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Being a god was a lot.

That was Erick’s first real thought after leaving Xoat and Nothanganathor behind.

And then he left that thought far, far behind, too.

Erick saw everything. He was everywhere. In the blades of grass under the Benevolent Sun of Margleknot. In the heart of his lead Valkyrie, Shivraa, who was in Margleknot for some reason, working with House Benevolence to fix up some housing projects here and there. Far away on the worlds of Abarial, where he had first culled corruption from the Fractal Cosmology, and revived a society from slavery and blood and tumor magics, but now there were gleaming towers and people walking around like normal, and individual choices given back to the people.

Erick flowed through the cosmos like a many-colored light, visiting lands he had saved from corruption and seeing people rebuild with Benevolence.

Wherever he could, he lent a hand.

Veird and Fenrir were not a part of his journey, and he did not think that odd at all.

– –

A man was building a hospital in some small, nowhere-land, because none of the locals had healing magics and they needed spaces for doctors and otherwise. That’s why he was here, using his masonry skills to build. The man didn’t have healing magics either, so when he cleaved a rock with a hammer and the rock fell and crushed his foot, he was in trouble. The doctors were still three months from coming out here. He’d lose that foot in a few days, to infection and decay. He didn’t know that yet. All he knew was blinding, shooting pain.

The man called out to the uncaring gods, though it was more like a series of expletives than any real call.

Erick heard his call anyway, because the man wore a necklace of gold that was in the shape of a ring with a break in it; a [Renew] symbol. Erick offered a healing touch upon the man’s foot. A warmth flowed from his necklace in that action. The man gasped in sudden relief as he grasped his necklace. He was up and walking around in a day. The man knew he had been blessed, but he did not know how, or why. Not exactly. His necklace had never done that before. It had been a gift from his grandmother, who had grown up in Margleknot, in Tir Gael.

He carved a circle with a break in it on an unobtrusive part of the hospital, thanking Benevolence for healing him.

– –

Erick visited a warrior wearing steel and carrying a sword as he prayed at a white spike the size of a tree, deep in the woods of the deep mountains. That spike was actually one of Margleknot’s small universal connections, but he didn’t know that. No one in this land knew that. To everyone but those with a connection to Margleknot, this spike was just an odd, indestructible and unmovable object. People here had attributed some sort of malfeasance to the spike long ago, and so the town around it was abandoned.

People still came here sometimes, though.

The man kneeling at the spike was trying to make his kingdom better, and he had no idea how to do what he needed to do, so he was praying to the lesser gods because none of the larger ones knew how to help. He was actually going down a list, written down on parchment by a loremaster of his homeland. He had paid half of his life savings for that list, and now he was here in the woods, in what he called ‘the cursed land’.

It used to be a thriving hub of interstellar traffic, but that was eons ago.

The man went down the list of ancient names, listening to the maddening whispers on the air. Only some of them were the gods answering him. Most of the voices asked for churches in their names, or sapient sacrifices.

When he called upon Benevolence, Erick gave the man a vision of his kingdom between two rivers, lights everywhere, bread in every pantry, meat in every dry storage, and everyone working together. Erick was asking if this is what the man wanted, and the man was flabbergasted that he had chanced upon a name in his list that had actually worked. Tentatively, the man asked what he required for such a gift.

Erick gave him a 50 step plan.

The man accepted the plan, because unlike all of the other gods he had asked, Erick’s plan did not have ‘worship me’ in any of the steps.

– –

Something shifted on Erick’s shoulders.

He helped more. He felt more connected to everything.

The weight on his shoulders felt more his own.

– –

Erick felt a twist of something untoward. Something Unwelcome.

He followed the feeling to a land rife with Red. Mages stood upon hills and cast power into crowds, turning people into thralls, into mana batteries, or slaves, or whatever the casters wanted them to be.

Erick cast lightning down from the sky and burned the Malevolence out of every single person there. Those that died flowed into a Grand Reincarnation, to be spilled out on worlds where they needed to go to live better lives, to grow into better people, or to simply have another chance at it all. The mages casting the spells got the same treatment, but in conditions that would actually help them be less like they were.

People were basically good, if they were allowed to be good, if they weren’t unduly influenced by corruptive forces.

Erick allowed them to try again.

Erick did the same thing to a countless number of other Great Evils, many of which were nowhere near anyone who knew of him, and his Benevolence. That required going out of his way, though. That required power. Power required rest.

When he was weak from doing what no one asked him to do, he pulled back and held within Margleknot and other great sources of Benevolence, and even on Earth, where Personal Scripts had touched and spread, thanks to all the things that Erick had already done…

He vaguely realized something was missing, but he’d figure that out later.

When he was strong again, helping those who needed help, he cleared out more Unwelcome Malevolence.

