reality of all-self.

Each Harbinger was shaken by how precisely the Matriarch had identified their deepest desires and fears. She understood them, perhaps better than they understood themselves.

For the first time since the schism, the four Harbingers met in person, the Matriarch’s ultimatum forcing cooperation. They gathered at the Nexus of the Five Towers, the site of the failed ambush of Asheron, now recognized as neutral ground.

• ‘She’s forcing our hand,’ Marcus began. ‘United, we might resist. Divided, she’ll absorb us piecemeal.’

• ‘United under whose vision?’ Thomas challenged. ‘Your acceptance? My rebellion? Duulak’s experimentation? Maajid’s transcendence?’

• ‘All of them,’ Maajid suggested, his multi-dimensional existence allowing him to see patterns others missed. ‘The Matriarch fears diversity of approach. She understands unity because she is unity. But she doesn’t understand how different paths can lead to the same destination.’

• ‘Explain,’ Duulak demanded.

• ‘We each represent an aspect of human response to existential threat. Separately, we’re incomplete. Together, we’re unpredictable. The Builders create infrastructure, the Forgotten provide motivation through memory, the Seekers develop understanding, the Transcendent show what’s possible. Combined, we become something even the Matriarch can’t assimilate.’

The discussion continued through the night, old arguments resurfacing but tempered by necessity. Finally, Duulak proposed something that shocked them all:

• ‘We need Asheron. Not as savior but as catalyst. He understands this world’s fundamental magic better than anyone. If we’re going to resist the Matriarch’s assimilation, we need his knowledge.’

• ‘Work with our kidnapper?’ Thomas’s rage was palpable.

• ‘Use our kidnapper. There’s a difference. He wants us to survive and evolve. We ensure that evolution serves our purposes, not his.’

Marcus saw the tactical advantage immediately. Asheron’s power, properly directed, could provide the edge they needed. But he also saw the danger—Asheron’s help always came with hidden costs.

• ‘We set conditions. He teaches us, provides resources, but doesn’t direct our actions. We maintain autonomy even in alliance.’

• ‘He’ll never agree,’ Thomas argued.

• ‘He will,’ Maajid said with certainty that came from perceiving multiple probability threads. ‘He’s more desperate than he shows. The Matriarch threatens his plans as much as our survival. He needs us to succeed, but on our terms now, not his.’

They called Asheron using a ritual Duulak had derived from Empyrean texts, combined with power drawn from the Nexus itself. It was not a polite request but a demanding summons, treating the archmage as resource rather than savior.

He appeared looking older than before, the weight of centuries visible in his bearing.

• ‘You’ve grown,’ he observed, a mixture of pride and concern in his voice. ‘Faster than anticipated, though perhaps not in the direction intended.’

• ‘Intentions are irrelevant now,’ Marcus stated flatly. ‘The Matriarch threatens to absorb humanity entirely. We need your knowledge to prevent it.’

• ‘My knowledge comes with understanding of its cost. Are you prepared for that?’

• ‘We’re prepared for survival,’ Thomas snarled. ‘Everything else is negotiable.’

Asheron studied each of them, his gaze lingering longest on Maajid’s transformed state.

• ‘You’ve already begun the transformation necessary to resist her. Voluntary evolution rather than forced assimilation. But you’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.’

• ‘Then teach us,’ Duulak demanded. ‘Show us how to become what we need to be without losing what we are.’

• ‘I can show you the path. Walking it will change you irrevocably. You may defeat the Matriarch but become something your past selves would not recognize as human.’

• ‘We’re already that,’ Maajid laughed, his voice echoing from multiple temporal positions. ‘The question is whether we become it with purpose or by accident.’

Asheron agreed, but with conditions of his own. The knowledge he would share could not be used against him or to attempt returning to Ispar. The transformation process, once begun, could not be reversed. And most importantly, humanity would have to choose its path freely, not be forced into it.

• ‘Free choice,’ Thomas laughed bitterly. ‘In a world where all choices are constrained by your actions.’

• ‘All choices are constrained by someone’s actions. The question is whether you’ll constrain your own or let others do it for you.’

In the depths beneath the Nexus of the Five Towers, Asheron revealed chambers that had been sealed since the Empyreans’ flight. Here, the magical energy was so dense it was almost tangible, streams of pure possibility flowing through crystalline conduits.

