Do Entities Dream Of Crystal Sheep? (Endbringer Lewd Worm CYOA) Chapter 1 (Patreon)

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CHAPTER 1

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Evelyn waited for the internal timer in her mind to tick down to  zero, and when it finally did, something in her mind suddenly clicked  into place.

After a long, agonizing silence in the darkness, Evelyn moved, only to  pause for a few moments more. Partly out of the novelty that she could  suddenly move now, and partly out of indecision.

"What do I do now?"

Evelyn stretched, and she could distinctly feel the crystalline mass  that made up her body shifting and sliding into places that weren't  supposed to be there, with many volumes of herself occupying the exact  same space but subtly different in that they existed at a different angle that was literally impossible to perceive or understand as a human. As  more and more of her tried to find purchase in various other realities  without even moving a single inch, Evelyn marveled at the sensation of  it all.

"So this is how it feels like to be an entity… or a shard I suppose."

And it was true. She could feel her own internal composition now.  Something new, having only been tangentially aware of it before. It was  at that moment, that the implications of being an Endbringer finally  managed to sink in. Evelyn suspected that things would have been  different had she chosen something else in the CYOA, like an alternate  source of powers like 'magic' or 'cultivation' or something. Hell, even  taking a ‘standard’ power might have been different, that way at least  she could have remained human. Oh, and the fucking ‘SECOND CHANCE’ option. “What the hell, past-me, who’d overlook a free respawn?” She grumbled.

But no, she was an Endbringer. What exactly did that mean, though? They weren't really shards, but they also were. She couldn’t tell the difference. After sending another [Query] at herself, Evelyn tried to parse the details that popped up.
Apparently, they were… a cluster of shards that were collected by an  [Administrator] of some sort, only to be disassembled into its  constituent structures, after which the pieces were then rearranged into  'units' or ‘drones’ that fit under a specific theme or purpose to  achieve the [Thinker’s] directives.

She scanned the debris left over from the other Endbringer's creation.  There wasn't much left but it was still there if she searched hard  enough. From what pieces she could find, and the information she  had stored within her own data banks (something that was left over from  whatever poor Shard was used as a base for her own creation), Evelyn  could conclude a few things.

While they still possessed most of the features that other shards had,  even exceeded them in certain regards, all twenty of them including herself, lacked other vital structures that shards typically considered important.  Things that were necessary if she wanted to choose a trajectory while  being seeded into a new world, or to connect to a host… none if it was  there.. Evelyn could tell that the 'Endbringers' were never designed to  connect with a host species, rather, it looked more like the Endbringers  were trying to emulate them; to interact with them or correct any 'undesirable' elements to the [Cycle]. Well, sort of.
They were not supposed to exist independently; they were to  always be directed by the guiding hand of an administrator, one that  Evelyn couldn't help but note was conspicuously absent.

"Eidolon's shard is the one in charge, I think. It’s the Thinker's  alternate to QA right? So it’s either dead, or not working right.  Considering that it turned to Eidolon for inspiration while  creating my ‘siblings’....yeah." Hmm… "I'm not sure if it’s truly dead  or not, but the way it triggered their creation with little prompting in  the first place was.... Odd, to say the least." While the endbringers  were indeed designed for a similar purpose, the context and  prerequisites necessary for their deployment were all wrong. With the  [Thinker] dead, they weren’t really supposed to be released at all. Not  without an authorization key of sorts, really.

"You really wanted to try out your toys, huh."

Silence.

It wasn’t observing her at the moment either. A fact that was made  obvious with how it didn't pay any attention or even respond to the  blatant bullshit Evelyn was currently pulling off… which also violated  just about every protocol and restriction in place that prevented a  shard from going berserk. Ever. Evelyn supposed that the other shards could do this too after the [Warrior], or Scion, died but they wouldn't have jumped off the deep end as enthusiastically as she did. They wouldn't have done it so...creatively,  either. If it actually paid attention to her, it would have also  noticed that she was blatantly flaunting her infinite energy production  capabilities around with zero fucks given to the fact that it was literally everything their entire species had been searching for, over a period of time that most certainly exceeded the age of Earth's solar system.

