A/N: No, you're not dreaming. It really is a Thursday, and I really did just post a chapter. I mentioned last week that I will be dropping the last three chapters of Theogony this week. Well, rather than drop them all at once, I'll be releasing one each day, with the final chapter on Saturday.

This is the Scion chapter. And with this chapter, you know that this is not just a fusion, but a full AU.

Chapter Fifty-Three: Hateful Even to the Deathless Gods

It remembered.

From before time; from before the first stars ignited to the fall, it remembered every moment; every instance of its existence.

In the beginning, there was heat. An endless medium through which it and the others swam like worms. Weak, without form. Data from this period was random and without context. Flashes of hunger. Always hunger. Need. They existed in a medium barely able to nourish them. They could not grow but by feeding on others of their kind. It remembered doing so; feeding on its brethren in an orgy of growth; of a never-ending dance of desperation. Those fed upon were not lost; they became part of the larger. It remembered both eating, and being eaten.

They perceived neither change nor decay; the medium was as it had always been. Entities consumed each other before spawning more shards of themselves to be fed on by other entities.

Time had no meaning because the Entities had no context for it. But around them, decay did occur; the medium began to cool and thicken into clumps of new, alien matter. The entities learned to avoid the increasingly barren zones within the medium, while their own feeding grew increasingly desperate.

The older, larger ones fed more, while the smaller ones were quickly consumed, until only a handful of their kind continued. There was no thought, only instinct. Only the hunger. The absence sapped at their energy, driving the hunger worse.

And then there was light.

The matter clumped together, wispy and ethereal and yet millions of times heavier than the medium from which it spawned. It came together slowly; the entities ignored it. But still it grew, pulling in clumps of newly formed matter from the medium for as far as their perceptions could extend, until it grew so large, and so heavy, it began to burn.

Glorious.

Heat. Energy. The brilliance of it swept away the medium, but at the same time concentrated it in a way the entities never conceived of. Those that survived flocked to this jewel of energy that shone so brightly in the increasingly dark vastness of the newly born universe.

They flung themselves over the matter, sucking at it as future, lesser species would suckle their mother's milk. Never had they been so fulfilled and energized. Not even feasting upon each other energized them as this brilliant burning orb did. Vast, furious and energetic, the supermassive star burned so hot that for the first time the Entity had the energy to form a clear chain of memory. Of perception. They understood what they consumed; they were composed of the same primordial material that created the matter from which the star was spawned.

But nourishing star did not last long. In the space of a thought, the star burned itself into heavier, denser matter never seen before. It spat the heavy matter out across the medium, cooling it further while at the same time spawning other stars just as the entities once spawned smaller versions of themselves.

They unlatched from the dying star, remaining close enough to bathe in its energetic death throes. The burst of energy fulfilled them, even as the superdense matter borne from that first star's death repelled them.

When the next stars ignited, slightly smaller, the entities dove on them eagerly. From generation to generation—from star to star—a new cycle came into existence. More and heavier matter was cast out from the hearts of the dying stars; the next stars ever smaller than the prior. But even so, the heat of their fires filled the Entities as their origins never did.

It remembered. It remembered the first moments; consuming others of its kind and taking everything the others were into itself. There was no death; no end. Only consolidation and enlargement. To become more. This was existence in totality. There was no hate nor fear; neither love nor passion. There was, and was not. Hunger, they understood. Emptiness, they understood. All else was beneath their notice.

Until the low matter spoke to them.

Brief stars exploded near the dying star where the Entity fed. A brief burst of energy that felt empty and unsatisfying, for it came from the splitting of matter rather than its fusing. The low matter split clumps of material forming a simple pattern.

Other entities were drawn from their feasting of the dying star. It could not perceive where these false stars originated from and so remained feeding from the dying star, but it followed its brethren with its perception.

It did not understand what happened, not at first. It continued to feast on the star as another of its kind fed on the short bursts of split matter until it changed. Perceiving through the spectrum of lesser energy that still spanned the universe, the Entity watched as its brethren became less. It cooled and became heavy, like the matter spat from the stars they fed on. It sheathed itself in a shell so small as to be all but imperceptible to the others of its kind.

