**First Epoch, Year 3 - The Lost Era**
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.
Above them, the sun burned—though Adrian knew with certainty it wasn't a natural star anymore. It was the Primordial God Almighty, one of the Original Creator's two Pillar fragments, serving as the world's light source. The other Pillar, the Celestial Worthy of Heaven and Earth for Blessings, lurked somewhere beyond Adrian's perception, and the two were locked in a cold war that kept the emerging Beyonder races somewhat suppressed.
It was a strange peace. Terrible, but stable.
It wouldn't last.
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 years since the Cataclysm, and he'd adapted to the way he could *feel* the chaos around him, sense the Beyonder races emerging across the planet. Giants. Elves. Dragons. Phoenixes. Demons. Vampires. Demonic Wolves. Mutants. All of them born from humans who'd fused with Characteristics, all of them losing their humanity to convergence and madness.
But the Pillars' overwhelming presence kept the worst of the violence contained. For now.
The Beyonder Characteristic within him had stabilized through sheer force of will and scientific understanding. Where others became kins of chaos or lost themselves completely, Adrian had found equilibrium. His perfect memory provided an anchor—thousands of hours of human experience, every moment of his thirty-two years of life, every piece of knowledge he'd ever absorbed.
It was enough. Barely.
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. His Archivist Characteristic responded, information crystallizing with geometric precision. "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, encoded into the mystical framework his power was building. This was what his Characteristic did—it didn't just store information, it made information *permanent*. Protected against the chaos trying to erase everything the Pre-Epoch had been.
*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 madness. A low-sequence giant, driven purely by instinct.
She shambled away toward distant sounds—the kins of chaos fighting, or perhaps other nascent Beyonders locked in convergence-driven combat. Even with the Pillars' suppression, violence still erupted constantly.
Adrian watched her go and felt tears—still human tears, still salt water—trace paths down his changed face.
Three years of this. Three years of documenting humanity's death in excruciating detail.
And according to his calculations based on the mystical patterns he could sense, the Lost Era would continue for centuries more. Then something catastrophic would happen—he could feel it building, the tension between the two Pillars growing with each passing year as they absorbed more Sefirot and became increasingly unstable.
When they finally clashed, the world would change again.
"I'm sorry I couldn't help you," he said to the vanished giant. "But I won't let you be forgotten."
---
**The Sanctum**
The Prometheus Station observation deck had become his fortress against the chaos.
Adrian had spent three years fortifying it, using his growing understanding of Beyonder power to create protective barriers. The transparent aluminum walls still held, and he'd layered them with mystical defenses constructed from pure information—knowledge structures that imposed localized stability on reality.
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 Archivist Characteristic within him *reached* for the information, pulling it through some mystical channel directly into 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 that would never fade.
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. The process made his Characteristic pulse with satisfaction, growing stronger with each piece of knowledge integrated. "Another thousand pieces of who we were."
He'd spent the last three years doing this. Consuming data crystals one by one, transferring humanity's accumulated knowledge from dead technology into 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 Beyonders or kins of chaos.
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 under the Primordial God Almighty's "sun"—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. Or something that had fused with what would become elf-pathway Characteristics from the Tyrant pathway. But unlike the mindless Beyonders hunting each other across the wasteland, this one moved with purpose. With *control*.
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 mystical understanding itself, words that existed simultaneously as sound and concept and emotion.
Yet somehow, impossibly, Adrian *understood*. His Archivist Characteristic was translating, processing the information content beneath the alien sounds.
"You shine differently," the figure said. "Not like the mad ones. Not like the kins of chaos. You remember yourself."
Adrian's throat tightened. Three years 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 years 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 protective barriers.
"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 twenty-seven still alive within five 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 walls.
"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 shimmering barrier.
"I've been walking for seventy-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 deactivated part of the barrier. "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 Primordial God Almighty's light faded to something like dusk. 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. Old. Strange. It's building structures in my mind—filing systems, index categories, preservation matrices. When I document something, when I speak it into my archive, it becomes... permanent. Protected. More real than the chaos around us."
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 with perfect fidelity. I can sense information—where it exists, how it's structured, what's being lost or corrupted. And I'm getting stronger every time I preserve something. It's like my power feeds on knowledge itself."
Marcus leaned forward with interest. "That's remarkable. You're becoming a living archive."
"Or the last memorial for a dead civilization." Adrian's voice was soft. "The only one who'll remember the six billion people who died screaming."
They fell silent.
"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. The Pillars' presence suppresses it somewhat, but it's still there."
"I feel it too." Adrian touched his chest. "The convergence instinct. The Original Creator's fragmented will, trying to reassemble. 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 for seventy-three days, knowing his own mind was being eroded.
"I can help," Adrian said suddenly.
"What?"
"My power. If it can archive knowledge, maybe it can archive *you*." Adrian stood, pacing. "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. I could remind you of who you were."
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. In the distance, something roared—the kins of chaos never slept.
"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 think. I can assist. Maybe we can find 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. The Lost Era stretched ahead of them—centuries of relative stability under the Pillars' overwhelming presence, before something catastrophic would shatter that peace.
"The Pillars won't last forever," Adrian said quietly, sensing the building tension in reality itself. "They're absorbing more Sefirot. Growing more unstable. Eventually they'll fight each other, and when they do..."
"The world will break again," Marcus finished.
"Yeah." Adrian's voice was grim. "But until then, we have time. Time to preserve knowledge. Time to find others who still remember. Time to build something that might survive what's coming."
He looked at Marcus with fierce determination.
"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."
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, grown stronger. "I think... I think we just formed something important. Not just a partnership. A foundation."
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. Not just me. 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, an expression of surprising warmth on his crystalline features.
"Then let's get started, Archivist. We have nine hundred and seventy-eight years of the First Epoch left to survive, and a civilization to remember."
Outside, under the Primordial God Almighty's fading light, the chaos raged on. The kins of the Original Creator hunted through broken landscapes. The nascent Beyonder races fought and consumed each other, held in check only by the Pillars' overwhelming presence. The Celestial Worthy and Primordial God Almighty continued their cold war, each absorbing Sefirot, growing stronger and more unstable.
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 before the apocalypse.
Remembering forever seemed almost easy by comparison.
---
**End of Chapter 2**
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*Next: Chapter 3 - The Acting Method*