Chapter 289: Finale: The Answer

“Quenay.”

Alistair Kraid sat cross-legged on the floor in front of his divine trap. He had his skeletal hand laid flat on the floor, with tendrils of green-black fire extending from every fingertip to flow across the floor and ensnare the godly mechanism. One last bit of reinforcement before the curtain call.

“If you can hear me, and I think you can,” Kraid said. “Just know that this isn’t personal.”

The sickly flames of black magic surged, and lances of the unholy fire lashed across the room like solar flares.

“Well, technically it’s deeply personal,” Kraid said. “But not in the way most people mean that. You’ve never done anything to wrong me, of course, at least not that I know of. I’ve never met you, or been offended by you. You just exist.”

The waves of black fire washed over Kraid himself, and he did not flinch.

“And I just can’t tolerate that,” Kraid said. “Again, not in a personal way, it’s more like a mountain climber, right? I see a challenge and I can’t help myself, I have to conquer you just to say that I did it.”

Kraid’s entire life had been devoted to meeting challenges. Testing the limits of the law, of love, of life itself. People called him evil (and that was objectively true), but Kraid only ever saw himself as a scientist, always seeking to explore the newest, most challenging horizon.

For a time, that distant horizon had been Vell’s mysterious rune. Then the time loops. Now it was Quenay, and the secrets of the Last Goddess. One by one, Kraid would find out every secret. Every mystery would be solved, every barrier would fall, and every enemy would be defeated. He’d face every challenge and win. Like he always did.

----------------------------------------

Something made a very loud booming noise. Vell looked up from his papers.

“What was that?”

“Sorry, that was dad,” Skye shouted back.

“Normal experiment, just forgot to turn off the bit that makes noise for purely dramatic purposes,” Doc Ragnarok said. “All better now.”

Vell shook his head. The perils of working with a retired supervillain. He shifted his focus to an email from Adele and the arts students, with a list of historic symbols relating to life and divinity. Vell found a place for it in his rapidly-expanding web of information and let someone else do the rest. He was getting so much information so fast he’d had to divert Hawke and some other students just to parsing it out and sending it to everyone who might need it, as Vell himself could no longer possibly keep track.

The flow of information lulled slightly, so Vell got a drink of water and focused on what he was best at. He stretched out his carving hand and got to work on another variation of the ten-lined rune. The rune on the base of his spine trembled with energy now, almost like it was surging with power as the moment of truth approached. Vell wished it would do a little more than surge. He needed whatever help he could get. That rune had been on his back for more than a decade and he still couldn’t figure it out.

In an entirely predictable outcome, the most recent experiment was just as much a failure as the last few hundred. Vell tossed the useless rune into his extradimensional storage bag with the rest. He’d had to sweep up the failure pile, both for the sake of storage space and because it was getting so big it was starting to be demoralizing.

A little hydrokinetic magic had provided Vell with a perpetually-cold ice pack to rest his wrist on for some quick relief. He was starting to consider redirecting some medical students to find a cure for carpal tunnel, because he was going to need it.

“Hey boss,” Amy said. Vell had opted to leave his office door open, so she didn’t need to do her usual barging in. “If you’re not too busy suffering the crushing burden of destiny, we got an experiment we could use advice on.”

“I can suffer and help at the same time,” Vell said. “That’s multitasking.”

“Hell yeah, that’s why you’re in charge,” Amy said. “Come on.”

Amy led the way to one of the clusters of rune tech students across the room. Joan was personally overseeing the group, with Helena close at hand.

“Vell. We’ve been going through the divine information Helena brought over, and we think we’re on to something,” Joan said.

“The ol’ Burton Method might have some legs on it yet,” Amy said. “We compared the god-data to some historical methods of runecarving, and we think we’ve got a model that might work.”

Reg handed over an intricate diagram with instructions on how to carve a ten-lined rune, and notes on why they believed their method was right. Vell studied the instructions carefully, looking for any inconsistencies.

“Do you think it’s right?”

In spite of all the color and motion in the room, Vell still felt hyper-aware of the slightest twitches of purple wings. There were butterflies perched all over every window in the room, staring inward, staring at him. Watching on behalf of the Butterfly Guy, on the lookout for that moment: the question only Vell could answer. He wondered if this was that question.

“Only one way to find out,” Vell said. Vell had started to keep a chisel and a slate on him at all times, so he didn’t need any supplies to get started. He took a seat, followed the directions, and carved out a rune line by line. The other students watched and held their breath. Luckily for the breath-holders, Vell could carve pretty fast, so they weren’t breathless for long.

