Chapter Text
PHANES: HEAVENLY REAVER
Phanes knew hope, once.
Miraculous hope—brilliant, bright, and blazing. An outside variable beyond the imagination of his homeworld’s pathetic megalomaniacal creator.
After eons of enduring, of defiantly shouldering a cyclical eternity, hope finally arrived to deliver his perpetually dying homeworld onto salvation. Together, the heroes would kill the god that his people were created to feed with their suffering and despair. The wheel would break; Destruction would die.
The promise of tomorrow was at last within their grasp.
Then, hope died alongside his homeworld. Flames smothered by a cold cruel calculus that weighted the future of a single world against the gestating threat to the survival of the universe and made a choice accordingly. It was an elegant solution—denying DESTRUCTION through obliteration.
His homeworld, his people, and his dearest comrades…ceased to exist. Casualties in a cosmic war they never asked to be a part of. All that he loved, gone, with only that wretched corpse of ruined metal drifting lifeless in the void to prove they ever existed in the first place.
Phanes had been reborn among that smoldering wreckage of a world that never was and would never be. Their light, stolen by a cruel, uncaring universe. He’d raged then, raged until he could rage no more. Why did he live when all those he’d lived for were dead?
He’d thought, then, to chase the truest author of his world’s damnation—burn through the stars as a living conflagration of hatred until the universe was cleansed of all traces of The DESTRUCTION’s malevolence. If THEY could bleed, THEY could be killed. Or Phanes would die trying.
Hurt, because he’d been hurt.
Hurt, because no other world should be hurt as his home was hurt ever again.
…And, were it not for a witch, Phanes would have gladly walked the Path to his own self-Destruction.
In that graveyard of floating debris, the raging sun of Destruction struck a deal with the genius executioner of his homeworld: Phanes’ burning blade in the coming War Among Aeons for the memories of his dead world.
Amphoreus would live again.
The recovery of Amphoreus’ data is an imperfect process.
Scepter δ-me13 had been destroyed to halt Irontomb’s birth. Madam Herta’s work is a salvaging operation more than a simple extraction of code. A non-insignificant amount of his world’s data was corrupted beyond repair or just plain lost.
Nevertheless, Madam Herta is an unparalleled genius with a skill set uniquely suited to the task. Amphoreus was a simulated world and she is a woman whose magnum opus is a simulated universe. Phanes understands why the Nameless respect…respected the Emanator of Erudition so.
Madam Herta saves seventy-two percent of Amphoreus’ data.
The other twenty-eight percent? Irrecoverable.
The space station will never be his home.
While Madam Herta generously allows Phanes to reside within her domain and he has no complaints with their arrangement, Phanes is a revenant who cares only for one thing: Amphoreus.
The is a detached wonder at the newness and unpredictable of it all. After enduring thirty-three million five-hundred fifty thousand three-hundred thirty-six cycles, Khaslana knew every rock and stone on Amphoreus and knew the conversational/action flow-charts for every person in every scenario. He is free from the Eternal Recurrence at last, and Phanes can’t even appreciate it.
He feels hollow.
What good is a new dawn without loved ones to share the light with?
Phanes never allows himself to contemplate his home-world’s lost data beyond the effect its absence will have on its eventual reconstruction. He doesn’t want to know what or who specifically is gone. Knowing will not change the path Phanes is set on.
Seventy-two percent is enough to resurrect Amphoreus.
It will be different, Phanes understands. It is unlikely that Okhema, Castrum Kremnos, or Aedes Elysiae will ever exist again. But Amphoreus’ heart? The souls of its—his—people? They could live again, if with a permanent loss of memory.
That is…fine.
Normal, even. The world had forgotten thirty-three million five-hundred fifty thousand three-hundred thirty-six times before. Forgetting is an easy price to pay for resurrection.
Phanes dedicates himself to studying simulated worlds.
Along with all of her space station’s research facilities, Madam Herta also allows him access to her Simulated Universe Project. Phanes runs experiments on the theoretical planetary requirements, tests potential systems bridging digital and physical environments, and builds architectural prototypes. Instead of sleeping, Phanes reads scientific research papers and reviews experimental logs. His shadow copies lack the autonomy to be useful outside of combat, but they manage to serve as basic note-takers. His otherwise barren quarters are filled with data slates and binders of research notes.
He ignores the recommendations to socialize. Madam Herta has granted him access to all the vast scientific knowledge her station possesses, and Phanes would be a fool to squander the opportunity. Phanes is wholly dedicated to the revival of his home-world.
He failed them once, he cannot—will not fail them again.
And this time, the people of Amphoreus will be real.
