**First Epoch, Year 0 - Three Days After the Fall**
The thing that used to be human was dying.
Adrian crouched in the shadow of a crystallized time formation—reality here had fractured so badly that causality itself leaked like water from cracked glass—and watched the creature thrash against its own transformation. It had been a woman once. He could tell from the tattered remains of a Pre-Epoch medical uniform still clinging to parts of her mutating form.
She was becoming a giant.
The Beyonder Characteristics from the Twilight Giant pathway were consuming her consciousness cell by cell, bone by bone. Her screams had stopped hours ago when her vocal cords reorganized into something that could no longer produce human sound. Now she just... changed. Grew. Lost herself in increments too small to fight but too large to endure.
Adrian had her name. Dr. Sarah Chen. Cardiovascular surgeon. Prometheus Station medical wing. Played violin in her spare time. Had a daughter named Emma who died in the first moments of the Original Creator's awakening.
He remembered everything about her because he'd reviewed her personnel file once, three years before the end of the world, when he needed to schedule a physical examination.
His photographic memory was a blessing and a curse.
"I'm sorry," he whispered in Pre-Epoch English, knowing she could no longer understand the language. "I'm so sorry, Sarah."
She didn't respond. Couldn't. The woman who had saved lives was disappearing into something that would only know how to take them.
Adrian stood, his transformed body moving with unnatural grace. Three days since the cataclysm, and he still wasn't used to the way he could *feel* the chaos around him, taste the Beyonder energy in the air like copper and ozone and something older than both.
He raised his hand. The gesture felt significant, formal—like he was conducting a funeral rite for the last remnants of their species.
"Archive Entry: Subject Sarah Chen, personnel file SC-2089," he spoke softly, his voice carrying harmonics that shouldn't exist in human speech. "Brilliant surgeon. Terrible cook. Played Vivaldi when she thought no one was listening. Cried the day Earth sent its last message to the Mars colony."
The words became *real* as he spoke them. His Beyonder Characteristic responded to his will, to his identity as the Archivist. Information crystallized in his mind with geometric precision, filed away in cognitive structures that were simultaneously biological and mystical.
*This is what I can do*, he realized with a chill. *I can remember. I can preserve. But I cannot save.*
The creature that had been Dr. Chen finally collapsed, her transformation complete. She was eight meters tall now, her skin like stone, her eyes vacant with the madness of incomplete convergence. A low-sequence giant, driven purely by instinct and hunger.
She would hunt. Kill. Eventually be killed by something stronger in this nightmare epoch.
Adrian closed his eyes and felt tears—still human tears, still salt water—trace paths down his changed face.
"I'm sorry I couldn't help you," he said. "But I won't let you be forgotten."
The giant shambled away toward the sound of combat in the distance, where something massive was fighting something equally terrible. Adrian didn't follow.
Instead, he turned back toward the wreckage of Prometheus Station.
---
**The Archive**
The station had broken into three major sections when it crashed. Adrian had claimed the observation deck—the same place he'd watched Earth die—as his sanctuary. The structural damage was extensive, but the deck's transparent aluminum walls had somehow survived intact, creating a protective dome.
Inside, he'd arranged everything he could salvage with obsessive precision.
Data crystals lined one wall, organized by category: Physics. Biology. Engineering. Medicine. Art. History. Philosophy. Each crystal represented terabytes of human knowledge, compressed and encrypted. Useless without computers to read them.
But Adrian didn't need computers anymore.
He picked up a crystal labeled "Complete Works of Human Literature: Fiction, 1800-2100" and pressed it against his temple. The Beyonder Characteristic within him *reached* for the information, pulling it through his skin, through his neurons, into whatever metaphysical structure now housed his consciousness.
Words flooded his mind. Every novel. Every short story. Every poem written in three centuries. He *knew* them now—not just memorized them, but *possessed* them with perfect fidelity.
Shakespeare and Asimov. Austen and Liu Cixin. Morrison and García Márquez. All of them, forever preserved in a mind that would never forget.
"Another thousand years of literature," Adrian muttered, filing the information into his mental archive. "Another thousand pieces of who we were."
He'd spent the last three days doing this. Consuming data crystals one by one, transferring humanity's accumulated knowledge from dead technology into his living memory. It was desperate, maybe pointless, but it was all he could think to do.
*If I'm the last human who remembers*, he thought, *then I have to remember everything*.
A sound outside made him freeze.
Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Too rhythmic to be one of the mad Beyonder races.
Something was approaching with *intention*.
Adrian moved to the observation wall and looked out across the twisted landscape. The Gobi Desert had become something else entirely—a place where sand dunes phased between solid and liquid states, where the sky occasionally displayed equations in bleeding light, where the fundamental forces of nature seemed to be negotiating new terms with each other.
And walking toward his sanctuary was a figure that made his breath catch.
It looked almost human.
