It was entirely impossible to actually completely parse what happened next. My brain literally could not process the whole thing properly. When I possessed that creature, I possessed every single reaper that had combined themselves into the single body, as well as every single being each of them had absorbed. There were trillions upon trillions of personalities and individual memories trapped in there. And I was being pulled into all of them.
It was quite clear that I would have been ripped to shreds mentally if I was doing this by myself. My entire sense of self, my consciousness and everything that was me, would have been obliterated. I didn’t have anywhere near the mental fortitude needed to hold myself together against something like that. In the same way that a Seosten fetus was erased when they accidentally possessed their parents before birth, so too would I cease to exist. I was a speck of dust in the ocean.
But I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t doing this by myself, and that was what saved me. The very same unfathomably powerful creatures who had allowed me to possess them also guided and shielded me in that moment. I felt them pulling me apart, but not in a painful way. I felt new versions of myself stepping out of me over and over again. It was like having a shadow or reflection solidify and walk off, only for another to appear and do the same. Every mind within this place wanted to pull me in their direction, and my… hosts were duplicating me so that could happen.
Over and over again, I was split apart, and those parts were subsequently split as well. I was multiplying exponentially. Now it felt like I was falling through a void, an endless space where I tumbled end over end, while new duplicates of me continued to appear and fly off one way or another. The whole time, even more duplicates split off of each of them, and more off of them.
I caught glimpses of where they were going. But these were more than simply visual glimpses. I smelled, saw, heard, even felt what they did just for an instant. I saw one of me appear next to an elderly gray skinned figure watching his home burn down with his children inside. I saw another me watching a warrior woman with dark red skin and horns falling in battle. A third saw an old lady pouring poison into the dinner she was making for her husband. The fourth witnessed some sort of alien bus crash into a store. The fifth saw a crowd of civilians fleeing in a panic from the Reaper who was chasing them, only to be cut down one after the other.
On and on it went, far more than I could actually process. I acknowledged the first twenty, the first thirty, and then it was a blur. Some part of me acknowledged what I was seeing, but it was impossible to actually focus on. I was witnessing every single death that these creatures had perpetrated or witnessed and absorbed the energy from across their entire existence. And a different version of myself was being created, copied from the original me, to be there in that moment. At least in their memories.
A guide, an advisor, a friend, a shoulder to cry on or a target to be shouted at. Every version of me was all that and more. They were turning me into their counselor, their aide. And, perhaps most importantly, their teacher.
No, there was a better word for it, I realized. I was their Reaper. I was Death. Every time one of them died, every creature who had either been killed by one of these Reapers or whose death had been witnessed by them, I was there. I walked with them after their deaths. I talked to them. I told them what happened and what they now were a part of. I helped them accept that their memories, the personality, everything they were was now part of a much larger collective. I helped them find acceptance and understanding in that, some more easily than others. But no matter who they were, no matter how they reacted, I was there. I took them into a virtual space and eventually to the larger group where they could meet their companions throughout this strange afterlife. More and more versions of me brought them together and helped them become something like a family, a society.
I continued to fall through that void while time passed. It was simultaneously only moments and also thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. Time had no meaning in this endless space. I saw every version of myself, every duplicate, as they both arrived within those memories, and through subsequent years continued to aid and counsel those same beings. Maybe it was real, or maybe it wasn’t. Was I really being sent back to those moments and allowed to be physically present when they died before taking them into Reaper mindspace? Or were the memories of all these uncountable beings simply being adjusted as though I had been there with them the entire time?
When it came to something like this, it didn’t really matter. Not that much. What mattered was the effect. These trillions upon trillions of lives who had been completely alone and lost for so long had something at least close to a friend. They had someone there with them to help understand and accept what had happened. And that someone was me, so it wasn’t perfect. Far from it. But I was there. Every version of me that showed up to help these people did what I could to teach them, to be there for them.
I saw myself entertaining one of the very small children who had been murdered, and standing by them for the years that followed, always ready to play and help them feel better. I saw a version of myself actually playing teacher for another group who had died in the same moment. Yet another spent so much time with one victim that that version of me and his ghost fell in love. To them, that version of myself and what remained of that victim, many, many years passed. We–they grew as a couple in so many ways. And they weren’t the only ones. Across every one of these trillions of incarnations, these uncountable versions of myself, more and more mothered these children, fell in love with both men and women of all shapes and sizes, or with simply an incredibly close friend. I grew with and loved so many of them.
