Heretical Edge

What had once been lush grass was jagged, barren rocks and dirt. The sort of dirt that would never again support life, would never grow plants as it had once before. The deep lake that had been nearby was no more. It had become an ugly crater filled with what looked like a giant, pulsing egg sac made of stitched-together flesh, an enormous, horrifying organ several miles across. The thing beat slowly at first, gaining speed over time before eventually, every few minutes, reaching the point of pounding so hard the entire ground felt like it was going to tear apart. Then the egg sac would disgorge twisted, monstrous creatures that looked like they had been summoned straight from the deepest pits of the worst imagined level of hell, before slowing down to its normal pulsing. Then that would repeat again and again, creating hundreds of those monsters, an endless and terrible parade of the foul, unholy things.

Seeing that, taking in the monsters patiently and obediently marching onto waiting flying platforms made of bone and skin, Sahveniah made a noise of confusion and disgust, her gaze whipping around to stare at the horrors surrounding them. "Wait, what? No, I--I don't understand. What happened? Things were supposed to be better with him dead. When is this? When does this take place? What happened? Why isn't the universe better now? What did we do wrong?"

No sooner had she gotten all that out than the Seosten woman remembered the other confusing thing that had come in these past few seconds. She had been distracted briefly by the horrifying sights around her, but now she focused on the face of the man who had saved her and the others, the face of their benefactor, now finally revealed without his helmet. A face that was burned into the minds of every Seosten forever. The words came in a stammer. "You. You're…"

"Cronus," he confirmed for her. "Yes, I am. Or we are. We are all Cronus, every mind inside us. It took quite some time for us to come to terms with that, with what we have become. Almost as long as it took for us to build this suit. It protects you, and everyone else, from being taken. We cannot control that curse. But our suit can stop us from absorbing you. We drifted through space for many centuries, with nothing and no one but ourselves for company. Eventually, we… came to an understanding. We became ourself. Then we built this suit out of the remains of that ship. For a time, we only sought solitude, to avoid hurting anyone else. We found ourselves immortal, incapable of dying no matter what we tried, age included. So we chose to live alone, on a barren world as we worked through all that we had become. But eventually, we came to the conclusion that we must find a way to atone for all the harm we had done to our people.

"That is what led us to find you and the others. When we learned what happened to the universe, to our people and all others, we knew… we knew it was our chance to make things better, to make up for what we had done. You, and the others we freed and taught, became our only chance of fixing things. But it soon became clear that the only way to do that was by preventing Wreth from traveling into the future to create the universe we know. Now we have done that. We have changed the timeline." He paused, slowly looking around at what surrounded them. "Things do not seem to have become quite as pleasant as we hoped."

This was all a lot for Sahveniah to try to take in. She just stood there in silence, staring at the figure in front of her for a long moment while those creatures continued to be birthed from the nearby egg sac before being flown to their next destination. None of them paid any attention to the two figures in their midst. They might as well not even exist, which said a lot about the state of this world, and the rest of the universe beyond it. The monsters weren't even taught to react to intruders.

Finally, Cronus grimaced and muttered what sounded like a curse. "It's much worse than we thought." A look of shame and revulsion crossed his-- their face. "We are the ultimate cause of this. Our suit has absorbed the relevant information from this timeline. All of this is our fault. I-- may we touch you to share our knowledge? It is safe, you have our word."

Some part of Sahveniah screamed at her to say no, to run away, but she let out a breath before giving a short nod. With that permission, Cronus gently touched a gloved hand against her shoulder. She immediately felt the full rush of information flood into her mind. Just like that, she knew what had happened. There had been rebels against Wreth, rebels who made it through the rift before he showed up. In the original timeline, they were quickly decimated when he took his armies through. But with him dead and his army broken, they had been left alone on the other side once the rift closed. They had created their own new civilization and grew from there.

That civilization had eventually, many centuries later, led to another dictator, a dictator some of their people had fled from. Which had led them, of all places, straight to Cronus. So, instead of floating alone in space for centuries before finally pulling themselves together, Cronus had been found by those people just long enough to form a bond with them. Then that dictator's troops found and viciously slaughtered all of them. That had pushed Cronus over the edge.

He'd created the new Fomorians, pushing the minds of the old Seosten he had absorbed into those bodies to create hybrid monsters. And now, they had taken over most of the universe, eradicating everything they came across in their twisted crusade to kill everything that wasn't them, to turn every bit of life into more of their horrible creations. Savvy's own people, the Seosten, were all who still stood against them in any real way, and even they were failing.