“Okay. Charge that up, and...we’ll see.”

Joan took the rune and sent a spark of magical energy into it. For a moment, the rune flickered with energy, and everyone’s heart skipped a beat. Then the flickering faded, leaving behind nothing but dead stone and disappointment.

“Put it under the scanner, maybe I made a mistake,” Vell said. Amy took it and held it under a surface scanner used to detect imperfections in runes.

“Looks like it meets our spec,” Amy said. “Must’ve been our mistake.”

“Wait, maybe it’s my fault,” Joan said. “Something like this would need a lot of power, right? Lee, maybe you should try charging it.”

“If the magic source were insufficient it would’ve just had a typical non-charge, not the flicker fade,” Vell said. “You did fine. It’s just not the right carve.”

“Sorry, Vell,” one of the students mumbled.

“It’s fine. You did good, we just need to keep at it,” Vell said.

He grabbed some papers off a nearby table. They had printed out some guides on rune structure for their uninitiated helpers, and Vell snatched one of the sheets displaying the perfectly straight top-to-bottom line at the center of every rune, the one that represented “Order”.

“We’ve always got this,” Vell said. “We always know step one, so we’re never starting from scratch.”

He clenched that piece of paper tight in his hands and headed back to his office. Lee and Harley, who had been observing from the backline, followed him in. After a quick nod from Joan, Helena also started rolling that way. Vell sank into his chair and put his head in his hands, and didn’t realize he’d been followed until a few seconds had passed.

“Vell,” Lee said. “It’s nearly three in the morning. Do you need a break?”

“I’m not sure now is the time for a break,” Helena said.

“Rest is an investment in future productivity, and is therefore productive,” Lee said.

“I- I know,” Helena said. “But do you remember what I told you about Kraid’s timeline? He’s going to be activating that god trap any minute.”

Helena nodded towards a nearby clock. They were nearing the exact second when Kraid’s preparation window would be ending. Helena doubted that her departure would affect Kraid’s timeline in any way, so she could only assume they’d be seeing his grand plan any second.

After considering what she was about to say, Harley stood up and closed the door behind her, to muffle their conversation a little more.

“Well, are we worried about Kraid?” Harley said. “According to the Butterfly Guy-”

“Butterfly Guy?” Helena said.

“Long story, we’ll get you up to speed on the good guy lore later,” Harley said. “According to him, Vell’s the only person who can answer this whole big question thingy anyway. Doesn’t that mean Kraid can’t possibly win?”

“Even if we assume that to be the case, there are a lot of possible consequences to Kraid ‘losing’,” Helena said. “If the god trap is an utter failure, there’d still be nothing stopping him from blowing up this entire island to cover up his mistakes.”

“Ah,” Lee said. “Perhaps a slight time crunch, then.”

“What do you think, Vell?” Joan asked. “How close do you think we are to figuring this out?”

Vell looked down at the single line on a sheet of paper, and shook his head.

“I have no idea.”

He set the paper down and slouched back in his chair.

“We’re going nowhere,” Vell admitted. “Running in circles, always coming back to nothing.”

“Vell?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Vell snapped. “None of it makes any sense!”

He slammed his fist down on the desk hard enough to make it shake. A stack of papers slid off, exposing a multicolored ceramic elephant that had gotten buried in stacks of data. Vell snatched a fistful of reports and shook them at his friends.

“It’s like a spiderweb without a center, all this information is correct, it’s all connected, but none of it connects in the right way,” Vell ranted. “No matter what we find out there’s just a gap in the middle of everything!”

He tossed aside the documents and grabbed another fistful of useful useless information. He had a desk full of once-in-a-lifetime brilliance, a collection of information that would’ve made the Library of Alexandria weep with envy, and it was all useless.

“There’s supposed to be some answer here, something that makes it all make sense, but there’s nothing,” Vell said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

He tossed more papers aside and leaned on his desk. In the middle of all the data, his eyes locked on to the inexplicable multicolored elephant.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he mumbled. “Why doesn’t it make sense?”

“Maybe we should try a new approach,” Helena suggested. “We could-”

Harley gave her a very gentle whack in the shoulder.

“Helena, shut up.”

“I know I probably don’t deserve to be here, but I think I can contribute-”

“No, not like that, just shut up,” Harley whispered. “Vell’s forehead is wrinkling.”

Helena looked at Vell. He was staring at the messy elephant with a single wrinkle on his forehead.

“Is that significant?”

“It might be the most significant event in history,” Lee said.

