Second attempt at writing anything.
I do not own Worm.
I do not own Dresden Files.
Greg Veder stared at the gravestone.
His face crumpled in upon itself. His eyes were red, and tears were flowing down his face consistently. The grief within him was great enough that it should've, would've given him a trigger event, although of course, he didn't know this.
But with a one in a million- no, quadrillion chance, the shard failed within its only duty. His grief, which made him a more than viable candidate for any shard to choose as its host, was something that was ignored.
And so Greg Veder did not receive powers. The grief within him grew and grew. It swelled and howled to the sky to be released.
Yet Greg Veder simply looked at the tombstone. At the words that tired workers and saddened friends had sloppily carved in. The words were just barely recognizable.
It simply stated. Here lies Susan Veder. That was it. Those were all the words that were marked upon her grave. Upon the woman who had given birth to him. Upon the one, he had always loved, would always love, from the bottom of his heart.
And so Greg Veder howled at the sky. He howled and roared and screamed in despair. He wept and raged against the uncaring sky. He pummeled his fists into the hard earth and wounded himself that way. His world had shattered. His once certain paths had been cracked and broken into a thousand pieces. His heart had been ripped and torn apart.
He wept in a graveyard. He wept in a city consumed in sin. He wept and sobbed and begged for his mother back.
Nothing happened. For the world had never been kind. Once upon a time, there might have been kind people. Once upon a time, the world might've cared.
Yet with Brockton Bay engulfed in crime? With the heroes believing in a game of cops and robbers and the villains laughing at them all the while?
Nobody cared.
And all Greg could do once more was look up at the sky once more and think back to the day he received the news.
"C'mon, c'mon…" He muttered. "We've almost won this…"
And then he heard the doorbell ring. It distracted him just enough that he ended up messing up the timing required and losing the game.
"Awm c'mon! It wasn't my fault we lost, guys! It was the doorbell!" Greg whined. He slouched over to the door, grumbling all the instance at the 'stupid doorbell'.
"Who is it." Greg grumbled out at the door.
"Ah, Mister Greg, is it?" He heard a voice at the door state.
"Uh… yes?" Greg stated back.
"Can you… open the door so that I may relay to you something?" He heard the man hesitantly state back.
Greg thought this over for a moment. It could be an E88 gang member attempting to kidnap him. It could be an ABB member ready to kill him. Maybe it was one of the Archer Bridge Merchants.
And then from the depths of his brain, a thought stated. "What if it's a hero?"
Greg opened the door immediately after that thought, ignoring all the other thoughts that he had.
He saw a man standing at the door, dressed in a uniform.
"Excuse me, are you Mister Greg?" The man asked.
"Uh... yes?" Greg said back uncertainly.
The man looked down at the ground.
"...allow me to offer my condolences before I tell you the news."
"Huh?" Greg stared at the man.
He remembered that conversation clearly. He remembered the shock. The rage. The denial. He remembered him begging the man for a single shred of good news. Perhaps his mother had lived? Perhaps he had gotten the wrong person?
The man simply looked at him with somber eyes, bowed his head, and said he had to go.
Greg watched silently as the man left.
He stared at the door for a while, before numbly closing the door and heading up to his bed.
"Why… why my mother…" Greg sobbed on the ground of the graveyard. He stared up at the sky once more and screamed an incoherent scream for all the world to hear.
He was alone now. His father had left him long ago. His mother had been all he had left.
If there was a single thing he had valued above all else, something that he would've endured the depths of Hell for-
It would've been his mother.
In any normal place, the boy would get found and get comforted. He would have people understanding his agony and pain. And he would perhaps, find a way to find happiness again within the world.
This is not a normal place. This is Brockton Bay. This is a place where people are likely to get mugged for screaming. This is a place where rape and murder are committed on a daily basis. A place where the good guys are ineffective and the villains run the city. A place in which if you attempt to help anyone but yourself, death would be your grim reward.
Somehow, Greg Veder wasn't heard. He was left alone in that dark, dreary graveyard. He stared at the gravestone and determined a single thing.
Vengeance.
But no, vengeance wasn't enough. Merely killing the offending cape would not be enough. It would not be enough to satisfy the emptiness in his heart. The grief left his heart, and anger and hatred took its place.
"Heroes. Villains. What's the difference anymore?" He muttered to himself. "Maybe once upon a fucking time, the heroes were actual heroes. But that time has passed, hasn't it? Hero's death changed things. The rise of the Endbringers changed things."
"Now? Heroes roam the streets in a game of fucking cops and robbers. The villains haunt the city, striding boldly in daylight. They rape, they murder, they steal, and if there's no mark on their record? They get let out with a pat on the back. The Slaughterhouse Nine roam the world without fear for reprisal. Entire cities burn and scream in agony."
And Greg Veder thought of a dangerous thought.
What if powers had never existed?