This place, Rysthael, had been a free world not that long ago, relatively speaking. It had been the home of one of the Fomorian experiment species, people largely based on Seosten themselves but with the ability to blood bond with any other species and take their abilities. They would have allowed the Fomorians to completely overrun the universe even earlier, but they had escaped. Or rather, they had been taken away by a rebel Fomorian and brought here to this world to live safe away from everything else.

Unfortunately, that hadn't lasted. At some point, another of the Fomorians, a brother or something to the first, had found his way to this world and used powerful magic across several hundred years to literally pull the Fomorian home to this part of space, merging this world and that. The Fomorians had control of their lost experiment again, and they had used it, used them, to continue conquering the universe.

After taking all that in, the woman staggered a little. It was all she could do not to completely fall to her knees and throw up. The rush of helplessness was almost overwhelming. "I--I can't-- everything we did, all the work we went through, and we just made it worse. We made the universe worse. Wreth was terrible, but these creatures annihilate everything in their path. They twist all life into this filthy mockery. Is this the only thing time travel accomplishes? If we try to change things again, will we make the situation even worse than we already have?"

Cronus was quiet for a moment. They stood there, staring off into the distance before giving a small, soft sigh. They sounded utterly overwhelmed and ashamed, their voice actually cracking. "We don't know. We were trying to help. We tried to make things better, and this is what has happened. We have become the source of this evil. Was that time itself punishing us? Was that time showing that it cannot be trifled with? We tried to change things, and it made us responsible for what this universe has become."

There was a brief pause before they straightened up and spoke a bit more firmly. "No, we refuse to believe that this is inevitable, that time itself can hold such opinions or be so vindictive. Yes, this has gone wrong. But we can make it right. We have changed all of history with a single hard blow, devastating the mountain of the timeline with an explosion. Now is the time for a scalpel, the time to carefully fix things. We can make it better. We can give this universe a chance, but we cannot be explosive again. We must find ways to make small adjustments, which will then ripple outward. We must be precise."

Saveniah looked at them consideringly. She could feel that helplessness trying to overwhelm her once more. But the truth was, they didn't have a choice. Or rather, they did. She could lay down and accept that this entire universe was doomed, and that all life within it would be twisted, broken, and destroyed by these monsters. Or she could help Cronus try again. She could help him-- them try to fix everything one more time. Cronus was right, they could use softer, more refined methods now. Especially since they knew when everything had gone wrong for this universe.

"We can make sure the original Fomorian refugees never find you in that ship." With those words, she gave the figure beside her a long stare. Saveniah had, like all Seosten, been raised knowing what a tragic yet irredeemable monster Cronus was. They were the monster who nearly annihilated their entire civilization, and she had been as afraid of them as any of her peers. But now, seeing them like this, she just felt… sad for them. They were trying to help, and now they had come to this timeline to find out that this other version of them was responsible for… all of this.

To her surprise, however, Cronus shook their head. "No. That is too far back. We made that mistake once, by going millions of years into the past, which created this situation. There are hundreds of thousands of years between the moment that other us was found and now. If we change that pivotal event, that far in the past, everything beyond it could become worse. We only have so much energy left for time travel. Too little to waste more of it going that far back to create a situation we will inevitably have to time travel again to adjust. We need something, an event, closer to the present. We must… allow the event that turned us into what we are in this universe. We do not matter. The only thing that matters is the end result, giving this universe a chance to survive."

It only took Saveniah a moment to consider. "The spell that Fomorian creature used to bring their homeworld here. That is when these humans fell, which created the domino effect leading to this. If we stop that from happening, we give this world more time. My people--" She amended immediately, "Our people were already here, were already working at finding ways to fight with these humans. If we give them time, they may be able to form a true alliance and use the Fomorian creations against them."

Cronus considered that, before giving a short nod. "Yes, that could work. But not us. It's best, for the future growth of this potential alliance you wish our people to make with the humans, if it is a human who prevents that merge from happening. One who understands the gravity of the situation, who knows just how much is at risk. One who has lived through all of this."

"Well," Saveniah murmured thoughtfully, "I suppose we should start looking for the right person to save this timeline then."

"We have one in mind," Cronus informed her. "We have scanned every detail about the humans in this time, and have found the one most suited for this task, the one who will create a better version of this universe, who will prevent this version of events from ever coming to pass. The one who will change history by preventing the Fomorian devastation of their planet and the universe beyond. The champion we've been looking for. That is who we will send into the past.

"His name is Gabriel Ruthers."