• ‘This is where my people conducted their greatest experiments,’ Asheron explained. ‘Where they learned to transcend physical limitations, to touch the fundamental forces that shape reality. It’s also where they made their greatest mistake—opening the portal that brought the Olthoi.’

• ‘And you want us to repeat their experiments?’ Marcus asked skeptically.

• ‘No. I want you to complete them. The Empyreans fled before they could finish what they started. You have advantages they lacked—shorter lives that adapt quickly, the lifestones that allow learning through death, and most importantly, diversity of thought.’

He showed them the Synthesis Chambers, where consciousness could be separated from flesh and recombined in new configurations. The Evolution Pools, where magical energy could rewrite biological patterns. The Harmonic Resonators, where individual minds could temporarily merge without losing distinct identity.

• ‘The Matriarch forces unity through dominance,’ Asheron continued. ‘But true power comes from voluntary synchronization, maintaining individual will while achieving collective purpose. It’s the paradox she cannot resolve because her nature doesn’t allow for paradox.’

• ‘You’re talking about becoming like the Virindi,’ Duulak observed. ‘Thought beings that wear flesh when convenient.’

• ‘No. The Virindi abandoned flesh and lost something crucial. You would maintain physical form while expanding beyond its limitations. Become more than human while remaining essentially human.’

Maajid, already partially transformed, understood immediately. He demonstrated by shifting his perception, showing the others glimpses of what he saw—probability threads, temporal echoes, the underlying music that reality danced to.

• ‘It’s beautiful and terrible,’ he said. ‘You see everything—how small individual concerns are, how vast the patterns that connect all things. But you also see how crucial each small piece is to the whole. Remove one human, one choice, one moment, and entire futures collapse.’

Each Harbinger would undergo a different transformation, suited to their nature and role:

Marcus would become the **Eternal Soldier**, his consciousness distributed across multiple bodies simultaneously, able to coordinate forces with thought-speed precision. He would experience every battle from every perspective, understanding war as both individual struggle and collective movement.

Thomas would become the **Memory Keeper**, able to access not just his own memories but the collective memories of all humans who had passed through the portals. He would carry their lost homes within him, ensuring nothing was truly forgotten even as they moved forward.

Duulak would become the **Pattern Weaver**, able to perceive and manipulate the fundamental forces that shaped reality. He would see the mathematical foundations of magic, the equations that governed existence, and gain limited ability to rewrite them.

Maajid would complete his transformation into the **Paradox Walker**, existing simultaneously in multiple states, able to be singular and plural, present and absent, thought and flesh as needed.

• ‘These transformations cannot be undone,’ Asheron warned. ‘You will gain power beyond imagination but lose the simplicity of singular existence. You will always be apart from standard humanity, bridges between what they are and what they might become.’

• ‘We’re already apart,’ Thomas said quietly. ‘Every death, every resurrection, every day in this alien world has separated us from what we were. At least this separation has purpose.’

The rituals would take weeks, each Harbinger undergoing their transformation in sequence while the others maintained watch. The process would be agonizing, ecstatic, and ultimately irreversible.

Marcus went first, entering the Synthesis Chamber with soldier’s discipline. The process split his consciousness into five parts, each inhabiting a separate body created from stored magical energy. At first, the sensation was maddening—five sets of eyes seeing different things, five minds thinking different thoughts yet knowing they were all one person.

• ‘Focus on purpose, not perception,’ Asheron guided. ‘You are not five people but one person with five perspectives. Let them flow together like streams joining a river.’

It took days for Marcus to achieve synchronization. When he emerged, he moved with perfect coordination, five bodies acting as one will. He could hold five different conversations simultaneously, fight five different battles, exist in five different places while maintaining singular purpose.

• ‘It’s like being a legion unto myself,’ he said, all five voices speaking in harmony. ‘I understand now why the Olthoi are so effective. But I also see their weakness—they have unity without individuality. I have both.’

Thomas’s transformation was more painful, not physically but emotionally. As the Memory Keeper, he experienced every moment of loss, every farewell never said, every home left behind by every human who’d come through the portals. Thousands of lives flooded through him, each carrying their own grief and hope.

• ‘I can’t hold it all,’ he gasped, tears streaming down his face. ‘Too much loss, too much pain.’

• ‘Don’t hold it,’ Asheron advised. ‘Let it flow through you. You are not a container but a channel. The memories pass through but don’t define you.’

When he finally stabilized, Thomas had aged visibly, his hair white, his eyes carrying depths that hadn’t existed before. But he also radiated a strange peace.

