Tabitha's Prologue

My early life was one of adventure. You might think it was worthy of a whole series of exciting memoirs, detailing my many, many adventures battling monsters and demons and dark gods, of helping my fellow champions save the universe time and again. But honestly, looking back, it all blurs together for me. Not to say I’ve forgotten the details, or that I confuse events; not at all. Each adventure is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday.

But after a while, it all became routine. Being a champion of the gods no longer felt like I was making a difference, so much as I was maintaining some kind of status quo that merely reset everything back to a stale status quo. A couple times a year, chaotic elements rise and disrupt it again. Except that even the chaos became predictable. The same monsters, the same villains, the same disasters would recur. Certainly, many were distinct enough, but after the one thousandth battle against a city-sized, fire-breathing beast, you can practically set your watch to how the fight is going to go. The cries of the fallen, the cheers of the saved, fade to background a noise.

You do the job, clean off your sword, return to your home, await the next call, do it again. After a while, you run out of things to even occupy your time between missions. Towards the end, there were days where I did nothing but sit in my chair, waiting for the next call. The job was the only thing that mattered, and even then, I became numb to it.

It’s not even that I became so good at the job, so powerful, that said aforementioned beasts took a paltry effort on my part to eradicate. It’s that it just didn’t end. I thought that becoming an immortal, all-powerful champion would satiate my need for a purpose for as long as eternity lasted. Sure, there were times I needed a break, but I would always come back with a renewed vigor, ready to rededicate myself to the cause with full abandon. But eventually, that vigor got less and less potent.

Then my gods told me that the Final Day was coming. For the first time in a century, I felt the stirrings of excitement for my work again. This was it. The End of the World. A prophesized enemy that had laid waste to all of existence in eras past. Only the most powerful and skilled of us champions, fighting alongside our divine and infernal patrons, could stop this Nemesis before it could enact total annihilation.

They said it would be the end for all of us. That the fight would be so terrible, all of Creation would be destroyed, all of us would die, the gods themselves would fall, and the only chance of saving anything would be if we managed to defeat the Nemesis soon enough to allow at least a fragment of existence left. From this fragment, a new world would be born, the gods would eventually rise anew, Creation would be recreated, and the Nemesis would go into an eon of hibernation, until it had recovered enough to try again. So it was that the cycle of reality as we knew it had existed for longer than even the gods could remember.

I thought it a folly. If they valued Creation that much, why did they not seek to destroy the Nemesis while it rested? The gods said it was not possible, that they had tried time and again, but even they could never reach it where it lay. I did not accept this answer. For the first time in decades, I felt a new purpose driving me. The highest purpose any defender of Creation could achieve. While all my fellow champions simply accepted things as they were, I would defy reality itself and find a way to break the cycle.

With no clue how to even start, I nonetheless set out to the far reaches of Creation to find something, anything, that could give me answers of how I might destroy the Nemesis for good, and bring an eternal hope to Creation.

There is a gap here in my memory. The only gap I have in five hundred years of existence. One moment, I was driving my ship into the boundaries of existence, light years away from the last fragments of defined existence. The next moment, I was standing in my home, holding a sharpened shard of pure black ore. I knew without even a moment of doubt, that this thing in my hand was not of Creation. It was not even of the Beyond, the theoretical dimensions outside known existence, of which the gods occasionally whispered. And I knew something else.

Creation was not real. It existed, certainly, it was reality for the mortals that dwelled within. But that reality was nothing more than a jar of clay for the gods to mould. We knew the gods had created us, but we had assumed there had been a purpose to it. That we were the gods’ precious children and the world they created was meant for us to build our own future. We assumed their work was born of a sincere desire to make more of their existence. That once they created us, we meant as much to them as a child does their parents.

I don’t know why we ever thought that. It was obvious to me, then, what all of this was. The gods were children seeking only distraction. We were not their beloved offspring. We were their dolls. Toys to be bashed together until they either broke us or got bored, then they swept their table clean, made knew toys, and repeated the cycle.

The Nemesis itself was nothing more than a giant eraser, cleaning off the drawing board so they could draw anew. They could have activated it at any time. They could have never activated it again, and left Creation to continue on its natural path, left us mortals to determine our future as we were promised.

But no. Now they were bored again. They were going to kill us all, obliterate even our very souls, wipe us out and forget about us, so they could make a new Creation and do the same to another civilization. Again and again and again.

It occurred to me that this could be a trick. That this Thing From Beyond The Beyond, this fragment of another reality, could be another of the gods’ games. Something new and exciting to upset the stale cycle. The ineffable truths I now knew could itself be just another game.

But I didn’t think so. No matter how much I doubted, there was an assurance deep in my very soul that this was not a deception. This was the only Truth in a world of lies.

Of all the things that I have accomplished in my centuries of existence, after all the heroic battles and grand adventures and legendary championships and excruciating wars in Heaven and Hell, this is the only tale I feel is worth telling. All that came before were the predictable epics any of my former colleagues could regale you with. This adventure, however, this final mission, is the only thing I’ve done that actually matters.

I will kill the gods. I will stop the Nemesis. I will grasp a True Future for mortalkind. At long last, I shall free us from the tyranny of these callous creators. And when I am done, I shall end myself, lest I be tempted to follow in my makers footsteps.

My name is Tabitha Cain, and this is how I ended the world.