Tyr didn't know what to expect. It was hard to see through the cloud of incendiary magics and explosive projectile blanketing the egg. He expected some hulking beast, a thing of tentacles and pure darkness like the 'demons' they told children about in stories to make them behave. Like the dragons, just a figment of humanities wild imagination. 'Creatures in the dark', that sort of thing. There were already enough of them that actually existed without need to invent more.

What he hadn't expected though, was a young woman. A familiar one, at that.

“What is she doing here...?” Tyr mumbled, mystified at their surprise reunion. The others heard him, but then he was gone. Disappearing from the spot and sending them into a frantic search for where he'd run off to. Crossing the kilometer or so in an instant to emerge before the woman. Showcasing a speed that he most certainly hadn't been capable of just moments before.

They weren't sure what happened next. Tyr erupted into blazing light, culminating into a pair of wings the same hue has his hair. Long, feathered, and radiant. Beaming luminescent across the land and drawing a sword none of them had seen before. A bastard sword twice as long and thick as it should be, with a blue sheen to it. Radiating power all around, no less impressive than the primus' themselves. He was angry about something, but they couldn't hear him at that distance. The sky boomed and howled, a storm swirling above as his shape began to shift again. A wolf, a vague serpentine silhouette, and then the angel again. His mothers armor was still on him, only enhanced and made larger, as was he. A giant of a man with a silver arm, looking far beyond the age they remembered.

Even at this distance, they could taste the electric tang on the air. Such intense and primal power that it automatically balanced the scales and brought immediate order back to the highlands. The light pouring off of him so bright that the ring of the eclipse above was barely visible.

“What in all the hells is happening!?” Someone cried. All unaware of who had spoken, even the one who had spoke the words – forgetting they'd done so in an instant. The primus' were tyrannical in their might. It pressed down and ground at them. An uncomfortable and unwelcome sensation. This was similar, but somehow the opposite. It lifted them up, made them feel alive and full of glorious purpose, whatever that purpose may be. The woman, a beautiful one so unrealistic in her perfection as to make the skin crawl, changed as well. A layer of scales covering her form to serve as clothes, with two horns and a set of bony wings bursting in a spray of blood from her black. Mouth distending to split the perfection of her face. Fangs and tusks emerging from within. She roared, a bestial sound, but Tyr was apparently no fan of the dramatic entrance.

His knee came up with a quickness, a thunderclap resounding as his free hand pulled the beasts face into it. Sending her skyward, and he followed, wings slapping against the ground – cracking the stone for dozens of meters. Silver sword burning with might as they engaged in a sky shattering conflict. Moving at a speed just at the edge of what they were able to track with their eyes. Barely about to follow the ridiculous dialogue about this strange creature come to 'devour the light' and 'see all living things to dust'. While Tyr responded with a grabbing of her now exposed rib cage and planting her in the dirt. Raining blows down upon her and announcing that this world was 'under his protection!'. Even the primus' were stunned, all of them were. Since when had he been so strong? Strong enough to make the primus of strength himself feel weak in comparison.

Their battle raged on, and none could take their eyes off of it. His battered and bloody wings as Tyr fought more and more of these creatures that came from all over. All different in appearance, though just as horrifying. Monsters to blot out the sun, hissing in a failed attempt to pierce the barrier of light projected about both him and the others. Accumulating wound after wound, wounds that would not heal. The warrior atop a pile of broken enemies in the defense of their frail and brittle world. The greatest champion of mankind, king of kings. The blessed one, silver hand, the great wolf – these were names given to him by that creature. And he responded with a clashing of swords and radiant sheets of flame to replace those wings that had been torn free by the demon he was fighting.

–

Tyr was similarly confused. He watched, disembodied, as the events unfolded. All through somewhere else. There was a yearning in him to be that man that was fighting for the good of all, but it wasn't him and likely never would be. And the woman he was fighting certainly wasn't Orpheus. If it was, she wouldn't have been seated beside him with a smug look on her irritatingly perfect face.

“You really messed up this time.” She laughed. A perfect laugh, just like her face and body it was like a work of art that someone had sank their entire life into – yet failed to communicate the nuance of a living thing, too artificial. Putting too much love and care into the rendition rather than making it believable. “Perhaps not you, specifically, but guilty by association.”

“What's happening?” Tyr pointed to the window. Not quite a window... The 'view' composed the entire room they sat in. With the only objects appearing solid the two thinking beings and the luxurious table he'd been forcefully seated at. Blinking away and replaced by some kind of angelic knight as strong as any primus.

“Nothing, really.” She clucked her tongue after trying to lean over and rest her body on Tyr's own. He pulled himself violently from the chair and she let him plummet through the air for a bit. Just before hitting the ground, returning him to his previous position. “That's rude, you know? Why must you always rebuff me?”

“There are two dozen other versions of me down there that you could try on.” Tyr replied sourly, nervously peeking his head over the arm of the chair and staring at the ground below. Unable to understand the mechanics of their suspension in midair. “Maybe one of them will give you a shot.”

“But I want you.” She pouted. “They're just fakes.”

“What even are you?” Tyr demanded, rounding on her. “What is any of this?”

