Prologue

  Look closely, reader, at the face of our protagonist. See his dark, gritty stubble? His angled jawline? That thousand yard stare? The faint aroma of despair that follows him like a dog follows a man holding bacon…that's what fifteen years of working in industry does to you. His days run like a broken sink, one dripping identically to the one before it. He goes to bed two hours after he should have because he dreads waking to find out he has to endure another ground hog's day adventure through existential hell. He is not having a good time. Let's watch him die.

  Ulric woke much as he had yesterday and many yesterdays before that: hungover. There had been too many drinks but he wasn't able to accept that he had a problem because he was relying on that problem to solve other problems. This was not healthy, and he knew this. Just like he knew he had precisely fifty-five minutes to get the coffee brewing, take a shower, shave, and dress for work, so that he could make the forty-five minute train commute to work to arrive on time. Somatic autopilot carried him, with no recollection of the intervening moments, through to the parking lot of Dynamic Ceramics and Metallurgy Incorporated, the same plant he'd worked at since graduating college with his master's degree in Materials Science following his bachelor's in Mechanical engineering. He briefly smiled as he thought about those wonder days of classes, acquaintances between classes, and the fun he'd had with his dorm mates after.

  "Twenty-six." he thought. "I peaked at Twenty-six, it was the greatest time of my life and, if I'd had any sense, I'd have joined a homeless commune right after."

  Musing about these things Ulric clocked in, found his desk, and began to review his parting notes from the previous day. His terminal glowed softly and his eyes flickered over the scrolling screen, while he absently sipped from a gigantic ceramic mug of coffee, brewed as he enjoyed it: strong enough to pull a senator out of an oil baron's pocket. Having determined the priority problems and spent a few minutes recalling his planned approaches to solving them, he walked to the restroom to stand over a urinal and organize his attack on the most recent oppressor his project lead had laid on him. The bane of his mortal existence? A resistance to orderly metallic crystal deposition in a new graphene scaffold.

  It had resisted all theoretically sound measures. Seeding? No, the crystals grew unevenly, and with gaps that ruined the application. Gas deposition? Hah! Try getting your graphene scaffold to survive the temperatures necessary for metal gas deposition.

  No, he'd already tried the textbook solutions, and he was reaching the point of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck. Just get it to work and figure out why it works after the fact. His project manager had grown increasingly hostile as he failed to progress the project. Forget that six other senior specialists in metallurgy and crystal doping had also failed. Forget that the project manager herself had been trying for two years to find a solution to the scaffold doping problem. It was Ulric's turn to stand under the stone of Sisyphus and he was going to absorb every ounce of punishment she could muster because her department manager was eight centimeters deeper into her ass every quarterly status report that came without success. Somebody was going to pay for this and she had determined that if a sacrificial goat was necessary it would not be her getting the knife.

  Ulric knew that he was the likely candidate for eventual slaughter. He was cognizant of his status of Man on the Shitlist. That he had a credibly successful career at the company prior to this project mattered not. "What have you done for me lately?" was the name of the game in industrial applications companies.

  As of this current moment, feeling both urine and hope drain from his body, there seemed little chance he'd crack the problem in the near future. Goddamn graphene. Goddamn metal doping. Goddamn D-orbitals and their electrochemical bullshit in general.

  After having returned from his commune with the higher powers of the porcelain, Ulric resigned himself to another fourteen hours of slamming his face against a situation far too complex to be described with his feeble powers and far too demanding of his skills to be attainable. But still he tried. Computer simulations ran. While the code compiled literature was read. Forums were combed as if the wisdom of the ancients would be at the beck and call of the internet search engines. On the one hand, given impossible to achieve experimental parameters, he had a perfect doping film simulated at 85% confidence. On the other hand, his project manager would sooner grow wings and start cracking coconuts with her feet before she'd buy his simulation as progress. It was, after all, based on a scenario concocted almost entirely of a string of small miracles, as if by magic.

