A/N: And here we are again, ladies and gentlemen, back with another chapter... and one of the last few.

I hope you enjoy reading this one, folks, because I had the time of my life writing it: I'm still jittering from adrenaline even as we speak.

Of course, I should warn you all that this episode is going to be pretty talky, so to make sure the main points aren't lost, I've broken it up a bit for the sake of clarity.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter! Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls is still not mine, and that big closing credits sequence of all the references I made will be coming soon...

"First of all, this may sound a little far-fetched, but this isn't the first time we've met."

Dipper's brow wrinkled. "No offence, but I think I'd remember meeting a giant floating salamander," he remarked sceptically.

"True," conceded Axolotl. "But for your safety and the safety of this universe, reality was adjusted accordingly: officially, our conversation never happened." He sighed heavily. "But it's not as if it matters much anymore, is it? So perhaps you recall it now… Sixty degrees that come in trees-"

"Watches from within birch trees," Dipper finished, on instinct. "Wait, how do I know that?"

But Axolotl wasn't done reciting: "Saw his own dimension burn-"

"Wishes home and can't return," said Mabel, and then blinked in astonishment. "What are we talking about now?"

Dipper wanted to answer her, but his mouth seemed to be acting of its own accord all of a sudden, the words of the poem seemingly uttering themselves through his lips. "Says he's happy, he's a liar…"

"Blame the arson for the fire," Mabel replied.

"If he wants to shirk the blame…"

"He'll have to invoke my name."

"One way to absolve his crime…"

"A different form, a different time."

"And that," concluded Axolotl, "was my answer to your question: who is Bill Cipher? At the time, it was just another oracular riddle, standard procedure for any cryptic interdimensional source of knowledge… but unfortunately, it turned out to be a little less accurate than any of us would have liked."

Mabel looked from the cowering form of Bill to Axolotl in utter bewilderment. "Back the crazy train up just a minute: all that stuff about seeing dimensions burning or whatever, that was about Bill? He's the guy who's supposed to be lying about being happy and missing home? He watched his dimension burn?"

"More than watched it," said Grunkle Ford. "He made it happen. Flat minds, flat dreams, all liberated in fire and agony and a great tide of nightmares. All that remained was Bill, fleeing into the void of eternity."

Axolotl bowed his head in agreement. "That was when I met him the first time, over a trillion years in the past: I had sensed the collapse of his dimension, heard the dying screams of the world he had sundered echoing across the multiverse. I knew at once that with the power he'd mastered, he was a potential threat to all realities, even though he'd been reduced to a bodiless essence by his world's final cataclysm. So, I pursued him – either to arrest him or to eliminate him; unfortunately, Bill learned to traverse the void a lot quicker than I expected, and escaped into the Nightmare Realm, where I was forbidden to follow. I could only give him a chance to surrender himself and an offer for amnesty. To shirk the blame, he would have to invoke my name."

He paused, and allowed his audience to digest this. "And in other multiverses, the same pattern was repeated…"

"Other multiverses?!"

"Reality is vaster than many can imagine, Dipper, an unending matryoshka of dimensional nexuses. There are other multiverses, and in many of them, another Bill Cipher arose from the ruins of the Second Dimension, another me tried to capture him, and our chase ended with him seeking shelter in another Nightmare Realm. Eons passed, and countless Bill Ciphers set out to make their dreams of Weirdmageddon a reality: this is not the first time the Oddpocalypse has happened, you see, and though a thousand possible beginnings exist across the dimensions, the ending… well, I believe Ford has already told you something of the ending."

"You mean… all that stuff about Bill getting erased with the memory gun and Gravity Falls going back to normal? That actually happened – it wasn't just a possible future?"

"All futures are possible in the multiverse."

Grunkle Stan let out an exasperated groan. "Look, would you cut the fortune-cookie crap and just give us a straight answer, please? Did it happen or not?"

The permanent smile on Axolotl's face looked ever-so-slightly amused. "More than once, yes," he replied. "In countless other universes, Stanley Pines was able to fool Bill Cipher into entering his mind by posing as Ford, baiting him into a trap with the knowledge of how to escape Gravity Falls. Once Bill was locked inside, Ford used the memory gun to erase him from existence. Without Bill to maintain the Rift, the merger between the Nightmare Realm and physical reality collapsed, undoing his kingdom and bringing an end to Weirdmageddon before it truly began. In realities beyond counting, the zodiac achieved this victory… but in all of them, Bill made one last roll of the dice before he died."

"You mean-"

"At the moment of his demise, as the flames of the memory gun erased him from existence, Bill invoked my name. He had refused my first offer, but when the time came, he remembered the incantation: A-X-O-L-O-T-L! My time has come to burn, I invoke the ancient power that I may return!"

"You gave him another chance?" Wendy exploded. "After everything he did, you gave him another chance? Every version of you gave him another chance? I…" Her eyes flashed red and black, shark-like teeth flickering in and out of view around her gritted jaws. "How could you give him that," she demanded, "after all the lives he ruined? And we're not even talking about the version of Bill that did all this! How can you call that fair?"

Axolotl gave her a pitying look. "It's not fair at all," he said gently. "But it's the law. I am bound by rules, unbreakable magical contracts that ensure I do not stray from my appointed duties: I am a protector of life and order in the multiverse, and I must intervene when those outside the natural order threaten the lives of others… but I am also bound to offer amnesty to those who ask for it."

"And you couldn't have just let him get what he deserved? I mean, couldn't one of you have just ignored the rules just once?"

"It doesn't work that way, Wendy. Besides, the bargain is for those who accept that they have done wrong and are willing to reform; those who can't abide by those terms are weeded out very quickly and annihilated from reality. That is the truth of the riddle I gave Dipper and Mabel: invoking my name is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but a confession of guilt. Those who perform the invocation will be allowed to begin their lives again in another world in a new form, but with the understanding that they must repent and make amends for their past crimes.

"And you know what? It worked. Across the multiverse of multiverses, Bill accepted a chance to redeem himself and – once he was over the humiliation of restarting his life – embraced it with all his heart: in worlds beyond counting, Bill Cipher's iterations live happy, productive lives, fully redeemed in the company of new family and friends. Most don't even go by the name Bill Cipher anymore. A few could even be called heroic."

