The Empty-Archive held details pertaining to the ends of countless worlds. Every apocalypse. Every armageddon. Every Ragnarok. Every fall of men, and every clashing of the gods and devils. Every ending tale.

I had a seemingly never-ending supply of worst-days stored within that library of mine. Stored within my soul. Probability is data. It’s just some of the most difficult data to directly touch. However, once you know the trick to it, there’s a scary amount of things one can do by directly altering the probabilities of what is and what isn’t, and what can be and what can’t be.

My go-to solution for dealing with an extra scary group with the meat and potatoes to think about going up against the House of Antipodes, without putting my family and allies at serious risk, was a probability-bomb. Or rather a type of probability virus, that would automatically trigger cataclysm end of days scenarios in all the territories of our enemies.

I’m a little embarrassed to say it, but it was one of the ideas I’d come up with, when my paranoid mind would wake up in the middle of the night and say, “So what are we gonna do if the House turns on us?”

When I explained what my plan was and explained what the probability-bomb would do, Jack’s exact response was to gasp in shock, her breathing going hot and heavy. Her eyes dilated, as she licked her lips. Then she gave me the evilest smile she’d ever given me and said,

“Okay, well...In a little bit, you and I have a thing we need to sort out, because you can’t talk ‘that’ dirty without backing it up with some action, mister...But first, tell me what my part of this plan is.”

Jack’s plan was actually quite simple. Nothing and darkness were ubiquitous within the cosmos. Darkness was especially useful because of certain conceptual associations it had, regarding death. Meanwhile, nearly everything in the cosmos casts a shadow. Even in universes where the laws governing light would negate the existence of normal shadows, there are shadows. If I gave her use of my nothingness on top of that, she could use her darkness and my nothingness to invade the darkness of Dark Bell Collective’s multiverses.

The best part was that we didn’t have to take on the karmic debt that came with destroying all those multiverses. The Dark Bell Collective weren’t incompetent administrators by any means but they were just slightly more flawed than the House was. Even on a good day, the House of Antipodes had countless beings out for their blood. Even on a good day, our section of the cosmos was filled with countless entities that hated the way things were and all the prevailing forms of life. The House dealt with such beings and circumstances, by mollifying and befriending the entities that could be mollified and befriended, and eliminating, exiling, and/or sealing away those entities that remained actively hostile.

The Dark Bell Collective, on the other hand, did the very opposite, arrogantly ignoring and/or antagonizing all such entities, as part of their pseudo-scientific social Darwinist approach to cosmic governance. It probably didn’t help them that when the Dark Bell Collective reached their group’s personal limits they’d force the “excess” worlds to compete against one another for the right to continue existing. Sometimes they’d even just directly wipe out universes teeming with life because they felt it was expedient.

The point being that despite what I’ve just said, on a cosmic scale, they weren’t terrible at their jobs as cosmic administrators, but...they certainly made a whole lot of enemies. Way more enemies than the house did. Hell, the House Antipodes wasn’t the only hyper-cosmic organization that they’d been butting heads with either. So the Dark Bell Collective had enemies both within and without.

So, seeing as Jack and I had just filled their territory with carefully hidden, carefully scented, gas and nitroglycerin, I figured that eventually, someone would throw a little match. What I didn’t expect was that they’d throw matches as soon as they did, or as often as they did. It was a war fought in seconds.

All the mortals, whether sapient or non-sapient, instantly lost their minds. Plagues, all manner of conflicts, and sudden and violent soul-recalls swept over the area. Seas either rose or evaporated. Mountains either crumbled or spat fire and ash into the either. More than a few continents just straight-up sank. Planets either exploded or imploded. Stars either blew apart, or suddenly went cold turning into hungry, all-devouring apertures in space-time. Ancient evils were unleashed only to have beef with other ancient evils and make a mess in the ensuing grudge matches.

Jack and I had made a very big mess, for our would-be invaders. All we had to do to finish them off was wait until the fires we’d started reached and consumed their defense. That’s when Jack, Kalpana, and all our allies in the Shattered Heavens swept in to take what was ours.

We invited a few of the other factions, using this moment of extreme plunder as a means of making nice with those we thought would be worth making friends with. For instance, did you know that the Shattered Heavens has a small but close-knit farming community? Apparently, most of the gods of vitality and fertility tended to focus on war, politics, and monster creation, up here. Farmer Bros for life, my friends.

Our active conquest, and “rescue” of the surviving worlds of the Dark Bell Collective was when the Dark Song Orchestra stepped in. Which honestly, wasn’t part of the plan, but worked out nicely because, unlike real gas and nitroglycerin, what we’d set up wasn’t exhausted by the fires that had been started. Creating a situation that allowed our side to win despite their side’s overwhelming power-advantage over us. Like a regular person stepping into an already swarming wasp nest where all the wasps have guns.