I know what everyone's probably thinking.

"Why don't you have some sort of superpower and aren't extremely overpowered? Where's the gradual growth starting from zero and becoming the strongest being in the universe?"

I'm… actually not sure if people are thinking that, but upon writing in this journal I can certainly imagine some people wondering that.

Firstly, and foremostly, my superpower is in fact a very ordinary power. The ability to have a poker face and think through situations. Mundane? Yeah. But I did not join an improv troupe for several years to not be able to bullshit something to someone's face.

Secondly, that part about being the strongest being in the universe? Hasn't happened yet. I guess if I'm still writing this that means I'm still alive which means it could potentially happen. But I'm planning something much more specific than that.

Lastly, while I don't know about fate. Destiny is a confusing and convoluted topic. But I will love you regardless.

Destiny can never take you away from me.

My dearest memory.

Chapter 3. Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

Realizing that I might or might not have been the reason for bad things to happen to people, even if not necessarily straight away, but perhaps in the future did nothing but cause a sense of guilt to well up in my stomach. Which was odd, because I normally didn't feel guilt.

Not to say that I'm incapable of feeling guilt, but rather I never do something that could make me feel guilty. Everything I did back home was something I did for me and myself, and I made sure that everyone was aware of it. But now, it had only been around a half a day, but I'd already did something that affected others.

Introspectively I knew that I couldn't exactly do much about it, an unfortunate situation had occurred and I needed to help take the four people down into the underground, but I had an opportunity to go back up and get them.

Natasha seemed to be able to sense my thought process because she told me it wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault, I knew that, but it was my responsibility. There's a big difference between the two that other people might blur the lines, but I knew there was a clear distinction.

"Regardless of who's fault it was. The fact remains that we still need some medical supplies. Other towns are worse than ours and until the next shipment arrives we need to work by ourselves." Seele spoke up.

Bronya looked contemplative and Stelle was silent. Natasha gave the two of them, and inadvertently me as well, a rundown of their background and the plan. Fragmentum had seeped into one of the towns that had previously been evacuated, but the supplies should still be there.

"Seems simple enough. I'll help." The silvermane guard (wasn't she a captain?) volunteered.

"Simple…" Seele rolled her eyes.

Bronya frowned at that, and looked to want to say something, but Stelle interjected.

"I'll come too. The more help the better." Stelle said.

I had the feeling that she spoke now rather than later so as to stop whatever brewing conflict was so clearly rising between Bronya and Seele.

There was a tiny bit of pressure knowing that the two I had accidentally tagged along with were so willing to throw themselves into danger for others, but Seele shot me a look before speaking up.

"Who said you two can come? I'm not trusting my back to someone I've barely even met." Seele protested.

I knew when conversations were over before they even began, and my role in this conversation was done. Seele clearly had her reservations about this and even me who knew her (by technicality) wasn't spared from her judgment.

Obviously because I was oh so clearly a non-combatant but that fact was hardly relevant.

Natasha smoothed out the rest of the conversation, taking control and easing the rising tension in Seele. The quartet managed to come to an agreement that they would scavenge the neighboring town that had been swallowed by the fragmentum, and that I would stay behind and inform anyone where they went.

That was fine by me. I had an objective in mind and they would be fine gathering those supplies on their own. Hopefully.

There was more than a good chance that I wasn't thinking straight. This wasn't out of the ordinary, I've said it before and I'll say it again that pretty women would be the death of me, but rather than any one person that I latched onto to make a bad decision; This one was entirely my own fault.

Going back up the twisting path to the surface wasn't anything too difficult. I was very good when it came to remembering directions based on landmarks, but absolutely horrid when it came to street names. Turn left on 18th Street? Oh you meant the corner where the old cafe that the old couple owns?

Yeah. At least there weren't any cars here.

Or… at least not underground. I vaguely remembered there being trolley cars on the surface but-

That didn't matter. What mattered was that the surface was its usual biting frost temperatures, but I was feeling rather warm despite it all. I wasn't sure if I had just gotten used to the terribly cold temperature by now or that the thermal wear that I had on was better than what I had back in my own reality.

Probably both. My face was still relatively cold after all.

My objective in heading out to the surface alone was simple: Go back to the site of action and retrieve our lost supplies. Nothing else needed to be done and there didn't need to be any shootout between guards and trailblazers. Go in, get the stuff, get out.

Simple and clean. Almost sounded like a drug deal with how I described it.