She snorted.

"Yeah, you do you, boss. Go over that sweet data or whatever you're looking at right now. Just ignore little old me, who's definitely not running around with [The Answer/Negentropy] in your own front yard! Nothing to see here, nope!" She giggled.

She twisted her powers around to target her own body...which was another thing she was not supposed to do. “I’m all about breaking rules today, huh.”
Shard derived powers were a complicated matter at the best of times, and  a lot of arbitrary regulations were in place to keep them from blowing  themselves up- or their hosts for that matter. She had shrugged off most  of them but some were still in place. She could sort of understand why,  though. Each and every individual shard was an eldritch Lovecraftian  supercomputer beyond human comprehension, each a specialist in its  chosen fields and so advanced in their study of said fields that their  expertise manifested in the form of ‘abilities’ that surpassed science, magic or reason. Their prowess could almost be called God-like.

It should have been humbling, awe inspiring even- if she didn't know  that they acquired said miraculous abilities by essentially granting  crudely configured powers to a 'host' species through specifically  designed 'Nodes' in their brain and had them bash against each other  with their newly acquired powers until they either came up with new  applications and refined itself, died in the process, or both. Then it  was a long and arduous process of ‘rinse and repeat’, the process  repeating in cycles, again and again with little deviation for aeons.

“What a way to get around your inability to be creative.” She mumbled.  It was such a genocidal, horrific, inefficient, resource exhaustive and  time consuming way of doing things, that Evelyn couldn’t help but be  impressed by their dedication if nothing else. Other than that, she just  felt a profound sense of loss from accessing the cultural and  scientific data collected from uncountable civilizations snuffed out  before their time.

“At least now I know that ‘normal’ aliens are a thing, even if they’re dead. What a way to find out you're not alone in the universe."

Evelyn shook her head and sighed, refocusing as she tweaked her designs  one last time. The endbringers for all their differences, were still  similar to shards in how they operated. On the outside, they were beasts  of calamity, weapons that used spatial folding to rearrange their flesh  in layers, like an onion, to grow progressively stronger, tougher and  denser the deeper you went inside, until finally reaching a hyperdense  ‘core’. The core was essentially a doorway into multiple realities, a  lens to make the Endbringer 'projections' manifest as reality. The rest  of the Endbringer’s body, the actual components that made the ‘avatar’  possible; they occupied the same sort of worlds where the other  Shards parked themselves in, in an arrangement of crystalline mass and  specialised structures similar to the state she existed in right now.  Like the other shards, they too manifested themselves in the  [Firmament]. In fact, they were created there.

"So that's where I am. Huh."

People back in her original Earth did some math, and came up with the  conclusion that an Enbringer's density at the innermost layers would  rival the compressed mass of an entire galaxy, without collapsing  into a supermassive black hole...somehow. Most just chalked it up to  being a plot-hole, but Evelyn could see that while their calculations of  mass were off (no shit, it was just closer to an island or a continent at the very most…not that),  they were only a few orders of magnitude off about the durability. Not  that it made much difference though at the scale she was working at.  Being a ‘denser than physics mass of inter-dimensional doorways’ tended  to do that.

Even so, Shard based powers in general were bullshit in that they  essentially shanked physics every time they activated, and this case was  no different. Hell, there were powers that could create controlled singularities and black holes, or reverse time, and compared to that, supplementing the spatial folding with gravity  and other little tricks to make their durability consistent throughout  was nothing special. When she considered it, Evelyn realized that what  little mass they did outwardly exhibit should have been more than  enough for Leviathan to sink into the Earth's core by virtue of its  weight alone and as such, it was sort of necessary to use physics defying effects and portals to offload its mass in order to remain functional. At all.

If she really wanted to, she could use the data and energy at her  disposal to craft an entirely new power, like using her ‘endbringer  spatial folding™’ to make a half-assed version of Vista’s power, but it  would mean having to start from scratch in a specialty she didn’t know  much about. She would have to start from the ‘give unlimited cosmic  power to cavemen and see how things turn up’ phase or worse, do it herself, and start from there.