  His feet slogged heavily as he left that daily hell behind, window lights glowing like a soul beast that had feasted well. His project manager had, indeed, called bullshit on his simulations. She knew it was a pipe dream. She also knew it was a good enough pipe dream to be presented at the next quarterly update, with enough ribbons on it to be disguised as a step forward. She'd been nice enough to inform him that the reason she'd ridden him like a last chance Derby horse was because their sales team had already contracted a little over a quarter billion dollars on the product they were both sure was a materials science unicorn. Which meant that he had a little over two weeks to make this dream as tangible as a rock in your shoe or he'd be dragged before the alter of shareholders and beheaded for his sins of mediocrity.

  Ulric's train commute was, as usual, an utterly peaceful affair. Free from delay, impeccably clean, and totally silent. He saw none of the desolate landscape outside, the skeletons of dead trees, the sparse grasses, the utilitarian and utterly devoid of artistry buildings constructed to resist winds that raced over the mostly barren continent, currents of air that still had not settled from the climate stabilization initiatives of last century, and would not for another.

  "There might be problems in this nation." ran his internal monologue. "There might be deep societal issues brewing that suggest eventual collapse. Again. But the commuter train system will live on as a monument to our passion for efficient transport in the ages to come."

  Ulric was confident that advanced alien civilizations would consider a never more than fifteen minute wait between trains, departing promptly five minutes after pulling into station, and arriving within a few moments of perfection, to be the bar of entry into their galactic federation.

  A short walk from the station into his neighborhood booze store saw him restocked on a cheap, potent whisky and the lemons and maple syrup he would craft into a sour mix to make it palatable. An even shorter walk from his over the counter self-medication clinic saw him ensconced in his apartment, sliding out of his work slacks and into a pair of well worn, not to say ratty, sweat pants.

  His body reclined into a familiar divot in his recliner and he nursed his whiskey sour while, as had become a tradition well-nigh unto a religious rite, he carefully reviewed every step of his life that had led him to this point. Each choice had seemed logical. Had seemed correct. And yet, taken as a whole, each had led as surely deeper into an abyss of grinding dissatisfaction as a mine shaft led deeper into the cold rock below.

  Looking at the big picture, a slightly obsessive personality immersing itself in an environment which is littered with small problems was as clearly problematic as jumping into the aforementioned mine shaft without light nor harness. Hindsight. Paired numbers. All that jazz.

  The third whiskey was always a mistake. It was a mistake which, much like all insanities, he made unaware he was making it because it seemed so sensible at the time the decision was made; upon reflection, that seemed to be a critical personality flaw in need of attention. He wasn't drunk, yet, and his glass was empty, ergo, refill the glass and let the while "not drunk" loop run to completion.

  Alcohol at this level always rendered him maudlin and he couldn't help reflecting on his past abortive relationships and curtailed friendships.

  It wasn't that he wanted to live like a hermit, it was just how things seemed to turn out. He met people, made casual acquaintance, shared common interests and, after six or seven months, began to make some emotional connections. Most people took his slow to warm up social clock as a sign of misanthropy, which wasn't strictly true but, absent telepathy, was rational. Being a cold bastard sort of put off most of his coworkers, and they naturally formed their peer groups to his exclusion. It wasn't their fault, his rhythm just didn't quite match. He was absolutely dreadful at remembering to call his parents and friends. Somehow, the days just managed to pass, frictionless, without his ever quite getting his feet underneath him. Then, months later, he would realize he had simply been carried away on the currents of life from his already small social circles.

  Same thing for forays into the dating world. As much as he hated modern music, Ulric could go out into bars or clubs and be sociable, provided his drinking partners didn't mind a rough sense of humor fit for a gravedigger. He could meet attractive strangers who seemed to share his attraction. Sometimes things kindled, sometimes passionate fucking was had, and, sometimes ill-conceived notions of the future were borne. Then came familiarity and with it a pervasive boredom. They only spoke of holonet shows which were about people who had already been in holonet shows and now were not. They only wanted to walk through materialist shrines of commerce centers, every other weekend, browsing endless aisles of ephemera, much of it that served only to remind him of greater eras bygone. They only seemed interested in satisfying pathological interest about the neighbor's doings. They only grew bored when he spoke of his work and its challenges. Or when he wanted to vacation by taking them on nature hikes in the old growth forests, such feeble remnants of those as remained. Or when he discussed idle curiosities about the nature of the world. They bored him. He bored them. And they drifted apart rapidly as they had come together.

