Chapter Text
Cradle was on the brink of annihilation. Eithan had explained as much. The Abidan had abandoned the iteration, and the Vroshir had struck a blow that they knew would really hurt the inter-universal organization.
Worst of all, the Monarch of Twin Stars thought as he kneeled before a scorched world, all his friends were… dead.
Except one.
“So you see,” before him was a talking corpse of a white-haired man, half exposed flesh and skeleton, yet still somehow able to communicate. “It is the only way.”
Lindon could not believe his ears, or fathom the concepts that Eithan espoused.
“All this power,” he continued, wheezing. “The worlds I reaped…” He closed his eyes. “They will let me reverse the flow of events, reverse the Way itself.”
“The way is ineffable,” Lindon said. “You can’t affect it any more than an ant could.”
He smiled. “The Abidan grew the way from the sapling that it was, to the enormous oak that you currently enjoy the power of. By growing its power, we grew our power, and became gods capable of answering the prayers of mortals.”
“What good did it do?!” Lindon roared. “Look around us! My home is destroyed!”
“It was my home,” Eithan wheezed. “Before it was yours. It is up to you, now. Seize my harvest, Lindon, and twist the tree.”
Lindon plunged his fist into his mentor’s chest, seizing the origin of Eithan’s, of Ozriel’s existence, and reached into that stockpile of raw, chaotic power, and was, for a pregnant moment, one with all of creation.
His authority of Creation reverberated. His Icon was the missing puzzle, the other end of the coin that was creation and destruction. The Reaper Reaped, and the Creator Created. Alone, they were death: death from destruction and annihilation, and death from rampant, cancerous growth.
Only together could they balance each other out. Only together could they bring life from nothing.
He opened his mouth while his mind reached towards the command, his authority roiling until it came to a critical mass. “Return.”
With that phrase, his authority ignited, and the Way spun on itself. Lost iterations, destroyed from the Vroshir’s campaign of terror, grew from nowhere. All of time reversed.
But it was not far. Lindon’s Creation authority was still nascent, so his use of power was still highly inefficient. Only ten years would be reversed, decades in the timespan of the Abidan, but it would be an absolute reversal, one that only Lindon would be privy to.
It would be up to him, now, to save all of existence.