It was not simple, nor was it clean.

I had taken care of what Natasha had asked of me, namely alerting people to where they had gone, but the one thing that I didn't expect was the darkness of night to shroud my path the second I got onto the surface. Only the forever burning shine of the streetlights kept my direct path illuminated.

That made it not simple.

The other thing that was standing in my path, was the fact that there were guards stationed in pairs on the street. They certainly weren't there earlier, and were most likely stationed in this section of the Fragmentum due to the fact that there had been an altercation (And what they probably perceive as Bronya's kidnapping).

That made it not clean.

And so, I turned right back around and went back to the underground.

If there was one thing that I had learned in the day that I had been lucid to the fact that this was reality and not some sort of dream. It was the fact that if you fucked around, you would find out.

I would not be getting a stray bullet to my skull if I could help it. My own mortality was something I had been made painfully aware of and it was not an experience I planned on repeating. Getting home was my motivation, not dying on a frozen rock of a planet.

Even if it was a nice frozen rock.

The trek up and down the hidden road that connected the two layers of Belobog wasn't a long one, but I did feel significantly more exhausted than when I came up. It was largely a waste of time, but it gave me reason to focus on other things. Such as the other Zenith. The other me. Apparently they had written a book or something? Pela mentioned asking for the next update and I had rolled along with it.

I found it in my apartment. A book, well worn by the wear in the binding, but still new based on the state of the paper itself. If anything it seemed to be less of an actual published book from a printing press and more of a personal diary just from the state of it. That made sense, after all. I doubted the underground had anything like a printing press readily available to every John and Jane Doe, and I wouldn't be surprised if the primary method of distribution of books down here were tied to our phones.

Opening the book I found an author's note on the inside cover.

To Me, Myself and I.

Do our memories make us who we are? Or is there some innate blueprint that guides us towards a predestined personality? Are we the product of our experiences or do our experiences cause us to be greater than the sum of our parts?

I don't know the answer.

But I'm going to find out.

My dearest Zenith.

Thank you.

Incomprehensible. Complete and utter nonsense. It felt like a letter directed to me. To ME and not Zenith. Even if we were one and the same, to address a letter to yourself was nothing short of some strange attempt to seem cryptic. Something not out of place in a fan work, but for a published finished one…

The worst part of it all, was the fact that I could picture myself doing such a thing. Ugh. What was wrong with me? Did I know such a thing as shame?

…No. Not really.

As such, I flipped to the next page. Taking in the title and beginning to read my own book in hopes of understanding myself just a bit more.

It started in a blur.

I was running somewhere, hand in hand with someone. I'm not sure who She was, but I knew how important She was to me. The most important person in my life. I would kill for Her, and die for Her.

She was everything to me, even if my memories held gaping holes in them, as if someone had carved out sections with a knife and left only vague impressions and emotions.

"We have to keep moving." I said to Her urgently.

She was exhausted, her breaths were labored and came out in deep gasps. I knew She wasn't one for physical activity, and at this moment it was none more evident than ever.

What were we running from? Who was out to get us?

"P-please Zenith. I need a minute." She gasped out.

I pulled Her a bit more, just enough to hide around a corner and allowed myself to peek out from it. I had to ensure we weren't in any immediate danger. It didn't seem like it, as I couldn't see nor sense anything, but I didn't let my guard down.

Kneeling next to Her. I checked over Her condition. She seemed fine, just woefully tired. I couldn't tell how long we'd been running for, but I knew it wasn't some insignificant amount of time.

"Are you okay?" I asked Her.

Something about what I said set Her off. She reached up and cupped my cheeks, letting me practically rest between her soft palms. In any other situation I might have been flustered, but the adrenaline running in my system blurred my reaction.

"Zenith. Are you dreaming?" She asked me.

I blinked. "What?"

Information about her filtered into my system and immediately was cut away. Her eye color registered into my mind, only for it to be taken from my grasp before I could hold onto it. It was the same with her hair, the color and style, all slipped through my senses.

I couldn't identify a single piece of information about Her except for three small dots of pink, white and orange underneath one of her eyes.

"You are…" She whispered. "You need to wake up."

"I-I don't-"

"Shh." She placed a finger on my lips. "I know. But I'll be waiting for you."

For some reason terror grasped at my heart. Like there was a cold hand clutched around the organ that circulated blood around my body, chilling my entirety.

"I can't leave you." I pleaded with her.