“I am Orpheus, but you knew that. A goddess, but only a fragment, one of two that has unfortunately been freed from their prisons. Still enough to dominate this astral space and form hard light constructs necessary to give us time to speak. It's all fake, obviously. None of this is real and none of the simians will be harmed. Or that incredibly handsome crustacean. All safe.”

“How much time do we have?” Tyr asked.

“Seventy cycles, three months, six days. That is using your own world as a reference, cycles meaning rotations around your sun.”

“We call those 'years'.” Tyr frowned, but he had bigger fish to fry. “Am I trapped here for that long?” He panicked. Spending seven decades with this woman made him near irrational in his anxieties.

“No.” She frowned. “I can release it whenever I'd like, but you'll sit through the crescendo, I refuse to do all this work for nothing. Everything has significance. All actions, every breath you or anything else in the known cosmos takes. All significant. One grain of sand stops another from being washed away. Extrapolate, and you've eventually got a beach primordial life is flopping all over and learning to breathe, live, think. It's nice to see you again, by the way.”

Tyr exhaled, he could feel a tightness in his skull that came with increasing regularity in recent years. “I thought you were a part of my arcanum?” He asked. “What do you mean you're a goddess? That's the exact opposite of what you said before.”

“The two are not mutual exclusive.” She answered with a small smile. Orpheus was no longer albino, with a bit of color to her, hair still silver and glossy, but her full lips were pink and healthy as with the rest of her complexion. “I told you that we belong to one another, and always will. A shard of me is indeed your arcanum, but I – as in my whole self – am not. I'd love to be, to go where you go and see what you see. To be together for all eternity, but it's impossible. I'm not a lesser deity to be absorbed like that, my shard is far too significant for a little mouse.”

“What's the point of all this?” Tyr asked. “Why are you in this astral space trying to destroy my world?”

Orpheus raised an eyebrow, clucking her tongue in annoyance as the first unpleasant expression crossed her face. “I did nothing. Your people were the ones who foolishly freed me from my prison and set me loose. But contrary to your accusations, and I'll repeat myself, I am not some great evil. I don't care about your world, I was content to remain in my slumber as the eons passed. It's so... Boring. Up there, I mean. To be an immutable part of existence, forever. Truly forever, even when the stars dim and the void overtakes us I will still be here. Inevitable, and then onto a new plan or a new scheme that I am forced to abide by again and again. My prison was my sanctuary, and now another piece of me has been set free, which isn't good. Though I feel no interest in explaining why.”

“What crime did you commit?” Tyr asked the obvious question.

Orpheus contemplated that, not answering immediately as she had before. Drumming her slender fingers against her lips and shifting her bosom suggestively to give Tyr a better look at it. While she might be unpleasant in essence, he was still a man. An actual man now, he supposed. His nervous jerk of the head to avoid staring seemed to amuse her a great deal. “I was both prisoner and jailer. Defender, protector. It's my aspect. I am the guardian of fate, and technically, I obeyed the prime directive as I always had. We, the high ones, cannot be killed or destroyed. It's impossible, we exist in a state of constant existence and without us this reality would unravel. Without me, everything would stop moving. I am change and fate and the speaker. Every action even the most basic matter in the universe takes is because I said it would. It's complicated, I'll say that, but I saved your life once and I was fairly punished for it. Even though the one who took that life from you broke the order in doing so, all I did was repair it as best I could.”

“Should I thank you for this?” Tyr asked. “How did you save my life?”

“Thank me? It wasn't out of goodness. You owe me nothing, I was simply doing what I was created to do, and it was a greedy thing. I would clip the threads of fate that govern the workings of the universe and bring the void upon us if it meant that you'd accept me. Morality is a mortal concept, for the most part. It's reflected in those who feed on the faith, but I do not. I have no need to, and never turned to that particular diversion.”

“I don't understand.” Tyr frowned, her personality was something almost worth admiring. If not for the undertones of slaughtering an entire universe of living things to 'be with him'. “You saved my life when I resurrected Alex?”

“No.” She shook her head. “In doing so, you became your truest self. The king of all law and the balance of the scales. Thus, my interest in you. Shards change and warp over time, only in their gathering again will you return to your true essence. You're just the next best thing. All nephilim are shards, and so on and so forth. Time rolls on like a river. You killed yourself, the only approximate of death a high one can experience, but we cannot stop existing. We need to exist. You did a terrible thing, and She cursed you to stop it. He gave you mortal life and free will that should not exist out of pity and love. A soul, feelings, morality by extension. Otherwise, you'd have been doomed to a state of autonomous action, with no mind – like in the old days, a relic of the past. And I... How to say it.”

Her fingers were drumming on the surface of the table now. Outside, they were still in their fabricated conflict. Tyr routinely checked the orbs of light surrounding the others. The primus' were trying to break out of it and 'help' him, presumably, but there were like children beating on a wall of stone. Leaving Tyr wondering just how strong a 'god' really was.

