Altered States
(Disclaimer: I own none of these characters)
Prelude: The Black Oasis-
Before the age of heroes and villains, monitors and anti-monitors, dark multiverses and gods, there was the spark. The spark of potential that birthed the sea of possibility, and from this all else flowed. Soon the siblings tasked with overlooking creation were joined by their next of kin, from whom the future was wrought. He made his home in the very essence of things yet begun, and drew inspiration from all that is. Working tirelessly, he perpetually sought to hone his craft making better and grander worlds, more complex and intricate universes, and richer forms of life. Hopes and dreams made for grand creations, and fears and nightmares created turbulent miasmas of instability. And in the seemingly infinite upheaval of evolution, both terrene and cosmic, there were eons populated with nightmares bred from the growing pains of creatures in the march of progress. Existence is too fragile a thing to allow for any one force to mitigate completely, and as instability bled into The Forger's works, soon he found himself sorely in need of a means to balance the duality. The dragon Barbatos was knit together to fulfill this purpose.
He was the sickle in the hand of the reaper of existence. Together, The Forger and The Dragon worked in tandem, seeing to the quality of all that was to be. Countless multitudes of failed realities were incinerated or consumed at the hands of the great leviathan, as the great metaphysical cycle spun on and on, like a stage play with no audience conjured for the amusement of no one but its composer. As this push to quell the overt negativity at play in his tapestry of actuality was under way, The Forger was hard at work repurposing the sum total of the hopes birthed by his hand into more and more substantiality. Like the returns on an investment, he flowed a river of potential into so many beautiful layers of existence, each an improvement on the last. He constantly worked to see the energies of every living thing used to one end or another, working with a sense of pride but not without a desire of his own in play: all these many levels, much like pages in a sketchbook, were all as prototypes. Each one was a step closer to some as-yet undefined masterwork The Forger had conceived yet not fully visualized, for even possibility made manifest was not without a dream of its own.
In the forge of worlds, time was a known yet essentially meaningless dimension. Things passed as they needed to, when they needed to, and not before. But after an allotment of millennia nearly unfathomable to a human mind had come and gone, The Forger had become skilled beyond measure at his monumental craft. His celestial progenies now ranging more consistently on the side of viability, he gave into his creative impulse more and more with each dimensional plane he willed into being. Greater lifeforms aimed at better purposes where more and more commonplace, as the hopes and fears of the multitudes they protected and terrorized fed the fires of the world forge to build the next of The Forger's works, with the notion of a crescendo just out of his reach.
In all this swirl of fabrication, it seemed to go unnoticed that The Dragon had developed proficiency for his job that more adequately could be described as obsession. He lived only to consume and to destroy. The notion of homeostasis and duty to his actions was lost on him. None of that mattered, so long as there was a universe to devour and fears to feed on. Soon, he recognized this will to decimate, and he recognized the greatest impediment to the most bountiful prize of all, in his master. All that separated Barbatos from the stable multiverse, alive with so many points of conduction and possibility, was The Forger. More and more, the wheels of betrayal moved The Dragon to enact an insidious plot he had concocted to clear his path to finally gorge himself to his own contentment on the only thing that made sense in his mind: destruction. This was now his sole motivation to keep up the masquerade of duty, for now to say he was obsessed with destruction was inaccurate; Barbatos was addicted to it.
After finally constructing a universe ripe for imitation, The Forger began his labor of love. Tucking it deep in the sea of possibility, he shaped this passion project in pure potential. Setting it right with the greatest heroes ever imagined readily willing to see to its defense, he reconstituted a bent line of actions and effects from the players acting out in the stable plane of existence. This mirror would serve to twist things as he would have them be, to see what a maximized set of variables might render. This stage he had set was for him alone, to serve as his magnum opus.
Sadly, The Forger would never get to see his hope realized. He was struck down by the very being closest to him in his eternal balancing act. Now there was nothing in The Dragon's way to stop his insatiable appetite for ruination. He became overtaken by his aspiration so much so that he neglected his intended purpose to the point that a whole dark multiverse was realized from the presence of the universes he was tasked with initially destroying. But even in this perpetual darkness, the final creative endeavor The Forger managed before his demise remained safely out of the sphere of The Dragon's knowledge. Left seemingly forever to its own devices, protected merely with divine deception and the ignorance of the damned. Beyond the endless night, wrapped in a blanket of hope from a dying god's last wish, deep in the sea of possibility as if it were an island lies The Black Oasis.
It is here that a connection was forged, between 2 people unlike any their reality had seen before. And while doppelgangers for them existed throughout hyper-time, it was here on this tenebrous sanctum, this sinuous reflection, which they found something very few of their many facsimiles had.