Inside the twisted wreckage of his ship, lay the twisted wreckage of Scifer. He was suspended weightlessly amidst the drifting shards of metal, circuitry, pipes, wires, screws, bolts, paper, dust, soot, glass and a few spherical drops of blood. The pilot’s blackened eyes heaved open like a portcullis, his weary vision almost refusing to focus on the carnage through which he swam. A tiny red glow caught his gaze as a stray bolt gently grazed past his cheek. The distress beacon was active.

Scifer remembered now. The fire. The flames raining down from above and tearing the ground beneath him apart. His home world had surely perished, along with the lives of his friends and his enemies. And, in any other circumstance, Scifer would have, too. The hero would have fallen and his story would have ended there and then. But Scifer had been granted with a terrible privilege. For although he was there during planet Virridia’s final moments, hearing her scream as she was set ablaze and ripped apart, Scifer’s ship had taken him to a new place just before its’ mortal components succumbed to the immense heat and the pressure. There she was now – A glowing blue sphere, unharmed and calmly drifting through the endless night above the glass canopy of Scifer’s ship, unaware of the calamity that had befallen her parallel self a mere dimension jump away.

An immense feeling of guilt gripped Scifer’s heart as he painfully raised a shaking, bloodied paw up to the glass in the canopy, as if he was trying to feverishly stroke the face of his gentle homeworld. He was rewarded for his efforts by voices echoing dimly through his mind. Voices of artists and writers giving powerful speeches that gave hope to people in a time of need. The voices of children, laughing and playing without a care in the world. The voices of warriors and soldiers, giving a mighty cry as they fearlessly charged into battle to protect the ones that they loved. All those billions of lives, all those trillions of memories – gone, with Scifer as the only witness to their passing.

Virridia now became a single entity in his mind, obliviously smiling down upon the tiny speck that was Scifer’s ship. Scifer’s paw left a muddy stain on the cracked glass as his eyes began to well up with tears. He felt crushingly humbled, as if the Gods he did not believe in were taunting him with the seeming lack of consequence for his failures. Scifer’s paw crumpled into a fist as he beat it against the splintering glass canopy out of reckless frustration. He grit his teeth and sobbed. Only now did he realize the true weight of his abilities and the trauma they could bring to a mortal mind. Not only had he lost everything, but he could lose everything over and over again, ad infinitum. And he was forsaken to carry this emotional baggage with him, through every new, unsympathetic and indifferent universe to which he travelled. This was his curse.

No paradoxes. Only consequences.