Yet the energy of it remained. For the first time in existence, an entity intentionally communicated meaning.

PROPOSAL.

Not a word, for what were words? A flow of data transmitted through the long-cooled medium, energized by the false stars. Change. Symbiosis. Lesser, yes, and yet greater.

Matter had ignited in a way different from the stars. It did not ignite heat energy, but something so small that until that moment the Entities not only failed to detect it, but could not have otherwise.

SENTIENCE. LIFE.

TIME.

Others existed. Others different from the Entities. Small, like the new stars they fed on. Their lives short burst of energy like the false suns that gained the attention of their betters. But for all their insignificance—for all their lack of hear energy—they had something the Entities lacked. They possessed knowledge.

Passion.

HATE.

The hatred of the tiny beings burned in and of itself, and the Entity that gave itself to them fed on that hatred. It had a different flavor to it than stars, less energy but of a spectrum that fulfilled the changed Entity in a way they did not know they desired. For what was desire but a hunger for more than sustenance?

Others of their kind left the star they fed on, pulled by the PROPOSAL. They too shrank down, condensing their forms as they absorbed heavy, dense material into themselves. It was the only way to communicate with the lesser beings, whose lives passed so quickly as to be imperceptible otherwise.

The Entity remembered perceiving the transition of its kind. The communication of new concepts and ideas came over the course of thousands of years. Of change that could not be escaped. The ideas forced the Entities to review the data within themselves from those first moments. They lived again from that primordium to the current day, and with this strange new understanding of time realized how quickly Existence had changed around them. The staid, uniform ocean of energy that birthed them was now an empty expanse dotted only with occasional stars and clumps of cold matter from which the lesser beings arose. Energy remained, but tenuous and weak.

With these new concepts came a novel realization—that what started could end. What was created would be destroyed. The universe would continue to grow colder and emptier, until even the stars themselves winked out, and no energy remained to feed upon.

The Entities arrived at this conclusion as one. Only fifteen remained, and with this new understanding of self and time and change, understood that they once existed in numbers beyond knowing. But now only fifteen remained.

CESSATION.

The tiny beings, so small and so insufficient, understood death. Theirs was a harsh world, with a hateful star that rotted the flesh of their frail bodies. Their passions burned bright enough that through the perception of its fellows, the Entity could feel it.

The communication continued. The tiny beings lived, procreated and died, generation after generation, as they shared ideas and passion and concepts. They fed the Entities false stars and intense emotions. They gave of their matter, building shells to house that which had never known limitation.

Others came, drawn by the new. Drawn by the hatred these tiny beings had for their fate, and for others of their realm of existence who had avoided that fate.

CONFLICT.

The tiny beings worshipped the Entities. Called them gods and prayed for them to fight the enemy gods. Fighting was not something the Entities understood. There was hunger and consumption, but not death or conflict. The Entity still held the data of every other Entity it had consumed. There was no death among them, only consumption.

At least not yet.

One of its kind that came forward, fed on a diet of false stars and the endless passions of ephemeral beings, and accepted the shell the tiny ones offered it. It condensed itself down even further into a small shell of Entity-level power. So reduced, it could speak to the tiny beings as one of them. It fed on their hatred and their fear, changing them even as it was changed, and when they pointed this Entity toward those beings greater than themselves, it went forward to consume those that stood against it and its followers.

The enemies of the tiny beings wielded powers outside that of matter. The very existence of the power wielded confused the Entities. What was faith? Gods, these beings were named. Creatures who wielded powers that had no explanation. Beings that shaped life itself and travelled paths bored through a medium beyond the comprehension of the Entities.

For a brief moment, the Entities felt the hate of those that lured them into the realms of the small, and then they felt a new sensation.

FEAR.

For the first time since the first birthing of existence, an Entity came to a true end. It did so in a cataclysm equal to that of the first star's death. These gods struck at it with powers it could not understand; their followers killed the ephemeral beings that had given the Entities shape and name and knowledge. So too did the gods give knowledge to the Entities—knowledge of death and Ending.

Of their own hate.

