I was back on Terminus Earth. I wasn’t back-back, I was still technically laying low until the various mortal and immortal powers-that-be got the message that not only was I not planning anything nefarious, I didn’t want to be involved in any of their nefarious plans.

I was in the office, helping Margot out because, for some reason, the House of Antipodes had elected to confer our little Office Cosmic Artifice another promotion. We were now the Division of Cosmic Artifice. A subdivision of the House of Antipodes. The same House of Antipodes which played administrator and law keeper for the entire material plane.

If you’re not quite getting what I’m saying, let me say it plainer. Our status in the cosmos had been elevated. Raised to an almost mind-boggling degree. I was honestly unsure what to say about it, beyond the fact it was now very clear that even if they’d given up their plans to shove the role of “Mister” onto Margot and I, for now. They’d set things up in such a fashion that we were clearly in the running, clearly in a position to take over if Misters, White, Black, or Gray decided they needed to take a vacation or “step away” for a bit.

Our workload had similarly be elevated. We were now getting casefiles from other multiverses and branches of our own multiverse.

It was a damned stressful period. I’m a nigh-omnipotent, night-omniscient being, and I’ve nearly been brought to tears by all the paperwork and clerical crap that’s been dumped onto my table. Add in the fact that it’s still not safe for Margot and me to be intimate, and we were both feeling pretty miserable.

I was a little concerned about Margot. I was a lust devil so I should have been the most affected between the two of us, but I knew how to deal with long dry spells. Margot on the other hand seemed to be turning a little eccentric as time passed. I wasn’t sure if it was the overwork, or the sexual frustration, but I’d had to nix a few of her dungeon designs because they were straight up death-traps rather than being merely challenging.

I’ll admit to maybe saving a few of those designs for me and Missus’s private use. They might be a little fun for those of us who can’t die and I could see them being useful for training. A few of those designs were so fiendishly brilliant that instead of simply deleting them I added to our personal security suites, and defensive runtimes of the FC-Fleet’s security AI.

The point I’m trying to make is that for the third time, in less than three years, our little office was having yet another major expansion. We needed more bodies to help us deal with the increased workload. We were able to make up for some of this overwork by repurposing a portion of my FC-Fleet and having them take on clerical roles and certain simpler duties at the office.

However, there were still some things that needed to be done by actual people and I didn’t feel comfortable with summoning and contracting with the souls I’d need to gather, if I wanted to create that many sapient beings. Which meant having to have a whole new round of interviews to fill the office the normal way.

It was less of hardship than might have been expected because we’d barely finished the last round of interviews when all this nonsense started.

In any case, I was wandering in from the office’s kitchen with a mug of coffee spiked blood for myself, and a thick and sweet, mocha with marshmallows and extra chocolate for Margot. I wandered into Margot’s office, either unaware that there was someone in there with her, or aware and apathetic.

Margot was dressed professionally for once, wearing a crisp black pantsuit, and her favorite pair of dark-rimmed glasses. The interviewee was a woman this time, medium height, average looks, fair-skinned, mousy brown hair, green eyes. I placed the mocha on Margot’s desk, turning to say hi to the interviewee.

I wasn’t really planning on butting in or anything, I didn’t need to. Beyond the fact that Margot was fully competent when it came to running things at the offices, Margot and I had already set up a semi-autonomous Head-hunting and Human Resources Program that used my data-feed to create profiles on people who applied to work with us.

I was shocked when the woman shrieked like a banshee, pissed herself, dropped the folder she was holding, and ran out of Margot’s office like the devil was chasing her.

The woman ran so fast that the humanoid security-units that patrolled our office could barely react to it. Then as soon as she’d left the threshold beyond the entrance of the building she teleported away.

“Okay…What the fuck was that?” I said.

Margot looked at me and shrugged Snapping her fingers and magicking away the fairly pungent smelling urine that was soaking into the office chair that the woman had been sitting in.

“So...Do we need to be concerned about that? Or….?” I said.

“I honestly don’t know, hon. This is...It’s been a long day, and from I can see on my end, the program okayed her as a possible job candidate. She’s not an enemy or a potential saboteur, she doesn’t belong to any of the blacklisted groups...Huh, wait a minute, I think I see it,” said Margot. Frowning into the empty air as she used her interface to access my data-feed and our Human Resources Program.

“See what?” said I.

I accessed my interface and immediately understood why the woman had gone running for the hills.

“Oh…” I said. Not sure what else to say.

“Oh, what?” said Margot. Frowning as she tried to parse the partially-corrupted data regarding the woman.