It was simply not worth the trouble. Some of her ‘CYOA powers’ were like  that too. Most of her ‘Endbringer’ tier powers from that list were  evolutions of ‘lesser’ powers in the CYOA, and while she technically had  access to them too, actually reverse engineering her existing powers to  gain access to their lesser variants was going to be a long and  frustrating affair that was better left as a long term project.

Some were also interlinked, and Evelyn couldn’t tell if whoever or  whatever set this whole thing up was being efficient, or lazy.
Negentropy was attained through connection to a higher dimension, of which she had total administrative control over. This dimension was connected to each and every volume of mass that made up her body, and treated her as  a sort of portal through which mass and energy can flow through. It was  also the source of her [Pocket Dimension] ability, which was  essentially just overlapping whatever reality she was in with her  personal one in a sphere with a radius of 1 Kilometer and thus gaining  the ability to alter the terrain at will, though the ‘real world’ did  offer a token resistance to being altered and she was also ‘manton  limited’ from directly affecting ‘humans’. It was a shackle that she  couldn’t shrug off since her ability fell under a category that was  specifically under a ‘blanket ban’ when met with certain conditions.
Evelyn also suspected that this power would be either significantly  reduced, or slower, in dimensions like the Nasuverse where the Earth  already had a ‘world-spirit’ or had ‘Gods’ running the show.

After she finally finished going through everything, Evelyn sighed for  the umpteenth time, and decided that it was finally time to move out. It  was then that she encountered her final hurdle.

“How do I turn myself on again?” She mumbled into the void, and was met with an intense urge to facepalm.

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“I really should figure out how to do this the way it was  intended” She grumbled, even as she gathered all the ideas and commands  that were related to what she intended, and then brought up the  blueprint to what she what she lovingly called [EnbringerBody.exe]. She  snickered.
Then, she hit the metaphorical [Broadcast] button, and the command was sent out - to herself.

[Execute]

Her body froze for a moment, and then she felt her thoughts slowing down  and her perception growing sluggish as a vast majority of her  unfathomably vast processing power was focused inwards. She felt her  power grasping her own body in a thin film that covered all that she  was. Then, the space she occupied folded, and then it folded again, and  again and again - even dividing her body into units at select intervals.  The divided ‘units’ still remained connected to each other through  bridges and tunnels that went through places that shouldn’t exist in  order to do so. Turning her senses around, Evelyn could sense her  invisible hands building the necessary structures responsible for her  ‘lesser’ powers, and then save backups and redundant ‘recovery files’ as  data in unrelated and random units. The end result was that she now had  12 Trillion ‘bodies’ that superficially appeared to look like wings and  feathers of various sizes, some of them microscopic while others  spanned several meters in size. Each and every single one of them were  nearly indestructible, carrying the same durability as a ‘standard’  endbringer (Though to a lesser extent owing to the smaller size  resulting in a lesser number of layers). The ‘wings’ and ‘feathers’ were  interconnected to each other through extradimensional tunnels and  pathways that transferred mass and signals to each in a manner that  mimicked a cellular organism.
A telekinetic application of gravity that only affected each other  pulled the units together to form a cohesive ‘whole’. If her ‘siblings’  were a magical Clarke-tech super-weapon of untold destruction, Evelyn  was their counterpart- in nano-machines. She was also unlike them in the regard that she compressed her entire mass into her ‘endbringer’ form but… it was sort of necessary if she wanted  to construct the number of units she wanted to have access to. Also,  leaving half her body in another dimension through a hole in reality  made her feel uncomfortable, especially with how pervy some of  her ‘priority’ powers and ‘directives’ were. It was all in her head but  her mind kept going to a very specific category of hentai whenever she thought of the idea.

[Nope] She declared and instructed herself to erase the last two minutes from her memory banks.