Tall—perhaps three meters—but proportioned correctly. Skin that shimmered between flesh and something like living crystal. Eyes that burned with intelligence rather than madness. It wore robes that might have been woven from solidified starlight.
An elf.
No—a *nascent* elf. Someone who'd fused with characteristics from what would become the Tyrant pathway, but who'd retained enough consciousness to control the transformation.
Like him.
The figure stopped fifty meters away and spoke. The language was wrong—not any human tongue Adrian knew, but something that emerged from the chaos itself, words that existed simultaneously as sound and concept and emotion.
Yet somehow, impossibly, Adrian *understood*.
"You shine differently," the figure said. "Not like the mad ones. Not like the kin of chaos. You remember yourself."
Adrian's throat tightened. Three days of isolation, of being surrounded by screaming transformation and mindless violence, and now someone—something—that could *think*.
"I remember," he replied in the same impossible language, his changed vocal cords shaping concepts rather than mere phonemes. "I remember everything."
The elf-thing tilted its head. "Everything is a dangerous claim in a world where everything has ended."
"I mean it literally." Adrian felt something crack in his chest—not physical, but emotional. The dam holding back three days of horror. "I remember the world before. I remember all of us. Every person who died, every city that burned, every dream we had before the Creator woke up and *destroyed us*."
He was shouting now, his voice carrying overtones of grief that made the crystallized time formations around them vibrate in sympathy.
"I remember the taste of coffee! The sound of rain on concrete! The feeling of falling asleep next to someone you love! I remember *being human* and I—"
His voice broke.
The elf-thing was silent for a long moment. Then it moved closer, each step measured and careful, until it stood just outside the dome.
"My name was Marcus," it said softly. "I think. The name feels... slippery now. Like it belongs to someone who died. But I'm trying to hold onto it."
Adrian wiped his eyes. "Adrian. Dr. Adrian Thorne. Prometheus Station. Last survivor who still has language."
"Last?" Marcus's crystalline features shifted into something that might have been sadness. "Surely others—"
"No." Adrian's voice was flat. "I can sense them. The survivors. There are maybe thirty still alive within a hundred kilometers. And they're all like Dr. Chen—losing themselves to convergence instinct. Becoming monsters who forgot they were ever human."
He gestured to the data crystals lining his wall.
"So I'm doing the only thing I can. I'm archiving. Preserving. Making sure that when this age of madness ends—if it ever ends—someone will remember what we were."
Marcus stared at the crystals, then at Adrian. Something complex moved behind those burning eyes.
"That's..." Marcus paused, searching for words. "That's the most futile thing I've ever heard."
Adrian laughed—a broken, bitter sound. "Yeah. Probably."
"And the most necessary."
Their eyes met through the transparent aluminum.
"I've been walking for three days," Marcus said quietly. "Trying to find anyone who still has a mind. Everyone I've found is either dead, dying, or too far gone. You're the first person I've been able to have a conversation with since the world ended."
Adrian felt something loosen in his chest. Not hope—he wasn't ready for hope—but maybe the faintest echo of it.
"I have food," he said. "Pre-packaged rations from the station. They're designed to last decades. And water recyclers that still work."
Marcus's expression flickered. "I... I don't know if I need food anymore. The characteristics changed so much. But the offer means something."
"Then come in." Adrian pressed a button, and the emergency airlock cycled open. "Come in and be human with me for a while. Even if we're not human anymore."
---
**That Night**
They sat in the observation deck as the chaos outside painted impossible colors across the sky. The barrier between reality and the Spirit World had grown thin—Adrian could see ghostly shapes moving through walls, could hear whispers from places that no longer existed in conventional space.
Marcus had accepted a ration bar mostly to be polite, holding it in hands that looked like they were carved from living opal. Adrian noticed Marcus didn't actually eat it, just turned it over and over, as if the familiar gesture was more important than the sustenance.
"Do you know what you are?" Marcus asked eventually. "What pathway you fused with?"
Adrian shook his head. "I've tried to figure it out. My characteristic feels... different from the standard twenty-two. It's old. Strange. It's like my consciousness is building new structures in my mind—filing systems, index categories, preservation matrices."
He held up his hand, and information flickered across his palm like a holographic display, except it was being generated directly by his Beyonder power.
"I can store knowledge. Perfect, permanent storage. I can sense information—where it exists, how it's structured, what's being lost or corrupted. And I can..." He paused, uncertain. "I can make things *true* by documenting them. When I speak something into my archive, it becomes permanent. Protected. Real in a way that transcends normal memory."
Marcus leaned forward. "That's remarkable. Like you're becoming a living library."
"Or a memorial." Adrian's voice was soft. "The only one who'll remember the six billion people who died screaming."
They fell silent again.
"I was a network engineer," Marcus said eventually. "I designed the quantum relay systems for the outer colonies. I had a husband named James and we were trying to adopt. The paperwork had just come through when..."
He didn't finish. Didn't need to.
"I'm sorry," Adrian said.