“She’s someone I used to know…”

“I’m guessing she wasn’t a friend?” said Margot. Her voice filled with a mixture of curiosity and concern.

“You guessed right, but once upon a time she actually was a friend…A good one in fact. She and her sister were probably the two people I was closest too back then,” I said. A bitter mirthless laugh escaping me.

I stared at the closed door and felt a familiar coldness filling my bones and turning the blood in my veins to ice.

I closed my eyes remembering a farm that was owned by a fool with bubblegum hair, a woman with hair the color of sunflowers, and boy with hair the color fo the sky. I shut the memory down and erased it before I could recall the darkness that hurtled towards them to destroy everything.

“Hon?!” said Margot

“Huh?” I said.

She pointed and I looked down to see that my peculiarity was acting up. The mug of blood I was holding was gone. Its core physical and conceptual structure breaking down to a point where it wasn’t so much melting in my hand as it was...unmaking itself.

“Oh...Oh shit!... Er, sorry. Let me clean this up,” I said. Thoroughly embarrassed.

My innate probability manipulation abilities didn’t just bring things to their best conclusion, they could also bring things to their worst conclusion.

If I was guessing correctly, that woman was likely one of those who were responsible for my mastering the darker side of my power. Eternal life meant endless stories, and unfortunately in my case, not all of them had ended happily.

“It’s fine. See? No harm, no foul…Er do you want to talk about it?” said Margot. Willing the stain on the cream-colored carpet out of existence. Resting her hand on my back, the warmth from her palm seeming to seep inside of me and make me feel human again. Bringing me back from the dark precipice I hadn’t realized I’d been leaning over.

“Talk about the spill?” I said. Playing dumb.

“.....” Margot simply raised her brow at me.

I could remember feeling a hatred so hot and endless that it set an entire multiverse ablaze ending countless worlds. Now that I knew who that woman was I could recall chasing her down through multiples realities, and multiples planes, and multiple branches of the cosmos.

I could remember killing her and her cohorts over and over and over again. Continuing their cycle of endless suffering for so long a time that eventually I almost forgot why I was doing it. The chase and the hunt hollowing me out. Their screams and their despair serving as my only means to keep a hold of myself during a time where I’m pretty sure if I’d just let go, I might have simply stopped existing.

I sighed and chantlessly cast an isolation spell. I used the full extent of my powers to make to strengthen the shield, not wanting anyone to overhear us. This shield was less a shield and more of a temporary sub-space that was edited according to my need, and copy-pasted over mundane reality acting as a buffer between us and the rest of the world.

“Do you remember those parts of my past that I don’t like to talk about?” I said.

Margot nodded.

“So this is one of those stories, then…” said Margot. Squeezing my side as if aware that I needed a little extra reassurance right then.

“It’s one of those stories…” I said. Nodding as well.

Margot is not the first woman I’d ever fall in love with. Nor was this little family we were building the first family I’d tried to build. It didn’t work out. Things ended up going so badly that I never again attempted to start a family...At least up until now.

Till this very day, I have no real clue exactly what went wrong, partially because I’d erased most my memories from back then for my own sanity’s sake.

All I knew were the broad strokes. I knew that back then, I was much younger, and much weaker, and much more trusting. I’d made some friends, who turned out to not be such good friends, and had a teacher who turned out to a self-righteous, self-serving, bastard.

Somehow my good friends and my bastard-teacher found out about my peculiarity, and they also found out about its self-correction feature. Inherent in my probability manipulation power was an ability to increase the output of the power when I was under attack.

The long and short of this little story was that I ended losing the lover, and our child. They killed them. Then they captured me, tore me apart and placed me in a jailed made of my own skin and bones and basically used the souls of my lover and child as the catalyst for a machine of nightmares that would turn me into a never-ending factory of good fortune and positive probabilities.

Then my friends and teacher set themselves up as the chief deities for an entire multiverse, whose foundation was built on my personal suffering and the endless suffering of the souls of my loved ones.

I’d spend what was essentially an eternity, futilely trying to save them, only to realize that they were already dead and had in fact been dead for quite some time. This was because the machine wasn’t perfect and my adaptive physiology wouldn’t let it keep me under.

That woman who’d just run screaming from Margot’s office was the warden whose duty it was to put me back to sleep. She was also the one responsible for sharing my secret with our bastard-teacher, and the one who chose not to warn me when they came for me and my family.

I eventually escaped their machine of nightmares, that much should be self-evident. Or at least I think I escaped...No, I escaped. I definitely escaped. I wasn’t not going to doubt that. I’ve learned and mastered far too many mind and soul strengthening cultivation techniques to be pushed down that rabbit hole...I think.