Outside, Adele silently examined a butterfly, scouring the gentle flapping of its marked wings for any clues. She got a very big clue when the flapping stopped. Across the campus, every butterfly stopped as one, frozen, motionless, compound eyes fixed on the rune tech labs, and on Vell Harlan.

Vell continued to stare at the ceramic elephant. In all his musings, Vell had never been able to come up with a reason why Professor Nguyen had owned such a thing, much less kept in a place of importance on her desk. There was no reason for it. But Nguyen had kept it anyway.

Vell’s brow furrowed, and his forehead developed a second wrinkle.

Vell looked up at Helena and Joan, at two people who had betrayed him, hurt him, and even killed him, but still chosen to trust him in the end. He had chosen to trust them too. He hadn’t really had a reason. But he’d done it anyway. Third wrinkle.

He looked towards Harley and Lee, his most trusted companions over years caught in the time loops. The time loops had never made any sense, they had no rhyme or reason, and they were purely destructive. In a rational world, the daily doomsdays would have been a source of nothing but confusion and pain. Yet he’d managed to get his two best friends, a lifetime’s worth of joy, from the loops.

Harley started to smile with delight when the famous fourth wrinkle appeared on Vell’s forehead. All of his friends waited with bated breath, watching, not daring to interfere -except for one friend(?). Helena was, as ever, slightly less patient than everyone around her.

“Vell,” she said. “Why doesn’t it make sense?”

Vell looked up at her, and locked eyes with Helena. He spent a few seconds staring at eyes filled with pain, confusion, conflict, regret -and hope. The lines on his forehead moved a little further. Harley gasped as a previously unseen fifth wrinkle appeared on Vell’s forehead.

Below the five-wrinkled forehead, intense eyes turned to stared down at a single line, the foundation of everything Vell had ever studied, the central truth around which his entire field of wisdom rotated. The structured, monochrome perfection of the Order line stood in perfect contrast to the misshapen, multicolored elephant.

The world was silent. The butterflies watched. The forehead wrinkles vanished. Vell looked down at that universal line, the foundation of everything he knew to be true -and he turned it upside down.

“Because it doesn’t have to.”

The butterflies took wing. Thousands took to the skies at once, filling the air with a cyclone flurry of iridescent purple. Students across campus watched in awe as the mass of butterflies took off in one great swarm and then scattered. The night sky sparkled with impossible purple wings that faded into nothing as each one departed to parts unknown.

“I got it.”

Vell Harlan barreled past his friends and slammed through the door.

“I got it!”

All the work in the room ground to a halt in an instant, and every eye turned to Vell Harlan.

“I go-”

The sky outside went from sparkling purple to sickly green. The island below their feet shook harder than any earthquake, and the air filled with the shrill sounds of a resonant scream. Joan raced to the window and looked in the direction of Kraid’s lab. A pillar of green-black fire shot into the sky, and drew down streaks of white light from the stars themselves, with the flaring of light matching the rise and fall of the shrill shrieking sounds. Joan covered her mouth in shock as she realized what she was hearing -the agonized screams of a Goddess being torn from the heavens.

“We’re too late,” Joan gasped.

“Nope, that’s fine,” Vell said. His chipper attitude had not been affected in any way by the deicide being perpetrated before his eyes. “All good.”

The island resonated with the desperate pleas of Quenay, the Last Goddess. Students managed to tear their eyes away from the horror long enough to stare quizzically at Vell.

“I acknowledge that this looks bad, but trust me,” Vell said. He held up his hands as another lance of green fire punctuated an earth-shaking scream. “Totally fine.”

He pointed to the door.

“I probably should head over there, though, you guys can come if you want,” Vell said. He headed out the door, and the other students shrugged and followed.

There were students all across the quad, some of them covering their ears to try and mute the pained screams, some of them on their knees, some of them weeping at the prospect of their utter failure. All of their lamentations ground to a halt when they saw Vell Harlan walking across campus with a spring in his step, followed by a horde of confused students. Curiosity got the better of even the most melancholy students, and they followed him as well, spreading the word to all those scattered around campus that Vell was either about to save the world, or had gone completely insane. Either way, it would be interesting to watch.

At the heart of misery, as he often was, Alistair Kraid smiled with complete and utter satisfaction. He could see his own reflection in the crystal walls of the divine cage, and saw the all-too-familiar smile of a man who knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had won. The cage swirled with mystic energy -the trapped essence of a Goddess. A corporeal form could barely be seen in the midst of the divine glow, thrashing against the glass in a desperate bid for freedom.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

“Don’t bother,” Kraid said. “I always win, Quenay.”