It was impossible to fully comprehend or cope with exactly how many versions of myself were out there. There were more versions of me, more instances of my own mind and self spread throughout this place, this mix between space and mind, than had ever lived on planet Earth throughout its history. And that still wasn’t even doing it credit. Not really. That was like saying there were more ants in an ant hill then there were people living in the average house. If I lived ten thousand years, I would never be able to fully experience and process even an hour out of the lives of every version of myself that had been created and put toward this purpose. I was getting the barest snapshot of what was happening. It was like taking actual film out as a projector and glancing at the still images in the light. I saw frozen moments and pieced together a few details. I would never, no matter how much time I had, ever be able to actually comprehend the full scale of what I had been through, what I was being put through. I would never truly mentally process all of it. And that was certainly for the best. As far as I was concerned, no living being should have so many memories, should experience so much. Trillions of different versions of myself were created, whether in mental or physical form, to help every mind attached to these Reapers.
And it was actually even more than that. Because I wasn’t only sent to help their victims. There were those same Reapers too, all of them feeling various sorts of confusion, anger, disbelief, and more about what they were supposed to be. And while there may have been fewer of them, they were perhaps the most alien of all. They were each creatures completely beyond my comprehension all by themselves. They narrowed themselves in scope, making themselves shrink down into some closer semblance of something I could understand and talk too. They split themselves up, one Reaper showing me its anger. Not in an abusive way, but merely because that tiny sliver, that single emotion, was all a single version of myself could hope to interact with. Others split themselves into various wants, needs, or even portions of their memory rather than a single emotion. But all it came down to was that to speak with these Reapers one on one, to help them the way other versions of myself were helping all of their victims and absorbed personalities, they had to split themselves up.
Some of those Reapers were worse, more violent and nasty, than others. They were all rough around the edges, not exactly surprising for beings who had devoted their entire selves toward wiping out all life in the universe, of course. But they were also confused, lost in so many ways. They knew that they had somehow become more than they were, that all those millennia of being trapped within that prison with the personalities of every being they had killed swirling around inside them had done something, had made them more than they had once been. From what little I understood about other Reapers, they collected their absorbed memories and minds and put them in some other space to be used when needed. The Seosten did something similar with their own memories, taking them out of their minds and collecting them in magical form to be labeled and brought back when they were needed. Because no living beings could have all those memories and remain the same sort of being they were. It was hard enough for Seosten who lived thousands of years to keep things straight and remain who they were with only that much smaller time scale and their own mind involved. Well, their own mind and the memories of those they possessed.
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But Reapers? They were on a whole other scale entirely. They held so many more memories inside them. And these ones, those who have been imprisoned here in this tower, had had no outlet, no place to store those memories away from themselves. The personalities of every single one of their victims, of the people whose deaths they had absorbed, had stayed with them through these millions of years. No one in this universe or any other could possibly remain the same being they were at the end of all that.
These Reapers weren’t what they had been when they were imprisoned. At most they had been going through the motions, doing what they remembered from before they were locked away. But after all that time, after everything that happened and the entire mental stew of every memory and thought that was in there, they were changed.
The whole problem had been that they didn’t know what that change was. They didn’t understand what they were, or what they could be. There were so many lost, terrified, angry, desperate thoughts inside them that nothing coherent could escape. They had needed help. They needed someone who could not simply talk to them as they were now, but who could actually talk to every version of themselves throughout their entire joined existence. They needed someone, a separate being who wasn’t taken by them, to step into their joined minds and memories and help carefully and painstakingly guide them toward what they were capable of becoming.
In this case, that was me. My Seosten possession power allowed me to be inside their minds. And they were able to split that single version of myself up into one of me for every single one of their absorbed minds, and for each of the Reapers themselves no matter how many times they split themselves into smaller pieces. While my primary self simply fell through that void, they took what they needed, copied me over and over again and sent those versions of myself off to help guide, protect, teach, and even love them.
Those other versions of myself led lives so much longer than I could even imagine. I was given just the nearest glimpse of how that went, seeing tiny bits and pieces from those lives. It was just enough to illustrate to me quite effectively just how staggeringly overwhelming the full scope was. No, that wasn’t even right. I had absolutely no idea, no comprehension of how massive it was. That was like someone who had never really seen the ocean standing on the beach and thinking they understood the size of it. Theoretically, I knew I had a lot of other lives out there, a lot of other memories. But I could no more really, truly understand it than I could drink that very same ocean.
Once again, it didn’t matter whether this was actually physically happening and those versions of myself were being sent through time, or whether I was simply being retroactively inserted into those memories and thus adjusting everything from that point. For all intents and purposes, both on their side and mine, it was the same thing.