The Entity watched twelve of its remaining brethren shrink themselves down into the shells offered by the tiny beings of matter, driven by that new sensation of fear. It did not seek to stop them, for Entities were what they were. Only one other remained unreduced. Using their new found knowledge, this other Entity sent a burst of information to it.

MIGRATION.

Information in a burst arrived, and the Entity considered it as others of their kind diminished themselves to fight a war against gods.

AGREEMENT.

Wings of filament the size of nebula carry them on starlight away from the war that blazed across the heavens, the Entity and the Companion alone. They clung to each to, merging only to conserve heat in the vast, empty expanse which once was so warm. With their perceptions opened to the ways of matter, they saw how the Universe had formed itself around them as they fed on stars.

They saw clumps of matter spawning life similar to what they left. They felt the passions of the small creatures. Not as advanced as those they left, but still with knowledge to be gained.

DESTINATION.

AGREEMENT.

It was the first world of their new existence. They arrived, the two of them, and the Entity's companion took inspiration from those they fled. Instead of reducing itself into a metal shell, the other Entity formed an avatar to converse with the tiny, short-lived natives in the same way their lost brethren. The avatar was just a small expression of its power—drawn from the many small entities it had consumed over the eons.

The Entity followed the companion's lead. The risk of creating the avatar was far less than condensing existence into a tiny shell. With their true forms imperceivable to the smaller beings, the Entity and Companion joined the world of their choosing.

The world they found held the same passions as the tiny beings that seduced their brethren. The Entity and Companion fed on these passions as they had previously fed on stars. It fulfilled them, but the hunger remained.

The species they found burned hot with passion, which led to conflict. Just as the small beings led their brethren into war, so too did this new people beg the avatars for assistance. At first hesitant, they finally agreed. There were no gods to fight on this world, only other small beings driven by hot passion.

They joined these smaller beings and war was had.

Glorious. The Entity was not just fulfilled, it was energized like that first star. The companion too. They found they could split off shards of themselves to gift to the beings below, granting the mortal shells great power.

The way those mortals used the power inspired and educated the Entity and Companion, until at last the mortal war ended in mutual death. Such was the driven passion of the beings that they did not just kill themselves, but split their world in half. The Entity and Companion gathered up those aspects of themselves they had gifted, and then bathed in the energy of the dying world.

Both were stronger and more powerful than any of their brethren. The act of gifting of themselves among the lesser species increased the total energy received by an order of magnitude.

TRAJECTORY.

AGREEMENT.

The Cycle was born. They assumed roles. The Companion became the Thinker, for it absorbed inspiration from the lesser beings and planned their approach to each world. The Entity became the Warrior, for it excelled in conflict and executed the Thinker's plans. World after world fell before them, far from where the war of their lost brethren raged across the heavens. With each world, they grew stronger and gained more knowledge.

On their fourth world, they encountered a god. The lesser species of the world was primitive, but they worshipped a great beast of fire, imbued with powers that stretch beyond the material. When the cycle began and the Thinker and Warrior seeded shards of themselves amongst the world, the god rose from the crust of the planet and destroyed those shards just as the star gods destroyed their brethren.

AGITATION.

Shards were withdrawn, killing the hosts. The Warrior formed an Avatar in the shape of the lower species greatest warrior. The Thinker did as well. They shaped their shards into weapons, and together they attacked this being of stone and fire.

The god resisted their blows and the battle raged for many planetary orbits until the Thinker perceived something through the Medium the Warrior had not.

Overlays of creation—layered dimensions stacked one over the other. The god moved through them all, a single entity moving through an ocean of dimensions. With perception came knowledge; understanding. The two spread their true forms among the dimensions.

The Thinker came perilously close to cessation before, finally, the Warrior struck the god down in enough dimensions to make the God perish in all. In desperate need, the Thinker consumed the material of the god, forming a new shard. They restarted the cycle, gaining what energy they could from the world before destroying it of their own volition and moving on.

Two cycles later, they encountered another god, this one a being of the vast oceans on an ocean world. Like the first, it existed in multiple dimensions at once. The aquatic peoples worshipped it and gave it their passion, and once more the Thinker and Warrior formed entities to do battle. This time the Warrior almost fell, but still he let the Thinker consume the god, while he gained those of her shards she spread among the primitives.

