It would not be accurate to say that Alpha Trion could see the future so much as to say that he, every version of him, had written The Covenant of…of Something so many times that he knew the patterns. He was no god, to see all of what was and what was to be as a single moment outside of time; only an archivist. He saw only what he had written and what he had written before.
So when he wrote Prowl's name centuries before the mech's ember had ignited, he noticed. "How did you get then?" he murmured to himself. A rhetorical question; The Covenant would answer eventually.
When Prowl looked up, through the pages of the Book, and considered the ancient Prime's question, was the next thing he wrote, unexpected words that were definitely in his handwriting, he nearly jumped out of his plating. "It will be called the Darksaber. It doesn't exist yet, but time is immaterial to the resonance of such things," the once-tactician finally answered with clarity now rare to him before walking off the paper and into obscurity.
Shaken, Alpha Trion put down his quill and closed the Book. He needed a drink.
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Notes: This story is set in the same TFPrime Shattered Glass 'verse as Rodeo and Juliet and Cassandra, both of which are part of the Unrelated Livejournal Prompt Responses.
Thanks to rizobact for making me realize this thing probably did have a required reading/watching list, to burkojames for helping my iron out what I'd written into something that was understandable without compromising either the non-linear timeline or requiring a lot of exposition, both burkojames and rizobact for helping me beta this monster, and to 12drakon for the conversation and questions that spawned it in the first place.
And I'd like to thank Neil deGrasse Tyson, for being an atheist who was an inspiration for a story about gods primarily because he is a poet as much as an astrophysicist. Not that I think he'd claim poet status for himself.
Spoilers/Required reading: A working knowledge of the first half of the Exodus novel and of the TFPrime episodes "One Shall Fall", "One Shall Rise" 1-3 and "Alpha / Omega" would probably be very helpful in understanding what's going on.
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Love and Hatred
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"The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all."
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Can you hear the cat within the box; Can you hear electrons moving free
— Crüxhadows, "Love & Hatred"
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This is truth:
Autobots fight because freedom is the right of all sentient beings.
Decepticons fight for peace through tyranny.
To children and gods alike, this truth is too complex for proper perception and so in the rendering of colored lines on paper, in the weaving of fate from stardust, this is the only truth that matters:
The Autobots are good.
The Decepticons are evil.
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This is also truth:
Every decision has consequences.
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In one intersection of space and time, the Council decreed: Orion Pax was to be the next Prime, if he could locate and retrieve the lost Matrix of Leadership. Victory and sadness filled his spark.
Victory because this meant they had won. As Prime he could make his and Megatronus' vision of reality come to pass and do it with far less loss of life than a violent revolution. Sadness because this truly should belong to Megatronus. Orion had no desire for the Primacy, but the Council had made their choice.
He turned, optics still wide and shocked to Megatronus, who shared the council floor with him. "Brother?"
He held out his hand, blunt fingertips curled slightly. He was nervous. He hoped, but in truth he did not know how his friend and companion would react. The Decepticons had been so violent lately. Megatronus had claimed innocence of what others were doing in his name, but had refused to denounce those actions.
His brother turned away.
With that refusal, two mechs who had become brothers unleashed the dogs of war, and bloodshed, the Great War, consumed Cybertron and its wildfires spread to the stars…including one, seemingly insignificant star by the name of Sol, where the Decepticons met their ruin.
Many died. Many lived.
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In another, Orion held out his hand to his brother. He did not know what the gladiator would do, but he hoped. Blunt fingers curled slightly. It was an apology, an offering, a beckoning. "Brother? Please join me?"
And Megatronus, gentle as befits a butterfly's wingbeat, placed his wickedly clawed hand in his brother's.
"Together."
And Convergence came unopposed by hero and villain alike.
…no…
Megatronus placed his hand in Orion's outstretched one. It wasn't the victory he'd wanted, but his brother was right: they needed to preserve lives as well as improve them. The dead had no need for higher wages or caste mobility.
Together, united, they faced the council.
Convergence came unopposed by hero and villain alike.
