Lore: When a Trickster Meets His Match

Chapter One: The Void

The Void at the End of Time was a place that no human mind had ever imagined. Atom-by-atom, it was a place made of the darkness that lives within a trauma. It was held together by the sting of vengeful words. It was fed by the life-blood of darkness. There was no sun. The only way to properly distinguish day from night was the fact that the day was opaque and grey and miserable and the night was opaque and grey and miserable but significantly colder. The land was wide and flat, uninhabited by lush trees or made verdant with flowers; instead, it was as monotonous as a desert with the dark ground, made of the dust of broken dreams, with only the roots of evil growing from the soil. Or whatever passed for 'soil' in this land where nothing grew. There was only one tree, which was skeletal and crooked in its struggle to survive. There were shoots of long grass which grew in flat fields, which stung your hands and knees like the tentacles of jellyfish if you tried to walk through it.

There were dead, rotting things. Things from ages long past which had fallen from the sphere of time into the dark timelessness on the fringe of reality. There were pirate ships with ratty sails, which longed for a sea with which it would never be reunited; there were chipped columns of stone and statues with weathered faces. There were the scraps of 1950s beetles, which had been disgorged by the strange inhabitants of the Void, until nothing but the seat stuffing - stripped of leather - and the bare, naked bones of steel remained.

Variant 1313 moved carefully through the void. She was quiet. She was careful. Stepping over the pile of lunch trays that scattered the ground like autumn leaves, she followed the path to the hide. It had been a difficult job : scrounging the plains for food. When her foot kicked into a pile of debris, something fell out and cluttered across the ground. The noise was so loud and piercing that she feared she caught the attention of Alioth, the destroyer, so she threw herself down on the ground. There was a sound, explosive like a crack of thunder and terrifying like the roar of a lion, but the beast did not appear. Stealthily, she got up and found what had caused the cacophony. It was a glass jar with a sticker on it. She scratched away at the tag , which read T365, with her thumbnail and found the most curious thing. It contained a frog. It looked at her with glassy, dead eyes and shot its tongue out at her. It left a streak of saliva across the glass.

The Variant hesitated. Slowly, she slipped the jar into her bag.

It was difficult to precisely pinpoint how long Variant 1313 had survived in the Void. After being plucked from her own time and labelled as a 'time variant criminal', her own time in the TVA had been short. The TVA agents had not much use for her, it turned out, and 'pruned' her into this place. Thinking at first that she was dead, the Variant had stared up into that hellish sphere that she called 'sky' purely because it was above her head and not under her feet, and had been paralysed with fear when she set her gaze on Alioth.

Alioth was a trans-temporal entity. That meant that it existed in a ghost of a body, being made up of dark, nebulous matter that gave it the impression of being a troop of ominous cumulonimbus clouds seconds before the point of thunderstrike. Yet there was no thunder that came from these clouds; the only light was the glow of two evil eyes of purple. Sometimes there would be a third light: the last light that a variant would ever see. A mouth that bared gaping fangs, which were as solid as the splintery crags of an uncrossable mountain peak. It was a leviathan that consumed most of the variants who were doomed to the Void.

Variant 1313 had almost become a part of that statistic. As the beast approached, she remembered the stench of ozone that knocked the very breath from her lungs. There was no way that she could run with the thunder of her heart slamming into her ribcage. It was only when she was about to die that deus ex machina had presented itself.

Deus ex machina. God and the machine. Oftentimes when she told the tale of her first few hours in the Void, she liked to use this description. It had always made him laugh.