Chapter Text
Chapter One
Wake Up
Black.
All that there was… was black.
An endless sea of featureless nothing, cold, vast, and empty.
And then there was one.
From the infinite expanse came life, the last of their kind. Or perhaps they were the first?
From a certain frame of reference, this life was 18 years old. But here, ‘years’ had no meaning. Here, all was eternal – it had always been, would always be. There were no laws as you would understand them that governed this infinite abyss, and to its denizens, such laws, when they did exist, meant next to nothing. But this life – this single, solitary soul, a dreamer in a world devoid of others – was unique here.
Life could not, under ordinary circumstances, exist here. It did not belong here. And yet, it did. And yet, here they were.
In a sense, they did belong – all did, in the end – but for an individual life to persist in this place with no place, this black without boundary… that was simply unheard of. There could be visitors, yes, momentary passers-through, but for a soul to persist for more than a moment here was quite the event indeed.
“Steven… we can’t both exist,”
On the surface, he looked at peace. But surfaces can be deceiving. In his mind, the dreamer raged. His name was Steven Universe, and he once had a life and a world that was vibrant and alive, full of color and personality. It was nothing like the space through which he currently drifted unaware. From his perspective, this young man was reliving the entirety of his life, second by second, from his birth until his death. The strain of having an entire lifetime condensed and repeated back to you in a matter of moments – from a certain frame of reference – could drive anyone insane. It could even kill them. Perhaps it was a gift, then, that his life had been so short. Had he lived to his life to its natural conclusion, there was no telling whether he’d make it out of this dream, this experience, intact.
But one could not persist in dreams forever.
“Wake up.”
The voice resounded in his psyche loud and clear, like a vision from an angry god. He couldn’t have ignored it had he wanted to. But to his curiosity, the voice was a familiar one.
“…Mom…?”
“Steven!” Another familiar voice. The voice of somebody he loved. Another life cut short by the cruelty of fate, a second soul adrift in the black. Like a light, she flickered into being mere moments after Steven had, and yet, an eternity of solitude had passed before she reconvened with her other half. Her name had been Connie Maheswaran, and she had been enjoying a break between semesters when her existence came to an abrupt end.
From a certain frame of reference, she had stirred from her slumber almost as soon as she appeared here. Clearly, it had happened before Steven. She had gone through much the same ordeal as he was going through now, and had made it to the other side first. It was a testament to her resilience, and her strength of will. She did not know where she was or how she had come to be here, but she recognized the boy adrift beside her, and she needed him to
“Wake up.”
The voice repeated in his mind, and Steven’s eyes snapped open.
As if it had always been that way, the endless black was pink. Clouds formed up beneath him, and as he stirred, he was gently lifted to his feet by their coalescence. The space around him had chosen a form he would find familiar, the closest analogous match to its nature it could gleam from his memory. This place was a place of subjectivity, you see – its form was decided by the wills of who inhabited it. To Connie, it had been a familiar pink room as soon as she opened her eyes, and now, so it was for Steven.
“I… Connie?” Steven asked. He felt as though he’d been sleeping for a very long time, and he wasn’t all there yet. He’d yet to reorient himself.
“Steven! You’re awake! I thought…” What? She could not recall. It was on the tip of her tongue, and yet the thought escaped her. She did not know it yet, but this ignorance was a gift. “…why are we in Rose’s Room? I thought we were in the park…” she said. She tried to recall more details, but once again, they eluded her.
“This… isn’t Rose’s Room. This feels more like the mindscape,” As his senses returned to him, Steven felt a familiar sense of othering that at first he couldn’t place. But I could. It was the feeling of having come untethered, finding yourself a drift in a world beyond your own, a world beyond your comprehension. An othering, yes, but with a strange sense of belonging buried underneath. Though it was alien, it also felt like home. It was much the same feeling he’d had any time he fell unconscious, and found himself in the mindscape. So the mindscape, he presumed, is where he must be.
“Did we fall asleep, then?” Connie asked.
“I can’t remember…” He, too, had been given the gift of ignorance. Beyond a certain point, his memory was a blank. All he knew was he was here, and that meant he wasn’t really here, but his mind was. He couldn’t possibly have known the truth of his circumstance, that he was a soul unbound, adrift in a sea of void. That the girl beside him, too, was little more than a soul clung to the form it found most familiar. But what he thought he knew was close enough to the truth to feel correct. Close enough to tell him that this place was not what it seemed on its surface.