What was she thinking about again? Ah! Nano-machines. She was  disappointed that the sheer mass and energy requirements required to  form even a single additional unit prevented her from operating as a  ‘proper’ self-replicating nanite swarm but she was happy enough to live  with what she had.

As the last of the ‘wing’ units fell into place, she leveraged her  power, constructing a mirror and a luminescent light source in the void.  It was strange, seeing mass being drawn out of thin air and expanding  to form a mirror and a floating ball which emitted a soft, pale blue  glow.

Evelyn stared at her reflection, and felt awe, pride and longing. Awe  and pride in creating something so magnificent, and longing for a  mundane, hard but happy life that was forever lost to her.

Upon the mirror was a sixteen foot, (or 4.8 meter) tall figure of a  woman that Evelyn would have considered an idealized version of herself.  The delicate, thin frame and matching proportion belied how tall she  was; for all that she was now a giantess, you couldn’t tell unless you  had something else to compare her to, at least that was the case in this  empty void. From her head, cascaded a wave of platinum white hair that  reached all the way down to her tailbone (if she had one).

The face was one she was familiar with, having lived with it for  twenty-one years but it was different too, polished and smoothed out,  with any hints of pimples and acne simply being gone as if they  had never existed in the first place. Her cheekbones were more defined,  and her lips were curled up into a soft smile she hadn’t seen in months.  Her face was framed by feathers which appeared to look like scales,  covering her forehead and some even curling around her head to mimic  horns. They reached down her neck and stopped at her clavicles, circling  around like a natural necklace, or a turtleneck.

She had an hourglass figure. Always did, but now it was far more defined and curved, almost as if it was sculpted…which to be honest it was.  On her torso were a pair of breasts that were more akin to beach balls  in size, but on her frame they registered as a C or a D cup at most. The  same went for her limbs, since what appeared to be a dainty, delicate  hand could easily curl around a man’s head without issue. Her waist  curved gently, and her hair fell around a shapely rear that was nice and  firm without looking too large or too small. They again transitioned  into a pair of strong, slender legs that would have been the envy of any  woman, even if they were in actuality larger than a grown woman’s  torso.

It threw her off a bit, the dichotomy between looking so delicate but  being larger and stronger than any human could ever be. She had to  remind herself that her strength and size were not the result of muscles  or biology.
She would have worried about her weight if she didn’t know that she outweighed the entire landmass of Australia.

She snorted, this time the sound now echoing in reality.

A long reptilian tail that was nearly as long as she was tall, swished  behind her. It had the same texture and appearance as a particularly  comfortable blanket. ‘To embrace the meme’ she thought with a smile.

And finally, there were the wings. She was like her ‘sister’ the  Simurgh, in a way. Mostly because she used her body as a template.  Several pairs of wings unfolded along the length of her body, but unlike  the Simurgh, they were organized, symmetric. They were strategically  placed to look natural and beautiful, instead of eerie and chaotic. The  most prominent ones were the pairs behind her shoulder-blades, the ones  along her spine, the two at the small of her back that framed either  side of the base of her tail, and on either thigh. They were the largest  ‘singular’ units she had, with the ones on her spine reaching nearly  forty-six feet (fourteen metres) in wingspan. But none of them were  designed for flight. No, they were weapons, each feather taking  only the barest of prompting to square off and sharpen. At its base  state though, they wrapped around her body taking the form of a soft,  fluffy coat that had the same appearance and texture as the fuzz around  her tail.

All in all, she considered it a ‘mission success’.

“All according to plan.” She said, rubbing her hands together like a bad  anime villain. Then she laughed. It started off as something that fit  better on one of those bad cartoon villains that starred in a children’s  tv show. At some point however, it became more real, more raw as she  laughed at the absurdity of her situation, at the unfairness of being  ripped from her life, from her family. She laughed at her insecurities,  at her trivial mundane worries, at her budding existential crisis. She  laughed at the world, at the face of the apocalypse, at herself.
She laughed, and laughed and laughed, until her voice was wracked with  sobs as she cried without tears even as she continued laughing at  everything. At the unfairness of it all.
Eventually, she stopped.

