The next thirty years were both the longest and the shortest of Alcor's life.

Long because each minute felt like an eternity when spent without friends, without family, without anybody but the handful of people who stumbled into Bill's summoning circle. Long because when he did get to interact with his loved ones, it was to do terrible things to them, and he knew just how those actions would ruin their lives, had seen it all play out before from the other side. Long because there was nothing left for him to do but act as fate's puppet, left waiting in the wings in between acts.

Short because Alcor knew what awaited him at the end of those thirty years, knew down to the minute when the show would come to an end. Though he'd lived far longer than he would have without the Transcendence, longer than any human was meant to live, when the certainty of death lingered over him, it suddenly felt like not nearly enough, like it had passed in the blink of an eye. A world of possibilities out there, and he would never get to do more than scratch the surface. After agonizing years spent having to come to terms with his own immortality, now he faced a reminder that he was not so invincible after all.

Eventually, of course, the thirty years ran out, and the day that he so feared came to pass. The day of the Transcendence. The day which was forever seared into his mind, every detail preserved as if it had happened only yesterday. The day in which past and future fought, in which one would emerge forever transformed, and the other not emerging at all.

Alcor knew how this played out, knew everything he had to do, but that didn't make it any easier to nearly destroy the world, nearly destroy his family, nearly destroy himself.

One of the last things that Alcor saw before entering his mental battle with young Dipper was Mabel- his Mizar, his Twin Star, his sister- looking at him with utter hatred in her eyes.

But he didn't have much time to dwell on that before the fight began.

He was supposed to lose. He needed to lose. It was his time, he knew that.

But parts of Alcor's mind weren't willing to just roll over and accept that.

Part of Alcor wanted to rebel against his fate, wanted to survive no matter what the cost, didn't care if the world fell to pieces around him as long as he was there to watch it burn-

Part of Alcor just wanted to give some signal to the outside world before he died, let somebody know what had happened, that he wasn't the evil mastermind that they all saw him as, to replace the hatred in his sister's eyes with understanding and pity, and that was such a small change in the grand scheme of things, that couldn't hurt anything that badly right-

He wanted to live it couldn't end like this he wasn't ready-

But the part of him that accepted his fate, that fought the instinctual urge for survival that pervaded his being, was enough to make it all come crashing down.

Alcor's last thoughts were a jumbled mixture of denial and anger and sorrow and acceptance, all the stages of grief mixed together and muddled until finally coalescing into a single sentence:

So this is it.

And then it was all over.

Death, Alcor found out, wasn't as painful as he had feared, not nearly as much as what had preceded it.

The story proceeded as it always had, as it always would.

The world kept turning.

Tales of Bill Cipher were replaced with tales of Alcor the Dreambender were replaced with tales of other demons, other monsters.

The holes in the fabric of reality quietly, unceremoniously stitched themselves back together.

And over the course of thousands of years, a soul divided unlike any other- victim and villain, man and demon, killer and killed- pieced itself back together.