…this can't happen…
They pulled apart, finally remembering they were in public, ending their hug and looked into each others' optics — blue gazing up into red — elation still coursing through their lines like fine engex. The shape of victory may have been unexpected, but it was victory nonetheless.
Of course there was still the not insignificant detail of finding and retrieving the Matrix, but together Orion Pax and Megatronus could conquer any obstacle.
Convergence came unopposed by hero and villain alike.
…you can't let this happen. You have to stop it. Please!
Together Orion Pax and Megatronus…Convergence came unopposed…
…please…
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It started here:
Doorwings spread wide to catch every minute drift of air in the near total darkness. He tried comming Magnus on the police channel, then again on his private frequencies. Nothing but static. There was just too much metal between himself and the others to get a signal out.
He remembered the car chase. The criminal fleeing after robbing a vital energon storage facility. Built for power and precision first and speed second, his interceptor frame was no match for a race-frame. The criminal's ill-gotten gains, however, had weighed him down enough for Prowl to keep on his tail. Had Prowl been alone, the chase would have been determined by which of them had the biggest fuel tank. But Prowl wasn't alone. His partner, Ultra Magnus and the rest of their unit had cut off the villain's escape route. In the ensuing struggle, Prowl had been knocked off the bridge on which they had cornered him.
Using the light of his optics he searched out the hole he had fallen through.
He was standing inside what once had to have been a building. Here at the base of the canyon into which he had fallen, he must have hit what was normally seen as the ground by Cybertronians hard enough to break through the ceiling. He was lucky the fall hadn't crumpled each and every bit of plating in the front half of his alt form. He was lucky to be alive at all after that plunge.
He should stay where he was. Eventually the Praxus police search and rescue teams would have to dig down to him and pull him out, but curiosity was gnawing at his processor. There were archaeologists, of course, who probed the ruins beneath modern cities for their secrets, but no one, no study he had read, had gone this deep. This find was monumental and he wanted to be the first to really examine it.
Within the building was close enough for S&R to find him, he reasoned and gingerly moved away from the spot upon which he had fallen.
Gold light from his optics illuminated the space. High vaulted arches and fluted columns gleamed back at him, dull with rust and pitted with acid. Shards of colored glass and thin threads of lead glittered from the floor and from the occasional fragment still stuck to the window frames. Blank-faced statues may have once been gold but were now the same grimy black as the rest of the metal. Examining both the statues and the walls revealed that both were cast, rather than constructed as they would have been today, which at least told him how the structure had survived so much time.
It was a temple. It could be nothing else, which made it even more important to archaeology. Cybertron's society had no gods any longer and any evidence of them, buried in their pre-history, was precious. That observation killed the last of his reluctance.
Carefully testing his footing before each step — it wouldn't do for him to fall deeper into Cybertron — he explored. It wasn't long before he found the altar in the next room.
This room had the first sign of light he could see. A purple crystal glowed from within from where it grew out of the altar itself. He watched it, mesmerized, only to jolt awake when it flickered. Gone, then back, still embedded in the altar.
He knew better than to touch it, but he decided to wait here. He settled on the floor for S&R to find him.
Mesmerized by the crystal he didn't notice when he slipped into stasis from lack of energon.
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And (somewhere else) it started here:
The artifact did not, in all the writings that had ever described it, have a name. Sometimes called "The sword" more often it was called only "the artifact". As a sword, if a sword it truly was, it was unsophisticated, even primitive. The crystal from which it was shaped was purple and glowed faintly. How the crystal had been shaped was unknown. It bore no marks from whatever tools had shaped it; it was as though it had been grown into that shape… a shape that no crystal would grow into naturally.
The temple, deep in the netherworld of Cybertron, had stood for all time to hold it, but the pedestal stood empty most of the time. It was here, but not always.
Ultra Magnus ripped the massive doors of the temple reliquary aside. He snarled in rage. Rage was all he was, all he would ever be. And the tiny guardians of the temple, who trembled and shouted before him… they were nothing, absolutely nothing before that rage.
They fought. They fought with energon swords and shock sticks and blasters and acid pellet rifles but the pain was insignificant. They were insignificant. Carelessly he swept them aside.