  He mused drunkenly that his ground state was that of the bachelor and the activation energy to find a permanent partner too vast to climb.

  Too late he realized that he'd gotten hammered and missed dinner. He had some tentative thoughts towards a quick meal a water and an ibuprofen, at least to calm the ulcers. But the traitor that was his metabolism had already slid the alcohol knife deeply and he passed out in his chair, fighting sleep desperately as he was afraid to wake to face another day.

  Just as he slipped away, he dreamt that falling dream— a rushing sound, like a river running powerfully in the distance. An ocean, waves rolling gently through his being carried him away on tides of space and time. The last thought that held purchase seemed, almost like a stranger's. An exotic female voice with a peculiar accent who whispered "Good night, lost one. Sleep thee well for thine destiny hath been reforged."

  Bright flickers of light, merged with the fading roll of breakers, urging Ulric to wake. Those patterns of light triggered alarm bells and his eyes shot open, adrenaline dispelling the expected hangover. He sat up abruptly and vertigo drove him to roll over and vomit whatever parts of his stomach hadn't already eaten themselves.

  He lay curled up on himself in a stop hurting me ball while the universe spiraled uncontrollably. Leaves crished and crackled underneath him and he couldn't stop a low moan from wheezing out into the cool air.

  Panting, he nearly gathered himself but, just as the vertigo subsided, the god of migraines inserted one part war drum to three parts broken glass into his brain. This initiated yet more dry heaving as he jammed the heels of his palms into his eyes to keep them from leaving his skull or to crush his own brain and get it over with, whichever happened first.

  One minute seven seconds had passed while he experienced a subjective thirteen and a half hours of pain. A sighing wind blew over his fetal form. Trees shook gently at the passage and his migraine eased enough for him to roll over onto his back, eyes closed and hands draped over his chest with a mixture of dry leaves and damp foliage cushioning the bare skin of his back.

  Smell is linked most intensely to memory, but the scents in his nostrils carried nothing familiar, no prompting at all to connect the was to the now. Gone the smell of concrete, ozone, lubricants, and a million other notes of a humanity clawing its way back from the edge of extinction in a ravaged environment. Now there was the rich odor of humus, damp decomposition, greenery slightly citrus, with a harmonious blend of vegetative life only passingly familiar to the treasured forests he’d sought out, and, last, clean, pure air that had never known the taint of burned fuel, industry or mankind’s mark on the atmosphere. Without smell to prompt him his other senses began to take hold and, given his eyes were still closed, touch was most insistent, as he was cool and naked.

  Naked? Leaves? Leaves meant trees, and the sudden realization left him stunned even through the migraine’s aftershocks. Trees were damned near unheard of. Ulric's eyes opened slowly, the adrenaline ebb and cerebral punishment having dulled somewhat his survival instincts. Something was wrong. Like a painting viewed too close, he couldn't rationalize the shapes and colors his eyes were receiving. The dapples of sunlight filtered through what seemed to be a sky made of single branching tree, with a dawn sky suggested beyond.

  Abruptly it clicked. Ulric was looking at a part of one large branch from what had to be the largest goddamned tree in the entire world. Slowly turning his head side to side and upwards confirmed that, indeed, it was a tree of mythologic proportion and that, contrary to his initial impression, the tree was but one of an entire grove of similarly massive trees. A quick look down at himself and a cup check also confirmed that, yes, he was in fact naked, and had not imagined the nudity.

  Getting to his feet slowly, his bare soles compressing a comfortable carpet of leaves, moss, and assorted flora, he came at last to a standing position.

  "I am so fucking high right now." he announced to the impossible forest, disbelief heavy in his unsteady voice, "I'm high, dreaming, or dead." he told the behemoth woods. A rippling of boughs overhead seemed to set the forest in nodding agreement. After a moment of consideration, what was happening right now was so beyond impossible that the likely-hood of being merely high seemed remote. He couldn't afford or know where to find drugs this good. He never dreamed, not so he remembered them, and it would be incredibly unfair to have a dream that started with so much puking, so he discarded that option as well.