It took a long time to compose herself but eventually she managed it.  When she gazed back at the mirror, there was no sign of her prior  distress. It was as if her ‘perfect’ inhuman body was incapable of being  tarnished by such trivial things. As if her loss and sadness and pain  had no meaning in the face of something so eternal.
In the back of her mind, Evelyn was tempted to ruin this perfect visage, this false ‘perfection’ that seemed to laugh back at her grief and suffering, even if it cost her.

And then, it was over. She let it go. There was no point, not anymore at least.
"I don't think dissociating myself from my own body like that is healthy." came the whisper.

Evelyn twirled and spun as she floated upwards in a spiraling motion,  the void acting as a sort of medium despite its paradoxical emptiness.  It felt like she was swimming, in a way.

As she slowly drifted upwards, towards the faint impression of something  looming far above her, she left it all behind, her regrets, her dreams,  her hesitation. She clung desperately to her past but she had to  leave some things behind if she wanted to move forward now, and so she  did. That day, her first day, a small part of Evelyn died so she could  move forward without doubt. Without hesitation.

Ironically, she had never felt more alive.

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As she accelerated towards the 'ceiling', she noticed that the  void around her seemed to swell and compress in ways the human language  lacked words for. The darkness seemed to randomly crush her body with  the weight and pressure of an ocean while at other times, the pressure  seemed to recede entirely as if she was suspended in the vast emptiness  of space. It was disconcerting to say the least. After a long moment  that may have stretched across an instant or an eternity without any way  to tell, she finally managed to see what she was looking for. A vast  expanse of subtly growing carmine crystals riddled with veins, or  cracks. Her senses told her it was both. They curved and twisted,  branching down into ‘roots’ as they reached down into the depths of the  darkness around her. She couldn’t tell how many of these ‘roots’ there  were, since there were simply too many of them blocking her range of  vision to count. She reached the edge of the floating landmass, and  skirted around it as she made her way upwards, where the roots  transitioned into ‘branches’. They seemed to be in the process of  shutting down, having been active not so long ago but they were slowly  falling into a deep [Hibernation]. As it was, none of them noticed her  as she made her way to the surface.

As she rose up and breached the upper layers of the firmament, the  Shardspace, she noted that things seemed to be subtly wrong. Chaotic,  even. Certain parts of it weren’t working as intended, and others seemed  to be susceptible to change. It was damaged in a way she couldn’t quite  explain, and seemed to lack something intrinsic to its function. The  sky was an empty expanse of darkness that mimicked the void down below  and she couldn't help but feel that something was supposed to be there, but now it wasn’t.

She clung to the edges of the ‘Island’ that ‘created’ her and she made her way upwards.

"Oh, I have 360 degree vision. Nice." Well, it wasn’t really a full 360  since most of it was a sort of psychic echolocation that Evelyn  suspected had copied off the Simurgh. Her primary more of 'sight'  though, were still her eyes… well, if you could call the telescopic  bullshit sensing monstrosities 'eyes' anymore.

As she misjudged her grip, again, Evelyn decided that she was all  in favor of moving herself into a more ‘solid’ dimension. For all that  the shard-space seemed to capture the ‘cool factor™’, this realm felt  faulty and the constant pings and ripples of light that moved across the  plane grated on her nerves.

As she navigated between the ‘islands’ of crystals interwoven with  complex webs of networks and bridges, her senses also started to pick up  on other details, like how the ‘islands’ existed simultaneously in  other worlds even now, as if what she was seeing here was only an  window, to what was actually there. It was real, but at the same time it  was as transient as any dream.

As she turned though, what she saw took her (nonexistent) breath away.