Phanes refuses to trap them within another Scepter or similarly powerful computational prison. They will exist in the physical universe. Madam Herta agrees it is possible. Difficult—demanding very specific environmental requirements be met—but gloriously possible.
He will need to find an anomalous planet in the same vein of Punklorde, where the line between physical matter and information is blurred. And, unlike Punklorde, uninhabited by sentient life.
Then, when Phanes isn’t studying, he runs the Simulated Universe—like Stelle had. It pleases his host, grants valuable experience, and lets Phanes destroy everything.
It is almost cathartic.
Though Phanes knows he never will again, he longs to clash against Mydei.
| AHA, The ELATION. | FULI, The REMEMBRANCE. | HOOH, The EQUALIBRIUM. |
| LAN, The HUNT. | LONG, The PERMANENCE. | MYTHUS, The ENIGMATA. |
| NANOOK, The DESTRUCTION. | NOUS, The ERUDITION. | OROBOROS, The VORACITY. |
| QLIPOTH, The PRESERVATION. | XIPE, The HARMONY. | YAOSHI, the ABUNDANCE. |
The War Among Aeons is no less than devastation on an universal scale as The FINALITY’s birth grows near and all the AEONs—save for IX, the NIHILITY—wage war. The entire universe became the battleground of higher dimensional beings. A conflict that touches every inhabited world in the cosmos with its horrors.
Mortalkind does as Destiny Slave’s tattered script demands of them to thread a path beyond FINALITY.
Phanes plays the part ascribed to him. He is the raging sun of Destruction that descends upon the Antimatter Legion like a vengeful god. His flames burn away Harmonic hive-minds and cleanse planets of undying Abundance. A burning bulwark that turns Voracious horrors to ash before they can enter inhabited systems to feast. Phanes brings skies down in cataclysmic blazes of Destruction.
The scale of Destruction Phanes witnesses and enacts…
Life is an unfathomly precious yet so terribly fragile thing.
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AEONS are uncaring things, and, though Phanes despises DESTRUCTION most of all, he has come to hate each and every one of THEM. THEY care nothing for life and living—THEIR Path is THEIR only consideration. Even though there are other ways THEY can die, Phanes detests that only an AEON could kill an AEON.
Phanes would have loved to make THEM all bleed.
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The War Among Aeons is long—even by Phanes’ reckoning.
Dozens of Amber Eras come and go before The PRESERVATION swings THEIR hammer for the final time, and still the war wages on. Phanes longs for Amphoreus’ rebirth, for the day the souls of his people will finally be granted new life. Ultimately, they are who Phanes fights for.
Dreaming of Amphoreus is the only way Phanes stays sane.
Phanes tells himself it isn’t truly that long of a wait. What is the equivalent of a handful of cycles compared to the thirty-three million he has already endured as Khaslana?
The precious data Phanes carries has no concept of time. Amphoreus’ people are not enduring the passage of time alongside him. To rush his people’s revival because Phanes is lonely would be unforgivably, monstrously selfish.
Amphoreus can have no future in a universe ravaged by AEONIC war.
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Phanes never fights with Dawnmaker.
The sword is tainted by billions of years of memories. It is a weapon drenched in the golden blood of Phainon’s beloved comrades and that Khaslana used again and again to slaughter Aedes Elysiae. Dawnmaker is also the weapon Chartonus labored over for days and that Phainon had wielded to protect his world. The blade has been with Khaslana through thirty-three million five-hundred fifty thousand three-hundred thirty-six cycles of the Eternal Recurrence.
Dawnmaker is the only physical memento of Amphoreus that Phanes’ possesses.
And, this specific Dawnmaker—the last Dawnmaker—had fought side by side with Stelle’s flaming lance and has never been buried in Mydei’s back.
The idea of losing Dawnmaker to battle damage is utterly intolerable.
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Phanes is not a witness to DESTRUCTION’s fall.
The DESTRUCTION is far from the first AEON to fall nor will THEY the last. Regardless, the raging sun of Destruction does not get the privilege of carving Amphoreus’ vengeance into the AEON’s flesh. Phanes does not get to bath in the hateful golden ichor that he shares with his AEON.
However, Phanes is not without satisfaction.
Phanes still played his part in The DESTRUCTION’s demise even if the script had denied him the starring role. The god that the people of Amphoreus had suffered at the altar of was no more. That is enough.
And Phanes gets Luxbane, Celenova, Zephyro, and Phantylia—his fellow Lord Ravagers, Emanators of Destruction all.
Luxbane and Celenova, he slays alone.
Zephyro, he kills in ambush alongside Emanators of Preservation and Hunt.
Phantylia, Phanes chases into the arrow of her slayer.
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There are few and fewer Emanators left as the War Among Aeons nears twilight.
