I sunk to the bottom and realized I could breathe. The water around me had its own dim glow, showing the whole expanse of the pool in its light. Everything was muted and distant, but I saw the man I was after. The man who started it all. He had no human name. He was known only as the Logician.

He had a heavy Neanderthal face and a brick-shaped body. He wore the same pelts that I'd seen before in my vision on the moon, and his head was adorned with heavy black dreads. His face was stern, but his attention was distant as if cast towards the future and completely unaware of the present. I was nothing to him.

But I’d come all this way to talk, and we didn’t have much time before Seraph got here. I wasn’t going to be ignored, therefore. I couldn't afford to be. “Hey!” I shouted at him, trying to get his attention. I was startled to hear my voice come out as normal, despite the water. It was echoing yet crisp and clear.

Slowly, he turned his gaze to me, looking down from his throne. “Walter,” he said.

“Yes, that’s me,” I told him. “The man on the moon called me your greatest disciple. If that’s true, then I’m here to call on your help in return. We have to stop Seraph and we have to do it fast.”

“Indeed,” he nodded, his voice reverberating through my chest. “Indeed.”

“So,” I asked, “what are you going to do?”

With a solemn nod, the Logician told me exactly what he planned to do. “I plan to die.”

I slid back against the rocky walls and stared at him in exasperated confusion. This all had to be part of some plan, I knew. Everyone had a plan. Seraph had a plan. Even I’d had a plan or two, though they never entirely worked out. Certainly, this immortal godman had to have something really precise in mind. Please, God, let that be the case. “You’re just giving up?” I asked.

If he was playing some game, I cursed him for it. The clock was ticking.

“Seraph will arrive here, and I will die, no matter the path I take. My choice is made, for all living things come into being and therefore must also pass away. Time is only ever borrowed, my child, and only change is permanent. The shadow of death is what casts the light of life.”

I sighed. By this point, I knew what he was talking about, but it was not what I needed to hear. I needed concrete assurances. “So, what, Seraph just wins?”

“All beings must go through this process. The man of Iron was loyal, and he has protected me all these years. But it was never in him that I could find my hope for a successor.”

“A successor?"

“Yes. And now I will tell you the origin of your destiny and the nature of my lifecycle, as I am no less a living and dying thing than you are. My world is simply bigger and the breadth of my existence greater. Is this not what you wish to know?”

I had to calm myself and take the time to hear what he had to say. Even though doom was bearing down on us, I had to trust this entity knew exactly what he was doing. I wouldn’t risk the fate of the world for it, but I deeply wanted to know what he had to say. “Go on then.”

“All things begin simply and grow to overcome their limitations, becoming complex. Yet, limitation is the only thing that brings life into existence. We are, all of us, defined by the things we are not, and to give a complete account of that which we truly are – this is impossible. Constraint is what brings infinite primordial chaos into organized Being, but it must always leave room to grow, as we are subject to the ravages of time. There is no solution to this struggle between the need to be stable and the need to transcend oneself and outrace entropy. Even a being as great as I cannot avoid falling prey to the unwinnable nature of existence. Nevertheless, we accept this futility.”

“I know all of this,” I said. “What about Seraph who wants to end everything? He wants to regress into a dreamlike state, where he can be anything, but there's just him and his control. No outside world. Nothing real.”

“He must be stopped,” the Logician continued. “But not by my hand. You must understand the great and horrible truth of the position you now occupy. The truth is that I have a name that was given to me just like you. It was granted to me in my mortal life, before the end of the previous cycle. I cannot say when the first of our kind came into being, but I once stood exactly where you do now. I took the mantle of Logician long ago. Before that, I went by another title.”

“You used to be a human just like me? What was your name, then?” I demanded.

“It was Creep,” he told me.

I felt an earthquake tremble through the pool, sending ripples out on its surface. The Iron Tyrant was fighting to keep Seraph from getting down here, but he could not hold him back forever. Yet, I didn’t know where we could possibly go from here. I couldn’t form the words to speak.

The Logician smiled at last. It was the first human expression I’d seen him make. “Now you see,” he explained. “I am the Creep who became the Logician, just as you now must. Both of us have succeeded countless upon countless times at our aim. We have reset history and brought ourselves to this very point again and again as a means of asexual reproduction. It is a necessary cycle, as we are not exempt from age and death. You will understand, nothing which exists in this world is supernatural. Rather, the things you call Powers are in actuality the rarest class of genetic mutation. They are macro-quantum effects and, as you have learned, they cannot be duplicated. Only one copy of a given Power may exist in its universe. These codes originate in time immemorial, millions of cycles long ago, but the knowledge of them is passed on from one Logician to the next. Then, in the end, we release all this genetic information into the wild, like pollen on the wind.”