Inside the divine prison, Kraid could barely make out two hands pressed against the glass -and a pair of mismatched eyes glaring at him with utter disdain. He glared right back, at least until he heard the doors slam open.

“Oh, there’s that audience I wanted,” Kraid said. “So I didn’t lose anything after a-”

Clap.

Clap.

“Who-”

Clap.

“Who the fuck is sarcastically slow-clapping me?”

Clap.

Kraid turned his eyes down to the crowd that was rapidly filling the lab. As expected, he saw Vell Harlan at the head of it, slowly putting his hands together in mock applause.

“Harlan. You-”

Clap.

“What do you want?”

“I just want to congratulate you on a job well done.”

Vell stepped up on stage, right alongside Kraid, and examined the elaborate crystal walls of the divine prison the way a parent might examine a toddler’s crayon scribbles.

“Really spot on work, I do have to give you credit,” Vell said. “This thing is absolutely perfect. Flawless design, exactly what you need to capture and contain a Goddess of Life.”

Kraid glared at Vell and waited for the hook.

“There is just one slightly minor teeny tiny ever-so-insignificant problem, though.”

Vell leaned on the crystal wall, hand pressed against the diamond barrier, and turned to Kraid with a smile on his face. It took Kraid a moment to recognize that smile, as it was an utterly foreign expression on Vell Harlan’s face: the all-too-familiar smile of a man who knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had won.

“Quenay,” Vell said. “Is not the God of Life.”

“Wh-”

The crystal tank made a thumping nose. From within, a hand pressed against the diamond wall, as Quenay gave Vell a deific high five.

The divine prison exploded. So did everything else.

Kraid’s lab was torn apart at the seams, with chairs, walls, computers, everything, all ripping into fragments in an instant. The students within flinched and dove for cover, but none of the flying debris so much as bumped into them. Every student was unharmed as the lab was torn to shreds and reshaped itself into a new form: a stage. Stadium seats manifested into existence right below the butts of confused students, arranging them all into an audience around a stage highlighted by three hovering spotlights: one aimed at Vell, one aimed at Kraid, and one aimed at an empty patch of stage.

“Vell Harlan!”

The voice of a Goddess split the sky, and a crack of lightning dove down after it. The bolt of divine fury struck the empty spotlight and coalesced into a new shape in the center of the circle of light. Quenay stood, mismatched as ever, uneven eyes locked on Vell with manic energy. She looked much the same as she ever had, black and white and different from every angle, but something almost imperceptible had changed. Her form was surging with energy, like water pressed against the barrier of a dam, about to break free. The Last Goddess walked forward with unsteady, energetic steps, towards Vell.

“You’re further than anyone else, kid,” Quenay said. She bared uneven teeth in a hungry smile. “But there’s no credit for partial answers.”

She closed the gap and stood face to face with Vell, staring down at him with the mismatched eyes of God.

“What kind of God am I?”

“Easy.”

Vell took out a chisel and a rune slate and started carving. Joan was on the front lines, and she noticed something curious: he didn’t start from the central line. He started with an outer left line and started working his way inward.

“Life is technically a correct answer, probably why it was so easy for you to fake it for so long,” Vell said casually, as he continued to carve. “You’re what all life is, technically, among other things.”

Vell continued to scratch lines on the rune from the outside in. It was backwards, foolish, utterly wrong in every way -just like a time loop full of aliens and pizza heists and weaponized octopi. Vell scratched one final central line -from the bottom to the top. He held up a ten-lined rune that was the exact opposite of everything it should have been, a rune that never should’ve worked. A rune that started to glow all on its own.

“Chaos.”

Quenay looked at Vell. Kraid looked at Vell. Everyone in the crowd looked at Vell. The entire world waited for one breathless moment to see if he was right.

Vell never blinked.

“Yes!”

Quenay’s mismatched form exploded outwards like a barrage of fireworks. No longer black and white, she was suddenly red and orange and blue and fuchsia and citrine and chartreuse and lacewing and every color humanity had a word for and millions they did not. She threw her hands wide and expanded until she towered over the stadium and her vibrant hair scattered across the horizon like the northern lights, her delighted shout echoing across the ocean.

“The meaning of life is that there is no meaning,” Quenay laughed. “I was fucking with you the whole time!”

Various expressions of shock and disbelief spread throughout the crowd. Vell just smiled and enjoyed the lightshow. Quenay’s enthusiasm and her form were muted, and she shrank back down to the size of a human, though her newly vibrant and colorful form remained. She jumped for joy across the stage and grabbed Vell in a bear hug, hefting him off the ground and spinning him through the air.

