Staring down this… thing, Dei could help but feel an irrepressible fear well up inside him. Despite [Meditation] centering him and ensuring his actions remained unbiased, it didn’t suppress his emotions.

  “We are being influenced,” Perumah spoke in his head.

  “I figured.”

  “I don’t know how. I sense no manipulation. If anyone else were to look into such a thing, they would interpret this as the soul’s natural response, that Hatred’s Call induces fear on an instinctual level, but I am very skilled at emotional manipulation, and I sense the signs; whatever is happening, the creature before us has active and dexterous control over it. Be cautious, for that speaks of it having… something of backdoor access to the soul. Just as The Mother controls the Dream, this does control something within you. It may not be your entire soul, as that would mark it as the Primordial itself, but it is not entirely distanced from such an origin.”

  The lanky dark figure stumbled forward, its hunched body tripping for a moment and stepping down on the rubble.

  “Decisions decisions…” it seemed to mumble, the sound carrying itself to their ears.

  The warped space around them seemed to crack further for a moment, and through one of the swirling portals Dei saw a gargantuan eye appear, glaring at their opponent.

  Cistasaria sat the edge of the Physical world, and Dei could feel the loathing she felt for Hatred’s Call. Ironically, though, the affinities within him did not recoil from it in the same way they did from Phantom Plague.

  Hatred’s Call caught her eye, and said “Decisions to be made. Decisions to undo.”

  Dei’s accelerated perception saw the space warp, two massive hands cupping Hatred’s Call as Cistasaria pushed to crush it, consequences be damned.

  The figure never lost its grin, and even Dei sensed resignation in the Leviathan’s actions, as if she knew she could not slay it, not like this.

  Moments before the boundary broke, the color drained from the world once more, everything freezing, even Cistasaria helpless to stop it.

  This time, no orange glow emanated from Clever, but even Hatred’s Call was not spared its locking sensation. Dei watched its silvery teeth dull, its muscles still.

  Distantly, at the edge of his vision, he saw the walls of the cavern dissolve, the world fading away into dust, revealing the darkness beyond.

  It closed inwards, more of the world vanishing into nothing with Dei at the center. When even the Gem Dweller city disappeared, he knew this was an illusion of sorts. No chance could a single being surpass the combined effort of a hundred Shaman’s, no matter how strong.

  The wave flowed over Hatred’s Call, and its body was the only thing untouched. When it arrived at Dei, he and his friends remained… but his internal world, Ashvorn, and even Fendrascora’s Garden dissolved into nothing.

  He felt Fendrascora panic, and immediately said “This isn’t real, it can’t be. We’re in a fake space.”

  Only his group and Hatred’s Call remained, none of them able to move.

  “An illusion?” Hatred’s Call questioned his words, “No… We are real. We are the only ones that are real. All of it is fake. A beautiful lie sung by the ones before, constructed as a paradise of satisfaction and accomplishment.

  I admit, I am surprised that all four of you are here, as only Dei was expected. You cannot change the flow. Only I, the First of Twelve Apostles, hold such a right.

  Let us go back then, shall we?

  I ask you now, YOU, Not Dei, not Perumah, not Fendrascora, not Clever, I ask YOU. If you could change the outcomes, where would you start?”

  Dei felt the vibration, something… encroaching on them. It was not within his soul, but of it. It was surprised at being seen, and thoughtful of the question.

  The darkness twisted in unknown colors, the beige and black of them giving way to the kaleidoscopic them.

  The shadows peeled away, and Dei felt the distant swelter of a sun, the frozen nipping at his fingers of the icy moon, and a gargantuan life between the two. He felt their presences, the three, but they were… muddled.

  Facing the three heavenly bodies, he saw that all were blurred and unreachable. Despite being an unfathomable distance away though, he felt the thrum in his soul.

  ‘Those are… the Primordials. A true vision of them… a glimpse directly into the past.’

  He knew they were not as close as they appeared, an illusion borne not of trickery but simple physics. He was not anywhere near the known multiverse- his body had been moved out into the depths of the unknown, and now the photons of light that’d once bounced off the three Primordials met his eyes; like looking through a telescope to view a star that’d collapsed on itself a billion years ago.

  Much closer, looking at the same ancient light he did, Dei felt a new presence- something not Primordial, but older.

  Despite their distance, the echoes of their will still sought out, hands grasping at the light to make themselves known, to tell the Primordials what they wanted to be heard.

  They hated the Earth, hated the Chaos. The ancient voices were everything, but Earth wanted more.

  The Sun and Moon sought to keep the order, while Earth grew weary. Isolation nagged at it, so she did the unthinkable: she created without permission. She broke from the ways of the ancient voices.

  And they hated her, but they were helpless to her.