Then once I was free I turned everything they built to shit. Almost literal shit. Countless universes were reduced to a state of inert non-matter, that cosmos would be forced to reprocess a few times before it could be recycled into something useful.

They’d disseminated my essence into every particle of their multiverse, and I used my self-possessed nature, and my negative possibility generation powers, to take back everything I was owed, with interest.

Then as all those worlds burnt around them, I went after my friends and teacher directly. Hunting them down, hunting down the things they cared about, and loved. Making sure they tasted at least a tenth of my pain before I finally tore apart their bodies and scattered their accursed souls.

I went after our teacher first because he was the most powerful. I wanted the rest of them to be scared. I wanted them to know that I was free, and that I was coming for them, and that there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it.

Also, being the self-important, above-it-all prick he was, beyond the multiverse itself and his title as God-Emperor, our teacher had the least to lose. So it was simply expedient to punish him first.

I saved her for last. Sure, we had our tussles and skirmishes, during those few times when she was still brave enough to try and save the rest of her friends, but I didn’t turn my full attention to her until I’d finished dealing with all the others.

I think I was probably hardest on her. I chased her the longest. I killed her the most. Every last hint of happiness within countless lives was thoroughly utterly stomped out.

I didn’t let her go till I’d reached a point where I simply no longer remembered why I was chasing her. Then with that final kill and that final scattering of her soul, I moved on.

It wasn’t about realizing that I’d become the villain of the story, especially in light of how much collateral damage I’d caused in my vendetta. I didn’t care about that for the most part, and wasn’t in the frame of mind to care about that.

After all, I’d kind of forgotten about the whole revenge thing by that point. Plus, I was barely sapient at that point, I’d allowed my hatred and grief to drag my mind to a place so dark that actual thoughts of self-awareness and self-reflection were far and few between.

By the time I was ready to let go, the heat of my hatred had long cooled and I was starting to think clearly again. Thinking clearly enough to realize that I was no longer “living”. My entire life had become the hunt and it felt repulsive and meaningless. What little awareness I had, told me that it was time to move on to other things.

Now here I was, staring at the door that a blast from my past just bolted through.

My fingers flexed gathering enough power to tear stars from the sky, I felt the embers of my old hatred grow warm within the deep cockles of my soul

That hate was ancient, and brutish, and tainted with a madness I’d worked very hard, for a very long time, to seal away. I felt the old instinct rise. Even knowing that it was more a pavlovian reflex than an articulate need for recompense, didn’t help. I could still feel a part of my mind telling me to go after the woman and do what needed to be done.

Then Margot leaned into me, I took her in my arms and gave her a kiss. I shook myself and held her tight, because I remembered exactly why I’d let ex-friend go back then. Fully aware that if I’d killed that woman a final time, then I might not be standing here right now. She’d have ceased but I would disappear alongside her. Everything that lets me call myself a person would have eventually decayed and gone away because I could feel myself on the precipice of that change as I stared into her eyes, looking at my own lifeless gaze reflected in her fearful one.

I would have become a beast, less than a beast. Descending into being exactly the kind of monstrous machine that she, her idiotic cohort, and their shithead master, had tried to make me into. Except, I wouldn’t have even been that good, because all I would have been able to do was destroy, the positive and creative aspects of my being likely falling away as I changed.

“I know this might always seem obvious, babe...But you’re really important to me,” I said.

Margot chuckled and returned my kiss, the taste of the cocoa she’d barely gotten a chance to get more than a sip of, still clinging to her

“Nah, You’re actually pretty good about letting me know how important I am to you,” said Margot.

“I am?” I said. Momentarily distracted from the emotion up-swell going on inside me.

“You are…” said Margot nodding.

“Oh...Uh, well, that’s good. Because you are important to me,” I said.

“So are you going to go after her?” said Margot.

“Do you think I should?”

“I don’t know, that’s for you to decide. In the meanwhile, I have more interviews to do...Too many more,” said Margot.

I laughed.

“I’ll try to see about upgrading the Human Resources Program later to lighten your load, later,” I said.

“See...there you go again, showing you care. Anyway, are you going to be alright,” said Margot. Her gaze still filled with concern. Searching my face, deftly peering behind my mask of a smile to see my actual expression.

I nodded and sighed. Running a hand through my hair as I felt the emotional turbulence fade.

“Yeah...Yeah, I think I’ll be okay,” I said.

“Good,” said Margot.