“I have been waiting for so long for someone to figure this out,” Quenay said as she spun. “Thank you thank you thank you!”

She suddenly dropped Vell, and her demeanor changed in a flash. Quenay stood in front of Vell and loomed over him, though not with malice. She grabbed him by the hand that still held the Chaos rune, and clasped it tight between her own chromatic hands.

“And as the winner of my game, you are entitled to a prize,” Quenay said. “You, Vell Harlan, are the First Priest of Chaos. My rune is capable of anything, but only by my command -and now, yours.”

Vell could feel a searing warmth flow through Quenay’s hands into his, and for a second the veins of his hands felt like they were filled with magma, but they did not burn. The heat passed through him and into the rune clenched in his fist.

“You’ll have to put a little more work into it than I do, naturally,” Quenay said. “But you’re a smart guy, you’ll figure it out.”

She stepped back and released her grip on Vell’s hands. He held up his palm, and the carved rune started to float above it. Vell thought that was pretty neat.

“The power of chaos is yours to control, and yours to share.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

At the sound of the outraged cry, Quenay’s head rotated one hundred and eighty degrees with a loud snap, prompting some horrified gasps from the crowd. The divine gaze turned towards the occupant of the other spotlight: Alistair Kraid. Quenay’s colorful face flicked into a very different smile, replacing all its previous warmth and joy with sheer malice.

“Bad idea.”

Without moving, Quenay suddenly appeared by Kraid’s side, and her colorful form briefly flickered to be only shades of red.

“I was so excited I almost forgot about you,” Quenay said. “Loser.”

“You think I care about who you think wins or loses,” Kraid scoffed. “You’re an idiot. You think Vell Harlan is the master of chaos? I understand chaos better-”

“Than the average boulder, but that’s about it,” Quenay said. She grabbed Kraid by the cheek and turned him towards her. “You see, a lot of people think ‘life is chaos’, sure, but nobody ever really gets it right!”

Kraid swatted at the Goddess with his skeletal arm, and his blackened bones turned to dust the second they brushed against Quenay’s glowing skin. She didn’t so much as flinch.

“Just a bunch of misanthropes and edgy teenagers, mostly,” Quenay said. “And worst of all: you. The kind of guy who thinks just because destruction and death are unpleasant means they’re chaotic. I’m afraid not, mister ‘smartest man on earth’.”

Quenay shifted position again, appearing by Kraid’s other side to lean on his still-intact organic shoulder.

“You think just because you destroy and burn and kill you’re ‘chaotic’,” Quenay said. “But the thing is, none of that is special, unique, or even unexpected. Gravity can destroy. Chemical reactions burn. Time kills. No matter how many hoops you jump through or fancy tricks you try to pull, Kraid, you’re just another expression of entropy in a universe already full to bursting with it.”

Quenay shifted again, and appeared behind Kraid. She grabbed the back of his head and lifted him off the ground, letting him dangle helplessly in the air.

“Building, sharing, and preserving is how you defy the cruel order of the universe,” Quenay said. “Kindness is chaos.”

She raised her hand even higher, holding Kraid aloft for everyone to see, displaying him like a prize fish caught on a hook.

“Now it’s time for my second favorite part of the gig,” Quenay said. “Karmic punishment.”

Kraid tried to strike back, and a gout of green-black fire danced off Quenay’s chromatic form, rejected from the spectrum of her divinity.

“You wanted to live forever, to stand above and beyond everyone else,” Quenay said. “So I think I’m going to let you see things from the other side, Alistair Kraid. I am going to give you immortality.”

Kraid attempts at retaliation ended as his forehead started to sting, and he felt pain for the first time in years. The crest of his brow burned white-hot as ten blazing lines formed a rune on his forehead.

“But I am going to take your ability to form new memories,” Quenay said. “You are going to wander this world forever, lost and alone, scared and stupid, watching the world leave you behind.”

The burning rune on Kraid’s forehead was almost complete, missing only its final line. Quenay dragged him through the air and forced Kraid to face Vell Harlan.

“And the last thing you will ever remember will be the face of the man who beat you!”

The last burning line of the rune cut its way across Kraid’s forehead, and Quenay pulled him back to whisper in his ear.

“Nothing personal.”

As the final line burned into place, and the rune completed, Kraid let out a scream of defiant rage -and then vanished. Quenay lowered her hand and wiped her palm clean.

“Ugh, dude’s hair is greasy,” Quenay said. “Being evil doesn’t stop you from using shampoo, Alice.”