"So what went wrong with our one?" Robbie grumbled, idly kicking at Bill's cowering form with a stray body.

Axolotl shifted uncomfortably in mid-air, and for the first time, something not unlike embarrassment could be seen in his eyes. He coughed loudly and muttered, "Er, well… this isn't something I'm proud of, but-"

"He dropped the ball," said Nyarlathotep cheekily.

"Thanks, Nyarlathotep," Axolotl sighed. "Beautifully finessed as always." He cleared his throat and tried again: "I'd seen Bill's redemption play out so many times across the multiverses and been in contact with so many of my counterparts when they spoke of how well he turned out… well… I, um… may have gotten a little complacent."

There was a collective groan from the assembled armies. They could already see the direction this story was headed.

"Look, every Bill Cipher who has invoked my name is whisked beyond death to my realm within the supraversal substrata, where they are escorted to the Gates of Time: it is through here that they are transported to their new lives, but our Bill here…"

He sighed and shook his head. "He was carrying just a tiny atom of power with him, not enough to harm me, but enough to cut through the chains I'd bound him with. I'd grown… lax, overconfident that my Bill would be redeemed just as surely as the others, and I hadn't checked him for weapons: as soon as I took my eyes off him to chart a course, he slipped his bonds and threw himself through time."

There was an outraged pause.

"I traced Bill's path back through the multiverse," Axolotl continued, "but by then, it was already too late: he'd made his way back to this universe, at a point in history just before he'd entered Stan's mind." The ink-spot eyes gleamed with regret. "I arrived to find the once-saved world now devoured by the World-Gone-Weird… and with the runes in place, I could not intrude upon it. The only solution was to seek a willing host body through psychic dreams and hope that together, we could be able to destroy Bill's empire from within. You know the rest of the story well enough by now."

"So we won that day we first attacked the Fearamid?" said Mabel incredulously. "It all worked out? Weirdmageddon never went global back then?"

"In the original timeline, yes."

"And our Bill just… undid it all?" There was a note of despair in her voice now.

"I'm afraid so, yes."

Grunkle Stan floundered for a moment. "All that stuff about me and Ford going on adventures – that actually would have happened? All that stuff in that weird journal would've happened if it hadn't been for Bill?"

"Yes," said Axolotl sadly.

"So all this…" Dipper stopped, realizing that he was starting to transform out of sheer frustration, and hastily clamped down on the budding mandibles before they got any bigger. "Everything from the failed deal onwards, that only happened because you-"

"Screwed up, yes. Believe me, you don't need to tell me just how badly I mishandled the situation: I've seen it for myself… and if it's any consolation, I ended up having to suffer for my failures more than once, and nearly die."

"Hence why he had to rely on the services of yours truly," added Nyarlathotep.

There was a muffled whining from somewhere around floor level. "Why did you even bother to come after me this time?" Bill demanded weakly. "I mean, the runes didn't just block your power: they made this place my property, just like the Nightmare Realm! What made it okay for you to break the rules now instead of before? I mean, I wasn't doing anything against your rules – the rest of the multiverse would have been just fine if you'd kept your nose out!"

For the first time, Axolotl looked genuinely affronted. "Putting aside the fact that your claim of possession wasn't what kept me out of the Nightmare World – believe me, your stamp of ownership isn't that impressive – putting aside the fact that you were planning on expanding your madness to the rest of the multiverse-"

"I wasn't!"

"Oh for crying out loud, Bill, do you think nobody was listening at all during those fevered little rants of yours? But putting all that aside, you've already done some very serious damage to the stability of the multiverse without even meaning to."

Bill looked blank. "What are you talking about?"

"You remember seeing one or two unfamiliar faces around your territories since Weirdmageddon began?"

"I don't follow."

"Early on, back when this infection was still limited to Gravity Falls, you'd have seen one: big green guy, tentacles, wings, noticeable stench of dead fish?"

"…oh. Erm… was that a problem?" Bill asked, clearly doing his best to look innocent.

The light bloomed again and Bill screamed in pain.

"A problem?" roared Axolotl. "A PROBLEM?! GREAT CTHULHU WAS WANDERING AROUND IN THIS DIMENSION, FULLY CONSCIOUS, AND YOU ASK IF IT'S A PROBLEM?"

"Aaaaaaaargh, okayokayokayokay! I'm sorry I said anything, just please stop hurting me!"

The light faded, and Axolotl took a deep breath. "In his native universe-"

"My native universe," Nyarlathotep interjected smoothly.

"-Cthulhu has been asleep for millennia, dreaming deep within the sunken corpse-city of R'lyeh; he can only awake when the stars are right and the time comes for him to bring back his fellow Old Ones and put an end to the rule of humanity. He's been woken up once or twice, most notably by the Alert in 1925, but he can't remain conscious for long unless the stars are right. For eons, those have been the rules in that universe… unless a rift in reality were to open in R'lyeh, and Cthulhu were to find himself here, in a world where the rules that usually keep him asleep do not exist."

"…Oh."

"'Oh,' indeed, Bill. The havoc you've been wreaking on this reality has resulted in an infestation of portals across the universe: as the barriers between worlds grow softer and softer, beings from other worlds begin to infiltrate this reality. Your antics have already given one of the most destructive forces in that world an early parole – and that was during the early days of Weirdmageddon, back when things were still contained to Oregon. Now, we've had a wellspring of the Filth, an invasion by a primordial spirit of order from the World of Darkness, we've had rumours of a vampire Antediluvian on the loose – things which, to put it mildly, should not be allowed to jump dimensions! All of them are supposed to be kept under wraps by the rules of their world… but you've given them an avenue to freedom!"

"Um… it wasn't my fault, though, was it?" Bill protested. "It's not like I meant to do that."

"Do not make me hit you again, Bill. For the last few hours, I've been trawling through rumours and eyewitness reports from everyone lucky enough to escape your grasp, and the things I've heard are just about beyond belief: Dalek scouts in the fringe worlds, parasite-universe Elves kidnapping children from slave camps, Scarrans cavorting in the lava fields, Chaos incursions in the spaces between planets, follows of the Judgements probing the stars for weaknesses, worship of the Ori in Cipheropolis… and there's every indication that they might be able to move on to other worlds in the multiverse if they find another weak point!"