• ‘I know now why we can’t go back,’ he said. ‘I carry ten thousand memories of Ispar, and in none of them is there room for what we’ve become. But I also carry the seeds of what we’re building here. Every settlement, every friendship formed, every child born on Dereth—we’re creating new homes, new memories. The loss is real, but so is the gain.’

Duulak’s transformation was the most dramatic physically. His body became a conduit for magical energy, his skin developing patterns that looked like equations written in light. He could see the flow of magic like others saw color, could reach out and adjust reality’s parameters within limited範囲.

• ‘Everything is mathematics,’ he laughed, the sound tinged with mania. ‘Every spell, every thought, every heartbeat—all following patterns that can be understood, predicted, manipulated. The Matriarch is just a very complex equation. And equations can be solved.’

But the cost was severe. Duulak could no longer fully return to normal perception. He saw the world always in terms of its underlying patterns, making simple human interaction challenging. Beauty became wavelengths, love became chemical reactions, hope became probability calculations.

Maajid’s final transformation was the strangest. He entered the Evolution Pool already partially transformed and emerged as something that defied simple description. He existed in quantum superposition, simultaneously present and absent, individual and collective, human and other.

• ‘The cosmic joke finally makes sense,’ he said from everywhere and nowhere at once. ‘We’re not the punchline—we’re the setup. The real joke is what comes after, when all consciousness realizes it’s been one thing pretending to be many. But the pretense is necessary. Without it, there’s no story, no growth, no point to existence.’

With the four Harbingers transformed and united in purpose if not in method, humanity launched its assault on the Great Hive. It was not a conventional military attack but something unprecedented—a war fought on multiple levels of reality simultaneously.

Marcus coordinated the physical assault, his five bodies leading five different divisions of human forces. Each division approached from a different direction, forcing the Olthoi to spread their defenses. But more importantly, his synchronized consciousness allowed perfect coordination between units, matching the Olthoi’s hive mind with human collective will.

Thomas provided motivation and intelligence, sharing memories of Earth to remind fighters what they’d lost, while simultaneously accessing memories of previous battles to predict Olthoi tactics. Every human fighter felt the weight of their collective history and the hope of their collective future.

Duulak rewrote reality’s rules in small but crucial ways—making human weapons temporarily able to pierce any armor, making Olthoi communication nodes fail at critical moments, creating probability pockets where human victory was statistically inevitable.

Maajid did something none of them fully understood—he existed partially within the Olthoi hive mind itself, not as invader but as paradox, a concept their unified consciousness couldn’t process. His presence created confusion, hesitation, moments of doubt that a hive mind shouldn’t be capable of experiencing.

The battle raged for seven days and seven nights. Thousands died and resurrected, the lifestones working overtime to maintain human forces. The Olthoi adapted to every tactic, evolved counters to every strategy, but couldn’t adapt to the fundamental unpredictability of four different approaches working in concert.

At the heart of the Great Hive, in a chamber that existed in more dimensions than three, the four Harbingers finally confronted the Matriarch. She was vast beyond description, not just physically but conceptually, a being that had assimilated so many species she was less individual than living library of consciousness.

• ‘You resist integration,’ she spoke through a thousand hybrid voices. ‘Why? You could be eternal, part of something greater than your small selves.’

• ‘Because our small selves have value,’ Marcus replied through his five bodies. ‘Individual perspective creates possibility that unity cannot achieve.’

• ‘You are chaos. We are order. Order always prevails.’

• ‘You are stasis,’ Duulak countered, his equation-sight seeing her patterns. ‘We are change. And change is the only constant in the universe.’

The battle was fought on levels beyond physical. The Matriarch tried to absorb their consciousness, to pull them into her collective. But each Harbinger’s transformation made them incompatible with simple assimilation.

Marcus was too distributed to capture all at once. Thomas carried too many memories for her to process without losing her own identity. Duulak existed partially as living mathematics that corrupted her biological patterns. And Maajid was paradox incarnate, simultaneously joining and rejecting the collective, creating logical loops that threatened to crash her entire consciousness.

• ‘You cannot destroy us,’ the Matriarch said, her voice showing the first signs of uncertainty. ‘We are billions. You are thousands.’

• ‘We don’t need to destroy you,’ Thomas said, accessing memories of peaceful coexistence from other worlds. ‘We need to change the terms of engagement.’