“What’d you do to him?” Vell said. “I thought you were making him immortal?”

“I did,” Quenay said. “I just teleported him really far away. He doesn’t need long-term memory to strangle you.”

“Oh, yeah, makes sense.”

“When—well, if—he ever digs himself out from under that sand dune in the Gobi Desert, he’ll never be able to track you down,” Quenay said. “You’re good.”

For a second, Vell contemplated the fact that Kraid was going to suffer an eternity of torment thousands of times worse than death could ever be. Then he remembered Kraid absolutely deserved it and moved on.

“Thank you for that,” Vell said. He held up the floating rune in his hand. “And for this.”

“Anything for you, First Priest,” Quenay said, making a tiny, joking bow as she spoke.

“Could I ask you a question, Quenay?”

“Shoot.”

“How much of all that stuff you told me was a lie?”

“Almost nothing, if you can believe it,” Quenay said. She’d spent quite a bit of time talking to Vell last year, and kept the deception to a minimum. “It’s a lot easier to get away with a lie if you cage it in truth. Other than the whole ‘God of Life’ thing, I think everything I told you was true. I can’t go in bathrooms, I don’t like Jared Leto, and I really am pretty bad at video games.”

A very small group of students in the audience took that news a lot better than most. Vell took the news in stride too. Quenay had been smiling for a while now, but the corners of her mouth had taken on a coy new curl at Vell’s question. Maybe she’d been trying to hide her big lie among the little truths -or maybe she just didn’t want to lie. Vell doubted he’d ever get a straight answer, but he had his suspicions.

“Anything else, my Priest?”

“No, that about covers it,” Vell said.

“Really? No more questions?”

“Well, not from me,” Vell said. “I think they might have something.”

Vell pointed at the edge of the stage, where Joan and Helena were trying to get a wheelchair up a set of stairs.

“Oh my me,” Quenay said. She summoned the two up to the stage with another burst of divine movement. “I am so sorry about that, I got so excited I forgot to make the stage handicap accessible, that is all my fault but I’ll fix it right away, please don’t sue me.”

The staircases leading to the stage were instantly joined by a set of very accommodating ramps. Helena did a quick double take between the ramps and the Goddess.

“Is that an option?”

“A very convoluted one, but yes,” Quenay said. “The Lawyer God is a real piece of work, though.”

“I’ll take a chance to ask for a favor, instead,” Helena said. Quenay stepped back and regarded her silently. “I’ve been hoping for a miracle all my life, and you’re the only source of miracles I know.”

Helena shook her head and swallowed her pride once again.

“Can you help me? Please?”

“Oh, very bold,” Quenay said. She drifted in a tight circle around Helena. “You see, I’ve been keeping an eye on things, and I couldn’t help but notice that up until about three hours ago, you were trying to kill my boy.”

She blinked to Vell’s side and gave him an affectionate pat on the head, then blinked in front of Helena to glare down at her.

“After everything you’ve done, do you think three hours of being slightly helpful entitles you to anything?” Quenay said. “Do you really think you deserve my help?”

Helena sat in her wheelchair, with the eyes of the entire island on her, and the multicolored eyes of a Goddess also bearing down from on high.

“No.”

She reached up and grabbed Joan’s hand for support.

“But it’s help,” Helena said. “You don’t have to deserve it. You just have to need it.”

“Oh, she’s been paying attention,” Quenay said. She kicked off the ground and hovered a few inches above Helena. “Very well! For the sisters who are a little bad and a little good, I have a prize that’s a little bad and a little good. You want a miracle, make it yourself.”

She spread her hands out to Joan and Helena. Mismatched eyes flashed with myriad colors even faster than usual.

“You can do it. You can find the cure you’re looking for, and you can do it right. No hurting, no lying, no stealing, nothing bad,” Quenay said. “Maybe slightly annoying some people you have to repeatedly ask for help or call in the middle of the night, but nothing worse than that.”

Quenay tucked her hands behind her back and floated a little closer to Helena, with a devious smile on her face.

“But...you have exactly two years, fifty-eight days, thirteen hours, and seventeen minutes to pull it off,” Quenay said. “You don’t make it happen, you have no one to blame but yourselves. Good luck!”

Quenay took off in a spiral of light and hovered about a dozen feet above the stage.

“Let’s see...A prize, a punishment, and something a little in-between,” Quenay said. “Seems like my work here is done!”

A hand in the crowd shot up. In spite of herself, Quenay looked down at it.

“Hi, yes, what is it?”