"But that wasn't me!"

"YES IT WAS, YOU IDIOT! None of this would have happened if you'd accepted my offer wholeheartedly and allowed yourself to be reborn. But no, you had to have your way, even though it got you killed the last time! And now look what's happened: you haven't just wrecked this universe, Bill, you've made it into a crossroads for everything that shouldn't be let loose on the multiverse!"

For several seconds, there was silence in the throne room.

Then, Mabel's confidence must have finally rallied, because she blurted out "We can still fix things, right? I mean, everything went back to normal once we got rid of Bill the last time, didn't it?"

There was a colossal sigh from overhead, and Dipper felt his heart sink as he saw the look creeping across those glossy black eyes: he'd seen that look many times before, usually on the faces of adults who were about to share some very bad news with kids. Axolotl knew that what he was going to say next would hurt Mabel more than any torture Bill could ever have devised, and he was clearly steeling himself for the worst, knowing full well that it wouldn't make a lick of difference.

"Yes," he said at last. "It did. But unfortunately, it's not that simple anymore."

"Why not?"

"For one thing, we don't have an absolutely guaranteed method of killing Bill anymore: the ritual no longer works, and the memory gun's been destroyed. Plus, even if we could rebuild it, we'd still need him to inhabit someone's mind in order to be destroyed: quite apart from the fact that one of you would have to sacrifice yourselves, I doubt we'd be able to coerce Bill to do that, even with our powers. So, no method of killing him."

"But I thought you were all-powerful!"

"For all intents and purposes, yes... but being omnipotent doesn't mean infallible, as you probably know by now. Bill's connection to the Nightmare Realm makes him almost impossible to kill: his body and spirit regenerate almost as quickly as they're damaged, and even if we grind them down to atoms and scatter them across the multiverse, there's no guarantee it won't try to reconstitute itself."

"But it'll make things normal for now, right? So… why don't we just get on with it?"

Axolotl closed his eyes; the pained look on his face was even more pronounced now. "That's the other thing I was going to mention. You see, even if we could destroy Bill, it wouldn't do much – not now that the reality-warping energies loose in this universe have begun to exist independently of Bill."

"It's begun to what?" Bill demanded.

But Axolotl ignored him. "We reached the Weirdness event horizon a long time ago, Mabel. There's no normal to go back to, Mabel: the merger between this world and the Nightmare Realm has become permanent, and nothing, not even Bill's death, will separate the two. This is the new normal."

"Well… I…" Mabel floundered for a moment, clearly trying to think of a new solution. "Well, we can undo it, then: we can go back into the past and stop the Rift from being broken! We can stop Bill from ever starting Weirdmageddon!"

If anything, Axolotl looked even sadder. "What past, Mabel? Bill's been tampering with established ever since he learned to manipulate time, and because of that, Weirdness has permeated every single moment of history. He made the Big Bag triangle-shaped, forced the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons to worship him as a god, he brought microtransactions to Ur, turned the Pyramids into giant floating replicas of himself, murdered every prophet and messiah that wouldn't convert to his worship, had all the Roman emperors from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus wage war on each other, replaced Genghis Khan with Groucho Marx, extended the Hundred Years War by ten thousand years, he turned 12th century England into a penal colony for 20th century Imperial Japan, had the Crusades declared in his name, compressed every single dynasty in China into a single emperor and then shot him, made it so the Aztecs won the American Civil War, allowed the Thousand-Year Reich to become a reality, tripled the length of the Holodomor, and assassinated everyone from Lincoln to Lenin – usually when they were children, usually three times in a row! And the less said about what he did to Quentin Tremblay, the better."

"And then there was all the stuff he did to me," Dipper realized out loud.

"That's exactly my point: he erased the original Shapeshifter from history and forced you to fill his shoes, essentially. You exist as living paradox, at once Dipper Pines and Shifty. And you see," he continued breathlessly as he turned back in Mabel's direction, "That's the same problem all over the space-time continuum in this realm: every change he made now coexists no matter how violently they contradict one another! So you see, if undoing Weirdmageddon was at all possible, Bill would have done it by accident long ago – in part because one or more of the many, many, many changes he's made to history has killed your ancestors several times over!"

He took a deep breath. "And that's just the beginning. History is broken, Mabel, and the universe is even worse off. Between the destruction of Time Baby's future, the changes made to the past, the conquest of 95% of the entire universe's population, and all the damage that Weirdness has done to established reality, this dimension has been pushed to the brink of total collapse. Even if we could undo all the damage through simple time travel, there's a good chance that the strain would shred this world into confetti."

The echoes died away, leaving the throne room plunged into a terrible, oppressive silence, broken only by Bill's terrified whimpers; perhaps he was already thinking about how much torture was being added to his sentence with every new revelation… though judging from the look of grief and anger on Mabel's face, the punishment might be arriving a little sooner than Bill expected

"So… there's nothing we can do? The world's just… stuck in Weirdmageddon mode? Earth's going to be like this forever?"

"Not necessarily: it's impossible to get rid of the Weirdness now, and I doubt this world will ever be returned to the way it was, but it can be rebuilt. The key thing will be reducing the chaos and diluting Weirdness into a force that be safely integrated into the physical laws of this reality, then repairing all the damage done to time, space, civilization, death, and so on-"

"And how long is that going to take?"

Axolotl paused. "I don't know," he said at last. "Maybe centuries, maybe millennia. Either way… a very, very long time. In the meantime, all I can do is pass down Bill's sentence."

He hesitated, and added, "I'm sorry."

A rumble of discontent swept across the crowd, and Dipper felt a sting of pain in the palms of his hands, realizing that his fists had clenched so tightly that they'd dug little crescent-shaped grooves in his flesh. A quick glance around the room revealed that the others looked just as angry as he felt: everyone, even Mabel and Soos, now wore a furious-looking grimace. The only exception to this was Grunkle Ford, who just looked sad and lost.