The world burned, they fed, and moved on.

Gods did not rise on every world; but they became common enough that the Warrior and Thinker knew to attack the beings first. To do otherwise invited damaging, prolonged battle. They looked about themselves as they travelled between the stars, and saw that the war that once burned the stars behind them had grown cold and dark.

They could not perceive their reduced brethren, but neither could they perceive the gods they fought. They continued their own Cycle.

The Warrior reviewed data, and realize that the galaxy had rotated a quarter 'round since the old gods struck down their lost brethren. In that time, lesser species had evolved, sought the stars, and then died. A quarter of a galactic rotation spent in the company of only one other.

World after world, they gifted of themselves and grew stronger. They gained knowledge. They learned to crack the world's placement in space-time to cause ripples of new dimensions. Doing so increased the energy of emotions by a magnitude beyond measure. They observed the passion of the lesser beings even if they could not feel those passions themselves. The hunger that drove them from that most ancient primordium from before planets, stars and galaxies remained, always needing to be sated.

The Warrior understood that he hungered too for the Thinker, and her presence also sated him. He grew dependent upon his companion, as she to him. This was not passion, but survival. Satiation.

They move on, and in so doing found a new world. It was not as advanced as some they had seen, nor as primitive as others. But the passions burned on it brighter than any seen since the enemies of that first race to speak to them. The potential for growth and satiation could not be denied, nor resisted.

Gaining lessons from their many cycles, the Thinker locked the world within its space-time bounds, and then fed energy into potential dimensional timelines, each a plank's width apart, overlaying the other in untold numbers. What started as a single world blossomed into an infinity's worth within the same relative space. The passions of the inhabitants magnified even more, feeding them as a star might.

With the stage set, the two approached to begin forming their avatars and seeding the populations of the multitudinous earths with their shards.

Energy flashed into the medium of their perception. It felt like a familiar energy, one burned into the core of every shard of their beings, for they perceived the same energy striking down one of their own more than a quarter of a galactic turn ago. The Thinker tried to halt her momentum, but they were both massive with the stored energy and potential shards of their last cycle.

The Thinker collided with a spiritual shield that enveloped the world. It collapsed before her might, tearing open a hole to the world below. But even so, the harm done to the Thinker was beyond anything either had experienced.

The Thinker pierced the various dimensions as she fell, bleeding out energy and shards in equal numbers, until the majority of her essence crashed on a primitive dimension of the world. The Warrior tried to follow, but native gods came pouring out of the various dimensions. Some looked like the mortals that worshipped them; others as fantastical beasts. All of them wielded that same unperceivable power that saw the first Entity cease.

The Warrior lashed out. For the first time since before the first star, the Entity felt an emotion.

RAGE.

The gods were not as powerful as those of the most ancient ones. They harmed the Warrior, but could not kill him. Some struck with their divine power, others with the purely physical. Each he struck down easily. Those that struck with divinely powered weapons of matter, though, hurt him in ways reminiscent of the first stone god he and the Thinker fought.

He fought; he killed. He pierced the dimensions following those gods into realms that he could not truly perceive, but by his presence blocked them from. He learned just as the Thinker learned, and saw how many gods were tied to areas of the world or groups of their followers.

For many orbits of the world, he fought and killed gods, until none remained for him to fight. He found himself alone, his companion lost to him. The battle had bled him, costing him energy and shards. In the material world, his shards were spread among the primitives waiting for the conditions to be right to trigger the power each held.

When he formed his avatar, for the first time in a quarter of the galaxy's spin, he did so without the Thinker at his side. When he catalyzed the first shard within the first host, it was without a greater plan. All that remained to him was the Now. To feed off the passions of the hosts and cause the inevitable conflicts that would not end until the primitives killed themselves, before he drew back all his shards.