We just had to keep running. Everything would be fine. I didn't have to wake up. If I woke up I would leave her alone. She couldn't-

I couldn't do that to Her.

"You're not. But the others need you. So for for now, just-

WAKE-

UP

"-already Zenith. Don't make me pull you out of bed because you know I will."

I gasped and practically flung myself upright, nearly falling off my bed in the process. The book, my book, takes a tumble to the floor as I do so. It lands closed, with the title facing straight up to the ceiling.

Seele was in the door to my apartment, watching me with undisguised amusement. I couldn't help myself from scowling at her for the rude awakening. I didn't take her for one to participate in schadenfreude but I didn't doubt that I was probably one mess of a sight.

I straightened myself out, tugging on my clothes to get them back to where they belonged from their disheveled state. Flashing someone was not in my to-do list.

"You couldn't have woken me up without yelling?" I complained.

"I've been trying to wake you up for the past five minutes. Five entire minutes, Zenith." Seele deadpanned.

I coughed as an excuse to break eye contact. Five minutes to wake someone up was a long time. Even I could admit that.

"Sorry, I was dreaming about something."

"Better have been a good dream."

The dream was… slipping away from me the more I tried to grasp it. I couldn't even remember any specific details about it, only that I was with someone very important. The more I tried to think about it, the less I could recall. It was like sand falling between my fingers.

Seele continued. "We're finished up with gathering the extra supplies. It was a hassle and led into a few other things that ended up taking nearly half a day, but we came out learning a few new things about the Supreme Guardian and why she locked us down here."

I frowned. Nearly half a day? How long did I sleep for? I remembered starting the book, and the next thing I knew I was dreaming and being woken up by Seele. That was half a day?

"Is there anything I should know?" I asked her.

Seele shrugged. "Nothing that's so important that you have to be told right now. Natasha can probably do a better job explaining things than I can."

I nodded. Natasha and… "What about Bronya and the trailblazers?"

The Wildfire member scratched the back of her head. "They're resting before they go back to the surface. What they uncovered was apparently a top priority for them."

A familiar feeling of anxiety gripped my heart. "They're going already?"

"Yep."

It'd only been a day or so. The hours were blurring together, but I knew it couldn't have been that much more or less than that. I feared that if I lost my chance to tag along now I wouldn't be able to catch up to them. If that was the case, then my chance to board the Astral Express and find my way to Earth might be lost.

I refused to let that happen.

Making sure to pick up my book, I stuffed it and anything I might need into my bag. A bag that I didn't know I had prior to searching my apartment for the book, but a bag that I was glad to have nonetheless.

"What are you doing?" Seele asked me, confusion evident.

I stopped after I crammed some extra bandages and disinfectant I had lying around into my bag. "Leaving." I said.

"...Leaving? To where?"

"The surface."

"What? You're leaving the underground? We just got the weekly drop yesterday?"

I could understand her confusion. It was only natural. If I were to be in her shoes and someone I knew one day told me they were leaving and started packing their bags right in front of me, I probably would have reacted the exact same way. With confusion.

But I wasn't her Zenith. I wasn't Belobog's Zenith. I was me, myself and I. My decision had been made up only a few hours into realizing I was stuck in a completely different world, and reading the only thing that the other Zenith had left for me, I realized what I needed to do.

Her phone was locked, and whatever was left of the other Zenith was there. But I couldn't access that, not yet. Perhaps not ever.

Our memories clearly weren't shared. People knew me but they didn't know of me and I didn't know them. Any attachments were one-sided at best, selfish of me to admit but I at least acknowledged it.

And the book. The one thing that really linked me with her. I knew as I read it, what she wanted from her life was the same as what I'm doing now. Zenith wanted to leave just as much as I did at this very moment.

It was evident even as early as the title of her book. She didn't want to spend her days here, in the underground, with nothing to do but help out at the clinic and write. Otherwise, her life would wither away and just be-

Like Fading Stardust

Start: Aug 22nd. 2023.

End: Feb 7th. 2024.

Words: 2914

This is a chapter that had to happen to continue this series, even if it's messy as hell. Although I've been working at it here and I have an actual outline of what I want to happen, I realized very quickly that I want to speed things up. So scratch my previous author's note. Penacony reignited my desire for this, and you might see its influence. Which is actually extremely funny because What Penacony is about is EXTREMELY similar to what I already had planned for this fic before it even was announced.

Btw no Penacony spoilers please. I'm not finished and it's only two days in really.