In the devastated pause that followed, several different emotions appeared on Mabel's face at once: Dipper recognized grief, depression, frustration, guilt, and a look of bilious hatred directed at the cowering lump at Mayor Cutebiker's feet. In the end, though, she settled on anger:

"You're sorry," she said shakily. "You're sorry? You were supposed to be the one who could help us! All of this was building up to the day we could let you in and save everyone, and now you're saying it won't be done while we're alive! Now you're saying we've got to live like this – the blood, the death, the craziness – all of that… for the rest of our lives?! That we'll be dead long before anything's fixed? And that's all you've got to say, after everything you've… everything I…"

She stopped, breathing heavily, and seemed to sag; realizing that she was on the verge of tears, Dipper put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but Mabel was beyond consoling. Frankly, he couldn't blame her: after all the guilt she'd been forced to suffer through, she'd clearly been hoping that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel, a hope that everything that had happened could be erased from history and they could go back to their old lives – only now she'd learned that behind the light, there was even more tunnel and no escape.

And in that pause, Nyarlathotep laughed. "Oh Mabel," he chortled. "You really think you and the other zodiac will ever experience death by old age – after everything that Bill did to preserve his favourite playthings? After all the power that you've unlocked?"

"Oh, shut up!" Dipper snapped. "You're not helping!"

"Just providing the facts, Little Shoggoth: I hate to see you and your sister caught off-guard when linear time's finally restored and you still haven't started aging again." A wicked smirk etched itself across his face. "That'd be a bummer for your parents, wouldn't it? Well, assuming what's become of the two of you wouldn't be enough of a bummer already-"

"SHUT UP!" bellowed Mabel. "SHUT UP RIGHT NOW OR I'LL BRING THIS ENTIRE CEILING DOWN ON YOUR HEAD!"

Several people stepped back from her in alarm as the echoes rippled out across the throne room. "Oooh boy," Soos muttered. "She's in Boss Mabel mode again."

There was a rumble from overhead. "Mabel," Axolotl began, "I know apologising won't mean much, but-"

"You know what?" she yelled. "I'm with Wendy on this: why didn't you just ignore Bill? Why didn't you just let him burn?!"

Pacifica tried to placate her, drawing her back from her furious advance and whispering something vaguely soothing in her ear – but Mabel was in no mood to be calmed in any way. "You knew him!" she screamed, shrugging off Pacifica's hand. "You knew how dangerous Bill was, and you still took the risk! You took your eyes off him long enough to him for him to ruin anything! Why did you even take the chance? Why couldn't you have just given him everything he had coming to him?!"

There were roars of assent from the crowd – including Wendy, Robbie and Grunkle Stan.

If nothing else, Axolotl had the decency to look shamefaced. "I know that nothing I can say will ever make this right, but please believe me when I tell you this: I can't break the rules. All of the superbeings who live within the multiversal community have laws that bind us: that is our blessing and that is our curse. A curse because we must work within restrictions placed upon our infinite powers, a blessing because it keeps us from destroying ourselves in one way or another. If you want to understand what happens to beings without any kind of binding law, you need look no further than the foot of this throne."

He the onlookers to take in the sight of Bill before continuing. "I know that is of little consolation, but-"

A shoe bounced off his head.

"Ow! What-"

Instantly, the surrounding multitude fell silent: nobody had actually expected someone to actually attack the giant salamander, not after how casually he'd stopped Bill – shouting at him had been the absolute limit of their rage.

A quick glance towards the source of the thrown shoe revealed Grunkle Stan, hopping on one leg as he struggled to remove his other shoe. "Hope you enjoy these, you bastard, they were the best thing money couldn't buy," he grumbled furiously to himself as he struggled with the laces.

Now it was Ford's turn to put a hand on his shoulder. "Stanley-"

"No!" Stan bellowed, eyes glowing balefully. "I'm done mincing words, and I'm done listening to this guy whining about the rules! Look, Mr Axolotl or whatever your name is, we've gone through hell because of you: my brother's been driven almost out of his mind, Dipper's two people, Mabel's been put through a guilt-trip that'd make my dad give a standing ovation, and I'm barely keeping my temper under control – and that's just what's happened to my family. Everyone here has been put through the wringer, if you're expecting a round of applause for working around the rules to fix maybe half of it or sympathy for everything you've had to put up with, you're expecting too damn much. Right now, I don't need to hear what you can't do, because right now that's sounding like an awful lot: what we need to hear – what my niece and nephew need to hear – is what you can do. What are we going to do about Bill if you can't actually kill him permanently?"

Axolotl huffed. "Unfortunately, our best option on hand will be to keep him alive and in captivity."

There was a ripple of anger from the crowd.

Now it was Pacifica's turn to look outraged. "Wha… you just finished telling us all about how he broke out of captivity, went back in time and ruined everything!" she yelled. "You screwed up the first time around, and now you want to do it again?! Y-"

She took a deep breath, mustering every last atom of Northwest dignity as she visibly struggled not to resort to expletives. "Okay," she said wearily. "Okay. Fine. Whatever. Now… what makes this any different, exactly? Why can't we just kill Bill and keep on killing him every time he comes back from the dead?"

"Because," said Axolotl, "loathe as I am to admit it, there are gaps in my knowledge of this reality. Bill is the only one who knows for sure just how many deliberate changes were made to the world as we know it. So, in order to correct his handiwork, we have to leave him alive… for now."

"And you think he's just going to tell you about it?"

"I wasn't planning on giving him much of a choice in the matter," said Axolotl (was it Dipper's imagination, or did the ink-spot eyes twinkle gleefully at this?). "As long as he's in custody, he'll be datamined for relevant information: a simple transmitting probe will be inserted into the brain of this physical shell and grant access to us at any time we require it. If we find any anomalies we're not certain of, we can simply enter an enquiry at any time and received detailed information. Essentially, we will have a search engine for Bill Cipher's brain."

"I am still here, you know!"

"Nobody cares, Bill."

"And he'll be in your custody, then?" asked Gideon.

"Well, yes. I thought that went without saying."

Gideon's brow wrinkled. "After what happened last time?"

"Look, I made a mistake just once: you have my word that accidents such as this won't-"

The audience bellowed its disapproval, and even some of the figures hovering overhead winced. "Probably could've put that a little more delicately, Axolotl," muttered the old man with the glowing skin.