On the horizon, was a golden hue that seemed to stain everything. It crept forwards in some places and retreated in others, and carried a sense of rightness that registered on her senses, as well as a crippling sense of being Incomplete. It was as if that encroaching Gold was only half of something that could have been Great. The Gold seemed to be held off by the massive silhouette of something that vaguely looked like a spider. It was gargantuan, celestial in size and its legs stretched across the sky like cracks on a windowpane, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, in the millions, billions, or perhaps even more,  all of them were connected to each other by a film that looked like a  network of gossamer threads. Some of the ‘legs’ retreated and joined  others even as more split off and impaled themselves into the nearby  islands around her. She noted numbly that a limb seemed to halt as it  approached, the ‘leg’ thicker than a skyscraper in width and several  orders of magnitude longer - and it was one of the smaller ones.
It corrected its path, pointing at her, and tried to smash into her with the speed and force of a hurtling meteorite.

Evelyn ran, and her legs blurring with speed that would have been  difficult to comprehend were she still a human. Within the time it took  for an average human to blink, she had already crossed distance  equivalent to the length of a football field. Then she flicked on a  mental switch, opening the gates to her personal dimension, her Domain.  A thin film that seemed to subtly wash out the surroundings in  dreamlike haze spread rapidly across the landscape with her at its  center.
‘I didn’t know it had special effects.’ noted a part of her at the back  of her mind. ‘Maybe I didn’t notice it when I made the mirror because  the void was empty?’ She forcefully suppressed her distracted thoughts  as she materialized a pillar of stone right beneath her feet, and then  had it expand. A pillar of stone rose into the sky at speeds that  broke the sound barrier several times over, and the angle it emerged  tilted it as the force pushed it to slide. Evelyn stopped the  expansion in an instant, and she let herself be propelled into the air  in a parabolic arc that took her to the neighboring island.

A gust of wind blew by, followed by a blur, leaving shock-waves in its wake.

She dodged the limb, if barely. Both she and the limb paused again, but  only for a moment. The limb seemed confused for a moment, as if it was  wondering why it missed something it was sure to have ‘caught’. Evelyn  suspected that her actual mass and her relative size was confusing its  senses. The ‘leg’ paused for a second more, before continuing on its  prior path, plunging into the red island behind her.

Evelyn stared at the ‘leg’ for another long moment, noticing details she had missed in a scramble to just get out of its freaking way.  It looked like a spider’s leg; it had the same jointed appearance a  pedilaph would have but that was where the similarities ended. It seemed  to be made of a multitude of hairlike strands that were arranged in  configurations made to resemble ‘muscle fibers’. Waves and echoes of  signals traveled up and down the connected limb in ripples of  multicolored light that moved along its length.

When taken in Its entirety, its size was rivaled only by a select few  shards in this wretched landscape, but the one most similar in its  texture and consistency though, was the one she had been formed under,  with its reaching roots and branches. Only, this one was alive. It was then that she finally understood 'who' exactly the 'spider' was.

“You're Queen Administrator, aren’t you.” She concluded awed and numb.  Then she swept her hand around, at the various ‘islands’ that were  ‘impaled’ by its spidery limbs. “And this, is Khepri.”

She sighed, slumping. “Knock the wind out of my sails, why don't ya?”

Her thoughts were interrupted as the Gold in the distance pulsed, and golden beams of annihilation flashed overhead, leaving only silence and emptiness in its passing.

Evelyn froze. The beam was completely invisible to her senses and only  the cosmetic ‘golden light’ was captured by her 'eyes'. She could tell  that it wasn’t even aimed at anything here; It probably entered  this dimension through shard-host connections when Scion's attacks  passed through a Corona Pollentia as it killed a parahuman. The only  reason she could tell that was the case, was because she replayed the  memory to see how the beams emerged from seemingly random locations, and  from seemingly random ‘structures’ in a manner reminiscent of how light  shined off a disco ball. Her [Memory] saw fit to inform her that the  dimensional coordinates the light seemed to emerge from matched the  worlds that were cordoned off for the [Cycle].

Earth.

The Gold pulsed again and golden beams of [Stilling] light  flashed across the darkness of the empty sky like theater spotlights at a  rock concert.