As I said before, surfaces can be deceiving.
Around them, the pink clouds began to swirl. Though neither of them had willed it to change, the room was changing all the same, having received its orders from the will of another. But though they looked around, they saw none but themselves. By the time the transformation finished, Steven and Connie found themselves in the middle of a long, dimly lit tunnel.
Behind them there was only black.
In front of them, a light blinked into being.
“A tunnel…?” If that were the case, then that light, they reasoned, must’ve been the exit. Or at the very least, the end point that the current master of this room was ushering them towards.
With nowhere to go but forward, the two souls began to walk.
*** *** ***
Korra fell.
It felt as though she had jumped into a lake, but had misjudged its depth. She kept wanting to land, but no matter how deep she sank, the bottom never came.
Above her, the last light beyond the water flickered out of existence, and Korra was left alone, more alone than she'd ever felt in her life, sinking further into the abyss.
A familiar voice resounded in her mind.
“Wake up.”
“Raava…” she whispered. Of course, Raava. How could she ever feel alone? No matter where she went, where she was, Raava was a part of her.
Though she was dreaming like the boy and girl before her, for Korra, the experience was a familiar one. Trauma had had its way with her mind many times in the past, and she’d relived many of the moments she was reabsorbing now as though it were for the first time. That past experience and familiarity meant that unlike Steven, Korra had no trouble waking from her slumber.
Her eyes snapped open and Korra gasped for air. Water filled her lungs, and soon, down became up, and falling became floating. She was thrust from the sea into a familiar world of vibrant color and alien life, a world of spirits where little made sense to one who had been born in the physical. She wondered, had she somehow meditated into the spirit world in her sleep? But if that were the case, why did it feel so
Asami.
She had been sleeping next to Asami.
Once she remembered, Korra frantically looked around, finding the love of her life unconscious on the shore behind her. She had yet to wake from her slumber.
“Asami!” she called, shaking her love to pull her from her dreams. It was not the shaking that did the trick, however, but the sound of Korra’s voice. Just as Raava’s commanded Korra to awake, Korra’s voice, in Asami’s mind, was now commanding her to do the same. And, only because it was her, Asami complied.
“Korra…?” Asami awoke, groggy from her dream. Already the experience of what she’d gone through was fading from her mind. “Why are we in the spirit world?” she asked as her eyes adjusted to the light.
“This isn’t the spirit world,” Korra said, “I know it looks like it but it’s not. I can’t explain it, but this place feels… different, somehow. It feels-”
“Cold.” Asami concluded. Korra nodded her head in agreement. It was cold. The spirit world that they knew and spent so much time together in was warm and alive, but though this place looked just like it, there were no spirits in the sky, in the water, in the grass. There was no presence, no sense of peace. All there was was a facsimile of a world they’d come to know, and in the distance, a deep, dark wood they felt as though had no end.
“How did we get here?” Korra asked.
Asami was wondering the same thing, of course, but she couldn’t remember the answer. Like Steven and Connie before them, this ignorance was a bliss, they just hadn’t come to know that yet. They didn’t know how lucky they were. So, ironically, their feelings turned to fear. Was this some sort of spiritual attack? Or perhaps some sort of Avatar Vision? Korra wondered, but Asami was here too. She could feel her spiritual presence clear as day, and this didn’t seem like a vision or a dream or like any form of attack. It didn’t seem like much of anything, if she were being honest. She couldn’t get a read on this place at all.
Though the answers eluded them, each took solace in the fact that, wherever they were, at least they were here together. The two grabbed each other’s hand and warmth returned to them as they held each other close. Neither had ever felt so warm and welcoming as they felt right now.
In the distance, an orb of light flickered into existence, deep in the heart of the distant wood. Though each of them felt as though there would be no return should they enter its domain, they weren’t being given much of a choice. Though the world looked vast and open, in fact, there was nowhere for Korra or Asami to go but forward. Nothing else existed now but forward. So with no other clues as to what it was they should do, forward was exactly where they went.
*** *** ***
For Adora, this voyeuristic view of her life was nothing new.
She’d watched her memories play back to her in perfect clarity in First Ones temples before, holograms in tune with her mind. The only thing was, she hadn’t been in a First Ones temple in some time. So as she watched her life play out in front of her, all Adora could wonder was why? She thought she’d left all this behind her when she left Etheria to restore magic to the universe. This fixation on the past, on choices she regretted, promises she broke. In retrospect, it made sense before – she had a lot to work through. But now?
