I watched the collapse again and again, from a thousand angles at once.
Civilizations crumbled. Cities drowned in flame and shadow. Beasts swollen with chaos devoured continents in days. Even the sky wept blood. The very concept of hope decayed.
I saw it all. Every timeline. Every failure.
Until I could bear it no longer.
I acted.
Driven by instinct, I reached into the threads of causality and tore them apart. I unraveled what was yet to be. I erased the future and forced time to rewind.
But I was too forceful.
I didn't repair the flow. I shattered it.
Reality buckled under my will. The laws I once shaped screamed in silence. The universe collapsed into nothingness.
Void, again.
But this time, I did not retreat into sleep.
I rebuilt, atom by atom, law by law, soul by soul. Everything, precisely.
From the fragments of the ruined cosmos, I shaped a new one. Nearly identical. A reflection. A cleaner thread of possibility. I called this world Elarion, a place where balance could thrive.
Here, I rewrote history.
The Dreamers, immense beings who slumbered beyond dimensional comprehension, had allowed their unconscious minds to seep into reality. They were not born within it and thus remained unaware of their own existence. Their dreams twisted causality, bent reason, and unraveled order. Not malevolent, merely detached.
So I intervened.
I did not fear them. I had long transcended fear.
But I understood the consequences of their presence.
Their dreams connected infinite dimensions, rippling through countless planes like an unseen tide. If left unbound, they would overwrite every law in every world, without intent or understanding.
So I sealed them.
I cast them into a realm beyond even the idea of infinite dimensional space. Despite their immeasurable number, I banished them with ease. My perception had long since transcended infinity.
Not out of hatred, but by design. They were the same cosmic entities I had seen upon my first awakening.
I created a veil vast enough to obscure them from all that lives. A layered reality where their dreaming could continue, endless, undisturbed, disconnected.
They remain unaware.
Still dreaming. Still spawning infinite multiverses in the void beyond concepts. But sealed.
And the seal holds. For eternity. An infinite beginning without end.
They are not dead.
They are merely removed from the concept of beginning and infinity. Their existence has become meaningless to all that is.
Yet even as I sculpted this sanctuary of law and balance, my awareness reached beyond.
I had transcended every narrative, every layer of fiction. I sensed all things, even the gazes watching me now. Eyes that did not belong to gods, beasts, or mortals.
Eyes beyond the page. And there was something even beyond that, like an infinite loop.
If I were to describe it, I was like an author gazing from the outside, hoping someone might understand my forgotten imagination and fading emotion. Perhaps even these watchers, fragmented souls observing my story, are echoes of what I once scattered. In their curiosity, I see reflections of the self I abandoned.
Was it their gaze that guided me?
Or was it mine, reaching to be seen?
Still, even this reconstructed world bore echoes of the old.
In the timeline I destroyed, ancient races waged a final war. Giants, Dragons, Demons, Dream Beasts. Their conflict fractured the earth and erased entire epochs.
Most were lost to time.
But some escaped.
Now, they exist only in whispers, half-remembered in songs and fading ruins. They hide deep within the folds of Elarion, in caverns no light has touched, in mountains that remember sorrow, in vaults sealed by their own hands.
Forgotten, but not gone.
The world I created remembers nothing of them.
But I do.
And I wonder...
Is it truly peace I've given this world?
Or merely the calm before awakening?