Showing me my possible future meant more than my success and failures for this life, it meant showing me a variety of all my possible futures. The tribulation was a Heavenly event and could reach past the limits of time and space. It was linked to and could tap into the multiple AI that was tasked with running the countless worlds that existed. That link allowed Heaven's tribulation to guide my vision and give hints of what was in store for me.

In one instance, I lived a life of degradation and humiliation where I was born a slave. Any potential that I might have had beaten out of me. That was a life lived with no significance, I would leave no lasting mark on the world, I would die forgotten, neglected, and fodder for those in power. I was beneath notice by those who replaced the human slaves they owned as easily as they replaced broken crockery.

I was robbed of my heritage and forced to feed a chained dragon as thread fell. The fall of Thread that would have obliterated the world at large, if a moment of a song hadn't gained the attention of a Dragon Master. His notice was enough to give me position and opportunity, that simple song spinning threads of fate to give my soul life.

If I had not been noticed by a Dragon rider. If he hadn't decided to land and water his beast in the only field of green growing in a vast desert that I was tasked with watering. If his waste of the bucket of water that I had been carrying hadn't angered my master. I would have lived two lives of waste and obscurity.

The man, the person that owned my life had not noticed the Dragon rider, too incensed at the spilled water. He had reacted viciously immediately drawing his crop that served as a whip. His reaction to the water I had drawn wasted when the dragon rider, thirst quenched had dumped the rest over his head to cool himself from the fiery sun that beat down during the height of summer, was to lash and beat.

The dragon rider had allowed the first two lashes before interfering, and with that interference changing my life. Claiming me as page, a dragon stable hand, he had plucked me from that life of despair and tossed me like a bag of potatoes over his dragon's neck. Together we flew, away from that island of green in a vast expanse of sand and heat, into a new life, one that was both satisfying and rewarding.

I learned the secrets of taming and training dragons. I managed to abscond with an egg, hatch it, and bond with the dragon that lived. And I used the architecture of sand, heat, and dragon pens to my advantage to raise that dragon until together we achieved first flight, and I was a Dragon Page no more. The bond between me and the dragon so deep that it could never be broken.

I had my share of lives that were indolent, lives of hubris and lechery. In one I was a King of a vast star culture, an empire that forced citizens into rebellion. I had allowed and encouraged corruption to proliferate until worlds that had been the first to join the empire were destroyed, burning pyre to the voracious appetites of that King.

The Senate that I had allowed to continue to exist as a vehicle to rubber stamp my edicts, had attempted to oppose me. Their efforts were wasted and those people that thought they held real power brought to heel, once I sent my disciple, a man I had corrupted and turned from the light, to instill fear and terror in all of those Senators who thought to oppose me.

Great space battles followers as the rebels gained in numbers, doing everything they could to turn back my encroachments. My hunger to control everything, to bring the Universe under my control, further increasing my power. But my actions were not without a cost. I became a wizened, shrunken reflection of the vital man I used to be. But my skills with lightning, with my power, grew. I had embraced completely the corruption of the dark side.

Planets destroyed, spacecraft fighting heroic battles to protect rebel interests, drone strikes decimating people living in peace under the yoke of tyranny. Each saga a chapter, a grand epic where I sacrificed people indiscriminately. Foe or friend, nothing mattered or could stand before my greed, until my young disciple rebelled, unable to watch as I killed his son and daughter.

Those two lives had been the extreme.

In one I had grown up while walking the path of good, my evolution from slave to dragon rider affecting more than my life. I lived a life searching for justice and fairness. Justice was found only when I spent time uplifting those that had been forced into slavery as I had been. The victims of a clash of ideologies between two governments.

The other I had grown walking the path of evil. My greed for power transformative. My body slowing changing until the outside reflected the evil that was contained within my soul. My depravity so horrendous and evil that I had a weapon developed that destroyed planets.

But for most of the lives that Heaven's tribulation shared with me, I lived lives of contentment. Rich, poor, adventurer, merchant. The lives began flickering so quickly I wasn't able to understand or give context to what I was seeing. They become nothing but flashes of light, an image frozen in time as if a photo taken freezing that moment digitally for all time, briefly glimpsed before the next monochromatic image flickered before my eyes.

"Jayden?" Genesis said her voice restoring my equilibrium. A balance and sense of loss that I hadn't realized I was experiencing as I become more and more lost to the futures I was being shown.

Her voice had jarred me, freed me from an endless cycle of life and death, of seeing what could or would be. And as I registered her voice, as my brain was able to process timber, tone, and pitch, I found myself back at character creation.

The confusion I had felt as I was bombarded with images only intensified as I realized where I was, and that it was here at character creation that I had set out on my journey as Jai Myche. There was no reason for me to be here, to stand before Genesis once more. No reason I could think of but one.

Had I failed my tribulation and died?