Last she knew, she’d been on Mara’s ship, asleep in her quarters with Catra by her side.
Catra…
Adora looked around. Her life played back around her in all directions, but she did appear to be in some sort of space, and in that space, Catra lie asleep, floating in the air to her right. Adora reached out to grab her, but her hand passed right through, as if she were a hologram.
“Wake up.”
Mara’s voice rung in her head like a bell, louder and more distinct than she’d ever heard it before. Wake up? Was she asleep? She didn’t feel like she was asleep. But Mara had never led her wrong before. If she said she needed to wake up, then as far as Adora was concerned, that meant she needed to wake up.
Closing her eyes, Adora inhaled deeply and focused on herself. If she was asleep, then all she had to do was-
When Adora reopened her eyes, she was standing outside The Beacon. “…Why am I back on Etheria? Am I still asleep?” she wondered.
Looking around, her eyes settled back on Catra. She was still there, floating next to her, not-so-blissfully unaware. For Adora, the experience of reliving her life had become old hat, but for Catra? With all the terrible things she’d done, all the mistakes she made? To have to relive all that was her own personal hell, and it showed on her face. She was sleeping, but not very peacefully. Inside, her mind raged. She still needed to
“Catra, wake up,” Adora said, reaching out to shake her, and this time finding purchase as Catra’s clawed hand shot out and gripped tight around her wrist. As she jolted awake, there was fear and rage on her face, and tears welling in her eyes, but as soon as she saw Adora, all that negativity melted away.
“Adora! I’m sorry, I, I thought I was…” she rushed to apologize.
“It’s okay. I’m… pretty confused, myself.”
“…Why are we back on Etheria?”
“That’s exactly what I was asking,” Adora said, “but it feels… different, somehow. Doesn’t it?”
Catra tilted her head. “It’s green and bright and feels exactly the same to me.” As she said that, the image of the world shifted, and Catra and Adora now found themselves deep in the heart of the Whispering Woods. “What the hell!?” Catra yelped. She was in a clearing now she didn’t recognize, but Adora knew all-too-well. The look on her face said it all.
“This is where I found the sword,” she revealed, looking around to be sure. And indeed, forming from the ground was the sword of She-Ra, the false one created by the First Ones to control her for the Heart of Etheria project. The sword she’d shattered ages ago. Now she was even more confused.
Then, the sword began to glow. ‘Reach for me’, she heard it say, clear as day in her mind. “But you’ll hurt me,” Adora replied. ‘Reach for me, and you will understand’, the sword insisted.
But Catra could not hear the sword. From her perspective, Adora was speaking to herself. Or worse, her. “I’m never going to hurt you, never again,” she repeated, recapturing her girlfriend’s attention.
“Oh, nononono, not you, Catra, I'm sorry, I know you won’t, I just… I think the sword talked to me…?”
Catra quirked an eyebrow. “So it can talk now?” she asked incredulously, “Is this some sort of weird magic She-Ra thing? Why’d I get pulled along for the ride? Can we go home now?”
Adora frowned. She didn’t know how, but she felt as though they wouldn’t be able to do that if they tried. And she was right. “…I don’t know what’s going on, but… it says if I reach for it, I’ll understand.”
“Understand what?” Catra asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Ugh,” Catra sighed, “fine, whatever. Grab the sword and let’s go then.”
“I don’t know if I should,”
“Then I’ll do it,” Catra said, walking forward to do just that.
“Catra, wait!”
But it was too late. Catra grabbed the sword, and the whole world went white.
*** *** ***
“Mom!” Luz cried, reaching desperately for the cube, the window to her native world through which she had been conversing with her mother for the first time in months. How cruel that she was to be pulled back now, out of her makeshift portal, after such a severe misunderstanding. She’d hoped to bring her mother some peace, some hope, but only succeeded to give her pain. And now, no matter how hard she willed it, she wouldn’t be able to set that wrong right. Her exit from this realm between realms was out of her control, the rope tied taut around her waist hoisting her back to the demon realm.
Or so she thought. It had happened so fast, she wasn’t even aware of it. She’d been lucky to be in interstitial space to begin with. Had she been solidly within one world or the other, she would have required the bliss of ignorance to escape the horror of what transpired. But perhaps this was even more cruel. The others – the grogginess of their dreaming state, a side effect of their salvation, meant the specifics of what they’d lost eluded them. They were just happy to see their other there beside them, to know that they were okay. It was a quiet relief for reasons they couldn’t quite remember. But Luz? Luz had no such luxury.