– –

The Dragon God of Many Colors stood in judgment over a world that had fallen to a corporation that had fallen to civil war, far removed from everything the God had ever known, and yet, he had known this land for tens of thousands of years, too.

He was brilliant and glowing and black and white, with wings that shielded worlds and claws that tore at continents, ripping out corruption and the corrupt. A horde of Valkyries flowed around him, in orbit and in the sky of the world. Some Valkyries were from Margleknot and other strongholds of the Dragon’s. Most of them were taken from the planet itself. Most of them were not people. They were animals, and less, for the animals needed to be saved, too, for the world itself was doomed by the civil war.

Nuclear waste, continental destruction, viruses both artificial and incredibly virulent. A huge crack in the side of the world, where they had released a few antimatter bombs. All of that needed to be fixed, and it was not a small job at all. It required a complete reset.

The Dragon God coiled around the entire planet, touching, molding, fixing. He sent a million lives down the Lightning Path, casting them far and wide, into better places, for their place was no longer here. Most Valkyries remained. They held in orbit, waiting while he fixed their planet.

Some of them helped in the fixing. Most did not.

The boiled ocean returned, swelling and blue and deep.

The cratered mountains grew lush with many colors, but mostly green.

The toxic sky twisted with thick air, becoming mana that soaked into the world.

The deeper places, filled with wrongness, placed there for problems for future generations, turned to thick air. The Dragon God of Many Colors laid down hoards of wealth into the planet for them to find, for them to rebuild.

Little Benevolence ‘Dungeon’ Slimes grew fast under his touch, and then they burrowed into Benevolence Itself, to create Safeholds for those who needed such. Some people still called them dungeons, but the Dragon God called them Safeholds. They would create more slimes and more mana in a side reality next to this one, and that mana would replace what the Dragon God had stricken from this world, as soon as people learned how to use it. Those Safeholds would also allow these people afterlives, where their previous, small gods, had been claiming their souls for themselves, to consume and grow like pestilent diseases, because that’s what some gods did. They weren’t all like the Dragon God of Benevolence Itself. Not by a long tale.

This was a normal day for him.

For the people of this world, this was a day that would be written down in history books and preserved for all time…

What would these people call him, when they wrote his name down?

Erick grinned as he put the finishing touches on the world, as he thought of how the Valkyries had always called him ‘Apparent King’, because of some words that Teressa had said on a whim, so long ago…

… Oh.

Those were important names to him, weren’t they.

And just like that, the [Onward] broke.

Time settled.

Erick became all of his apparent self.

He was Benevolence Itself, wearing the Mantle of the Primal Dark. He was a god. A Prime God.

“Ah,” Erick said, “Yeah. So. That happened.”

About 15,000 years had happened, and yet, not really happened at all, because Erick had been ignoring the main problems of his life, way back there.

Back on Veird.

Back at Fenrir.

Erick finished up fixing the planet and released his grip on this world of the Infinite Cosmology, pulling back. With a command, he ushered the Valkyries back to their rebuilt homes, if they were people, or back to their pastures, if they were cows or sheep, or back to their forests and oceans and lakes and rivers and everywhere else, if they were animals of other sorts. Some of the Valkyries chose to move on, to an afterlife inside Benevolence Itself, inside the Safeholds of the world. From there, those people would be visited by their descendants.

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Mostly, the dead would simply be at rest.

With a few last measures, Erick installed a Grand Personal Script within the core of the world, replacing the corrupted manaminer he had crushed. The Grand Personal Script did nothing except to keep itself going and hand out smaller Personal Scripts to those that needed one. Not many would need one, though.

But maybe, in the far future, the world would need to be saved by those who needed to save it, and Benevolence Itself and the ghosts of the afterlives of the people here would act, and crown a hero or ten. Those heroes would get a Personal Script.

Those were the choices Erick had made for this land. Not every land got the same treatment, but these were the choices Erick had made for this place.

Erick Flatt, Dragon God of Many Colors, Apparent King of Illuminated Crossroads, Grand Wizard of Benevolence Itself, The Light in the Dark, Commander of Valkyries, wanted to go home.

He had too many personal questions.

Where was his title of ‘Father of Jane, Abigail, Beth, Candice, Debby, and Evan’? What had happened to Yggdrasil? Or Ophiel? Where was Shadow? What about the Painted Cosmology, and Quilatalap, and Poi and Teressa? House Benevolence? Al and Mog and Savral? Spur? Candlepoint? What about Solomon and Destiny? What about Rozeta, Melemizargo, Kirginatharp, Koyabez, Nirzir, Zolan, Dariok, Rizala, Ascendant Prime? What happened to Fenrir—

Erick fell out of the bottom of a dream, through the diaphanous Dark, plunging through years and centuries. Land and times passed him by as he stretched and then folded in on himself, becoming smaller, leaving behind the majority of himself in order to inhabit—

– – – –