  "Door number three then." he said. "I died."

  "It grieveth me that I must bear grim tiding. Thou hast comen to troth on the matter." said the woman behind him.

  "FUCKING SHIT why would you fucking- " Ulric spun violently and cut off as he beheld the most perfect physical form possible. The approximately human looking being was immediately identifiable as impossibly too symmetrical, too flawless to be real. He spent a solid minute looking at whatever this creature was, a fresh dose of fight juice pulsing and causing him to dissociate while he took in minutia which might indicate a need to begin mortal combat in the buff or a strategic naked retreat into the bush.

  The personification of exotic beauty was wearing a loose robe that seemed made of wide silk ribbons joined in such a way that their colors, blues, greens, browns, and yellows, merged and patterned, in a way beyond mortal ken. The robe ran from left shoulder to right hip that left one utterly perfect breast bared. Long black hair spilled to the ground pooling there but with not a strand out of place. Eyes were ever so slightly orientally slanted but lit like a violet flame from within leaving no doubt as to her status of being beyond human.

  The Impossible, as he was currently thinking of it, seemed content to stand patiently under his scrutiny. An almost uptick of the corner of its mouth suggested faint amusement.

  "You." Ulric began, "You aren't real. Are you?" he couldn't keep the tension out of his voice but his aggressive tone slid off the Impossible.

  "As are thine own thoughts am I real." It said, with almost humor, "As the forgotten dream, vivid on waking, yet gone in moments am I real."

  A gentle smile lit the not person’s features as it continued "It matters not that thou will forget, for that is what all thy kind do, but only that the message is passed and that thine destiny is laid reforged before thee."

  "I heard that before. That thing you said about reforging." Ulric's mind swept back to the moment just before he'd lost consciousness. The rushing sound and the gentle voice.

  "You were there, weren't you? What happened to me?" Part of him already knew but he had to ask, had an obligation to understand what fuckery was going on that had led to him standing naked in a forest eons old surrounded by trees that dwarfed the Sequoia, like an NBA center standing next to a horse jockey.

  This forest was as impossible as the not person, too ancient, the arbors too massive to ever support such mind boggling mass as the branches sprawling so high above. His racing thoughts were dragged from the towering woven tapestry of canopy above back to the creature, which was now describing to him his own death.

  "Burned too brightly thy flame did. Burnt itself from the inside, consuming, on a world that could not support its fire, nor welcome its heat." the Impossible's smile faded to an expression of one long suffering as she spoke.

  "Twas not the time appointed, nor the manner forseen, but none was there who could intercede as thine candle guttered. Comfort for thee, I do not offer, but only knowledge. That thou may knoweth that the life thou hast led was not the one intended nor was its end."

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  Ulric grimaced at that. Sure as hell wasn't any comfort. He'd known he had a problem. He'd known it was unsustainable, that stress. The drinking, the abandonment of his health, the isolation. They were all signs that he'd been grinding himself away only he didn't think he'd crossed some point of no return without being aware of it.

  "So, what is this place?" he asked, "Am I in purgatory? Hallucinating before death? I'm a lifelong and devout atheist so I hope you'll forgive me not having aspirations to paradise."

  The Impossible's smile returned now. "Thou art reforged. I was allowed to gather the embers of thy soul and create thee anew here, snatched from the moments between seconds that separated past from present."

  Her arms swept up, palms open and Ulric was becoming comfortable enough with this situation to more than notice the fascinating things that did with her anterior thoracic region. The Impossible gestured to encompass the world around them, drawing his attention back to the landscape that reminded him of a masterwork of animated cinema, a princess of wolves, and the spirits of nature that had dwelled under verdant branches.

  "This land is mine. It is the one given to me to shepherd through the cosmos, to watch, and to cultivate as I see fit. And as this land is mine, so now are thee. Until death do we part." she told him.

  Ulric paused his *cough* examination at that. Thoughts were beginning to run in circles and he wasn't absolutely sure but it felt like an anxiety attack might be coming on.