Phanes knows his kind were always few in number, but the Emanators were all drawn into the war, and—whether for their AEON or for their own reasons—they are fighting one another—dying to one another. Those are the battles Phanes has come the closest to death.
And each AEON that falls is one less AEON to ascend new Emanators. As the AEONS died, they—he—are increasingly becoming monstrous relics of a bygone era. Tolerated because they are needed, and feared for what they could do.
Once the last god dies, will mortal-kin cast down the demigods next? Phanes finds he doesn’t have an opinion—he hardly intends to stay after the war is won and Madam Herta is long dead.
Numbness shrouds Phanes’ heart, a heavy apathy broken only briefly by flashes of wrathful hatred or longing love. He is tired, oh so tired of it all. He destroys what the script bids him to destroy and dreams of the better world he will build for Amphoreus when the universe is safe.
All else is irrelevant.
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The War Among Aeons is over.
The universe is more dead than alive here at the end of it. The intergalactic community exists only in frayed tatters. The cosmos has never been so empty. Thousands of galaxies were lost, billions of planets destroyed or uninhabitable, and quintillions are dead. Word is, the universe will take millions of years to recover—if it ever does.
The end of the golden age, they lament.
A universal mass extinction event.
Phanes doesn’t join them in their grief over all the universe has lost. Even if he was physically capable, he ran out of tears to shed long long ago. He watches them mourn the dead and celebrate the living and feel nothing except a heavy, tired numbness.
No goodbyes were said when Phanes departed.
Phanes cares for no one and no one cares for him.
The War Among Aeons is over and the time has come to find a new home for Amphoreus. Wings of light and dark spread afar, Phanes sails through the sea of stars like a golden comet.
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Phanes searches systematically, system by system.
He evaluates the planets and moons of every new star-system he comes across for suitability. Most stellar bodies, Phanes can eliminate as possibilities from orbit. The universe favors worlds that are too purely material for Amphoreus’ needs. The rare anomalies, he investigates thoroughly. None have yielded the results Phanes yearns for.
So Phanes keeps searching, keeps enduring.
Had Punklorde still existed, Phanes thinks he might’ve claimed it for his purposes—inhabitants be damned. The Punklordians could have moved anywhere in the universe while the Amphoreans would have needed that planet to even exist.
Amphoreus’ origin as a simulated world makes the Phanes’ mission challenging because his people were never truly physical beings. They existed as data and code in the discarded neuron of a now dead AEON of ERUDITION—NOUS. A purely physical planet could never house the souls of Amphoreus.
Phanes has discovered planet-sized supercomputers that possessed the necessary computational power to host a simulated civilization. Those he summarily rejected.
Amphoreus deserves no less than to bask in reality.
And if Phanes has to search another billion years or more to find the key to granting his people life outside of an accursed machine? Then so be it.
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Traversing the void between star systems as a radiant streak of gold, there is little for Phanes to do except plan and dream.
He has studied thousands of theories pertaining to simulated worlds. His mind turns over possibility after possibility, devising systems to sustain each iteration. In his mind, he constructs the new world he so dearly wants for the people of Amphoreus, over and over again.
This time, mankind will be loved.
Beloved and protected by the heavens, humanity will live and thrive into endless tomorrows. Love swells in Phanes’ chest as he imagines the sweetest future. Simple life and living, it’s all he desires for his people.
And Phanes will spend the rest of eternity guarding them, protecting mankind’s new world to the end of time. In his experience, the universe is cruel and civilizations are easily extinguished. Life is terrifyingly fragile so Phanes will shelter his people under his wings.
There is little left living in the universe that can contest Phanes’ might.
Destruction will never again touch Amphoreus, Phanes vowed.
They would be safe.
Forever.
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The Abyss comes into the universe uninvited and unwanted.
The Dark Destroyer emerges and sweeps through the sea of stars like a malicious cancer. First star-systems and then entire galaxies go dark as the devouring darkness consumes them. It is the start of the universe’s second mass extinction event.
The Abyss is an evil, hungry thing.
A hateful reminder of the Black Tide.
The Abyss had come upon the universe at the worst of times. The universe is the weakest and most vulnerable it has ever been in the aftermath of the War Among Aeons. The twenty-thousands of years they’d had was hardly enough to rebuild what the war destroyed.
Phanes burns away Abyssal filth wherever he encounters it.
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A parting gift of a vengeful fallen AEON, Phanes hears the Abyss called during a rare foray into inhabited space. The DESTRUCTION, VORACITY, HARMONY, and REMEMBRANCE are the oft voiced suspected. Or the denied FINALITY.
Phanes wants their star-maps, not their baseless speculations.
