A/N: Aaaaaand here we are ladies and gentlemen! The final chapter! Don't worry, I'm not going to end this the same way I began - ie, bitching about Burial At Sea. Believe me, I've finally gotten all that out of my head. I'm just going to issue a colossal thank-you to all my viewers, reviewers, favouriters and followers: this story would have been nothing without you!

Disclaimer: Bioshock Infinite is not mine, nor the Bioshock franchise in general. Also, I've provided another paragraph of references just under the second horizontal line; for those of you interested in making a game of this, see which ones you can recognize - and try to guess which entries are secretly original creations.

At the beginning of this chronicle, I asked myself why I bothered to archive these histories. At the time, I said that I wanted someone to learn from its mistakes… and as I've continued my research, I've found myself only reaffirming this vow. Now, there are even more lessons to be learned.

Columbia may be gone, but the madness that plagued it endures in a thousand failed utopias and dystopian hellscapes across the possibility space – just as it always has. Just look at Rapture, Andrew Ryan's refuge from the horrors of the surface world, where no gods or kings would reign, only man. The same passion that made the genius of Rapture possible slowly degenerated into dogma and obsession, and gradually transformed the once-glorious streets of Rapture into a drowning necropolis, a hellish cesspool of violence, addiction and insanity.

Once, the Founders of Columbia had good intentions: they truly believed they were creating a monument to America, not a totalitarian substitute for it, that their grand merger of technology and faith could light the way for a happier, more prosperous United States. But as time went on and the city grew more isolated from external influences, idealism mutated into extremism; dissenting voices among the Founder elite either left Columbia in disgust or fell victim to "Vox anarchists." All who remained were the hardliners, the most ardent and remorseless of all Comstock's followers, those who not only believed in his apocalyptic vision of the future, but would accept any order he gave – no matter how monstrous – if it meant making that vision a reality.

Even Comstock's speeches began to change as time went on: before Peking, his sermons appeared inspirational, even saintly, portraying Columbia as a utopia and his ascension to the role of Prophet a sign that grace was within reach of everyone; nobody could have guessed at his cataclysmic designs from listening to these proclamations. But as the turn of the century neared, his lessons became more extreme, his doctrine more intolerant, often discussing the instructive nature of cruelty and the righteousness of Columbia's increasingly brutal race laws. By 1905, the Founding Fathers were being venerated as saints, Abraham Lincoln had been demonized as the antichrist, and Comstock's fire-and-brimstone rhetoric now heralded an apocalypse ordained by God and ushered in by Columbia.

In the end, with the world below unable to stop him and no opposition remaining among his inner circle, Comstock's need to absolve himself of guilt drove him to enshrine the very sins he claimed to crusade against, and his desperate wish to escape the prejudice of his past drove him to justify it – again and again. Slavery and racism blossomed, the latter more grotesque even than the standards of the time, and Columbia gradually decayed from its outwardly optimistic beginnings into a caricatured theocratic nightmare.

And the Vox Populi, the revolutionary movement that might have steered Columbia into a kinder future? Year after year of attrition by the Founders weeded out the moderates and hardened the survivors, warping the ideals of freedom and equality into a brutal doctrine of vengeful annihilation – aided in no small part by my own ill-advised tampering with the space-time continuum.

How can anyone learn, I wonder, if I chose to leave those stories untold?

That was my initial reasoning… but as my research has continued and I've learned more about Columbia's deeper secrets - particularly among the Vigors - I've found another lesson to consider among the horror stories of Jeremiah Fink's blind avarice: all the monsters that the Luteces discovered across the possibility space are still out there.

Hecate, Sutter Cane, the Chaos Gods, Bill Cipher, the Dreamers, Nyarlathotep, Winter's Maw, the Filth, the Weaver, Morrigan Lugus, the Hyperbreed Omnibeasts, Mad Jim Jaspers, Persephone of The Lost, Dajaal, the Great Watchmaker, the Wamphyri, He-Who-Once-Slumbered, Threat Null, Proteus the Mask, the Hallowed Guests, Mama Sanguine, Papa Madness, the Reapers, Alma Wade, the Moon That Never Sets, Dormammu, the Crooked Man, Maldis, the End of the Cycle, the Not-God…

All of them are still ruling over their respective domains; all of them have powers that would make Columbia's purge of the Sodom Below look like the fall of a sandcastle… and far too many of them are on the lookout for fresh playgrounds.

And then there's the Archangel Columbia.

For the longest time, I believed she was just a fantasy, a symptom of Comstock's self-deluding religious mania, a means of disguising his observations of the Tears as genuine prophecy. But then I began watching his progression from newly-baptised convert to self-styled prophet, replaying the memories that remained preserved within the possibility space. I still don't know what I was looking for; maybe I wanted to refute the myth of the Angel once and for all, maybe I was desperately hoping I'd find an understandable reason for what the Prophet eventually did.

One way or another, I soonrealized that Comstock's first documented visitation by the Angel and his vision of the city occurred several years prior to the day he met Rosalind Lutece. This date could have been a lie, or at the very least a symptom of madness, but that still wouldn't explain how he happened to be in exactly the right place at the right time to meet Rosalind and sponsor her experiments, nor would it explain how Comstock somehow met the woman who could make his dreams a reality purely by chance.