  The Moon heard this, and many things filled its head. The Moon was a piece of them, their evil, and it grinned as it knew the desires of those ancient voices. They did not know it, but they wanted to hate, they simply held no frame of reference.

  Or so The Moon told them.

  Before him was the true body of Hatred’s Call, the one so far from everything that it was still stuck in the past. The light of the Primordial War, the signal it’d sent out, was fresh within its flesh.

  They were natural laws. They were HP, SP, MP. Life Act, Change.

  When The Moon heard their emotion, it gave them voice, and their will was tinted by its lens.

  Hatred’s Call was never meant to be; it was a corruption of the most basic forces of nature. The Moon hadn’t simply cast a spell and planted that into the Earth Primordial’s powers, it had tainted the Earth Primordial’s link with her past, with her… parents? He didn’t know how to quantify the relationship they held, but it ran deeper than parents.

  The Primordial’s embodied the wills of HP, SP, and MP, but the Earth Primordial found herself to be a will without a body when her tether to her source was corrupted.

  The path he traveled extended even deeper into the grand depths, into the HP, SP, and MP, until not even light remained. Until nothing remained, and his ability to think ceased.

  Celestial Parasites were not fair. They were not affinities, and most would die here, as there was simply nothing for the soul to latch on to. No time, space, or matter to hold their bodies.

  “Very interesting,” Perumah said, now the head of their menagerie. The other three were stuck in nothing, and may have remained like that for either ever or until something happened.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  She could sense that Hatred’s Call was keeping them in a limbo, preparing itself for something. They were not meant to be conscious here, but it also could not kill them this way. No matter how unfair, Dei had a domain that would shield him from higher powers, and was not something a being could simply swipe away.

  She found it curious that they now shared an existence. Though there was no sight or sense, she knew that she, Dei, Fendrascora, and Clever were one- one path, one goal, one domain.

  Aloran had integrated his friends into his domain, so she should not have been surprised, but she could see that they would ascend together, all building on each other.

  When Hatred’s Call put them here as it prepared its battlefield, they were stripped down to the domain, and the reason they remained together was because they were functionally inseparable in idea. There was no Perumah without Dei, no Dei without Clever, no Clever without… etcetera etcetera.

  This was not a state foreign to her though. After all, this was what Okrin had done to her.

  Erased her.

  In ancient times, before the Supreme Universe fractured, there were a few paths to magic. One path was the most lethal of them all- the Path to Oblivion.

  It erased enemies, it killed everything. It was to simply not be.

  In Okrin’s Trial, Perumah had been erased time, time, and time again, to feel what it was like. When Okrin found out she was on her way to creating a domain, he’d committed to a much more violent, painful manner of showing and teaching her than he would to one of his old disciples. Domains were… nonexistent in the time before, so Oblivion was a one-hit-kill every time.

  As the world matured and concepts fought back, Oblivion fell to the wayside as even the most basic of affinities for a concept would prevent it from killing you. Supposedly, after the fracture, some still utilized the old ways, but as the world grew and they became obsolete, they were forgotten.

  Just like all primal technologies, Oblivion magic was interesting, but there were very good reasons it was not practiced any longer. As the rules of magic changed, Oblivion was just… not the danger it once was.

  Hatred’s Call likely did not expect such a thing, and it put her in the one position it really should not have, inches from its real body.

  She questioned for a moment. “Should I? Should I genuinely hurt a most basic law of the universe?”

  Then, looking around, she saw how vast, how infinite it was, and said “Absolutely. The Celestial Parasite is barely a small fragment of it.”

  She reached into her chaos, shaped it into Oblivion between her hands, and shot it forwards in a beam.

  Within her, Okrin cheered.

  Outside, there was no scream, per se, but there was a reaction. Hatred’s Call flexed, and she sensed the space it was preparing- some kind of world that held far too many Rights for it to be an illusion, and something she did not wish to encounter.

  “Chaos-born,” it growled, “You should be extinct.”

  “Release us, parasite.”

  “A vessel is required,” it said, signaling towards the Dei aspects.

  “This one is claimed.”

  It threw the fragmented space towards her, and universes, no matter how small relative to the others, were not easy to dodge.

  The gaping maw consumed them, and she found herself pulled backwards to the past- true time travel, not the stuff that Clever did. Her rudimentary understanding over the concept meant she could glean little to nothing.

  With their vision returning though, she felt the burst of emotions from Clever.

  “HOW?!” he asked.

  She could only say “Not now,” as she knew they were nowhere near safe.

  She could tell this was supposed to be Dei’s original Gem-Dweller village, but she’d broken it in her initial surprise assault.

  Instead, they were in some kind of… white liminal space, with fractured pieces of land floating about.