One went tumbling into the artifact of crystal and metal and light he'd come here for. It fell from its pedestal. A look of calculation crossed his faceplate. The battle, one-sided as it was, raged on.
Ultra Magnus was too much for the guardians to hold back for long. Plans and possibilities clattered together; the only option with any possibility of success — seventy-three percent was not high, but it was the highest — was to run.
So the guardian, in fear and desperation and calculated planning, did what his kind were sworn never to do. He picked up the artifact and prepared to flee…
… And at that moment it disappeared, taking Prowl with it
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Megatronus chose…Convergence came unopposed by hero and villain alike.
Convergence…
This is what the Matrix was for, and if nothing else His chosen bearer had that weapon. Cybertron stayed as it was, hanging inert in space and trusting that the right people had the right tools to take up this battle.
But where another timeline had hardened the Bearer and his enemy both, here they knew only peace.
Cybertron exploded, glittering shards of metal flung outward in all directions. Malevolent eyes looked out from the origin point. Laughter vibrated the surrounding space. Freedom, finally. After eons untold. An epoch ended; a new one begun with the death of his most ancient and persistent enemy. And now he was —
No!
— was — If —
No! This cannot come to pass!
Megatronus chose… Convergence…another possibility, an alternate course of action…
If Cybertron fell to Chaos, the rest of the universe might follow. And quickly. Cybertron made a judgement and weighed against the weight of lives throughout all of space and time, its own favored children were dust. They did not have the strength for this battle. If it could, Cybertron would spare them, but it was too late. Chaos had come to do battle and the Matrix was not going to be enough without a warrior's spark behind it.
Awakening began with earthquakes as Cybertron stretched and doom came to every burning ember.
Tell me! Tell me how I can stop it. Please!
Something stirred. Something deep and unfathomable. Just beyond his perception, the universe tick, tick, ticked away, atoms and galaxies spinning away, dancing to the same rhythm.
A sense of sorrow, of resignation, seeped into his ember like energon leaking from an infected wound. It had not happened yet, but it would.
Prowl lashed his will against that barrier. There had to be a way to affect this battle of gods; he would not tamely accept his own destruction — the destruction of his race, of his world. If only he knew not just what would happen, but how and most importantly how he could stop it…
God is beyond concept.
Prowl was insignificant against the vastness of that barrier. One moment it was like a high-speed alt-mode crash that crumpled his plating and drove his drive shaft into his core, breaching rad containment leaving his ember sputtering; the next moment it was the vast gulf between worlds, so distant, so vast that he would cross the multiverse before he placed so much as a tire tread on the other side.
Something like pity engulfed him, all at once as hot as the core of a star melting his plating away in an instant, metal evaporating in the the ionization of solar winds and as cold as space between galaxies, ice crystalizing in his joints and seeping into his lines, electrons crawling through his wires, slowing, slowing, stopping as it dove towards absolute zero. Pity buoyed him on seeker's wings and buried him in alien silt.
And he saw what the gods saw.
An algorithm. Numbers and signs and an infinite variety of variables spun out like a tapestry of stardust, integers dusted thinly across the empty space where gravity did not quite reign and collapsing into dense clusters of mathematics in the intimate gravitational embrace at the hearts of galaxies. Whatever else became of his ember, a mortal perspective was now forever beyond his reach.
Circuits that did not right now exist burned with the stress of understanding. Of finding, of calculating a way out of the trap free will has woven.
If I look into the mirror, what will I see?
The mirror shows many things. Things that are. Things that were. And some things that have not yet come to pass.
Come. This might be one of them.
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In the aftermath of the Cleansing of Praxus, on the long road back to Iacon, exhausted and and injured and hiding it, Ultra Magnus fell.
At the bottom of a crevasse so deep starlight did not reach the floor, he was found.
Furtively the creature crept up to the inert form. Did it have energon? Could it eat it? It smelled like energon.
It found the wound, dripping thick food/blood onto the ground where it mixed with the oxide dust and was wasted, wasted, wasted.