• ‘What terms?’

• ‘Separation. Boundaries. Your hives and our settlements, distinct but acknowledging each other’s right to exist.’

• ‘Impossible. We expand or die.’

• ‘Then expand elsewhere,’ Maajid suggested, showing her visions of other worlds, other dimensions. ‘This universe is infinite. This world is tiny. Why fight over scraps when banquets await?’

The final resolution came not through victory but through transcendence. Asheron, who had been observing, stepped forward with an offer that shocked everyone.

• ‘I can open portals to other worlds, uninhabited ones. The Olthoi can expand without conflict. Humanity can build without threat. But it requires agreement from both sides.’

• ‘You could always do this?’ Thomas’s rage flared. ‘You had this option from the beginning?’

• ‘No. I needed you to become capable of it. The portals require anchors on both sides, beings who can maintain the connection. The four of you, transformed as you are, can be those anchors. And the Matriarch, vast as she is, can maintain her end.’

• ‘Mutual imprisonment,’ the Matriarch observed.

• ‘Mutual opportunity,’ Duulak corrected. ‘We become bridges between worlds, allowing controlled expansion and exchange without forced assimilation.’

The debate continued for hours, but eventually, pragmatism prevailed. The Matriarch agreed to withdraw her forces to the southern continent, establishing clear boundaries. Humanity would maintain the north and central regions. Portals would be opened to three uninhabited worlds, allowing Olthoi expansion without human conflict.

The four Harbingers would serve as living treaties, their transformed nature allowing them to monitor and maintain the agreement. They would be neither fully human nor Olthoi but something between, ensuring neither side could break the accord without consequence.

• ‘We’ve become what Asheron always intended,’ Marcus observed. ‘Not conquerors but bridges.’

• ‘We’ve become what we chose to become,’ Thomas corrected. ‘That makes all the difference.’

The portals from Ispar still opened occasionally, bringing new confused, angry, desperate souls to Dereth. But now they were met not with chaos but with structure, not with abandonment but with guidance.

A young woman named Sarah had just arrived, torn from her life as a blacksmith’s apprentice, furious and terrified in equal measure. She was met by Elena, ancient now but still vital thanks to the lifestones, who had made it her purpose to welcome newcomers.

• ‘I want to go home,’ Sarah demanded, as they all did.

• ‘I know. We all did. But home is what we make it, not just where we come from.’

• ‘This isn’t what I chose!’

• ‘No. But you can choose what to do about it. Let me tell you about four people who arrived just as confused and angry as you, and what they became…’

And so the story continued, each new arrival adding their thread to the tapestry, each choice shaping what humanity would become. The Call of Asheron had ended, but the call of possibility continued, echoing across worlds and dimensions, reminding all who heard it that transformation was not just possible but inevitable.

The only choice was whether to embrace it or resist it, to evolve consciously or be evolved by circumstance.

In the end, the four Harbingers had shown that both paths led to the same destination—transcendence of what was in favor of what could be. The journey mattered more than the arrival, the choosing more than the choice.

And in the spaces between worlds, where thought became reality and reality became thought, the cosmic joke continued to unfold, its punchline forever just out of reach, forever worth pursuing.

In the great archive of New Cragstone, carved into stone that would outlast paper and memory, the four Harbingers left their final message for future generations:

**Marcus wrote:** ”Strength comes not from individual power but from understanding that we are simultaneously one and many. Every soldier who stands watch tonight is me, and I am them. We are legion, and we are one.”

**Thomas wrote:** ”Memory is burden and gift, chain and key. I carry the weight of all our losses so that you might carry the hope of all our gains. Forget nothing, but do not live in the past. We are the sum of our experiences but not limited by them.”

**Duulak wrote:** ”Reality is mathematics, and mathematics is possibility. Every equation has multiple solutions. We chose one path among infinite options. Future generations will choose others. This is not failure of our vision but proof of its success.”

**Maajid wrote:** ”The void mocks because it loves. The joke is that there is no joke, only the joy of infinite becoming. Be one, be many, be nothing, be everything. All states are true. All truths are states. The paradox is the answer.”

And beneath their words, added later in a hand that might have been Asheron’s or might have been the world itself speaking:

”They came as four, they became as one, they transcended as infinite. This is the way of consciousness when it finally understands itself. Not unity through force but harmony through choice. Not assimilation but synthesis. Not ending but transformation.

The Call continues. Answer as you will.”