The Wanderer’s Pain – Teller of Fate

Teller of Fate

Sixth Movement: The Fate of Stars

The Wanderer’s Pain

* * *

Once, only three things existed: NOTHING, the Metacosm, and the Lord of Entropy. The Wanderer in the Wastes was the soul and messenger of the Lord.

He remembered how perfect, how beautiful it had all been when he was alone with only this trinity for company. He had watched Aions born from NOTHING according to the scheme of the Metacosm and had dutifully fulfilled his role in sending all things—at their appointed time—to his master, the Lord.

This peace had been shattered by the arrival of the Other.

It was never known whence it came, but it was not part of the ordered arrangement of things. His Master, the Lord, was silent about this entity. There was no mention of it in the Metacosm and the NOTHING, being NOTHING, cared nothing about it.

Irritating though its existence was, the Wanderer elected to ignore it.

Then it committed the unforgivable. It had made an Aion. That new thing was not in the scheme of the Metacosm, it was not made from the NOTHING, and was not subject to the Lord of Entropy. The Wanderer tried and failed to end it. He next tried to end the Other. This also failed.

Again, the Lord was unbothered by this. For the first time, the Wanderer felt alone.

It was against Nature that anything exist that did not rot and was never to be harvested and fed to Entropy.

For the first time, the Wanderer felt something. This sensation was pain. It became unendurable. In his darkest moments, he feared this constant agony had driven him mad. Then he would remember that he was unique, that nothing he thought or did could be judged mad because he was he.

This new Aion had to end. The Wanderer made three attempts.

First, he learned that there were beings in this new Aion more terrible anything he could fashion. He captured several of them, twisted their nature and augmented their power. Imbuing them with a hatred of their home, he sent them to destroy it.

They hated it alright. The problem was they loved power more. Gods they became, Reality’s first. They sent others to do the work, lesser beings incapable of the task. In a fury, the Wanderer tried to kill his creations, but he had made them too well. He settled for imprisoning them to starve. A valuable lesson, it was.

These feral beings were too willful to follow orders, so he next chose a mortal race to do his work. He found an upstart young race, bent on conquest, gave them a god, one of the feral beings of the cursed Aion. This god gave of its essence to its worshippers, thus granting them power to conquer all things. Coercing this god, the Wanderer again instilled it the desire to destroy its home. He thought the Templars must want to destroy it and had the power to do so.

He was wrong on both counts. The Templars initial study of Aion showed them that not only couldn’t they conquer it, but it had a glory that they longed to emulate. The Templars grew to admire it and formed a plan to expand it, to convert the whole of reality to match it.

The Wanderer cursed himself. He had made the problem of this new Aion worse. He destroyed the Templars by fooling them into unleashing the White God upon themselves.

A solution to the problem of the continued existence of this new Aion came to him unexpectedly. He learned that the conjugal unions of the Templars with other races produced beings much more potent than mortals should be. In many ways these offspring rivaled their Templar sires. In them was the power to end the Aion. To that end, he employed a powerful feral under his sway to make a tool capable of dismantling the Aion. These changelings, these Sages, he would force to commit this act of immolation by using this tool.

Their success was total, at least that’s what he thought.

The end of the Pleroma and the end of the cursed Aion happened almost together.

But the Aion was not gone. The shattered bits had been rescued and made into homes for the natives of the original. The Sages vanished before he could punish them. Worse, the tool he had commissioned slipped from his sight. There were copies of it now in the hands of skilled users. The plan of the Templars might still be fulfilled. All that work and the Wanderer was worse off than when he started.

* * *

Now, he would end all of it. All of Reality. He couldn’t kill this new Aion, but he could reset the Multiverse. It would die along with everything else. When Reality reemerged, it would be gone.

To do that, he had to kill his master.

These mortal fools thought he merely wanted to feed his Lord more Life, and so he did. But it was not for Entropy’s benefit that he did this. He intended to satisfy the master’s gluttony until it killed him. NOTHING would go when his master did. Not dying but becoming nonlocal. NOTHING and Entropy everywhere, creating and killing in every particle of space and time. All structure, all order, the very laws of Nature would fall.

It had happened before. Slowly, the ordered arrangement of the powers would return, but nothing from before would remain. A new Reality, perfect as it had been so long ago.

He needed more food for his master. The Lord must gorge himself to the point of death. He needed to release more gods to feed on the Spire.

* * *

There was no vision in the Wanderer’s world, not as life understood it. What the man John Airkhart had seen was merely what his mind conjured up to make sense of his presence in this nonplace where everything ended. Coming here, others had seen different things, often very briefly.

His master was not like a black hole or like a ball of protoplasm. A better analogy would have been a dung heap, collecting the excrement of the Multiverse and eating it.

Nothing was ever shit out, for nothing happened in the master. No compost would ever come from this pile of decay; nothing would ever grow from this. Dead, not Death, was his true nature.

The Wanderer himself frequently appeared as person-shaped since he had to deal with the living to find his Master sustenance.

See him now as a tall lean figure, covered in ragged grey cerements, face covered with gauze. Pillars that support nothing at all surround him in a vast circle. Shooting from between are the corpses of worlds, many more and much faster than they have for a long time.

Behind him, floating in the center is the indescribable form of the Lord of Entropy. Hear each dead world strike Him with the sound of a fistful of mud hitting hard ground.

The Wanderer smiled. It was time to summon more mindless hungry gods; time to punish those who, all unknowing, stood on the Gate of Hell, keeping it shut.

Now there was only the Lord of Entropy, feasting.

— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026

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