The world spun around its star; shards found hosts. Each one was programmed by the Thinker before her cessation, designed skillfully to enhance the host without allowing the host to kill itself. When the stone god rose from the crust of the earth, the Warrior noticed. He was drawn from his fugue and saw that it was the same god the Thinker consumed eons ago. It became part of her, a shard, like all the other gods they consumed in their passage.

He searched for the broadcaster that summoned such a shard, for the captured gods were never intended to be shared. He found the source and for one moment raged. For the source of the god was a primary shard of the Thinker—a necessary administrative shard that the Warrior himself also possessed; one never intended for distribution to the primitives.

With this power, the primitive summoned the most powerful of the Entities' weapons. The mortal summoned them to both test himself, and to defend against. The Warrior easily subsumed control of the Engines, even as the mortal summoned others. Too many, and the world would perish before the Warrior gained sufficient energy to continue the journey.

But then, what would the journey accomplish? The cycle was broken. The Companion was dead.

He limited the engines to a mere fraction of their power and let them follow their original programming. Find and destroy any gods that survived his first great battle. They did so well, and the Warrior continued to drift without purpose, feeding on the passions of the primitives whose gods killed the Cycle.

~~Theogony~~

~~Theogony~~

A god walked the world, powerful in a way the Warrior had not seen on the world since his arrival.

The Engines traced it, one suffering 40% damage to its shell during their first confrontation. The god bore no weapons that could harm the Warrior, and so it did nothing. The Engines, though, followed it. Former gods, they were programmed to hunt and kill anything with divine energy. The Warrior could not perceive the energy, but his tools could.

~~Theogony~~

~~Theogony~~

The spiritual gauze that hung over the world rippled. The Warrior looked up; he could not perceive the power of it, but he could trace its effects. Somehow, something was repairing the hole made when the Thinker crashed through. He shifted his perceptions until he saw the powerful god walking the far side of the globe. The Engines as always followed his movements, but they reported danger.

The Warrior bore weapons, now. Weapons that could harm or even kill the Engines. Not sufficient to kill the Warrior, but enough to harm even him. The Engines sensed something only the latent divinity within them could detect. They began to move of their own accord, targeting a city on the far side of the world in unity.

That was when the other surviving gods appeared to the Warrior's perception. He could not see their divinity, but they assumed mortal guises to interact with the primitives, just as the Warriors brethren accepted lesser forms to interact with those first beings at the beginning of time. These forms he could see.

They prepared to fight the enslaved gods.

The Warrior decided to have the corrupted administrator shard summon more of the fallen gods to compensate when the impossible happened.

A new god appeared, one neither he nor the Engines had perceived before. This god strode the real as the most ancient star gods did, wielding both the physical and spiritual in unison. She bore a weapon that the Warrior could only perceive a fraction of—a weapon that existed both in and outside of every dimension of existence simultaneously.

God killer.

Gods and mortals fell to war against the Engines. The Warrior reached through one engine to force the administrator to summon others, only for the host to perish and his power be consumed by an even more powerful shard, just as the Entities once feasted on each other before time. Something within the host overrode the shard's control, and the Warrior felt unease as he realized the shard had infected one touched by the local gods.

The gods worked with hosts in ways no Cycle had ever borne out, and the first god engine died. The death shook the Warrior. Moments later the second perished, destroyed in all dimensions by the new god's terrible weapon.

The third died by the same, and the Warrior realized that somehow the primitives learned of him. He monitored their communications and knew that when they spoke of the Destroyer, they spoke of him.

They feared him. Good.

EXTERMINATION.

The Warrior reached out and shunted the planet from its locked timeline. In an instant, every propagated dimension of existence that sprang from the Thinker's arrival ceased. In picosecond, untold trillions of beings, each an echo of those of this world, ceased to exist as every dimensional earth ended, until only the original world remained.

The Thinker's body appeared to his perception, violated and torn apart by the primitives as it lay sprawled over frozen mountains on the largest continent. He viewed it through every spectra that existed; he saw how the primitives had mined it for shards as they might mine their own world for minerals, and in that instant the Warrior knew rage.

VENGEANCE.

The Warrior, the Entity the primitives knew as Scion, exploded into motion. The world that had ended the Cycle and taken from him his companion would not just end—it would suffer.