“I suppose I wove your fate, a new one. I can manage fate, make alterations, but I was sworn to refrain from making one anew. You already had one, and it was not pleasant. You'd have been given, all your shards I mean, the chance to experience 'human' life. To live, and age, and die. Her curse and refusal to accept you into the lands of death resulted in a paradox. He who creates life and she who exists as the concept of death. He wanted you to experience all the flavors life had to offer, and her curse ensured that it'd happen again. On and on, in an infinite loop. To simplify, you would have been reborn in a biological shell for as long as life exists, in all universes. Forever. Notably always remembering your past lives, billions of years of existence in a mentally unbroken thread. It seemed cruel, so I shattered the poorly pieced together mosaic of your being and created all of you. The first nephilim. Sort of, it still hasn't happened yet, but it already has.”

She sighed. “It's confusing, I know. Mythos is like that. All of us do all things at once, have already done it, haven't done it yet, and are in the process of doing it as we speak. All at the same time, from the standpoint of linear time. What will happen, will happen, and has already happened. In any case, it was a good thing I did it, because His actions damaged the tree and threw the order amok. Later, you created the rest of the nephilim, and I – alongside you – created myself. The current iteration, in any case. She existed before I did, but we all existed as one. This 'time', this... This timeline, I suppose, exists for you and you alone. I cannot reverse it, but I exist beyond it. Otherwise, none of these events would have happened at all. We could simply go back before they had, but as beings beyond that dimension, it has already happened and always will happen.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Well, yeah. Imagine trying to teach a garden snail calculus. The gods that govern your universe aren't even capable of understanding it because they are native to the dimension of spira.”

“What's calculus?”

“My point exactly.”

“And who are you to me?” Tyr asked, curious and a little more frustrated. “What kind of relationship did we have in this supposed past that won't happen until the future, but is happening right now?”

“I was your wife. Your lover.” Orpheus smiled sadly. “I was. When He damaged the tree that presides over this cosmos and opened the way for the others in his madness, one became three, and three became many. I was all spira, a component of the great cosmic structure. I was Ryu, and from Ryu came Alyx, Orpheus, and Valkyrja. But now, you speak to Orpheus. The others are wholly separate entities, and quite insane in my opinion, that which was Valkyrja is now Hel and Ouroboros, it makes for quite the family tree. We are near everywhere, just as you are. Little pieces of us. All nephilim sprung from us first, and the others followed. Shedding our blood throughout the cosmos in an attempt to correct His great sin. With mixed results due to His constant interference. As for your next question, do not ask it. Ever. I will answer honestly, but it will change your path and all I've ever wanted was for you to be the best version of you. As broken and malformed as you currently are. We are two sides of the same coin and I have interacted with billions of beings that wear your face. I will say this, there are nephilim all around you, others. They are far more common than you think, and their blood runs thick on your world.”

“Okay.” Tyr nodded in contentment. It wasn't the conversation he wanted – nor ever wished for, but she didn't seem so bad. Clearly going so far as to put on a show to make him look better in front of the others. Although he didn't like the lie behind it. This would lead to some uncomfortable complications in the future. “Please tell me how to save my world.”

“Save your world?” She laughed. “It's already doomed. Sorry to spoil things for you, my love, but your world is long gone. Existing on a thread. As to how to stop this current calamity, I'll explain it like this. Astral spaces are all pieces of varied worlds that were plucked away and sent to the 'place between', let's call it. Inside the veil, the rift. At one time, your material universe was all spira, and ours was all mana. Event occurred, and they intermixed. Creating two near identical bubbles of reality on either side of the veil. They are opposites, but they aren't anathema. They are components of balance incarnate, and these bubbles are where life exists. There are exceptions of course, little experiments of various powers as they play at their games. Anyways, my shards exist almost wholly in the veil, which is where the great tree resides. There is no measure of space or matter or distance, or even time. Nothing exists, and everything exists. Everywhere. I'm only explaining it the way your biological mind might comprehend. Following?”

Tyr nodded. “Kind of...?”

“It's good enough. The greater significance is irrelevant, the laws and calculations... All nonsense to your tiny brain. We are in the veil currently, which is where the bulk of myself exists. There are others too, 'gods' of the astral. My job, specifically, in respect to this shard of myself you're speaking with now, is to serve as an anchor for this space. I'm not an 'astral god', but... No, never mind. I stabilize and my essence protects from external influences. It exists because of me, but it was already here in the first place. I just keep it bound. This was one a piece of a world that was cut free, destroyed – actually. Just a small part. You're on an isolated chunk of a planet. Now that I've been freed by the tampering and unfortunate congregation of energies powerful enough to awaken me, I cannot remain here. Not this shard. Following?”

Tyr didn't nod this time, he only tilted his head and squinted. In any case, she kept going. Unfortunately.

“Lucky for you, there is an ark containment ship here. It was shattered by my birth, which was to be expected, but I've already repaired it. Collected the scattered minds of all the shards of the builder held within. To make a long story short, survive for three hours, and this world will pass on like all the rest. You've the tools to do it, if not the power, but I would advise you to tell the intermediate nephilim to leave. Your biological father and his kin. They will find this place not so hospitable once I leave and if any of them fall in battle – your world will be destroyed by the backlash. Any energy left free in an astral space, especially that of the soul, if magnified. The more energy, the bigger the predator. Get it?”