"A mistake? I…" Gideon paused, massaging his temples. "Calling this a mistake doesn't even begin to… the level of understatement is… I don't see how you could…" He took a deep breath. "Wendy, could you please take over? I need alcohol."

"You're ten."

"I don't care! I need booze now, before my head hurts any worse!"

"Mistake?!" Wendy roared. "You call this a mistake – or an accident? You let him burn our world to the ground and dance on its grave because you couldn't keep an eye on him for five seconds, and you call that a mistake?! And now we're supposed to trust you with keeping him under wraps?"

"…well, I was the only one who could neutralize him," said Axolotl weakly.

"And you were the only one who could save him, too, and the only one who could let him loose on us. Isn't that right?"

"Look, I understand you're angry, but-"

"Bill's not leaving," snarled an inhuman voice.

It took a while for Dipper to realize that it was he that had spoken, for the voice had belonged to someone else: it was Shifty's voice emerging from his mouth now, deep and boiling with hate. Not too long ago, he would have been terrified at the sound, and probably would have worried for hours about the implications of using the Shapeshifter's vocal cords without meaning to; he might have even feared that Shifty's identity might split off from his and try to seize control again. Now, though… now he was grateful for it. For one thing, Shifty knew how to express anger and hatred better than any other shape in his repertoire, and after thirty years alone, he had a lot more of it than Dipper ever could. For another, Dipper was dimly aware – through his growing rage – that what he was about to say was terrible, and he didn't want what he said next to be heard in his own voice.

But then, Shifty's voice was his own voice, the Shapeshifter's body his true form. Oh, he might have Dipper's memory and personality, but he knew that he could never have his old body back – not now that Axolotl had revealed the truth. All he had was a disguise… and he desperately needed to unmask.

"Bill's saying right here," Dipper/Shifty growled, slowly sprouting upwards as his transformation took hold. "We're the ones who suffered at his hands, we're the ones who get to punish him… and we're the ones who'll do it right this time. Give us the probe if you like, and we'll datamine him as many times as you need to rebuild this world… but he'll be punished on our terms."

There was a roar of approval from the crowd, joined by Grunkle Stan, Wendy, Grenda, Candy, Robbie, most of the Manotaurs, and – to Dipper's surprise – Mabel.

"Uh, Dipper, there's something you need to know-"

But Axolotl's voice was suddenly drowned out by hundreds of voices baying for blood, screaming for Bill's death or worse: just about everyone was on their feet and screaming for justice, or for revenge, or something between the two. Everyone had suffered at Bill's hands, and now they wanted him to be on the receiving end for a change. Only a handful demurred: Soos, too placid and good-natured to join in, perhaps spooked by the angry mob; Gideon, too busy clutching his head in pain, either from telepathic feedback or from a migraine; Pacifica, who'd been trying to act as the voice of reason despite her anger, too shocked by the fury of the crowd to respond; and Grunkle Ford, who could have been a million miles away for all he reacted to the chaos and clamour around him.

Amidst the carnage, Dipper/Shifty was vaguely aware that Nyarlathotep was once again chuckling to himself. "How they've changed in the last few months!" he chortled. "Once upon a time, the zodiac never would have made such demands as this; if this had ended a little sooner, they may have even shown mercy to him, pathetic as he is… but now the children lead a lynch mob! Truly, Dipper and Mabel have come a long way! You must be so proud, Axolotl."

"I'm warning you, Nyarlathotep, one more goddamn word-"

And it was at that moment, with almost everyone shouting and the crowd surging forward and Axolotl trying to maintain order and Nyarlathotep laughing to himself, that Bill made his move.

Up until now, he'd been left motionless on the floor, cowering beneath Axolotl's merciless glare and too afraid of the light to budge from his position. But with Axolotl preoccupied with everyone else in the room all of a sudden, he'd seen an opportunity: scuttling over to a heap of rubble a few feet away, he scooped something into his hands and jumped to his feet.

"Alright!" he shrieked, a ghost of his old bravado creeping back into his voice. "Everyone get back, now, unless you wanna find out what this detonator's connected to – the hard way!"

A hush fell over the throne room; in the seconds that followed, Dipper discerned that the thing in Bill's hands was indeed a bomb trigger, one spindly finger resting on the red button.

"I mean it! I've been working on this last ace up my sleeve for long time, and I'm not going to let it and one of the last functional nuclear ICBMs in the world go to waste!"

Mabel looked blank. "You're going to blow up the Fearamid? You're going to try to blow this place up with…" She squinted. "Maybe thirty superbeings who could probably stop it without even trying? Is that it?"

"No, you idiot bitch! I'm going to blow up something much more important than that…" He cackled mirthlessly. "For every human plaything I found a use for, there were at least five I couldn't figure out what to do with. Most ended up as slaves or living in Cipheropolis… but a few were more precious than that. Just a handful of people, but they were way too valuable to be kept around here. So I made a special prison world where I could stash them for a rainy day – the Cookie Jar, I called it… and just to spice things up a little bit, I planted a nuclear surprise under it!"

There was a horrified gasp from the surrounding crowd; as one, they began to draw back. An ice-cold droplet of dread plummeted into the pit of Dipper's stomach as he realized the full extent of their mistake: every rescued prisoner, slave or refugee who hadn't joined the militia had been hidden away in the Cookie Jar; there had to be thousands of people in there by now, probably hundreds of thousands. Their safe haven had been a death trap all along and they'd never known it – and now Bill was threatening their lives as well… not that he knew it.

"That's right!" he gloated. "I've got hostages! And some very choice ones, too: Lee, Nate, Thompson, Tambry, Melody, Mr and Mrs Valentino, the entire Corduroy clan, a few choice members of the Ramirez family – including Question Mark's dear old Abuelita… oh, and how could I forget the prize of my collection? Markham and Annabelle Pines!"

The bottom dropped out of Dipper's stomach. A quick glance across the surrounding congregation revealed that everyone was just as horrified as he was… all except Nyarlathotep, Axolotl, and Ford.