The thought implanted itself within his brain. And it spread. It made sense. In a world without powers, the police would be able to do their job properly. In a world without powers, guns would actually do something.
In a world without capes, his mother wouldn't have died.
Greg Veder stared up at the sky, with a cold gleam in his eye.
"Maybe I'll die for this. Maybe I'll get captured and tortured by villains. Maybe I'll get slain by the heroes themselves. But it's better to die trying..."
He gripped the cold, hard Earth and looked up at the sky.
"...then to never try at all."
It was on that day that Greg Veder made a promise. A promise made in a crumbling graveyard. A promise made upon his mother's tomb. A promise made that could and would shake the world.
A vow to end the world of Masks and Capes. Whether by cutting off the sources of their powers...
Or by murdering all those who received the power.
That would be his promise. And he would be more than willing to die for that promise.
On any other day, that vow would have amounted to nothing. After all, those who only made a vow often did not have a plan, nor the resources to do what they wanted.
Yet greater powers are always watching. And some... some were greater then even Scion could attest to be witness to.
Beyond the realms of night and day, the fae mobilized their armies once more, preparing for a final stand.
The realms of the Nevernever began to awaken. The archangels prepared for one last endless war. Those sleeping gods that laid imprisoned within a forgotten prison cackled madly as the end of Earth had begun.
The Outer Gates were broken. The Outsiders were coming.
The last great wizards of the White Council had died years ago, in a desperate attempt to seal the Outer Gates, in an alternate Earth.
Their Earth was the first to burn in the path of the Outsiders.
The End was nigh. Even gods had acknowledged that fact and most had thrown themselves onto an altar of despair and quietly died.
Yet mankind, for all its flaws, had never, and would never stop fighting, even against insurmountable odds. Even as Earths burned and gods quietly died, the mortal armies raged and burned against the undying armies of the Outsiders.
A single desperate, last plan given purpose. For the memories of magic and their own powers and soul to be sent across reality. One last hope for the continued survival of all worlds that remained.
A conflux of energy. A promise made in blood.
"This... this, is our last chance." An old man stated.
"We will die. But we die, in hope that others may live."
"Let the ritual begin!"
It all seemed to be going well. It all seemed to be working.
Meanwhile, in an ever-distant future, on a throne built upon the bones of heroes and villains, Khepri, the Queen Administrator smiled while her hands lovingly grasped the skull of a long-dead villain.
She smiled.
Why did she care if reality ended? Why did she care if everything died?
Let the plans of mortals fail. Let the world burn.
She turned to the door, smiling, hearing the silent screams of her servants outside.
The Outsiders had come.
Silently, she ordered the Doormaker to open a portal directly beneath one of the Outsiders.
The latent energy alone should be enough to shatter the ritual.
Even as the Outsiders walked into her room made of bones, she simply laughed.
Even as her doom approached, she continued to laugh.
She laughed, at the doom of worlds.
An Outsider appeared. The magical energy shattered the ritual.
Truly, nothing ever goes as planned.
The Simurgh had always watched for as long as she had existed.
Observing the Earth. Watching humanity's tenacity with a hint of dark humour.
Fools. They were doomed to lose. They would've destroyed themselves even without the Simurgh or Leviathan or Behemoth.
It was, after all, in the nature of mortals, to struggle against the inevitable and lose any-
An old child fighting alongside and fighting against a Golden Man.
The paths leading to the future had crumbled and twisted. The roads she had seen lead were destroyed and wiped from her mind. New ones loaded in, yet they too crumbled away as the Simurgh looked at the paths.
A lake filled with ichor, the blood of the gods. Within it, lied a dead beast that had lived under the sea, that had died in an eternal war.
The paths. They were splitting. They were cracking and they were-
A trail of dead bodies. Covered in masks. At the end of it, two Masked Queens fought against one another, their powers the same yet their ideals eternally different from each other.
The Simurgh managed to create an illusion to hide against mortals before she began to scream.
A cauldron crumbling to pieces. Victory had been denied. The man with a thousand arms was dead. Hope was rekindled, even as a world of mortals found itself crumbling into-
Barely, the Simurgh managed to regain control of his powers.
She shut down the paths. It would leave her blind, but it was better to be blind than to be driven mad by those broken and cracked paths to the future.
What had happened, the Simurgh wondered, to leave the future so unsteady and broken?
The ritual had already failed.
Yet, even from failures, can come victories, even if unintended.
The magical energy, unreleased, had to go somewhere, after all.
Quietly, the clump of half-done memories and broken magic appeared in a graveyard.
The magic within it alone could've matched equally both Fae Courts without the mother. The memories would've given even an archangel pause.
Yet, as Greg made the vow, he unknowingly accepted the burden of that energy.
And Greg screamed as billions of fractured memories and enough magic to make entire worlds burn streamed into his mind.