  "You uh…you mean I'm alive? And, uh…you're a god or something?" He said that last with a fervent hope he'd be told otherwise.

  Hope was consigned to oblivion as the Impossible gestured toward him nearly possessively with delicate, superbly carved hands and exclaimed, "Well worth the effort to harvest thee, wasted was thy flame on that world. I am the Watcher of this world and thou are reforged, given life to burn anew bringing light into whatever path thy feet tread, for as far as thine wit and skill carry thee."

  "I am called a Watcher. But the peoples of thy world called us gods." It continued, that answer confused him more than anything that came before.

  Ulric frowned at that. Rapidly he carried out a quick series of practiced mental exercises to ground, colors: green leaves above, black soil under feet, violet fire eyes ahead, golden star shaped flower over yonder and…there. Brain back on track he considered what he'd been told while the Watcher assumed her former stance of eternal patience.

  "So, I maybe, sort of killed myself on my world and you were able to just…what…scoop up my consciousness and rebuild it here?" he asked this question but some of the words the Impossible had chosen were clearly suspect. Harvest, for one, was a word with implications implying.

  "Imprecise is thine description. Dying was thy flame, thy soul, so snuffed it out I did that I might hold enough of its heat to reforge it here. I Rendered thou to firmament to make PASSAGE and from the stuff of my world have thou been reforged in the form of the people most like thine own." Its voice was even with that same strange cadence until the word "passage" was uttered and it felt like Ulric's bones shook as the Impossible's voice washed over him. Something significant about that then, maybe an expression of power that permeated even discussion of the event.

  Then the full impact of those words penetrated and, in his immensely destabilized cognitive state, Ulric swore at god.

  "You Bitch! You killed me!? Why? To what end!? Why the fuck am I standing bare-ass naked in Fern Gulley talking to Queen Perfect Tits the Soul Collector!?"

  Composure was gone now, the only thing that remained was outrage. Frustration. The culmination of thousands of indignities perpetrated against him with no recourse but to suck it up and take it, because Losing Ones Temper was Not Done in society. For nothing, as it turned out, because here he was, with everything he’d worked for rendered completely pointless. He was furious, a hot rage that had gone long suppressed set loose.

  "What gives you the right to just shave off the life I made myself?" He yelled. "I worked my goddamned ass off, sacrificed everything that makes life worth living, pushed myself as far as I could go and you just wonder by from Saturn or whatever and fuck me over?! Goddamn it! Goddamn it."

  His voice trailed off the anger running out of him when he thought about just how fucked the last two years of his life had been. The anxiety. The depression. The rut. But he'd been too deep to quit, to get out, to abandon his goals and start over. The sunken cost fallacy had had him by the balls and he'd never even considered it. Not while he'd been killing himself to keep up the cycle. But still. It had been his life, the one he'd made for himself. Emotions crawled over one another, anger, regret, disappointment, anger, sadness, relief, on and on.

  And the Watcher let him rage in peace because his frustrations, pains, and suffering she had witnessed in legion repeated over millennia. Time creates distance. Distance begets understanding. Understanding begets empathy, and the Watcher had mastered empathy before this world's star had been born.

  Gradually, the ebb and flow of anger and regret left him standing merely tired and confused. On the one hand, everything he'd ever worked for was gone, as was every one he'd ever known or loved. His parents would think him dead. Was there even a body left? Or would they bury an empty box just like they'd had to bury his sister, his best friend for all their days together, when an avalanche took her twenty years ago. That thought grieved him most, his parents deserved better than to bury their children.

  Shaking his head and the thought away, he searched for silver linings and tried not to notice the humanoid perfection standing sedately nearby. His hangover was completely gone. He didn't know what caused that initial pain but, by all rights, he should still be carrying a head like a melon and a stomach packed with sawdust. His ulcer didn't hurt at all. Hell for that matter, he looked down at himself and realized that his body felt better than it had in years. He'd been going down-hill rapidly the last couple of years and forty-three had not been a good year for the Ulric Einar vintage. Now his body looked like it had when he was twenty-six. He even had abs. He'd never had abs. And, now that he stood here, he realized his crippled leg was whole, not even a twinge of pain from a knee mostly made of composite materials, corpse grafted ligaments, and aspirin. Bones that had forecast the weather with total accuracy didn’t so much as phantom pain, despite the cool breeze on an otherwise warm day that should have had it aching all the way to the marrow.