The human known as Gabriel Ruthers had been born long before the Fomorian takeover of his home planet. As one of the very few humans who had been transformed by the so-called Heretical Edge (Created by the Seosten themselves) before the Fomorians took over the planet, he was powerful enough to be an actual threat to the creatures. He was also one of very few remaining living beings who remembered those times, a member of a tragically small 'resistance' group. Fifteen members. That was the entirety of what could be considered 'free humans' in this universe. Everyone else, every human in existence, had been taken, enslaved, killed, reshaped and twisted. He had seen everything fall, had witnessed just how hopeless and broken this reality was.

In other words, it wasn't difficult to convince him to take this chance to change things. Saveniah and Cronus gave him enough information to know what he was meant to do, and how it could completely shift the direction of his world and the universe beyond. They also ensured that he knew it was a mission he would undoubtedly not return from. The man accepted that without any hesitation, and took their offered transport into the past, to that incredibly key point in history.

The resulting battle against the creature who called himself Godfather, or Maestro, very nearly failed despite the aid the two time-displaced Seosten provided. In the end, Gabriel Ruthers struck the blow that destroyed Maestro's spell mere seconds before it would have been enacted, and seconds after absorbing a blow that would end his life. His last, desperate act was to break that spell and ensure it could not be attempted again.

That version of Ruthers died, but his effort was not in vain. The timeline was dramatically changed, and his younger self continued to exist, growing into a world that was very different than the one his other self had sacrificed so much to save. In this new timeline, as Cronus and Saveniah observed from the safety of a bubble the former created that allowed them to look out across events spanning centuries, the Fomorian home did not merge with Earth. Unfortunately, two hundred years after that point, the creatures invaded this planet anyway, spreading quickly across the world and overwhelming their defenders. It wasn't quite the same as the earlier collapse, but still wasn't right. The Earth needed a bit more help, needed more of a chance to grow into what it could be.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It seemed to get that chance before any more time travel was actually needed, when the Dragon-Bonded warrior known as Ehn revealed himself and took over the human resistance. He and his people successfully created an army capable of repelling the Fomorians from the planet. But in doing so, they created a far more militarized version of humanity, who refused to work with the Seosten the way they should have. The result became a three-way war between Earth and its allies, the Seosten, and the Fomorians. This still wasn't what Sahveniah and Cronus were looking for. The Fomorians would inevitably triumph against humans and Seosten who were not allies. The timeline needed another nudge in the right direction. It needed to become more than what this Ehn would turn it into.

Fortunately, their chance to change that came in the form of a woman named Virginia Dare. She had been the first English child born on the newly discovered continent back in the time of Maestro's attempt to merge the Fomorian and human worlds. The woman had grown up fairly ordinary, all things considered, before being bonded with an Akheliosan known as Fahsteth as a young adult when he and his allies raided her village. From there, she had grown into a very capable warrior, recruited by Crossroads Academy and transformed into one of their Boscher Heretics.

By the time of Ehn's takeover and transformation of humanity in his quest to defeat the Fomorians, Virginia had fallen in love with another Heretic known as Joshua Atherby, and the two of them had a child together, a son known as Vincent. The two of them wished to create a better world for their child, something more than what Ehn wanted humanity to be.

That was where Saveniah and Cronus came in. They ensured the Seosten gained access to a spell that would banish the Fomorians from the planet. Unfortunately, it required a large and ongoing sacrifice. That sacrifice became Joshua and Virginia's lives. The former literal and the latter metaphorical. Joshua was killed by the spell, while Virginia's existence-- or at least her connection to the man and her family, was wiped from the memories of everyone on this world and beyond. Vincent, their son, was taken in by Crossroads and became a powerful Boscher Heretic in his own right. He fought to live up to the example set by his dead father and the mother whose identity he could never know.

That eventually led Vincent to turn against Crossroads and their xenophobic teachings, taking his team with him. Including his lover, Deveron Adams. The two men and their allies created an ongoing rebellion. Sadly, Deveron was killed during this rebellion, leaving Vincent grieving and alone.

Once again, Ehn entered the picture, recruiting Vincent and offering him aid in changing history to save Deveron's life. Vincent agreed, and the two went back in time, under the close but secret observation from the other two time travelers. But Ehn and Vincent didn't simply go back to when Deveron had been killed. Instead, they went to that moment when the time-traveling Gabriel Ruthers had prevented Maestro from enacting his original plan. Ehn had detected the use of time travel there, and had come to believe that that moment was when things were made worse rather than better. He thought the two of them could start fixing things by preventing that.

Good and bad news came from that. The good news was that Ehn and Vincent did not manage to entirely derail Ruthers from his efforts. They arrived just slightly too late, allowing that version of the man to stop Maestro before dying.