"So," Bill continued, "Unless you two brats want to see mommy and daddy go up in smoke, you'd best back off! I think it's time we renegotiated my sentence: I'm getting out of here with new territory and my powers back, or everyone in the Cookie Jar dies."

Axolotl sighed. "Bill, I think you should know that-"

"Shut up! I'm setting the terms around here, and I think you know I can press the button on this long before you can destroy me – hell, I'll probably press it on reflex. So unless you want to see what your precious Dipper and Mabel are like after their parents have been barbecued in nuclear fire, I'd shut your trap right now."

"But-"

"NOW! OR THE PINES PARENTS DIE!"

Then, just as everyone was wondering what was going to happen next, Grunkle Ford spoke:

"You've forgotten the gift, Bill."

"…what?"

By way of explanation, Ford opened his right hand, revealing the swirling mass of nothingness he had showed Bill before. "Don't make me repeat myself, Bill: being this lucid hurts. And you know I offered you a gift."

"I don't want your bouncy ball of doom or whatever the hell it is!" Bill snapped, trying to avert his eyes from Ford and the shape in his hands. "Now get rid of that thing!"

"It's a world, Bill, a world stripped of everything but the barest constraints of corporeal existence: no life, no planets, no stars, no light… only space and ghosts. My brother and I have named it the Void Realm. It is the most precious thing that you could possibly find in all the worlds of the multiverse: the truth."

"Well I'm not interested in it! Now throw that away or I'll press this button: your idiot friends might have forgiven you for a lot, but they won't forgive you for causing the deaths of everyone they've ever known and loved."

A sad smile crept across Ford's face; was it Dipper's imagination, or was there a hint of regret there?

"You won't kill anyone, Bill," he said flatly.

"Oh really? You betting I'm not fast enough to press the button before you snip it off?"

"No. You won't press the button at all. You won't do anything."

"Why the hell not?"

"Because there'd be no point."

"What kind of answer is that?! I'm fighting for my life and freedom here! Of course I'd press the button, or do something at any rate! 'There'd be no point' – what are you even talking about?"

"The truth, Bill: there's never been any point to what you've done. Everything you've done, everyone you've betrayed, everything you've hoped to accomplish… it was all pointless right from the beginning." He held the sphere of swirling emptiness up by way of emphasis. "And the Void Realm is proof of it."

Bill's eye swept the room in confusion, evidently trying to work out what the plan was, before finally settling on Ford again. "Bullshit," he snapped. "I told you what I planned to do with this world back when I had you captive! I mean, weren't you listening?! I wanted a fun world, no more restrictions-"

"-no more laws, a party that never ends with a host that never dies.' I know. I was listening. And I know you've always chafed under rules and regulations, even when you were a young triangle in the Second Dimension: the stagnant, class-ridden society of your world disgusted you, its rigidity drove you mad with frustration, and you wished that something better could be built in its place. But instead of becoming a rebel or a reformer like others before you, you sought more than just change: you sought chaos. You wanted to escape from the suffocating routine of day-to-day existence, to be rid of all those little annoyances that had plagued you throughout your life, and liberate yourself from the tyranny of base matter. You wanted an entirely carefree existence for yourself and your friends, one that would last forever… and you wanted to become something greater than even the highest lords of your people.

You hunted down eldritch technology and forbidden spellcraft that would allow you to achieve your ambitions, and you happily bloodied your hands time and again in order to make your dreams come true Dozens warned you that you were taking dangerous shortcuts; dozens more told you that what you wanted to unleash could not be contained. But you ignored them: you couldn't stand a world with restrictions any longer. And so, your home burned; your friends burned; your family burned: only you remained, you and the void into which you'd fallen. Thus, the Second Dimension ended, and Bill Cipher rose from the ashes."

Ford paused, and added, "By the way, feel free to stop me if I'm getting anything wrong."

The mad, furrowed eye widened in shock. "W… I… how did you know?"

"The power you gave me has shown me more than you ever intended. I know your hidden past… but I have also granted knowledge that was beyond your reach, and so I now know the truth you have not seen: your quest for a world without rules was built on a folly."

"What are you t-"

"Do you know what entropy is?"

"What kind of question is that? Of course I know what entropy is: its chaos! Simple as that."

"Entropy is more than just chaos. Entropy is the decay of organized systems, the gradual descent into disorder and collapse. Entropy is at once what chaos is and what chaos is born from. Entropy is the reason why you have failed and why your quest was for nothing. Entropy is death."

He allowed Bill a minute to digest this. "Entropy is Weirdness in its purest form, stripped of all disguise. Entropy is the Nightmare Realm."

"I… I don't understand."

"No, Bill. You understand perfectly. You just don't want to: denial is another form of madness, after all."

"But-"

"When your world burned and dissolved into meaningless unreality, you saw how it flowed away into the spaces between realities – like quicksilver. Bodiless but already learning how to traverse the multiverse, you followed it across the nothingness like an explorer trying to find the source of a river, until at last you stumbled upon the Nightmare Realm." Ford smiled. "It must have seemed like everything you'd ever wanted: a world that bent to your every whim, responding only to the powers that you'd unlocked back in your home dimension; a place where the old laws meant nothing, where your immortal spirit could reside in comfort for all time. For a time, I imagine that it was heaven for you… but eventually, you found yourself faced with a problem."

"Entropy," Dipper realized aloud.

"The Nightmare Realm wasn't a dimension in itself, but a boiling foam between dimensions, an accumulation of unreality. Entropy had already come and gone, reduced it to matter without laws, and without laws, it was doomed to collapse in on itself; it would take trillions of years, but it would eventually self-destruct."

"That's right," Grenda rumbled. "You said your dimension had been decaying back when you took over Gravity Falls – and you said you'd been looking for a new universe."

"You needed a world you could merge the Nightmare Realm with, to give your utopia stability and new life. And when you found our dimension, you believed you had a chance for an eternal empire in your grasp… but you still didn't understand what you'd seen, and you still didn't want to know what the merger would do."

"What it would do?" Bill echoed. "It saved my life and gave me my own kingdom! That's good enough for me!"

"Did you ever wonder why we grew so strong, Bill? Did you ever think it was strange that we couldn't be depowered?"