  Furthermore, he didn't have to go to work today. No more fourteen-hour days. No more forty-five minute department meetings that could have been five minute emails. No more project manager kicking him in the balls daily to invent a solution to a quarter billion dollar problem. When you get right down to it, wasn't dying the easy way out?

  He returned his attention to the Watcher, taking in once more its impossible beauty, alien, probably a construct made to put him at ease. It probably kept all the weird tentacles in its spare robes.

  "Ok. So maybe things weren't going so great back there. Maybe you didn't exactly grab me in my prime or just before I had a threesome with ten out of ten twins on top of a tank rolling through the American white house lawn or anything like that." He conceded, "But why? Why me, and why bother?"

  "Thou were not meant to be in that world to begin with. It happens, occasionally, though not rarely, that a resonance carries souls from one world to another. An error in the flow of powers that transposes beings. Fail safes to prevent such were…unavailable." the Watcher explained, actually seeming subdued.

  "Mostly these transported souls adapt, attribute the sensation of unbelonging as paranoia and live out their lives complete. But not thee. Never at peace were thou, thy passions never swelled from common spring, thy wave never synchronized with those of that world. Always did thou feel discord, for it was not the world thou were meant to abide and there was none in that world that could rectify."

  That last statement hit home in a way he'd never quite considered. It did seem to make sense. Always out of synch he'd felt. Just ever so slightly off the beat compared to everyone else. He'd assumed it was a mild autism, or some kind of undiagnosed mental disorder.

  "You said you were the Watcher for this world, what about my old one? Does it also belong to you or is there a Watcher there as well?" His mind had, at last, found a problem to dissect, a puzzle with pieces to be assembled.

  The Watcher frowned, "Is this some form of mortal attempt at humor? Thou hast to know thine Watcher perished long ago. One of the great minds of thine own country declared that god to be dead. Nearly all of your myths include the inevitable fall of the pantheon in reflection of this fact. The loss is imbedded in the species consciousness of all the sentient life that could be, with great difficulty, kindled from Watchers of distant stars. Almost without fail, civilizations embraced ritual delusion to honor the ancient fall of that deceased Watcher."

  His eyebrows furrowed as he considered this. It was true. The Christians had their dead Christ, the Buddhists saw their Buddha ascended to Nirvana, the Norse awaited Ragnarok, and many other religions held similar themes. That Nietzsche had declared God dead wasn't a religious statement though, more a reflection of the loss of modern man for the need to attribute to the supernatural what could be understood rationally. But still. He could see the point.

  "I never thought about it.” He mused aloud, “I was never a believer and neither were my parents. And all the people I knew that were tended to be wack jobs I wrote off a long time ago."

  The gears turned while he thought it out. Too much was happening, his poor addled brain slug was overheating.

  He clarified "So the world I'm from really has no god? But this one does? What does that have to do with your soul harvesting my humble person?"

  A somber expression settled over angelic features and the immortal thing burned another few moments of its eternity to impart to the instrument it had reforged necessary information, after all, the cause for that world’s dead god and the broken man’s presence here were one and the same.

  "The one who was Watcher for thine world perished long ago, the victim of a hostile power. There are creatures called Abyssals, entities that appear throughout the lore of thy world as demons, fallen angels, malevolent deities, who roam from world to world through the deepness of the cosmos. They are the antipathy of Watchers, seeking to bring ruin and endings. One infiltrated thy world in its infancy and nearly collapsed its core. The Watcher of that world drove the creature away but could not stop the destruction entirely. With what remained, the Watcher of Sol drug a nearby sister planet which had failed and pulled it into the core of thine world merging them to save both and creating your moon. "

  The Watcher frowned at this last and looked away as if seeing the event. Maybe it did, it was a creature called a Watcher, after all.