The bad news was that their presence gave Maestro a target for his annoyance. In the resulting battle with these two new intruders, he spilled enough of Vincent's blood to identify his genetics, allowing him to subsequently target Vincent's just-born mother, Virginia, in an attempt to change history himself.

From there, a domino effect ensued. Virginia did not grow up in a safe, happy environment before eventually bonding to Fahsteth as a teenager. She was instead targeted by Maestro's forces and bonded to an Amarok instead. Beyond that, though her ensuing life was rather different, she still ended up finding her way to Joshua Atherby, and the two still fell in love. They proceeded to have a child… a girl rather than a boy. This one was named Joselyn. The boy had been given a name close to his mother's, Vincent for Virginia, while the girl was given a name close to her father's, Joselyn for Joshua.

Other than that, Joselyn lived much as Vincent before her had. She grew up without her parents, fell in love with Deveron Adams, and created a rebellion against Crossroads. Unlike Vincent and Deveron, however, the two of them had children. Those children were taken hostage and used to force Joselyn to surrender herself, eventually leading to her identity being erased, much like her mother's was. Stripped of her memories and powers, she was sent into the Bystander world, where she created a new family with the man named Lincoln Chambers and their daughter, Felicity.

Eventually, Joselyn was taken by the Necromancer, Fossor. Felicity grew up without her mother, was recruited by Crossroads, and eventually brought that rebellion back with aid from the headmistress, Gaia Sinclaire. Also known as Morgan Le Fey.

In this version of the timeline, it was Felicity who was approached by Ehn, after she helped kill the Fossor and absorbed his Necromancy. Which added to the Necromancy she had already absorbed from killing an empowered Seosten known as Manakel.

Once again, Ehn went into the past, this time intending to use a rift between Earth and the Fomorian world (created when Maestro's spell to connect the worlds was broken) to travel there as part of his attempt to eventually stop the Fomorians for good.

In the course of that, Felicity was left alone for awhile as Ehn proceeded on his own efforts, near where one of Maestro's original merging spells were located. Seeing that, Cronus and Saveniah realized they could greatly simplify and improve their earlier efforts. A now non-existent version of Gabriel Ruthers did not need to be sent into the past to die. Instead, the two of them contacted the group in Felicity's present known as Section Four, an organization devoted to saving Alters from Boscher Heretics. They gave those people knowledge of what Maestro was attempting to do in the past, and what they needed to do to stop it. With Ehn being what he was, however, the two needed to disguise their efforts and existence. So they created the lie that these Section Four people had time traveled themselves, alerted Maestro to the fact that the Fomorians would be defeated in the future, and caused him to create this merging spell. All to hide Cronus and Saveniah's presence and interference from Ehn, making him focus on that group and their supposed mistakes.

It was Sahveniah who recorded and sent the actual fake message for Felicity, the one that directed her toward Maestro. She used the pseudonym of 'Jaquelin Prose.' Jaquelin was an Earth name meaning 'supplanter,' while 'Prose' was simply the Earth word for 'written word' or story. Put together, the name essentially meant 'Supplanting the story.' Which was exactly what they were doing here. They were replacing the story of this universe with something better.

Either way, the message allowed Felicity to find and disrupt Maestro's spell herself, before that other version of Gabriel Ruthers ever had to be sent back and before Vincent and that other Ehn had come back as well. This rippled through the timeline, changing even more things. Some minor, some major.

Most importantly, the method Felicity used to disrupt the merging spell ended up spreading the rifts throughout the timeline. Including one rift that appeared all the way back to the original time that Saveniah had gone to in her efforts to create a better universe by killing Wreth. When Ehn and his young companion went through the main rift, trying to reach the Fomorian world, Felicity was torn and twisted, ripped apart until the mysterious Reaper-offshoot Ankou figures, friends of the girl's, intervened to save her. In doing so, they sent many versions of her to each of those rifts in order to close them properly.

That included the rift that was connected to the moment of Wreth's death. And as Cronus and Saveniah observed, this Felicity, without any further intervention from them, proceeded to end that man's reign before Saveniah herself had ever appeared.

Wreth was stopped, and in a way that allowed even more of the original Fomorian people to travel through that first rift, crossing over a hundred million years to reach their new home. Unfortunately, their general history remained the same, and that future version of Cronus was still corrupted and broken by their experience. The new, monstrous Fomorians were still created. But perhaps a new level of hope remained, in the form of the child Fomorian recruited by Felicity, an original Fomorian who might lead to something better. Hope. That was what they had been trying to create this entire time.

