A/N: This story is complete in three parts; I'll be posting one part per day. More notes to follow at the end of the story.

As You Wish
By San Antonio Rose and Enola Jones

Prologue

The One Who Is Three made many worlds. Some give Him different names: YHWH, Eru, the Emperor-over-Sea. Some worlds are more closely related to one another than they are to others. But all are connected in two ways, through the Wood and through the Mountain, which some call Aslan's Country.

Free choice is offered to all. Most rebel, and where rebellion enters, so also does death. Some die young; others grow ancient ere the end. Yet where death enters, so also does the chance for redemption, for the Son offers Himself as the sacrifice needed to repair the wrong the inhabitants of that world have done to themselves and to Him. Almost all worlds accept.

One did not.

In this world, one of many that contained a planet called Earth, tales that on other Earths would be great heresies collided in horrible truth. A great spirit there rebelled and named itself both Life and God, believing itself equal only to Death and servant of none, not even The One Who Is. It did its best to shut the doors to the Mountain and the Wood, would fain have detached its world from both were such a feat within the power of any created thing, and formed life in defiance of the Creator—life that quickly twisted itself into monstrosity. When The One Who Is granted that world the gift of human life made in His image, its God was awed but not humbled; jealous of the power with which human souls were imbued, it sought to trap them in its own versions of Heaven and Hell and did nothing to stop its son Lucifer from twisting humans into demons or its daughter Eve from twisting humans into monsters. And though it could not wholly shut out the power of the Son's Name, it refused to allow the Son to enter and redeem humankind, insisting that humans were capable of saving themselves.

Its hopes were pinned on two humans in particular, a pair of brothers who would grow up hunting monsters and being hounded by Heaven and Hell alike. In spite of all odds, these brothers would (if left alone) stop the world from ending no fewer than three times on the strength of their own character alone, dying more than once in the process and losing everyone and everything they held dear.

The God of that world cared little for the cost these brothers would have to pay to save their world. But The One Who Is saw and shared the sorrow they would bear—and from the world's founding, He determined to act.

That Earth, like another Earth, had a number of chinks and chasms linking it to a wholly different world. Though its God tried, it could not seal them all. And it was through one such crack that the word of The One Who Is came to the archangel Gabriel, who had run from his father many years before to mete out justice on his own terms. To Gabriel He offered redemption, a chance to save four lives, and a chance to play the ultimate trick on his family. And Gabriel, to his everlasting credit, agreed.

The story began, as intended, on November 2, 1983, in Lawrence, Kansas. The younger brother would indeed spend his early years on the road with his brother and their father. But at the moment when the family's world burst into flame, neither the child in the crib nor the mother on the ceiling was real.