"Your powers were all down to me, Sixer. As for the immunity, maybe it was some trick of Axolotl's, probably, or maybe something to do with the circle-"

"No. You may have given us powers, the magic of the circle may have allowed the unintended ones to adhere to us, but the true extent of our power and our immunity to your wishes is all due to entropy. You made a very serious error in claiming a physical form, Bill: had you remained a bodiless essence and commanded Weirdness as an invisible presence, you might have been spared the worst effects until later, but by building a body of your own you subjected yourself to the entropic effects of Weirdness in full. Your powers are failing you."

"WHAT?!"

"As I said, entropy is the decay of systems, including those of your body. First you lost your stranglehold over time and were overshadowed by Mabel. Then, you lost the power to negate our abilities. Over time, you have lost more: either you would have been forced to give up corporeal existence, or remained in your physical body and lose it all."

"You're lying!" Bill shrieked furiously.

"As for us," Ford continued, "We are different. We have been infused with Weirdness. The beings we already were have already been destroyed. From here, we can only continue to grow more powerful until this world finds equilibrium… or until it burns just like your world did before it."

Dipper blinked. "What."

"What," said Mabel.

"What," muttered Pacifica.

"WHAT?" Stan roared.

"I said we need to dilute Weirdness for a reason," Axolotl pointed out, though nobody paid much attention.

"The Nightmare Realm has not been stabilized by merging with another reality," Ford explained. "Indeed, it cannot be stabilized, for it is the essence of instability: its decay has only been postponed… just as it has by every other reality it has devoured for the past fifty trillion years."

Bill stared, his eye wide and bulging in disbelief. "What?" he gasped.

"Did you never wonder where the Nightmare Realm came from, or why the remnants of your world flowed towards it? Its existence is sustained entirely by dimensions that open themselves to the power of undiluted Weirdness: whether in the blink of an eye or the span of centuries, these worlds are consumed by unreality, dissolved into meaningless chaos and absorbed into the Nightmare Realm. That is why your world burned, Bill, and that is why this one would have burned too had you remained in control of it."

"No, you can't… that's not true, that's not even possible – you're lying, you have to be! I did everything right! I liberated my world!"

Ford shook his head sadly. "All you did was condemn it to death: you detected a source of power you could achieve your dreams of freedom with, never understanding what you'd tapped into. Your world collapsed into madness, and you called it liberation because you couldn't bring yourself to admit that you'd been wrong."

"No, you're wrong, I-"

"Saw his own dimension burn/ misses home and can't return/says he's happy, he's a liar/ blame the arson for the fire."

"I… I… But I thought I… you can't be… I'm a liberator, I'm a god, I'm the master of…" Bill's voice was beginning to fail him, the shrieking, high-pitched tone slowly fading away and leaving only a low, weak mumble in its wake.

"You're the master of nothing, Bill. All these years, you've been beholden to the hunger of something that doesn't have a brain, much less a personality of its own. Your search for an everlasting world without restrictions would never have been successful, Bill. It was a dream and nothing more, just like my dream of finding happiness at West Coast Tech-"

"Just like my dream of impressing dad," Stan muttered.

"Just like my dream of getting Wendy to fall in love with me," said Dipper.

"Just like my dream of a little more summer," Mabel sighed.

"And nothing in the world would have made your wishes come true," continued Ford. "Even if you'd defeated us in this battle and crushed all future uprisings, you would still have lost. Eventually, the Nightmare Realm would have eaten our world alive and left you with nothing but the Realm you'd tried to escape. You'd have been left with no choice but to seek out new worlds to feed the Nightmare Realm, lest you die along with it… but how long would you have been able to do that?"

"Stop," Bill pleaded. "Just stop, I don't want to listen to this anymore…"

Were those tears forming in his eye?

"How long would you have been able to continue finding people willing to make deals with you? Would you have had the will to do that, even as the brief years you spent ruling over conquered dimensions were outweighed by the millions of years spent trapped in the Nightmare Realm, alone except for your creations and your fear of death?"

"Stop…"

"You would fail in the end, Bill: the scenarios for your defeat are endless – another uprising, a new ritual, a quantum destabilizer fired at the right time, or a dupe failing to build the portal in time to save you… or perhaps you really could spread the madness to all the multiverse – and then find yourself with no worlds left to conquer, no more dimensions left to feed the Nightmare Realm's appetite. The end result would be the same: you would be left alone as all the vibrant chaos died away, leaving you with nothing but encroaching darkness as the Nightmare Realm finally died, until at last you faded away along with it."

"Please stop…"

Bill's colour was fading now, the vivid yellow fading to dull concrete-grey; he was shrinking too, losing inch after inch until at last he was shorter than Gideon.

"And so at last you see: there's no point in pressing that button, because there's been no point in anything you've ever done.

All that effort, all that talent, all that genius, all that hope... all of it wasted.

All for nothing."

Bill blinked furiously, his eye watering. "No… it can't be possible, I… I did everything right – it should have been perfect… I could have made it… I would have…"

The detonator fell from his hands with a clatter, and with a choked sob, Bill collapsed to his knees, a grey, shrunken shadow of his former self.

Then he began to cry, bawling and wailing without a single trace of dignity, sobbing like a child.

For perhaps ten seconds, the throne room was still and silent except for the sound of Bill weeping. Then, without warning, Nyarlathotep darted forward and grabbed Bill by one arm, hoisting him upright; from the pocket of his coat, the Outer God produced a tiny champagne flute and ran it up the length of Bill's angular face, scooping up several stray droplets of tears.

"I told you I'd be here to do this on the day you realized you'd shot yourself in the foot," he said smugly. "And today's the day!"

And with that, he tipped back the flute and drank Bill's tears.

"Ah, the taste of despair!" he sighed luxuriantly. "A unique blend of heartbreak, sorrow, and shattered dreams! And that final touch of futility gives it such a sweet-savoury aftertaste!" He laughed, and kicked Bill in the side.

Then, just for good measure, he crushed the fallen detonator under his heel, reducing it to a hail of useless plastic and torn wiring.

"So, what's to be done with Billy-Boy now?"

"I think we were about to agree that he'd be best off in my custody now that he's well and truly dispirited," said Axolotl.

"Aha, I don't think it's up to you anymore, old friend."