Seeing all that from the time bubble that allowed them to view those events, Saveniah watched as Felicity and her companions, including the child Fomorian, went to the rift itself. As they disappeared from the edge of the lake, she looked to Cronus while raising her hand to indicate her rapidly-fading form. Her body was already intangible, and was quickly becoming transparent. "That's it, isn't it? We're tied to the version of the timeline we originally came from. Now it's gone, so we're… going with it."

Cronus nodded. "Our method of time travel was not the same as most. We used the rift in the time period that Wreth created, and thus we were tied to it. Other time travelers would simply exist in their new reality. We… will cease to exist. It is the price we pay for creating this universe. But there is enough energy, enough power, enough… magic left in this crystal for us to do one last thing. Enough power for us to give you the reward you deserve."

"Reward? What reward? Wait, what are you doing?" Saveniah demanded.

Holding what remained of the rift crystal, which by that point was barely the size of a marble, Cronus looked to her. "You have only ever known pain, a universe of suffering, of death and slavery. You sacrificed your existence to create a better one, with no expectation of survival. In this reality, no version of you would ever have been born. The Seosten are too different, time itself has changed too much for you to live. But that need not be a sacrifice. We will use the last of this crystal's power to ensure your existence, to change time just enough so some version of you may still be born. That is the best we can do. We're sorry we can't do more."

Even as they spoke, the figure in front of her was becoming even more transparent, even closer to nonexistence than she already was. But they held the tiny crystal up, and Saveniah felt the power pulsing off it. Power that would be used to ensure some version of her was born, and could live in this new reality they had helped create.

They were almost entirely gone then, the two figures fading toward the point of being little more than a soft breeze in the air. "Cronus," this version of Saveniah managed as her last words, "did we make a difference in the end?"

"That is the true trick of time," Cronus's own final statement informed her. "There is no such thing as the end.

"Only an infinite number of great beginnings."

A/N - To summarize all three of these chapters, the original Saveniah came from a dark timeline where Wreth ruled the universe for hundreds of thousands of years after traveling through the rift. She used the crystal that had been created from his repeated use of that rift to go back to that moment before he went through the rift and killed him. Unfortunately, that meant that rather than being left on their own until they finally brought themself under control and worked to help the universe, Cronus was found by the original Fomorians and subsequently broken and turned evil when they were murdered.

The timeline from there proceeded largely as we know it, up until Maestro attempted to merge Earth with the Fomorian home. In one version of events, what could be considered the 'original' version from that point, he succeeded. The Fomorians conquered Earth, enslaved humanity, and proceeded to take what remained of the universe. Another dark timeline. But the good Cronus and Saveniah changed that, by sending Gabriel Ruthers into the past to stop Maestro. He succeeded, sacrificing his own life in the process.

Once again, the timeline was changed, this one even more closely resembling the one we know. But in this version, because Virginia Dare was never attacked by Maestro's people, she grew up slightly differently. She still ended up as a Heretic, albeit bonded with a different Alter (Fahsteth, in this case), and still married Joshua Atherby. But they had a son rather than a daughter, Vincent. The Fomorians still invaded, Virginia and Joshua still sacrificed themselves in their own ways, and Vincent still went to Crossroads before creating the rebellion (and was still romantically involved with Deveron). In this version, Deveron himself was killed in the rebellion, and Ehn recruited Vincent with the promise of changing things. Together, Ehn and Vincent went to the past, drawn to the moment that Gabriel Ruthers had time traveled to, the moment of his fight with Maestro. They arrived too late to interfere with that, but soon enough for Maestro to take his anger out on them. In the ensuing battle, Vincent's blood was spilled, and Maestro used that to identify his family line, proceeding to target Virginia Dare in retaliation.

This altered Virginia's timeline enough to make it even more closely match the one we know. She was chased from her village, her friends and family killed, and she herself was bonded to the Amarok. In this version, she proceeded to marry Joshua, and had a child together. This time, their child was a girl named Joselyn.

From there, everything generally proceeded as we know it. Joselyn formed her rebellion, was forced to surrender, had her identity and memory erased, and so on. All the way up until Ehn recruited the Necromancer Flick to go into the past with him. With Flick left close enough to Maestro's spell to potentially interfere with it, Cronus and Saveniah used Section Four, the secret Alter-human alliance meant to help hide supernatural beings from Boschers, to send a message to Flick that would lead her that way without tipping Ehn himself off to their existence. This included the reveal that the tape recorded voice Flick heard from 'Jaquelin Prose' was actually this version of Savvy.

This is what led Flick to stop Maestro's spell before any version of Ruthers had to be sent back, and before anything involving Vincent. The rifts were spread out through the timeline, and everything from there is how we know it… except for the young, toddler Saveniah's existence. But that was created and maintained by the good Cronus, as their last possible act in this reality before being erased.