“Uh, yes, hi, I’m Iman?”

“Hi Iman, nice to meet you,” Quenay said. “Do you have a question or were you hoping for another miracle, because I’m all out of freebies. There’s rules to this whole divine handout thing, there has to be a game attached, you know, winner slash loser, prize and punishment, that whole shebang, and I’m already stretching it a bit with Helena’s thing.”

“I did have a question, actually,” Iman said. “So this whole thing was some kind of big trick? We don’t get the meaning of life, or power over life and death, or anything.”

“No. That kind of meaning doesn’t exist,” Quenay said. “Nor does that power. The most power anyone can have over their life is how they choose to live it. There is no goal to meet, no purpose to fulfill, no standard you have to live up to. There’s just you, and how you choose to live. And all of you chose to live well. There won’t always be a Goddess to save you. You have to choose to save each other, and you did. You chose the hard road of selflessness when the easy path of greed was laid out before you, and you did it together.”

Quenay floated a little closer to the audience and smiled down at them lovingly.

“The world is cold and merciless, but you can choose to be kind and gentle,” Quenay said. “I hope you remember that whenever life is hard.”

Iman’s hand shot up again.

“Yes, Iman, what is it?”

“That’s very nice and all, but my mom has leukemia,” Iman said. “I was kind of banking on the power of life and death stuff.”

A few members of the crowd murmured in agreement and offered up various examples of similar circumstances. Quenay cringed with shame and started to float downwards.

“Oh geez,” Quenay said. She blinked behind Vell and leaned on his shoulder. “Vell, they like you, help me out here.”

“Yeah, sure, on it,” Vell said. Apparently bailing out a Goddess was part of his duties as First Priest of Chaos. He stepped up and waved to the crowd. “Hi, uh, everyone, I’m Vell Harlan.”

“We know!”

“Right! Anyway,” Vell continued. “Well, I have this now, the Chaos Rune, hypothetically capable of anything. As you all might have seen earlier, it’s self-charging, draws energy from ambient chaos, that’s very nice. Going to be great for mana consumption, you know, lower energy costs, keep that carbon footprint down, very good for the environment.”

A few people in the audience nodded approvingly.

“Also, this means we can now create rune sequences by controlling chaos rather than building up from order,” Vell Harlan continued. “That probably doesn’t mean a lot to most of you outside rune tech fields, but trust me, it is going to be huge. I can’t promise a specific solution to, uh, anything, but there’s going to be a lot of new developments that help a lot of new people.”

Even Iman nodded in understanding this time. It was certainly no power over life and death, but it would do a lot of good for a lot of people.

“And if you’d like to be at the forefront of those discoveries,” Harley shouted, from her seat in the audience. “Harlan Industries will be accepting applications soon!”

“Harley,” Lee snapped. “Is now really the time for advertising?”

“What? Kraid ate like ninety percent of the tech industry and he just got buried under Mongolia,” Harley said. “There’s a trillion-dollar gap that needs to be filled, we might as well be the ones to fill it.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Lee said. “Oh dear.”

Overhead, heedless to an impending economic crisis, Quenay soared back into the air and hovered over the crowd.

“Okay, everybody good? Everyone satisfied?”

No one raised any further questions or protests. Quenay spiraled in the air happily and trailed a sparkling chromatic light behind her.

“Well then, before I go,” Quenay said. “There is one more thing I need.”

She blinked back to the stage and swirled around Vell, bearing him up on a beam of multicolored light. He hovered above the stage, above the crowd, highlighted by every spotlight and the swirling colors of Quenay.

“I need you to give it up for the man who beat the unbeatable and solved the unsolvable,” Quenay boomed. “Let’s hear it for Vell Harlan!”

With one last wink at Vell, Quenay raced upwards into the sky, trailing fireworks behind her. Vell fell down from his spot in the air, but he never hit the ground. His friends and the crowd had rushed the stage to catch him, and he fell into their waiting arms, landing entrapped in hugs from Harley and Lee and a kiss from Skye, caught in the middle of a prison of cheers and congratulations.

Vell was the center of attention, and he didn’t mind at all.

Not at first, at least. After his shaking his two-hundredth hand, the novelty of success was starting to wear off. The ceaseless curiosity wasn’t much better. Everybody wanted to know how the Chaos Rune worked, which Vell only mostly understood himself. Having to repeat himself so many times at least led him to develop a concise explanation fairly quickly.

“It’s kind of like carving something down instead of building something up,” Vell said. “Like, with other runes you’re starting from nothing and creating, the way you’d build a house, but this is more like sculpting a statue. You start with something that could be anything and pare it down until it’s what you want.”