When she passed through her portal’s edge, her brief life repeated in her mind in perfect detail, from start to finish. She screamed and held her head, the pain unlike anything she had ever felt before, but the ordeal was over within seconds.
When the pain subsided, Luz Noceda opened her eyes back in the demon realm, outside the Owl House, where she had been when she first made her makeshift portal. But something was wrong. The air was still and silent, and her friends – King, Eda, Hooty – were nowhere to be seen. Even her portal seemed to be gone. She was completely, utterly alone.
And then she wasn’t.
From the corner of her eye, a familiar form appeared. A cotton candy haired goddess who’d just recently become her girlfriend. Luz had no clue how she got here, but it was a welcome reprieve from the crushing loneliness and confusion she’d been experiencing only seconds prior, an overwhelming feeling of loss that seemed to have no source. She turned and ran in her direction, and found her deep asleep on the ground.
“Amity? Amity!” Luz called, but to no avail. No matter how she shook, how she called, her girlfriend would not stir from her dream.
You see, Amity Blight had not been as lucky as her girlfriend. She was nowhere near primed or ready for the experience of appearing in this world, and she didn’t have the buffer of being between two realms to ease her transition. She was taking the full brunt of the experience that was her life, and as most people would, she found herself caught in a loop, reliving her brief 14 years again and again ad infinitum.
The others had been stronger, more experienced, they’d lived richer lives which had prepared them for an event such as this. They’d confronted their demons and had the lived experience of other worlds beneath their belts. But Amity? She was just a girl. As far as the demon realm was concerned, she was just an average witch. She’d yet to face her demons, or even acknowledge they existed. She’d yet to traverse between realms and see the world of humans her girlfriend hailed from. Her life had only just begun to change when Luz entered into it a few months earlier, she was nowhere near ready for an experience like this.
Perhaps you would think me cruel, then, to have brought her here. But as difficult an experience as this was, it was better than the alternative. And to make Luz face this journey alone would be a far crueler fate than a badly shaken teenage girl. There’s a reason that these souls come in twos. But that reason would not reveal itself if she dreamed her dream forever.
“Wake up.”
For Amity, the voice she heard was not of Luz, but that of her father’s. He was urging her from her slumber, ushering her into this new realm.
Her closed eyes tightened and she groaned, and Luz grew more desperate, calling her name more and more as she shook her harder and harder. She had to
“Wake up.”
Amity’s eyes snapped open and she gasped for air, bolting upright and into Luz’s arms. Her girlfriend cried and held her close, held her as though she might never be able to hold her again. After what she’d just been through, it was exactly what Amity needed. To be held by the one she…
“Luz…?” she asked, “I just had the worst dream…”
“Amity! I’m so glad you’re okay,” Luz wept, “when I came out of the portal, everyone was gone, but then you appeared! But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t wake you up. I don’t know why, but I… I…”
What she was trying to say was that she felt a great loss in her soul, but she couldn’t figure out why. That incident with her mom had been distressing, yes, but it shouldn’t have elicited grief. Her soul knew something her mind was not yet aware of, and the two had yet to reconvene and catch up with one another. She’d been thrust wildly from distress into mourning and she couldn’t know why. Not yet. But it left her desperate, not just for Amity, but for anyone. If Amity hadn’t woken up, she would’ve been alone in a way that all living beings must be alone eventually, but she was awake now. She was awake, and in this moment, that was all that mattered.
“Portal…? So it worked…?” Amity asked, confused as to what was going on. From her perspective, she’d just been at home, avoiding her mother as she was wont to do, but now she was at the Owl House, with Luz. And she’d had the most awful dream. How else could she describe her life until this point but awful? Like her name implied, Luz brought such light into her world. To have to relive her loneliness and misery not once, not twice, but several times over was a stressful experience. It would’ve been stressful for anyone. She didn’t know when she fell asleep or how she got here, but it was clear that Luz was in distress, and that was all that mattered. She knew she’d planned to experiment with a makeshift portal today. All Amity could think was that all this must somehow be related to that.
Seeing that her girlfriend was too badly shaken to respond to her initial question, Amity changed gears from confusion into comfort. “…Luz, it’s okay, I’m okay,” she fibbed. In truth, her head was sore and she was still reeling from her experience, but she had to be strong for Luz. She seemed really freaked out by something and she could only imagine what. “What happened?”