As far as I could tell, Comstock's encounter with the Angel had not occurred on pristine farmland under a sun-drenched sky as Columbian propaganda later claimed, but in the midst of a fever that had left him drifting in and out of consciousness for almost three days. Alas, I still can't read minds, so I've no idea what he dreamed of, but Comstock recorded the events of the dream quite thoroughly in his journal – though he eventually destroyed this record in order to have his vision appropriately glamorized.

Assuming this document can be trusted, the Angel appeared to him as a being of infinite majesty and horrific beauty, wings of sculpted flame, eyes as black as night, a body of fused metal and flesh, and a face that was at once loving and merciless. She spoke to him in a haunting voice that echoed and often overlapped its own speech, presenting herself as a messenger of God and entrusting him with a destiny unknown to any mortal before him.

"Rejoice," she had proclaimed. "For I bring an answer to your prayers: the world may indeed be cleansed of all corruption, the unrighteous kings toppled from their thrones, the wicked and unfaithful cast into the fiery pit, and the innocent granted eternal respite from their agonies. God in his infinite wisdom has given you the tools to end sin forever. You have but to reach out and claim them as your own. Do this, and you will be exalted as no other man before you, for you will be God's chosen voice on Earth: his instrument, his sword, his Prophet. Your seed shall carry on your glorious legacy long after you have left to claim your eternal reward, and by their deeds shall the work of purification continue… but only if you embrace this chance as God has embraced you."

And then a vision of Columbia – as it would be – appeared before him.

"Seek out Rosalind Lutece," the Angel proclaimed. "She will provide you with the means of building this heaven on Earth. I can show you where she will be and how to recognize, but you must do the rest."

"What must I do, Angel?" Comstock had asked. "How can I go about cleansing this world? Where can I even begin?"

"You hold the answers within your heart, Prophet," she replied. "I can only show you the path to paradise: you must attain it on your own. Rejoice, for your world will one day join the others God has enfolded in his embrace, and you shall be a part of his infinite glory. Now kneel and pay homage to God, and never forget this message – or the messenger."

Again, this could be nothing more than delusion, but I have studied every aspect of that fateful night, and the Tear activity surrounding Comstock's home was simply too potent for me to dismiss it as coincidence.

Curiously enough, Comstock also scrawled a list of names he'd heard that night in the margins of this document – a list of the many names of his God. He later scribbled them out, clearly believing he'd still been fever-ridden when he'd wrote them down, perhaps hoping he might forget them entirely. But the possibility space never forgets, and this list remained plainly visible to me.

I know the true names of Comstock's God.

The Watchful Infinity.

Angelikos.

She-Who-Must-Be-Worshipped.

Shodanus.

The Queen of the Spaces Beyond.

Ko-L'um-biarh.

.Stellar Crown.

Tzhuv-N'iq'roth,

Mother of the Depths.

Kahlumbiah, the winged lady.

The Archangel Columbia.

For a time, I almost believed this revelation had somehow redeemed Comstock, as if the Angel's sponsorship of the Prophet somehow absolved him of his crimes. In the end, though, I was once again acting out of optimism without heed to human nature: I was looking for proof that nobody could ever do something so monstrous of their own free will, and I thought I'd found my proof. It took a very frank and earnest discussion with Rosalind Lutece – my cynical mentor as always – to help me see the light.

Comstock received orders from the Angel exactly once in his entire life. On all other occasions, he was simply peering into other realities for answers and weaving what he'd seen into false prophecies. And in that first and last missive he'd received, Comstock was only told to build Columbia and use it bring the world to righteousness.

The Angel never told him to lie to the public.

She didn't command him to oppress Columbia's Black and Irish populace.

She wasn't responsible for the political purges and massacres conducted throughout the city.

She never gave Jeremiah Fink permission to claim the poor as his playthings, or run roughshod over the general public with dangerous products culled from nightmare realities.

She didn't ordain me as Comstock's successor; she didn't arrange to have my grief-stricken father hounded until he finally agreed to sell me to Comstock; and she never once voiced the idea that I should be locked away in the tower.

She never told him to murder his wife and blame it all on Daisy Fitzroy.

She didn't order the Luteces' assassination.

And she definitely wasn't the one who had me tortured and broken.

The angel may have set Comstock on the path, may have helped speed his corruption along, and likely intended to profit from his stewardship of Columbia, but in the end, the Prophet's crimes are entirely of his own making.

But the most disturbing thing of all is that Comstock wasn't the first mortal to be corrupted in this way.

Across the multiverse, I have seen worlds that worshipped the Angel as a goddess, even dimensions where she supposedly appeared in person before her worshippers… and many of them have suffered for it.

Post-apocalyptic nightmares with populations reduced to feral cannibalism, totalitarian police states with no purpose bar the accruing of power, gilded cages housing populations of hedonistic man-children oblivious to the outside world, monumental holy cities where worshippers live in filth and mutation for the pleasure of their goddess, galaxy-spanning research facilities run by fallen scientists experimenting for pleasure and little else, playgrounds for the most insane and depraved individuals from across the possibility space… and so many more.

All for the sake of expanding the Angel's interdimensional kingdom.

And that is why – more than any other reason – I continue to archive these lost histories and explore these far-flung realities.

Because Columbia may be gone, but the Angel who bears her name lives on.

And she's watching us.

THE END