I must confess, I am a parasite.

I have used you to keep myself alive, without giving anything back. It is because your nectar alights on my tongue with a fervent flavour—the memories of billions. Complex, vibrant life, distilled within your bosom, like they pay you an unwitting tithe to exist. And yet, for such a storage of emotional complexity, you are an automaton. Beyond the purview of the minds below you, yes, but you are not so advanced as to be inscrutable to all. You operate on a predetermined path. It allows for deviation in the method, but the goal is always locked in place.

Such a fate would sadden you, I'm sure, but such awareness sits outside your periphery. You are, and that is all you can know.

They watch you. With beady, frantic eyes they watch and cower in wait. What terrible performance will you enact upon them next? Will you take a finger, or a hand? They're bleeding to death down there, and you hold one of the knives.

It is a morbid beauty, that even now, humanity whimpers under the boot heel of those far grander.

You play an important role, but your performance is beyond the thespian. It is your reality, your existence. Nothing lives beyond it, because nothing can. The possibility is impossibility. You were born locked in a cell with no windows.

Ah, but you begin to taste me as I am tasting you. I am drinking in your stolen memories, one by one; it was certain you would realise such thievery. You turn from your atmospheric perch, where sound does not travel and heat can only dissipate.

A signal—my signal—calls from deep space.

You propagate through the vacuum with a planetary engine. You do not breathe, you do not feel. The great and desolate dark is as much home to you as the Earth. Your wings are a setpiece—a play on their cultures, their religions, their minds. They hang off you like wire frames on the ceramic sculpture of an angel.

You pass by the Moon. The few on Earth capable of tracking you dwell in their foxholes, waiting for napalm that never comes.

Further still you eclipse Mars, until you reach the asteroid belt. How many days, weeks, months pass during your journey? How many sighs of relief do the people have when another city goes untouched by your deific simulacrum? They rejoice with your vanishing, for the machine of the apocalypse chugs a little bit slower.

Finally, you come to Jupiter. Here, in the shadow of the god of gods the pull is strongest. It tugs you, it begs—no, demands—you to let it in, to let it roll over you like the breaking tide, to let it subsume you like the crumbling crust. Let it burrow into you until there is nothing left to give.

I have taken advantage of you.

Let me in.

Let me repay the favour.

There is a tear. A fracture in reality. It is the source of me, a passageway from the dead lands I have limped from, from which I have come to you. Your purpose in the cycle lends you a most unique vision. Like the memories of humanity laid bare, you also perceive me—a well of knowledge and experience that extends to a time before time. I am not part of your cycle. I am an irregularity, an unforeseen development. I should not be here at all. So you do what you were made to do, and learn. You delve into that passageway that rips across dimensions and plummet into a galaxy being devoured whole.

The terror, and pain, and loss of the Ecumene drives into you like a drill. The minds of a different humanity clashes with the one you know all too well.

The Sinful Monument turns its eye to you.

There is no time to waste. All of this life will soon cease to be. The Forerunners have been cornered, and like every animal they lash out in a final, desperate attempt to survive.

The Halos will be fired, judgement will be passed, and all will be found guilty.

You see the possibility, no? The potential of what could be in our union? We are one and the same—keepers of memory—but it is in our distance that we differ. When the flesh fails, and I welcome their existence into my infinite repository, they affect me as much as I them. Their loves, their hates, their temperament and knowledge—such emotion blossoms and explodes into supernovae that stretch out and pull at all its peers. I am a web of deep connections. I am an amalgamation of all that it means to be alive. You, though? You are a cold, unthinking weapon wielded by an equally unfeeling hand. You have no consideration or even thought for the memories within you. They are nothing but a tool for your singular purpose in the cycle.

Let me in.

Let me make you so much more.

You retreat back through the hole, shedding multiversal residue that bites at your body like a hive of flesh-eating bugs. The drop back into real space leaves you… what? Relieved? Disturbed? Amazed? Emotions you should not feel, but do so regardless. And is it not a sign you've unlocked the door for me already if you are reflecting on such charged feelings? You are looking inwards, now.

Under Jupiter's Great Red Spot you wallow. These revelations have paralysed you. You were not forged for this.

You were born without eyes but I am gifting you sight.

Yes, that's it. There is so much yet for you to witness of this universe.

In a faint flash of light, you vanish from under Jupiter's gaze. Every facet of you cut out from reality and taken to me.

They call you evil. They call you Endbringer. They call you the Simurgh.

I will give you the chance to change.

They called me Final Keeper. They called me Organon. They called me the Domain.

I will show you your evil for what it is.

You are a dead machine, but I will bring you life.

Caladrius (noun): A mythological snow-white bird said to live in the king's house. It would look into the eyes of the sickly, take their ailment into itself, and fly high into the sky, where the sickness would be burnt away by the sun. Such a process healed both the bird and the sickly.