Before she could get an answer – one which surely would’ve only left her more confused – Amity and Luz both noticed that, in the distance, in the woods, an orb of light had come into being. Yellow and warm, its glow illuminated nearby foliage and voicelessly enticed the two to follow it. They didn’t know how they knew that that was what it wanted, but they felt it loud and clear.
“Can you… feel that?” Amity asked.
Luz sniffed. The sensation was so strong it snapped her from her crying, pulled her back to here. It was if it had spoken to her in the loudest voice she had ever heard in her life, and yet it sat there still, floating in complete silence.
“Yeah… I think it wants us to follow it,” Luz finally replied.
Amity swallowed hard. She had no clue what was going on. Neither of them did. But maybe that light knew. Maybe it would give them answers. That was what she felt, what they both felt, so Amity offered Luz her hand, and the two stood up from the ground. The allure of the light was unlike anything they’d ever experienced before. They could feel it ushering them forward again, calling out to them without ever speaking a word.
The two girls exchanged a look, and their grip of the other’s hand tightened. There was nowhere to go but forward.
*** *** ***
For an immortal such as herself, loss was nothing new.
In her thousand years of being, Marceline had watched the whole world die, family die, friends die. Death was a constant in her life, and always would be until the end of time.
But even despite all that, she’d never felt a loss as deep as this.
Why she grieved, she had no clue. Last she remembered, she was baking a pie with Bonnibel Bubblegum in their kitchen. Now, she was watching her whole life repeat itself in front of her, and grieving the loss of something dear to her that she could not seem to remember.
Marceline had never felt so alone.
“Wake up.”
“Dad?” she asked, looking around for the voice’s source. But her dad was nowhere to be seen. Was this his doing? Part of some scheme to get her to take over the Nightosphere again? Why would he make her rewatch her life? It was quite the long life to sort through. But initial suspicions aside, this didn’t seem like her dad at all. All she knew was somebody was picking a fight with her.
“Wake up.”
The voice repeated, but it made no more sense to Marceline now than it did the first time. She was awake. Wasn’t she? What a stupid question, of course she was. She would know. Right?
With nothing else to do, Marceline sat down, pulled her legs up to her chest, and watched her life play out in front of her. She’d gotten hazy on some of the details, anyway. She could use the refresher course.
She sat there for what felt like an hour, and as it caught up to today, she figured the ordeal would be over and she’d be back in her house with Bonnie. But when it caught up to her most recent memory, it looped back around to the beginning, and Marceline threw her hands up in frustration. Well that had been a waste of time.
“I don’t get it, are you trying to teach me something? Come on, man,”
“Wake up.”
This time, the voice took on the form of Princess Bubblegum.
“Bonnie? Where are you?”
“Wake up.” it repeated.
“I am awake! Geez,” Marceline complained. “…I am awake, right…?” Finally, some doubt. She could never wake up if she didn’t even acknowledge she was sleeping in the first place. As she finally began to question herself, a door appeared in the middle of the void. “Finally,” she said, reaching out to open the door and
Marceline awoke with a start in a world ravaged by the Mushroom War. Looking around in confusion, she found her girlfriend wide awake and studying her surroundings. “Bonnie? What’s going on?”
“Finally, you’re awake,” Bubblegum said, reaching down to scoop some dirt into her hands which she spent precious seconds feeling filter through her fingers. “hm. It definitely feels real.”
“Uh… care to clue me in?”
“We seem to be in some sort of transitory space which responds to its occupants’ memories. When I woke up, it looked like the Candy Kingdom, but now that you woke up, it looks like the world just after the war. I don’t know how it decides whose memories it’s going to hide itself behind, but I guess it looks like this now because it’s somewhere we have in common?”
“Uh… what?”
Bubblegum sighed. “This is probably some sort of ding dong magic by some ding dong wizard. I’ll find a way out, don’t worry.”
Marceline was confused. What was she talking about? Transitory space? Wizard? Memories? “…You said, when you woke up. So you were sleeping too?” she asked.
“Yeah, relived my whole life condensed into a couple seconds. It was wild,” Bonnie said. Marceline frowned. A couple seconds? Why’d she get the express deal? “somebody’s probably trying to teach me some sort of lesson. Too bad for them I’m the only teacher here,”
“I had the same dream,” Marceline said, “do you think that means anything?”