"But-"

"To the victor go the spoils, after all… and they have the perfect means of containing him if he should ever find a new raison d'etre."

By way of evidence, Ford held up the tiny sphere of nothingness.

"The Void Realm will be able to contain him for as long as the Nightmare Realm would have lasted. He will have a little over a million years in which to languish, then he will die along with it."

For the first time, Axolotl looked genuinely shocked. "That was what you were intending to do all along?"

"One possible future, yes," said Ford. "In others, it's just a window into Bill's future… but here, it is his future."

"If he has your consent, of course," Nyarlathotep added, his tone suggesting that Axolotl's consent was the furthest thing from his mind.

Several minutes passed in anxious silence, and then the giant salamander's head inclined in a reluctant-looking nod. "Very well," he rumbled at last. "You will be granted custody of him; just give me a moment to connect the probe to his brain…"

There was a flash of light, a small thin length of coppery metal formed in the air above Axolotl's head: it looked almost like a nail, except studded with tiny glowing circuitry. As they watched, it floated down through the air and paused just above Bill's tophatted point; then, it shot forward and buried itself in the flesh of his head, drilling brutally downwards into his body. Bill let out a shriek of pain and cried even louder as he clawed impotently at his back, but the probe was already in place, sinking too deep to be removed by hand.

"There," said Axolotl. "He's implanted; now he's all yours. Just… just be mindful of him, no matter how defeated he may seem."

"Oh, I think they'll learn from your mistakes easily enough," Nyarlathotep muttered cheekily. "Now… I think it's time we said farewell to one nuisance of the day, don't you? Now… members of the zodiac, I believe you have permission to pass down Bill's sentence." A vicious-looking smirk cut his face in half. "Try not to have too much fun."

There was a pause, as all ten members of the zodiac silently exchanged glances.

For once, not a word needed to be spoken, not even through Gideon's telepathy. All of them were in agreement: nobody wanted Bill to escape punishment even if it was only via the Axolotl… and if they couldn't kill him, they knew that making him suffer for all eternity was the next-best thing.

They nodded silently to one another.

Then, Ford raised the pocket universe high above his head, allowing it to float free for the first time since he had completed work on it; it soared away into the centre of the throne room, and began to expand into a colossal portal – pitch-black and seething with lightless energy. Beyond that obsidian gateway lay nothingness, infinite darkness spanning the length and breadth of the world that Stan and Ford had built.

The Void Realm in all its empty majesty.

Seeing the awful sight unfold before him, Bill scrambled to his feet and made a frantic dash in the opposite direction, clearly not caring where he was going as long as it was away from the portal.

He hadn't travelled more than five steps before the zodiac descended on him: a blizzard of tendrils from Dipper flung him to the ground; struggling upright, he fled in another direction, only for Pacifica to toss him aside with a telekinetic blast; zombies blocked his next path to freedom; a blast of energy from Soos blasted him away from his next escape route, and a swarm of a clicking mechanized beetles from McGucket and a telepathic attack from Gideon stung him into submission. In desperation, Bill hurried over to Ford – either trying to plead for mercy or attack him – but even with his attention occupied by keeping the portal open, Ford was far from helpless: the shadows brought Bill crashing to the floor, chin-first. Then Mabel froze him in place, allowing the two remaining Horsemen of the Apocalypse to close in on him.

For fifteen straight seconds, Wendy and Stan laid into him, punching and kicking and hammering and pummelling him with a mad, frenzied abandon as all their pent-up rage and grief found expression at long last. Then, grabbing Bill by the arms, they scooped him up and began hauling him towards the open portal of the Void Realm, his legs kicking helplessly in the air as he went.

"No!" he wailed. "No!"

"This is what you wanted, Bill."

"Not like this! Not like this! Not like this!"

"This is your perfect world of chaos: no more restrictions, no more laws."

"Pine Tree! Shooting Star! Make them stop – you know this is wrong! You know this can't be right!"

"No more anything, in fact, except for the darkness and whatever nightmares you find there."

"Come on, Fordise, we're friends! Doesn't that mean anything to you?!"

"Now go: claim your perfect world and dwell there for all eternity."

As one, Wendy and Stan drew their arms back, ready to catapult Bill away into the void; their faces were no longer contorted with anger and hatred. Now, if anything, they looked perfectly calm except for the effort of keeping the struggling figure restrained.

"For god's sake, just kill me!" he bawled pathetically. "JUST KILL ME!"

And with one almighty heave-ho, they threw him into the portal: there was a colossal spout of void-stuff erupting outwards like a geyser as he struck the surface of the portal, and plunged deep into the pocket universe as if it were the waters of some pitch-black lake – except here, he sank horizontally instead of vertically.

In desperation, Bill clawed helplessly at the emptiness around him like a drowning swimmer, trying to fight his way back to the mouth of the portal, but the Void Realm had him now and would not let him go. Slowly but surely, he began to sink out of sight.

"I'M SCARED!" he screamed, sounding more like a child than anything else. "OKAY? I'M SCARED OF THE DARK! DOES THAT MAKE YOU HAPPY?! JUST LEAVE ME A LITTLE LIGHT! JUST A LITTLE! PLEASE! DON'T GO! WAIT! WAAAAAIIIIITTT-"

Then the portal slammed shut, folding itself back into a perfect sphere, and all was silent as it rolled back into Ford's outstretched hand.

Bill Cipher, Earth's Lord and Master for Eternity, was gone.

A minute went by.

Then another.

And at last, Axolotl spoke:

"I think now I should probably mention that I disabled the nuke while Tyler and I were imprisoned in the Cookie Jar," he said ruefully. "Bill's detonator wasn't going to work at all… but I didn't have the heart to tell him."

A/N: This chapter's soundtrack choice is "Pay The Iron Price" from Game Of Thrones Season 2!

Anyone have any ideas on what might happen next? If not, feel free to try your hand at the code:

Zg gsv irhp lu hlfmwrmt fmgldziw
Gsviv'h hlnvlmv dzrgrmt uli ivdziwh
Yfg sld wl blf gsrmp sv nrtsg yvszev
Ru sv hvvh srh nzhgvikrvxv rm rgh tizev?