  They saw various people, frozen and unmoving in their day to day life.

  Somewhere distantly, they watched countless shadowy hands reach and pull themselves up, supposedly appearing from around the “Corner” of nothing, no visible depth. In the middle of these overlapping arms, a bloodshot cyclopian eye atop a worm-shaped thing crawled out

  Dei’s floated up, ready to attack, when Clever said “Wait! It’s a trap! I don’t know how, but we are in some kind of, um, loop! If we go to him, we go backwards. Forwards! We need to go forwards!”

  “How?” Dei asked, and Clever turned this way and that.

  “There!” he said, pointing down one of the fractured streets.

  Dei didn’t question it flying forward a moment before he felt himself be pulled down.

  The concepts holding up his Rage were going… strange, like they didn’t truly exist here, and he was forced to run on his own two feet.

  He leapt between floating islands, and the warbling call behind them told Dei they were being pursued.

  As he moved, he saw how the people going about their day appeared to unfreeze, progressing.

  But it was only an illusion- snapshots from various moments that played on repeat.

  Looking backwards for a moment, he saw how the shadows chasing them would link the islands together and pull them towards itself, covering itself in an armor of reality as the time started to move on its back, only its eye unchanging.

  It reached through itself, and its limbs came out in some of the future fragments around Dei, not reaching for him, but the others, pulling them all together in a dome around him.

  Perumah said “I can break us free at a moment's notice, but not infinitely. I think we should enter the memory to see what it does, and if we become trapped, I will shatter it. Do any of your teleportation abilities work?”

  He’d already tried multiple times. “No, as Clever said, it’s telling me I’m already here.”

  He slipped through as many as he could, made it as far as he could, but the dome formed around him, the seconds playing out, and he was dropped into the space Hatred’s Call was attempting to construct.

  The change was instant, many of his powers cutting back in but no reason to use them any longer.

  He found himself in his home village again, no monster chasing him.

  He began to stealth around, [Good Samaritan] covering for him as he was already on a mission to protect the Gem Dwellers from whatever Hatred’s Call was trying to do.

  Looking around, several things clicked into place and he knew exactly where he was- immediately he ran for the center of it, Iora’s hut.

  “IORA!” he heard his father scream, “WHY HAVE YOU HURT MY SON?”

  His mother ran and he almost went after her, when Clever said “This… isn’t right.”

  He looked down, “What isn’t?”

  “I can feel the timeline getting… sick. Something wrong is about to happen.”

  The wall to Iora’s house exploded, and out she came, twisted.

  Her hollow eyes held only a speck of light, those of Hatred’s Call.

  Gor, his father, hissed as she appeared.

  “Corrupted Shaman! Get the council!” he screamed and Dei felt the world twist as he activated whatever Skill he’d used last time.

  Iora’s staff sizzled in her hand, and she looked down at it thoughtfully before casting it away.

  She hissed and growled, then launched herself at his father faster than he knew his father could respond.

  Gor barely had time to be shocked, but Dei was already there. He tackled her to the side with everything he had, but found himself almost ineffectual as he was only just able to move her.

  Still, it was enough, and they were driven into the ground together. Dei kicked off her instantly, dodging a swipe from her and landing next to his father.

  “You need to go,” he said, “Take as many people as you can with you. None of you are gonna be able to stop her now.”

  “Who are you?” Gor asked suspiciously. Dei only partly looked Gem Dweller, and anyone with a mana-sense would see he was entirely composed of Rage.

  “A Slaughterer, here to put down one more beast.”

  He flared the Slaughterer aspect of his Presence, and his father ran, picking up the weaker members to start running alongside the others.

  The corrupt Iora pulled herself from the crater and scowled.

  “The timeline is… better,” he said, and Dei grimaced as he realized the angle this might come from.

  If they were genuinely in the past, did that mean they were changing the past too? Would people that died here be erased?

  Hatred’s Call had tried to dive into the past and slay his father.

  He boiled with fury, teleporting behind Hatred’s Call and releasing a devastating blow to the back of its head- only for the strike to barely move its neck.

  It smirked, and backhanded him, sending him crashing through a wall.

  He was on his feet again immediately, but it tackled and tore into him, tearing gouges out of his flesh before Perumah spiked from his skin and pierced it. It grunted and hesitated long enough for Dei to teleport behind it, now with Perumah in hand.

  “It’s domains,” she said, “No matter how it seems, this isn’t truly a space, time, or battle. We need to fight it with our domains if we want to kill it.”

  He grunted, “How? How can I do that?”

  “Mine and yours are the only two that are effectively defined, so Clever, you watch the timeline and Fendrascora, you keep us mobile. Dei… this will hurt badly, but I believe there is more to gain here than we first assumed.”