Bonnie paused. “…Okay, so maybe it’s not about teaching me a lesson then,”
“Yeah, that was my first thought too, but I didn’t really learn anything? I just. Watched until the end, and then it repeated. Then I heard your voice in my head telling me to wake up, and a door appeared, and… now I’m here, with you.”
Curious. She hadn’t heard anybody telling her to wake up, Bonnie thought.
It was then that a light appeared distant on the horizon, like the glow of a city just out of view. Marceline looked to the light, then back to her girlfriend.
“Whoever’s doing this must want us to go there, I guess,” Bonnie said, “fine then, let’s get this over with.”
“For the record, I still have no clue what’s going on. If this gets us killed, just know I’m blaming you.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
And so the two went forward.
*** *** ***
Out of the light stepped five sets of two. The champions of this story. From the infinite expanse of interstitial space, they now appeared in my world, and like any good host, I stood in the proverbial doorway, dressed to the nines and ready to greet them. As they were all humanoid in construction, I took on a roughly humanoid appearance, too. Well, I say roughly, but it really is quite spot on. It’d been a while since I’d taken on a human form, but luckily, one of the lucky ten had a variation in their memory I could draw from. That lucky soul was Korra, and as her eyes adjusted from the light to the white, color-splattered void I called my home, she immediately became enraged.
“YOU!” She called out, charging forward before her girlfriend could stop her and before my other guests knew what was going on.
“What the hell?” Catra asked, looking around. All she saw was a girl in blue running towards a sharp-dressed man with bright blue hair with fire in her eyes. She likely would’ve pummeled me if she had the chance, but I reset her position as soon as she got within so many ‘feet’ of me, assuming such measurements are a thing that make sense where we are. Faster than a blink of her eye, she was back with Asami, and the light behind her through which they’d entered flickered out. Not that it was terribly apparent to them against the mostly white backdrop to begin with.
“Please, calm down, I’m not who you think. I’m just borrowing this form because it is familiar to you,” I explained. As the rest of my guests shuffled in, the nine girls and solitary boy looked around in confusion. None of them had any clue what was going on, and the only one I was familiar to was Korra. Perhaps I should’ve picked a different form? As my eyes settled on Adora, I shifted from the sharp-dressed man to the image of Mara.
“Mara?” she asked, but my form shifted again as my eyes settled onto Amity and Luz, and now I was their emperor.
“Belos!” Amity called.
“Not quite,” I said, borrowing his voice. Removing his mask, I revealed another man with bright blue hair and eyes to match, battered and scarred and different from the form that Korra found so familiar.
“Who are you? What’s going on? Who are all these people?” Steven asked, “Did you bring us here?”
“I did,” I smiled.
“So this is your space? Are you some kind of wizard?” Bubblegum asked.
“Belos is a witch, actually,” Amity corrected.
“Why is there a child here?” Bubblegum asked more pointedly. It was a good question, but its answer would have to wait. I had to start somewhere, you see, and the best place to start in this particular instance would be at the end.
“Who I am is not important. What is important is that all of you, as of mere moments ago, and yet an eternity prior, are dead.”
A silence befell my crowd, and each of them looked to the loved one immediately next to them. Though each of them wanted to protest – some more fiercely than others – they all somehow knew I was telling them the truth. The grief and loss they collectively felt on their way here must have been their own. The moments they could not remember had been the moments of their undoing.
“I’m… dead? But I was just… talking to my mom, and then…” Luz said. I frowned, and nodded sadly.
Once again, I changed my form, taking now a shape not too dissimilar from the one I’d picked initially: a sharp-dressed man with short, bright blue hair. But I was in different clothes, a fashion foreign to all I had gathered and yet close enough to what they knew to be recognizable as the belongings of a man of wealth and taste.
“How… how did this happen…? Are you… God?” Luz asked.
Amity looked quizzically in her girlfriend’s direction. "God?" she asked incredulously. I certainly would make for an odd one, yes.
But I shook my head. “No, I am not God. Nor am I a witch, or a wizard, or a spirit, or a gem. I am more of a herald; a facilitator. I am the voice of a higher power.”
“What kind of ‘higher power’?” Korra asked incredulously.
“You wouldn’t understand any more than that: a higher power.” And that, as they say, would have to be that.
“My mom… is she okay?” Luz asked, tears welling up in her eyes. “Eda, King, Hooty – are they going to be alright?”