  "This is not the way of our kind, nor do we wield such power without cost. The act of saving these worlds cost that steward existence, he spent the last of his energies stabilizing his working. Thou hast seen the imprint of his visage on the moon called Luna, a pattern of craters in the image of a face." It, she, he supposed, if they had some supernatural form of gender, not that it mattered to dust like him, continued, "I am diligent in my hunt for Abyssals, and have prevented such incursions. Even so they manage to touch the world from time to time, it is beyond even a Watcher's powers to completely isolate a world throughout existence. Thine own soul belonged to my world and, since it was suffering, I was in position to use a resonant node between our worlds to correct its placement. But a physical body could never survive such PASSAGE."

  Again, Ulric's bones vibrated with the ground and his knees popped. That was some serious mojo.

  "So, you just ran me through the cosmic juicer and reformed me here?" he ventured.

  "Exactly." She was almost smiling again.

  Sadist.

  Ulric was surprised at just how easily he'd passed through the various stages of grief to reach a calm acceptance of his fate. Dying, it turns out, was way easier when a god decides to mediate and hold your hand through it. It helped when god also had a rocking set of knockers on display, and didn't mind your eyes wondering.

  None of you people are allowed to judge. You weren't there, you didn't see what the ever so slightly chilly air did.

  Running through a mental grounding exercise for the third time, helped reset his center of balance. He took the window of mental clarity to address the elephant in the room.

  "You…made me a new body?" he asked. Hurriedly he continued "It's not a bad body, I'm not complaining. In fact, it's great. I feel like a kid again." he patted his stomach and chest as he said this, noting that his muscles had none of the stiffness he'd grown used to. There was none of the rigid tightness in the tendons of his hands, they felt loose and powerful.

  The Watcher observed him with her now familiar patience and replied "It was necessary. A material body cannot survive the resonances involved in PASSAGE. Self-mutilation through indifference aside, your old body had been further crippled by the death of your world's Watcher. He was unable to guide the genesis of life and the result was evolution through chaos. That any intelligent life managed to survive was remarkable testament to the robustness of the progenitor code, the script we use to encourage development of advanced life forms, and the efforts of our collaborations to occasionally tip balances to promote the eventual rise of sapience from your world, however begrudging it took hold."

  Once more, with the world shaking, but, for once, he didn't dwell long on it because the Impossible was laying some heavy context on him. He wanted to ask questions but it seemed like you should probably just let god roll.

  "In addition to culling the more virulent forms of disease and ensuring protective mechanisms to prevent the progenitor code from corrupting and inducing malicious variant lines, the Watcher of thine world was unable to guide the formation of soul crystallization in higher life forms. This resulted in a severing of the Akashic record, and prevented species memory from properly forming. One of the cults of thy world refer to this as Babel, the loss of species language. It also prevented the life on that world from harnessing the FIELD, what the cultures of thine world called magic.”

  Oh damn, another tooth rattler has hit the field. This one washed through him and seemed to sit particularly behind his breastbone.

  Wait. Magic?

  "Magic?" he asked. "You're talking about magic, as in the ability to use the Force, will made manifest, sorcery, and working the aether with your brain?"

  "Thou art using words in ways that are inherently nonsensical. I am referring to the collection and processing of mana by thine core, that thou may wield the tuned forces thereof." She said, the first signs of impatience he'd heard so far creeping into her voice. Huh, guess even an immortal can get irritated by blatant enough stupidity.

  "Sorry. Really. It's just that I was recently murdered by a cosmic deviant, resurrected ten minutes ago, told that the god of my universe is dead, found out I'm an alien soul stowaway, learned that DNA and magic are both the result of gods playing SimLife, and have you seen the size of these fucking TREES!?" He pointed at the primordial tree he'd woken under as his voice slid higher in pitch.

  He felt like he was handling it pretty well, all things considered. No running. Minimum profanity. Only a little screaming, and none of it strictly incoherent.

  Besides, these trees were absolutely massive and he had always had a passion for old growth forests. The wilderness he stood in was the nearest thing to divinity he'd ever experienced, the way a cathedral must feel to a Christian.

