What is more important: the present, the future, or the past?

The Present is the existentialist’s choice; the choice for those who want to live life to its fullest, not caring about minor consequences and prioritizing immediate satisfaction. It is the choice of those who go out drinking all night before sitting through their final the next day with a hangover. It is the choice of those who fall in love quickly, and fall out of love just as fast. It is the choice for those who understand that they only live once. Fortunately for me, I was living another life in another world. Can’t say you only live once if you were on your second life.

The Future is the optimist’s choice; the choice for those who want to plan their life out, obsessing about productivity and future gratification. It is the choice of those who stay in all night poring over textbooks to lift their GPA up by point two. It is the choice of those who will only fall in love to get married, and will only get married for the tax benefits. It is the choice for those who understand that life is tougher and it only gets tougher once your body gets older and the world around you changes and without a ton of money or connections or power or fulfillment of another sort, retirement will be a real pain in the replaced hip. Fortunately for me, I was either a plucky college kid with his whole life in front of him or a plucky elf nearly worshiped by all and with magic powers to boot. And with the way wisdom worked with magic in this world, I would only get more powerful with time.

And that left the Past—the obsessive pessimist’s choice. The choice for those who reminisce about the one time they went out, blacked out, and puked on their friend’s couch. The choice for those who remember crushes from years ago and are oblivious to people flirting with them in class. It is the choice for those who think they peaked in middle school, even though they were doing amazingly well by every conceivable metric. Just describing this hypothetical person already made it clear to me that yes, this was me. I really, really needed to listen to some songs from this decade.

The Simurgh had wanted me to take the Present and the Future and present them to it in exchange for the possibility of being sent home. I didn’t have to think too hard about how vague this promise was to realize this was a stupid idea.

I remembered what Noel had said. The Simurgh had tried to control us and turn us into its Ikons. I also remembered how it had been using its emotional manipulation magic to control me and my friends. Why would I give a being like that the power to control time? Besides, there was a ton of stuff from the Simurgh’s explanation of this world that I did not understand or believe.

This whole world, all of my friends, with their beating hearts, painful and beautiful memories, their entire being, was a reflection of some overgrown bird stuck in a white void? Madness was a crackpot invader but the Simurgh was some sort of creator deity? The Evil Eye was a half-baked Satan and the Simurgh, who had once insisted that it wasn’t a god, now claimed that it was The God of this world? No, I didn’t need to be able to sniff those feathers to tell that the Simurgh was fishy as hell.

And so what was the obvious choice when given the opportunity to hand over two immensely powerful abilities to a suspicious but powerful entity? Of course, it was to take them for myself!

The Simurgh was the first to react. The enraged shadow turned into a rainbow-colored bird that dove towards me like a bird of prey. The earth beneath my feet began to shake and wild birdsong echoed through my ears. I clung onto the two pages in my hands and kept reading them, somehow managing to read them at the same time as two similar voices started overlapping after being uttered by my mouth. I wasn’t in control of my mouth anymore, but at least this confirmed it hadn’t been the Simurgh controlling me back then.

The next to react was the Evil Eye. The red star glinted with fury and blinked closer and closer to me. It was faster than the Simurgh and beamed towards me at frightening speed. Whispers joined the birdsong and the words coming out of my mouth, flooding my ears with gibberish. But that was okay, I could ignore all of this if I could read the two pages and take control of the Present and the Future.

Except, the Simurgh and the Evil Eye were very close and I was nowhere near the end of the pages. I didn’t feel any stronger nor had any arcane knowledge flooded my brain, which meant I wouldn’t see the benefits of reading these pages until I was completely done with them. This was bad. All the two Immortals had to do was push me away and I’d be a sitting duck. In fact, they probably could’ve disrupted my chanting from way up in the sky. As the thought occurred to me, I wondered why they hadn’t done that. Surely, the only reason they didn’t interfere with the world was because the other Immortals might take advantage of their actions, but now that all of them were united against me, shouldn’t I be a smoldering pile of ash?

That was when I heard a chuckle cutting through the noise. The chuckle turned into a cackle, which evolved into maniacal, uncontrollable, and infectious laughter. Laughter that drowned out the birdsong, the whispers, and even my own chanting—although my mouth continued to move and I felt closer to gaining the knowledge held inside the pages.

“You’ve got guts kid!” shouted Madness as he transformed from the silver moon into the form that I had seen all those years ago in the Simurgh’s tree. “Fine then! You want the Future? You can have it! You want the Present? You can have it!”

Madness whirled in a dance towards the other Immortals, outpacing both of them and grabbing onto their coattails like reins on a pair of horses. The other Immortals jolted backwards, swinging around to give the insane silver immortal deathly glares. Madness cackled as he pulled them back towards him, and the Immortals realized Madness was, as expected, truly insane, and knew they had no choice but to go through him. They veered back and began assaulting him with rainbows and red beams but Madness withstood it all with wild laughter and an unbreakable smile.

“Promise me, kid!” shouted Madness through the attacks being hurled at him. “Promise me that once you have the Future and the Present, you won’t stop there! Go for it, kid! Go for the past! Go for the past and music and song and the earth and the sky, steal from us, take what hasn’t been claimed, become so powerful you will realize just as I did that the only answer is, and always was, Annihilation!”

A rainbow wave swept over the dancing Immortal of Madness. A red glint shot through the wave, piercing the space where he should have been. Laughter echoed everywhere until there was silence. The only sound remaining were the words pouring from my lips.

Words that ended as my lips closed and the world span and I caught a glimpse of Kelser breaking out of the ground, his face bloodied, but the light in his eyes strong and bright. He looked over at me and me at him and the world continued to spin and I saw Kol and Taoc and Paris finishing their fight.

On my left hand, Alek appeared and fell to the ground, and on my right hand, Noel appeared, gave me a strange look, and then fell unconscious to the floor. And finally, as if she had missed her shot from cowardice or from apathy, Princess Norn Izlandi appeared from thin air and tried to slice me with a rainbow scythe.

But it was too late and the world spun and my stomach lurched and laughter resounded and I closed my eyes.