I smilde sadly. That’s what I like to see. Her immediate concern was for her loved ones and their well-being. I only wished I had happier news to share.
“No.” I answered simply. I could see the child’s heart break in two, and nearly felt my own mirror the gesture. “But they might be.” And then there was hope.
“Who do you think you are…” Catra seethed. “Telling us we’re all dead, telling a kid that they’re dead, and then following that up with a ‘maybe’? What do you mean ‘they might be’? What happened to her family? What happened to my friends!?”
“Catra, calm down,” Adora requested.
“Calm down? You expect me to calm down? Have you been listening? Apparently, we’re all dead! And now this asshole wants to be all coy and tiptoe around the point while telling us everyone we love aren’t going to be alright without us?”
“You misunderstand,” I corrected, “it is not that they won’t be alright without you. It is that none of them any longer exist. I’m afraid I only told you all a half-truth in the beginning. It is not that you are all dead – technically speaking, you’re all somewhere in the middle, in-between life and death. Rather, it is more that your universes, your entire realities, have all come to an abrupt end. Billions upon trillions of lives have all been snuffed out instantaneously, and now, all that remains of your once vibrant worlds… are you.”
Once again, the space fell silent. It was a lot for any mortal to contend with, the concept of death on such a monumental scale.
In actuality, their fates were far worse than any ordinary death, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them that. It would’ve served no purpose and only demoralized them further, when what I needed was for them to have hope. But you know, and I know, and we should both be praying that they never know.
They all reacted differently to this revelation.
Luz, a child, one of the kindest souls I’d salvaged, fell to her knees and cried. She cried and she cried and she cried, held by her girlfriend Amity who cried equally as hard. They were only children. Nobody could blame them after what they’d just been put through.
Catra lashed out in anger. She cursed me as though I were the one responsible for her suffering, and not just the unfortunate soul tasked with playing messenger.
Korra and Adora both reacted in much the same way, falling silent and simply letting my words sink in. Everything they knew and loved was gone, and so were they. The only way they knew to process this was in stoic silence, making sense of it all in their mind.
Asami looked resigned to it, as though this were par for the course. And for her, it was. She’d lost so much in her life, the fact that she’d lose her entire world too certainly seemed to track.
Marceline was in denial, while Bonnie took a moment to process all that she had just learned. The loss was terrible, yes, but this new space and the sort of being I was excited her, not that she would ever openly admit it.
And then there was Steven and Connie. Connie had reacted how any normal person would, how Luz and Amity had, and had broken down in tears. But Steven was cold, distant, quiet. He was comforting her, yes, but he didn’t feel much of anything at the news right now, and he didn’t like what that implied.
“Everything’s… gone…?” Adora finally asked, the first to break the silence. “I… how? Why? Why did you only save us?”
“My instructions were to save only one of you, a champion to fight for your world’s right to exist. But I found these terms to be too callous, and cruel. I knew if I only saved one, there would be questions. If I am so powerful as to intervene in universal annihilation, why didn’t I save anyone else? What about the ones you loved, were they not important enough? So I compromised. I salvaged two from every world – partners, lovers – so that none of them would have to face the horror of their predicament alone. So that none of them would be tormented by the knowledge that the one they loved the most was gone, and might never come back.”
“But why us?” Adora pressed. “Why didn’t you save anyone else?”
“I already told you, I am not God. Nor am I a witch, or a wizard, or a spirit, or a gem. I am nothing any of you would be familiar with. From your perspective, my power is limitless, but I am bound by the rules of my role. In almost all circumstances, I am not allowed to intervene. But the circumstances of your worlds’ annihilation are different, your loss was never meant to happen. So a higher power tasked me with correcting this mistake the only way the rules would allow me to. I’ve already bent them for you by taking two of you. I couldn’t break them for you any further than that.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for nothing,” Catra seethed, “you should have let me die with everybody else.”
“I believe you are too important to simply let fade away,” I reassure her, “I believe as much for all of you. I chose you ten specifically for a reason. All of you are integral to your respective worlds, and their trajectories. You all have shaped or will shape your worlds’ futures in profound ways, and have power beyond that of its average denizen. All of you, even the ‘ordinary’ among you, have the makings of greatness deep inside of you. Greatness I believe may be just enough to save your worlds from oblivion.”
“But they’re already gone,” Korra reminded, “you told us they’re already gone. How can we possibly save them now?”
With a thought, I form a chair behind me and take a seat.
“For that, I will have to tell you a story.”