“Don’t you only have the one rune on your back?”

“Yeah, well, Quenay’s a Goddess, so she could just make it do whatever she wants,” Vell said. “Us mortals have to put more work into it, like she said.”

“Fascinating,” Amy said. “It’s a good thing we’re graduating, Harlan, I think you just rewrote the whole textbook on runes.”

“Lucky you,” Isabel said. She still had a year of study to go.

“It’ll make more sense when someone better at teaching is explaining it,” Vell said. “I’m not exactly up to-”

Vell stopped himself mid-sentence as Dean Lichman cut through the crowd.

“Please, god, don’t offer me a teaching job,” Vell groaned.

“Not exactly my intention, Vell,” Dean Lichman said. “Though we would be happy to have you, I respect that teaching is not your intended career. I was actually hoping to borrow center stage from you for a moment.”

“By all means, go ahead,” Vell said. It’d be nice to have a break. Dean Lichman nodded gratefully, then stepped up and held up the microphone that fed into the school’s PA system.

“Hello everyone! I’ll happily get you back to your celebrations in a moment, but I just wanted to announce that we have re-established contact with the Council of Einstein’s. A recovery operation is underway, and they have re-appointed me as the school’s Dean!”

People cheered and applauded, though not quite as many as Dean Lichman might’ve hoped.

“I am happy to let you all know that the school will be resuming normal operations tomorrow!”

Another cheer came to an abrupt and worrying end.

“Wait,” someone shouted back. “Does that mean we have tests again?”

“I suppose,” Dean Lichman said. “Yes.”

“I haven’t studied!”

A screaming, panicked crowd nearly trampled each other on their way back to textbooks and study guides.

“Please, no, calm down, calm down,” Dean Lichman said. “We’ll be mindful of the circumstances and offer very lenient scheduling and extension policies.”

The Dean’s desperate attempts to keep order managed to keep anyone from getting trampled to death, but the stands were emptied in seconds, and Quenay’s stadium fell silent.

“Well, that did not have the intended effect,” Dean Lichman said.

“Probably for the best,” Vell said. He stretched out a sore hand and yawned. “Man, once the crowd is gone there’s just nothing left in the tank, is there?”

“The concert crash strikes,” Roxy said. She gave Vell a firm pat on the back. “Rest well, my brother. You have rocked hard enough for a hundred lifetimes.”

She saluted once, turned around, and then turned right back around.

“Oh, and by the way, First Priest of Chaos is a kickass album name, do you mind if I…?”

“Go for it,” Vell said. “But also, I’ve been taking guitar lessons lately, maybe I could…?”

Roxy pointed at Vell, and Vell pointed right back at Roxy.

“Sounds like a plan, little brother,” Roxy said. “We’ll hash out the details later. You need to get some shuteye.”

“Yeah. I think I need to get back to my dorm,” Vell said.

“Speaking of dorms, where the hell am I sleeping?” Leanne said. “We were a little busy world-saving to sort out logistics.”

“This is not a concern of mine,” Sarah said, before wandering off into the night. Himiko and Kanya watched her wander away, but did not follow. Joan put a hand on her chin.

“It’s technically Skye’s dorm, but I guess I have some-”

Harley hip-checked Lee so hard she bumped into Joan. Both of them started to blush.

“Nevermind, occupied,” Joan mumbled.

“I’ve got a couch,” Vell said. “I think the chair could work too for someone not picky, I think there’s some cots in storage-”

“Hey, First Priest of Chaos,” Kim said. She grabbed Vell’s head and gave it a little shake. “It’s three in the morning and you’ve already saved the world and invented a new field of science. Call it quits for the day, and go get some sleep. We’ll figure this one out without you.”

“I...okay,” Vell said. His friends gave him a last few congratulations, that then turned into a chorus of “Now go the fuck to sleep”. Vell took their advice and wandered off to his dorm, hand in hand with Skye. He got to his dorm, took off his shirt, and looked down at the circular scar around his waist, felt the rune still engraved in his back. He thought back to the first time he’d seen those marks, to the frightened twelve-year old he’d been.

Vell wished he could go back and tell that little kid how everything would turn out -tell him everything would be alright. Then he realized there was no possible way he could sensibly explain anything that had happened in the past four years to anyone, not even himself. Vell settled for lying down next to Skye, and falling into a peaceful, satisfied sleep. For the first time since he’d been that little kid, so many years ago, Vell Harlan slept without the weight of the world on his back.