"Me too." Marcus looked at his transformed hands. "These characteristics—they want us to converge. To fight. To consume each other until someone becomes a god or everyone becomes mad. I can feel the instinct pulling at me. Telling me to hunt, to gather more power."
"I feel it too." Adrian touched his chest. "It's like a voice that's not quite voice. Suggesting. Demanding. The only reason I haven't given in is that my memories are stronger. Every time the instinct says 'hunt,' I remember a thousand things about being human. It's... anchoring me."
"Then you're lucky." Marcus's tone was bleak. "My memories are fading. Little things at first—the name of my street, the flavor of James's cooking. But it's accelerating. Soon I might forget faces. Voices. Love."
He looked at Adrian with desperate intensity.
"That's why I came looking. I needed to find someone who could still *think* before I forgot how to care about thinking."
Adrian felt the weight of that admission. The loneliness Marcus must have felt, walking through a world of screaming chaos, knowing his own mind was being eroded by mystical instinct.
"I can help," Adrian said suddenly.
"What?"
"My power. If it can archive knowledge, maybe it can archive *you*." Adrian stood, pacing the observation deck. "Your memories, your identity, everything that makes you Marcus instead of just a Beyonder monster. I could store it. Preserve it. So even if you forget, the information would still exist."
Marcus stared at him. "That's..."
"Insane? Desperate? A terrible idea?" Adrian laughed shakily. "Yeah, probably all of those. But it's something I can try. And right now, trying is all we have left."
Marcus was quiet for a long time. The chaos outside intensified—a distant roar suggested something massive had died, and the energy released was warping local reality into new configurations.
"If you can really do that," Marcus said finally, "if you can keep me human even when I stop being able to keep myself human... then I'll help you with your archive. I can still think. I can assist with organizing the knowledge, processing the data crystals, maybe even finding other survivors who haven't fully lost themselves."
He extended a hand that shimmered with inner light.
"We could be the last humans together. However long that lasts."
Adrian took the offered hand. The touch sent sparks of Beyonder energy between them—their characteristics recognizing each other, measuring, testing. But there was no instinct to fight. No urge to converge.
Just two former humans, refusing to let go of what they'd been.
"The Archive needs a guardian anyway," Adrian said with a small smile. "And I could use someone to talk to who won't try to eat me."
"Low bar, but I'll take it." Marcus returned the smile, and for just a moment, his crystalline features looked almost human.
They stood together in the observation deck, looking out at the chaos that had consumed their world.
"We're going to lose," Adrian said quietly. "The Mad Gods and Ancient Beyonders will rule this epoch. Humanity will become slaves or monsters. Our civilization will be forgotten, and nothing we do will change that."
"Probably," Marcus agreed.
"But I'm going to remember anyway. I'm going to preserve everything we were, even if no one ever sees it. Even if it takes ten thousand years. I'm going to archive the Pre-Epoch so completely that when the mad ages finally end, someone will be able to know what we lost."
Adrian's eyes burned with fierce determination.
"That's my purpose. My acting method. I am the Archivist. The keeper of what was. And I will not forget."
Marcus nodded slowly. "Then I'll be your guardian. The one who protects the Archive while you preserve the memories. Together, we'll be humanity's last witnesses."
He gestured to the chaos outside.
"Let them have their age of madness. We'll endure. We'll remember. And maybe, someday, someone will thank us for it."
They clasped hands again, and in that moment, something crystallized between them. Not quite a ritual. Not quite a vow. But something that Adrian's Archivist power recognized as significant.
He felt knowledge flow between them—Marcus's memories, everything the elf-being could still recall about his human life, streaming into Adrian's mental archive. Names, faces, moments of joy and sorrow. All of it preserved with perfect fidelity.
And in return, Adrian shared his purpose, his drive, his absolute refusal to let humanity die forgotten.
When they separated, both were breathing hard.
"That felt like more than data transfer," Marcus said.
"It was." Adrian could feel it in his power—something had shifted. "I think... I think we just formed the first alliance of the First Epoch. The first organization."
He looked at the data crystals on his walls, at the knowledge of a dead civilization waiting to be preserved.
"The Archive," he said with quiet certainty. "Not just a place. An organization. A purpose that will survive epochs. You and I—and anyone else we can save from madness—we're going to be the memory of humanity."
Marcus smiled, a expression of surprising warmth on his crystalline features.
"Then let's get started, Archivist. We have six thousand years of madness to survive, and a civilization to remember."
Outside, the chaos raged on. The Kins of the Original Creator hunted through broken landscapes. The nascent Beyonder races fought and consumed each other in their mindless instinct to converge.
But in one small dome of cracked reality, two former humans began the impossible task of preserving everything their species had been.
It would take centuries. It would cost everything. Most would call it futile.
But Adrian Thorne had never been very good at accepting impossibility.
After all, he'd already achieved biological immortality.
Remembering forever seemed almost easy by comparison.
---
**End of Chapter 2**
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*Next: Chapter 3 - The Hunt*