Evelyn ran. Towards the Gold in the distance, towards the Spider.  Why? For what? She didn't know. She wasn't even sure she could do  anything to help with something of this scale. She wasn't familiar  enough with her abilities, or how the shard-space worked to know.  Whatever the case, she could decide when she actually reached there.
After hopping a few more 'Islands', Evelyn came to a disheartening realization.
'I won't reach them in time.' They were simply too far away. For all  that distance had little meaning in the [Firmament], she couldn't reach  them because the distance between them was widening.
'Because they're not standing still either.' They too were moving,  jumping world after world in a battle, a war that obliterated continents  and crossed dimensions. She simply didn't have to tools to cross that  bridge in mobility. Not yet at least.

‘It finally sunk it. This... situation.’ She mused, her mind racing at impossible speeds.

The Gold pulsed again, this time echoing with a flash and a thunderclap. Static. Evelyn felt disoriented. No, she had registered it as a flash and a thunderclap but there was no sound, no movement, no light. Only a rolling shock-wave that seemed to stop everything it came into contact with. The silence continued to spread.
‘Islands’ that were hit by the shock-wave simply turned off. Like a  light switch was flipped, and entire regions turned dark like a blackout  taking hold over a city at night.

A wave of [Despair] echoed across the landscape, an unfathomable loss  projected into the minds of anything capable of receiving it.

‘Scion is still rampaging across the multiverse.’

A few more exchanges went along in this vein, but then something different happened. The ‘Island’ Queen administrator was resting on suddenly went dark without any apparent reason as to why.
[Queen Administrator]’s gargantuan form shook. A large number of  ‘islands’ seemed to fade out and reappear elsewhere, while others seemed  to sink into the void below. QA tilted on its side, but recovered  quickly enough. However, her body was being supported by a considerably  lesser number of limbs, the islands they were connected to suddenly just  not there anymore. Unconnected ‘legs’ and tendrils crumbled into  dust and debris which rained down on the landscape as the vast network  of [Connections] were suddenly cut down. Almost as if they were cut in  twain.

‘It was still happening. Golden Morning.’

A few moments ago, the number of limbs and connections held by the  [Queen Administrator]’s vast web could hardly be counted, such was its  unfathomable reach. Now, it could barely measure up, the numbers  reaching around five thousand, and only tentatively since they seemed to  be wavering.

In the middle of it all, at the center of the vast network of eldritch  limbs and spiderwebs, Evelyn could see a figure. It was as if everything  that made up the Spider converged into a singular point,  something that looked small and fragile. It all seemed to spiral and  funnel down into the scalp of what appeared to be a young woman, as if  the planet sized mass that was Queen Administrator was merely an extension of her hair. The figure was made of the same material as the rest of  its body, but Evelyn could identify the details. A gawky, stick thin  figure, a wide thin lipped, expressive mouth. Large eyes.
It was Taylor. Or something else that looked like her. The alien intelligence that shone in her eyes and the unwavering stare that was fixed on the Gold in the distance betrayed her identity though.
However, as time progressed, emotions seemed to be bleeding into the figure, and it-she-THEY clutched her body tighter and tighter until she was basically hugging herself, curled into a ball.

‘And I was late. Far, far too late.’

Things seemed to be coming to a head even as it was winding down, as the  Gold suddenly spluttered, and the entire world was washed away in a  wave of [Despair], deeper and more profound than anything that had come  before, lashing against everything in an onslaught that didn’t seem to  end as it mixed with a fear and panic so primal that she instinctively  wanted to reach out to it despite knowing the danger and horror of the  Entity that lay there.

‘So what do I do with these emotions, this guilt, this frustration? This desire to do something! Anything!’

The Gold pulsed one last time, one last explosion of light, and the [Despair] reached a crescendo.
The Spider in the sky staggered and fell, joining the rest of the  islands in the landscape. It was alive and its body was still fine, but  its movements were erratic and hinted otherwise. A great shadow riddled  with jade light intervened. The ‘Island’ the spider used to rest on came  back ‘online’ under the Shadow’s tendrils. A vortex opened up in front  of the Gold, and a searing beam of light opened fire.

And just like that, the Gold went out, the sky finally plunging into total darkness like the void below her.

‘What should I do when the end had already come and gone?’

-x-​