There was something it should know, something it needed to say or do to this maybe-food-thing but even the harsh violin-shriek of the Other across strings of stardust could not drown out a body's need.
Carefully, it licked the seeping wound, thick with blood-taste and energon (Ours is the lifeblood of gods; why will it take one rejecting the blood of his birth for that of another for that to become significant?). It licked away the food until the wound was clean. Nanites tried crawling across torn wires and broken fluid lines and cracked circuitry and greedy for the energon, the gods' blood, to shore up its own failing physical form it licked them away as well, crunching needed metals between denta.
The food's body held more gods' blood than even Prowl, ravenous as much for the taste of sunlight on the stranger's metal as he was for the life that flowed liquid in his veins, could consume. Once sated, he sat back and allowed the wound to heal. Cleaner than a medic's cleanser flush could make it, it healed quickly.
He recognized the mech who had/would become his partner and helped him catch criminals. The mech who had/would come for the artifact. The mech who had/would kill him/leave him to die/couldn't find him in time. But free of his frame's needs it was so very hard to see beyond the burning knot of the tapestry within his chest. Only the myth-pattern mattered.
The pattern, the shape of myth… the tapestry… the trigonometric factors that defined the shape of fate… the frantic beating of a butterfly's wings against a hurricane of broken prayers…
The pattern was broken, sundered, by his own actions as much as those of the Other, threads cut away in the shape of his own absence from the conflict. Threads he was in no shape to take up. Prime (Not the Prime…Oh, frag… gentle, innocent Orion… what have I done?) needed a tactician, not a soothsayer, if all that must happen was to come to pass.
Mind long broken by mathematics beyond comprehension he did not see coincidence in the body of the Other crumbling beneath Magnus' feet and dumping him here, in Prowl's hunting grounds. To him, as to the Other, coincidence did not exist. So he saw Magnus as the Other saw him, as a dense cluster of mathematical constants. As a thread made of stardust…a thread that would connect Prowl to Prime.
Magnus stirred.
A fight here and now would mean the chance had been lost, the myth would remain beyond repair. A world, the Other in His slumber would die.
Swift and sure as a medic's, Prowl's fingers found the catch sealing the plate that protected the data port at the back of his head and he connected his processor to Magnus'. A lifetime ago he might have been stymied by the firewalls. He was not and had never been a hacker, specialized in breaking down the defenses of another's mind. But Prowl's own processor had been slaved to the Other's. He'd spent eons doing nothing but managing the minutia of running a slumbering body he quite literally did not have the processing speed to comprehend in its entirety. The complex firewall was nothing compared to the programming that triggered the blinking of the Other's own physical optics.
Magnus woke to the violation of another mind within his own. Decepticon was his/their first thought and he/they fought the other as he/they giggled down at his/their captive and effortlessly took every byte of data he/they needed in order to weave the plans that would shape the future. The violin strings of reality vibrated, resonating with each other in time with an Autobot's fear; a dark rage-filled Magnus blurred together with one who preferred incident reports over displays of violence. Then reality snapped back in place, leaving only the berserker behind.
Glass is a liquid, one part of them said to the other, over the course of a geological epoch (in the blink of an eye) it will puddle on the floor, all intended form and function lost, lost, lost even before it shatters and time turns the pieces to sand.
They could feel the plans spinning out from the data they had taken, a gossamer branching web of possibilities.
What do you want? they growled threateningly. Rage swamped them, even as plans continued to weave themselves in another part of their mind, untouched by the emotion.
Pattern. Pattern. Pattern. The Other and the Opposite will awaken and convergence must not come unopposed. Inverse morality is the price of free will and the tears we made must be patched. You/we must stand at Prime's side and I/we will give us the means. The Pattern of Myth…
What pattern? What myth? TELL me!
Being, at this intersection of space and time, them rather than two hims, it was not a conscious decision. One part of them asked; the other part attempted to provide.
Upload begun: File cat_
Running…
Error: Too much data / does not compute
Discontinue upload: cat_
Discontinue: Y/N?