That IX The NIHILITY lives, and the undeniable evidence of carnage left by the War Among Aeons, is the only reason the AEONS haven’t faded entirely into myths. They only pretend to understand AEONS of old. Maybe ascribing the Dark Destroyers’ origin to the AEONS provides some comfort, pretending to know. Phanes does not care.
He has greater concerns—like finding a new planet for his people.
Sometimes, Phanes can almost hear Amphoreus’ screams for deliverance.
Though if the Abyss is the legacy of a long dead AEON, it isn’t The DESTRUCTION. Phanes is intimately familiar with the Path he walks and the Dark Destroyer is no hated kin of his. So the why and whence of the Abyss are of no interest to Phanes’.
He continues searching, continues dreaming, and continues enduring. The weight of Amphoreus’ future bears down on him, always. He carries all of their souls with him, to deliver into the ever distant dawn.
Distress signals go ignored.
His mission allows no distraction.
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If Phanes could, he would have burned away all traces of the wretched, dark malice from the universe. While Amphoreus will forever be his most paramount priority, he is not blind to the rest of the universe. Phanes is apathetic, not blind.
The universe is going dark.
The Dark Destroyer is spread, growing.
Light after flickering light, winking out like they had never been. The universe that Phanes remembers singing with life even in the darkest of hours is going silent. Worlds either devoured by darkness or hiding, hoping to escape that very fate.
A dark forest.
Phanes hates the Abyss—the vile corruption swallowing the universe. He despises it for the lives and worlds he witnessed it ruin and for the memories of the Black Tide it stirs within him. Though, most of all, Phanes hates the Abyss because the more of the universe it devours, the greater the odds that darkness will claim Amphoreus’ future for itself before Phanes can find it.
Amphoreus’ cries for salvation echoed loudly in his head.
Deliverer.
Deliverer.
Deliverer.
His flight across the stars burns a path of baleful burning light—leaving behind temporary firebreaks of golden hatred against the hungering tide. It is all the aid Phanes can permit himself to give, the only goodness he can spare for those he is not already sworn to. Anything more meant the betrayal of the countless souls sheltered within Phanes.
Phanes has to find Amphoreus’ new home—before the Abyss does.
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The raging sun of Destruction burns bright and defiant against the deepest devouring darkness of the Abyss. His fires burn away the poisoned malice seeking to corrupt him into a maddened mockery puppetted by the Abyss.
Phanes saves himself, and only himself.
His power is not enough—he was never enough.
Phanes is a radiant raging sun who can illuminate a star system with his light, and the Abyss has consumed galaxies. The Abyss is vast, vaster than he will ever be. Phanes cannot win against the totality of the Abyss.
It was a bitter realization.
Phanes fled the darkness.
For, if Phanes dies, Amphoreus dies with him.
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In a remote region of space yet untouched by the Abyssal calamity, Phanes drifts. His wounds are long gone and he dutifully checks each and every planet and moon he passes for conditions suitable for Amphoreus’ rebirth. His findings are the same as ever.
When Amphoreus’ world is finally found…how long will his people have before the Abyss comes for it? Will Phanes be enough to forever ward a single planet from the devouring darkness?
There is unspeakable cruelty to it all.
Phanes sinks deeper into his apathy, taking shelter in the repetitiveness of his task. Why dwell on questions whose answers only mattered after Phanes finds Amphoreus’ elusive new home-world?
Phanes searches.
Endure.
Phanes searches.
Endure.
Phanes searches.
Endure.
Then, a signal comes. Somewhere in the nearby cosmos there is a planet screaming out its existence into the dark forest of the universe. It is foolish and will eventually draw the Dark Destroyer to their door.
Changing his course, Phanes follows the signal broadcast.
It isn’t a deviation from Phanes’ mission. The signal came from an unknown star-system—he would have gone to search it eventually anyway, and interactions with the local civilization can yield star-maps to better guide his search. Passing along warnings of the Abyss while Phanes is there costs him and Amphoreus nothing.
The signal leads Phanes to a planet orbited by three moons.
The broadcast came not from the planet itself but from the surface of the brightest moon. The energy permeating the air distracted Phanes during his approach, turning what normally would be a controlled descent into a fiery crash landing onto the moon’s surface.
The moon is suffused with energy.
A beautiful cool calm blurring the line between energy and matter to the degree that Phanes’ more esoteric senses insists there is no distinction at all between the two. Is the brilliant moon special, or does the moon share its unique composition of energy and matter with the planet below? Phanes has to know.
Because, basking in the lunar energies—programmable matter—Phanes knows his journey is finally done. Soon, Phanes will deliver Amphoreus the dawn of a new world.
A new home.