  The outburst must have settled something in the Impossible's mind because she shifted and slightly tilted her chin, as if considering a relevant thought.

  "The fault was mine." She nodded her head to him, one of the most dramatic gestures she'd made thus far. "Thou are right to be unsettled and it should not come to thee to remind me of this instability."

  "My interference with events is taxing. I will seek to resolve this meeting and permit thy destiny to unfold as it will."

  She took a sudden step forward, somehow making that step cover the entire distance between them and placed a hand on his chest. He felt a rapid pulse of warmth in that space behind his breastbone. Heat rippled outward from chest to digits. The hairs on his head felt like they briefly lit on fire. Immediately this heat was replaced by a cold like frost forming on his bones. It had to be the single most uncomfortable sensation he'd ever felt.

  "There." She said stepping back to her original position with satisfaction evident on her face. "The core has been tuned, joining thee to the Akashic record, as it should have been. It will now also be able to properly harmonize with and utilize the FIELD."

  Vibration through his bones washed away the sensation of thermal cycling his nerves. He didn't feel any different. Shouldn't he feel different?

  "Shouldn't I feel different?" he inquired.

  The Impossible gave a slight head shake towards the negative.

  "The core is tuned but has not harmonized for long enough to fill. It requires time, proper technique, or proper place for a core to fill rapidly. Fear not, it is tuned and soon enough thou will be able to guide the mana to form. Have a caution. I have forged thee full meet, and, in the fullness of thine strength, great harm can thee bring to thyself. Most enjoy a lifetime to learn their limits. Time is not a luxury, destiny awaits thee, and purpose."

  Ulric was feeling at his chest as the Watcher finished. He couldn't feel any difference, especially not when his entire body was a novel experience.

  "A final gift.” The Impossible told him before its eyes flashed and a spike made of ice felt like it was jammed into his skull.

  The flare of cold turned molten in his brain and he dropped to the grass and tried not to claw too much at his eyes, since he only had the pair of them and was going to need them later. The heat turned into a loud buzzing that faded away. Ulric almost sighed in relief. Almost. Just as well he’d been breathing in or he might have screamed.

  Images blitzed through his wetware, each one a razor blade, pillars of fire reaching heavensward, Incendere, a running river pounding rapids, Aquae, stone unmoving grinding through eons, Terra, lightning flashing roar of thunder, Ceraun, winds driving whipping clouds, Caelum, frost creeping bringing silent stillness, Infrig. Alongside the images a bell tone hummed, loudly but in his chest, not his ears. Other images played briefly, too rapidly to catch, some horrific in nature, and his brain went white for a second, overwhelmed. He gagged once, before he managed to recover. Looking up balefully at the incarnation of perfect form, Ulric, climbed shakily to his feet and, once more, directed profanity towards what might be god.

  “The fuck did you just do to me you divine boobed cosmic deviant?”

  His spiteful tone passed around and through the entity without any visible effect. It replied casually, and he tried to calm down. If it wanted him dead it wouldn’t have to work very hard at it.

  “You have been imparted the smallest fragment of knowledge of the fundaments of the FIELD, what is called mana by those born of this world.” The Impossible told him, quieter now, as if from across a greater distance, “The peoples of this land would learn of such things from their parents, yet another luxury thou will make do without, but some things must not be done and this knowledge is necessary to preserve certain balances thou might upset through ignorance. Lastly, there is a way to view thine own connection to this world. Visualize thyself, thine own image, concentrate on thy being and name. Feel the core and call to this image. Some prefer to call out with their voice while they do this, and it may help. Synchronize with thyself and say Status."

  The Watcher's form began to shimmer, the already ethereal colors in her robes becoming something indescribable.

  "This will allow thee to access thine own portion of the Akashic record to view it in its entirety. Beware. Others of sufficient wisdom and with a strong enough soul can call to the Akashic and view not only their own piece but that of others. It is a magic called [Scan] and it is a potent weapon."

  Now fading beyond sight, Ulric heard her voice only faintly.

  "Journey well and far, warrior for though we will not meet again in this life, I will always be Watching. May thine destiny be kinder in this thy home world."

  And then Ulric was alone.