“But why do we age? And why did you need to create so many of these Powers, including Seraph’s? Why not just pick out the one specific mutation you need and complete the cycle by rebirthing Creep?”

“Creep is the single greatest Super that has ever mutated into existence, but its Powers follow an inevitable trajectory of development, unlike all others. At first, its constant drive to evolve breaks down the user's personality, replacing it with pieces from the strongest opponents it faces. It grows the ego, but there is something beyond mere ego in the eyes of Power, and that is the ability to overcome oneself. And so as the ego grows, it must necessarily move beyond itself, making an ego of egolessness by accepting change. He must completely shed his sense of self and become formless!"

His words fell into place. "It's the only evolutionary Power," I understood. "It's the only one that changes its host..."

"This process of enlightenment has already begun with your acceptance of Ironbolt's ideology. I see in your mind that you would erase the Supers if you could. This is the only way Creep can be truly eternal. He desires for the division I have sown amongst humanity to end, and for a Superorganism to rise out of their cooperation. He chooses to dissolve himself into all life this way, thus he will be the only Super. Creep chose you as its host because once upon a time, and still deep down, you believed in a world of perfect harmony and peace. A world where, by the laws of evolution alone, life would triumph by kindness."

“And we can’t allow it?” My mind was racing.

“To continue the cycle and preserve our unique being, including all the millions of Powers we have gathered, we must forsake the ability that birthed us, yes. Instead, we take a different Power for ourselves, called Logician. It is one of the few Meta-Powers that allows us, as with Creep, to access the Invisible Realm of Forms. Yet, it is not as dynamic. It is sclerotic and ossified in its usage. It merely stores and recalls Powers with a limited degree of control. We must survive, regardless, so that we can go on; forever waiting and watching for any new Powers to arise and be added to our collection. So much waiting. But these miracles are the only thing worth living for, after trillions and trillions of years. You will learn this. Novelty is the meaning of life. In the face of even one such miracle, all utopias are naught but dust.”

“But we’re sowing our own doom,” I said. “We can’t go on this way. If I understand you correctly, the first three Supers you created, the Moon Man, the Iron Tyrant, and Seraph – they were an attempt to circumvent this age of Heroes nonsense. But it didn’t work.”

“The Logician may release its Forms only by general command. I attempted to retrieve the Form of Creep from the Invisible Channel by calling forth three of the strongest Powers at my disposal. These ended up being a psychic type, one with omnipotent control over metal, and finally and most worryingly, the ability to steal and redirect the raw energy of a Power. This is the one you call Seraph. He is also a Meta-Type; something I try never to release. Indeed, when I cannot get Creep to come forth in this manner, I must carefully release the entire stockpile, beginning from the weakest and escalating until his appearance.”

“But as the stockpile gets larger and larger, it is filled with more and more Technicists. Seraph already almost killed you by utilizing their abilities to accelerate technology and organize the world to his favor. If we keep going on like this, someone like him will win eventually. As the number of Powers in our stockpile increases, the chance we will accidentally break the cycle becomes one hundred percent.”

“There is no other way.” He bowed his head. "We must go on until we cannot any longer."

The rumbling had grown so intense now that I was certain we only had moments remaining. “Everything comes to an end,” I said. “Even things that can be reborn. It's better to die with purpose than to drag the world down with you, screaming to the grave. Our knowledge is beautiful, but it's not what this is all about. We have to let go to make room for what's next.” I began to approach him, walking cautiously through the waters until I could kneel down at the foot of his throne.

I respect you, I thought, but this is the end.

His eyes opened again, and they were glossy white. “The time is nigh. I must relinquish my life to Creep. Summon him.”

The water around us started to boil, and his flesh was peeling up from his bones. Red poured out, tainting the pool, and I started to panic.

Does he not know? I thought. I don’t have the Power. It’s still on Mars.

I didn't have any choice but to try, though. I had to reach out my hand into the cloud of blood and dig deep into my soul. If Creep had listened to me and dissolved himself on Mars, then our Power was floating free to take. If only he had faith.

Suddenly, the blood began to flow into my body and I was consuming his designs. The cells cried back in unison, and every ounce of my body hummed with life.

We are life, they gloried.

It was Seraph who boiled the waters, I realized, as he came exploding in through the rock and iron above. The Logician and I both were consumed by the magma, but the deed was now done. The man older than this planet was dead.

Now, I had made my decision, and Seraph was next.

It was time for this bastard to die, once and for all.