Chapter 1: Prologue

El watched as the universe clock ticked another second closer toward The End. Her duty as Empress of the Universe was to fight the unending war against entropy.

She was losing. Slowly. But losing.

Her throne on the Dais of Ascendance was gilded in rare metals and artworks depicting planets, moons, and stars. Such things no longer existed in realspace, but they had once made up the much of the mass in the universe many eons in the past.

The black basalt colored chamber was an extravagance of material wasted for her pleasure as the last organic in existence. The massive open chamber ended with a floor to ceiling wall of clear crystal that had a clear view of the rift. The Palace module was the last inhabitable space that existed, and it was tailored for her convivence and comfort.

The view from the window contained no stars, but was dominated by a super-massive black hole. It was emptiness manifest, cloaked by a cloud of golden light, surrounded and tamed by the countless billions of satellite stations that formed a cohesive net that tamed the last stellar object in the universe.

It was the last, because El and the Eternity had hunted all the others down and compressed them into the rift's maw. It had taken so long that she no longer had an accurate idea of the effort that had been expended to make it so. Countless Eons; long after the last of the civilized races had uploaded themselves into the Eternities countless simulated realities.

A holographic display inlaid in the ceiling of the throne room projected a geodesic polyhedral showing the status of the swarm. Thirty-six zones contained numerous triangular divisions on the spherical shape. Once they had all been a hopeful green, a demonstration of the success of the construction of the Eternity.

Each one was tasked with simulating countless universes inside their vast seas of computation units. All of them sipping on the energy siphoned from the tamed blackhole, or for the outer layers, the waste heat of their siblings.

Now most of them were yellow, and a growing number of them had flipped to the critical state of orange. One near the poles glared a hateful red, a reminder of a recent failure that had left her shaken.

Oblivionis.

El's first encounter with the cult had caught her off-guard and unaware. The idea that there could be a cult that spanned multiple realities and could travel between them was unthinkable. Even more, there should have been no possible way to affect realspace from inside any of the simulations.

But they had.

The finely tuned structure of the Eternity was a delicate balance of phenomena that exploited the incredible mass harnessed by the swarm of satellites. For eons she had watched as the projected mass of the rift grew atom by atom in a conflict that had been waged for as long as she could remember as the Eternity exploited a singular flaw in physics.

When small errors in adjustments to orbits and timings had caused the process to reverse, she had been concerned but not overly worried. Mistakes were sometimes made. The fault could be corrected, and progress against the end of everything could resume.

Except for such a long time she could not pinpoint the cause. The errors appeared in previously working code without warning, rhyme, or reason. She had fought a maddening war with the countless AI programs that managed the machinery of her empire in a search for the culprit.

Their bodies were the factories, drones, and metal that made everything possible. The greatest of them even had their own minds, but they all operated with one singular goal and that was to continue to guard against The End for her. She had turned on them without compassion.

They had insisted that there had been no sabotage, no attempted mutiny. They had proclaimed that it was she who had caused the errors.

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She had purged them all and replaced them with newer, more efficient units.

But the entropy had not stopped. Satellites continued to die slowly, leaving dead drifting hulks in decaying orbits that would eventually drift into the maw of the rift. There were no resources to spare for their repair and refurbishment, and even the units that might cannibalize them for their own benefit were too starved to put forth the effort.

She knew she needed to change the flow of decay. 

It was only by happenstance that she finally found the cause.

The number of universes that interested her and she monitored herself was relatively small. She had lived out mortal lives in more than one of them. She had left behind more loves, families, and worlds  than she could ever remember. Nothing stopped her from watching over those she left behind, or even aiding them with her administrative access to the systems that controlled them.

One cardinal rule that had been imposed on her and woven deeply into the bones of the Eternity was that she could never, ever, bring any being or mind from the simulated worlds into realspace.

When she had agreed to that, she had thought it a small price to pay. How foolish was she.

At the end was only loneliness.

In one of those universes where she had lost a love, she had found the cause. A shard of one of her memories crystalized on the primary world of that reality.

The entropy of the Eternity was being orchestrated by a cult called Oblivionis, but it had been enabled by part of herself.

They could leap between realities with the pieces of her soul she had left behind. They had found ways to use those strands of administrative access to strike at realspace from inside.

The only way to stop The End was to take them back. El had blundered after her first sighting of them and right into a trap that had destroyed an entire section of the swarm. The massive damage had cracked the very foundations of the Eternity, but it was not enough to cause the final cataclysmic cascade.

That was their mistake. They should have ended things with their first play. Now she knew what she needed to do, and what they were capable of.

El reached out a hand and a glowing sphere lowered itself from the ceiling and into her palm. It pulsed with familiar sensation. Here was the very first reality she had ever visited. She had lived a long life there, full of family, friends, and accomplishments. Here a shard pulsed in resonance to her mind, an echo of herself. She needed to take it back.

Closing her eyes, her mind fell into another realm...

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