His first thought separate from his quarry's since he had connected was to curse himself for being ten kinds of idiot for not firewalling that away before attempting this. No mortal could perceive the shape of the Other and all He knew. That Prowl had once seen the mathematics of fate was the reason he could not be Prime's tactician and all that was left in the file was the violin-shriek of the Other against Prowl's ember and mind. Most of cat_ was meaningless, corrupted code and much of the rest was the arcane equations of a music no one confined to less than four dimensions could even hear. As gently as he could, Prowl sent Ultra Magnus back to unconsciousness and took control of their shared processor. He needed to fix what his zealousness had started. It wouldn't do to break the poor dear. He had broken them all enough already.
Y.
Upload ceased. File cat_ corrupted.
Delete file: Y/N?
Y.
File deleted.
Error persists. Overwrite memory: Y/N?
Y.
Overwrite begun…
Magnus would — could — not remember this.
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Magnus woke for a second time in the dark. He looked around for the mech he'd found connected to the ancient tactical computer. The Praxan was there, laying on the ground, wires still connecting his helm to the ancient computer.
He hadn't quite known what he was doing — couldn't tell himself why he'd done it — but when he'd found the old computer he'd used it to secretly go over his superior's battle plans in the aftermath of yet another defeat to the Decepticons. This time, he hadn't been alone.
This… this creature was a treasure.
This — Prowl was what these tactical computers were designed to assist, and now he had the real thing. All Autobots carried the basics for securing a prisoner. He did not want his prize wriggling in his cargo hold, so he set the cuffs to their highest immobilization — and pain — setting and pulled the chains tight around a primer-grey chassis. Secured, he swiftly he gathered the mech in his arms and loaded him into his cargo hold.
Autobots did not rescue captured and lost warriors. They especially did not go back to retrieve low-ranked berserkers, but one of the gems he had ripped from the darkness dweller's on-board tactical suite was a map of the tunnels and crevasses and ruins and canyons and seams. Labeled with nonsense poetry — "Behold! If thee cannot comprehend the shape of what thou sees, how canst thou hope to comprehend the mind behind the shape? — or pure nonsense — "Here there be predacons" — or even the true gibberish of corrupted code, nevertheless it would prove its worth if it got them to Iacon.
(At least he hoped the purple circle on the surface labeled "the threshold between reality and myth" was the edge of Iacon's great dome; the map did not actually contain any, more distinguishable surface landmarks.)
The creature slept and babbled disturbing sentences of meaningless words and laughed at things only he could see in turns all the way back to the capital. The glittering dome provided no protection to the city this deep below the surface. Only the obscurity of the paths through this labyrinth kept Decepticon spies out. He'd have to mention that during his debriefing — during which he would also have to be careful not to mention his treasure.
He left the crazy Praxan chained up and hidden in the darkness beneath Prime's palace.
When he returned a few orns later with a ration of energon, the chains were empty but Prowl was waiting.
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It started here:
Blood of two gods running through a future avatar's veins, something that was perhaps foolish was done. He stripped himself of his identity and stole that of another, an avatar of god, then used one relic to forge another from the blood of a different god. And when this weapon of perfect destruction was completed, he sundered the greatest weapon yet known to his race. He anointed it in the blood of his greatest enemy.
And he died with it in his hand.
When it was done, and why, does not matter. Such a powerful calling creates ripples. Resonance, that cascades along a timeline in every possible direction. And, as befits a thing of Chaos, in the wake of those ripples… worlds can be reshaped. Monsters can evolve. Names can be lost. Or a single person can end up where and when he was never meant to be.
Perhaps all of the above.
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Is it worth it?
Yes.
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This is Truth:
To children, such a minor thing as the impending doom of a universe does not assail that defining essence of their play: Autobots are good; Decepticons are evil.
To gods, faced with their own mortality such rules are fluid and under an onslaught of the sort of will a god can bring to bear... and with the aid of a mortal prayer and a touch of chaos... truths change.
Autobots are evil.
Decepticons are good.
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And this time, when Megatronus, trusting in Orion's good intentions, placed his claws in his brother's outstretched hand, malice gleamed in the future-Prime's optics.
Everything changed.
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End…?