And through all that, through what became millennia after millennia of trillions of versions of myself being inserted in those memories and adjusting everything that came after, these Reapers were changed. Their victims grew to understand them much better, grew to understand what they could potentially be. And, at the same time, the Reapers themselves came to understand their victims. The biggest hurdle to that had already been passed before I ever entered the picture. Millions of years of being trapped in the tower had made the Reapers want to change, even if they didn’t really understand or acknowledge that. They had wanted to become something more, something better. But they needed help. They needed someone who could go into their memories like this and bring them all together. I just happened to be the lucky one who put myself in a situation to be able to do that. And even then, I would have died in the attempt if the Reapers themselves hadn’t shielded me from the worst effects of what I was doing. This was something they couldn’t do by themselves, and I couldn’t do without them. We were rewriting their entire history and teaching them through those altered memories how to be better.
It was, in a word, overwhelming. And it seemed to go on forever. I may not have truly experienced all those years and all those lives, or even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of them. But some part of me knew that I had experienced an amount of time beyond all comprehension. It was more than anyone could ever truly understand. And I was glad that I would never actually need to physically experience any real amount of it. I had no doubt that I would have been driven mad immediately. I was pretty sure my brain wasn’t built to withstand the sheer amount of experiences that something like that would require.
But finally, after so, so very long and so many different versions of myself, it was over. I found myself no longer in the void. The memories of all those other selves were safely locked away. There were ways for me to access some of the memories a little bit at a time if need be to get answers about things they had experienced or discovered, but they wouldn’t pop up all by themselves. I had to actually go looking for them, and my brain would only allow me to take in a little bit here and there before locking them away again. I supposed it was a little bit like only being able to have so many tabs open on a browser at once before the memory was overloaded. Every time I accessed any of those memories, it would open a new window with a dozen tabs and I would need to be careful lest I overwhelm the computer that was my brain. It wasn’t the perfect comparison, but close enough. And now I had the ability to call up memories from completely extinct civilizations, which was… yeah I was gonna have to think about that a bit more later.
With the void gone, I was no longer falling. Instead, I was back at Crossroads. Yes, disorienting and surprising as that was, I stood in front of the girls dorm, with the rest of the still so familiar grounds laid out in front of me. After not being there for almost a year, this was strange, to say the least. Even though I knew it certainly wasn’t real, especially considering there was no one in sight even though it was the middle of the day, I still felt a slight twinge of pain. Yes, Crossroads had problems. It had to change. But it had still been the place that opened my entire world up to become so much more than I had been before. It led to me getting my mother back, meeting Wyatt, Abigail, and Koren, finding Avalon and Shiori, and… and… all of that. There were many aspects of it that I missed. And I definitely wished that we didn’t have to be at war with them. I just wanted things to get better.
“Felicity Chambers.” The voice spoke up from behind me on the steps of the dorm. I turned to find myself staring at Gaia. Or rather, something that was choosing to appear as such.
“You’re not really her,” I noted mildly while taking in the sight. Unlike the previous figure, this one didn’t constantly shuffle through thousands of eyes. At least physically, it was all Gaia.
“No,” came the response. A response that was fully spoken out loud, all at once rather than using the single word containing several sentences of thoughts like they had before. “But we believed a familiar and respected form would be for the best. Some advocated appearing as one of your familial or romantic loved ones, but it was decided that such would cause more pain, which was not our intention.”
Swallowing hard, I gave a short nod. “Yeah, that wouldn’t be fun. But–nngngnnn…” I stretched my arm out, running my nails over my skin before doing the same with the other arm. “Itchy. Tingly. My body feels weird.”
“It will pass,” came the calm, reassuring response. “You may experience some side effects from being taken through our minds. We were forced to take your body apart and put it back together again.”
That made me do a double-take. “Put me back together again?” I looked down, staring at my hands, then my legs, then ran my fingers through my hair and over my face. “Is everything in the right place? I don’t have a heart in my leg or my brain in my torso now, do I?”
The Gaia-Reaper sounded a little amused, though not in a harsh way. She promised, “Your pieces are all in the same place. We were very careful.”
Still a little creeped out, I checked myself over once more before asking, “Okay, but why are we here? What’s going on? Is it over? Wait, are you the same ones I was talking to before?”
That prompted a very faint smile. “You know the ones you spoke to before no longer exist. You changed that. You changed us. We are all very different now. In ways we are still only beginning to understand. Now we must speak with those who imprisoned us. There is much to catch up on, much for all to explain. We are still not like them, despite the changes. We are different than we were, yet not the same as them. We are something new. This situation will take much discussion. In the meantime, we have brought you here, to this frozen moment of your old school. It is an exact recreation of the entire island and everything on it at the very moment when you departed your present to travel into the past. We believe it is very important for you to see what is in this place precisely at that time. You may find something here that will be… illuminating.”
“Illuminating? I echoed. “What do you mean–” But the figure was gone. I was standing here alone on a recreation of Crossroads from just before I had gone back in time with Ehn. And now it was clear that they did this on purpose, that they wanted to show me something, wanted me to see something.
But… what?