Time has no mercy for those who see it in full. Matt learned that early, when his sight expanded beyond the mortal flow—past, present, future laid bare like dissected veins under glass. He could observe every branching possibility, every heartbeat that might have been. But he could not touch them. The laws binding him were absolute. His eyes pierced eternity, but his hands were shackled by it.
She died the first time under red skies, her blood reflecting the dawn he never forgot. The next time, she drowned in silence within a collapsing world. Each attempt to save her made the universe recoil. The threads of destiny, once taut, began to fray. The fractures spread—crimson lines running through the lattice of time and causality.
Those cracks called attention. From the gulfs beyond the first dawn stirred the forgotten gods: those sealed away when the pantheons still spoke as one voice. Their awakening rippled across creation, their lament reaching the divine peaks. They warned him to stop, to abandon his struggle before the structure of existence tore beyond repair.
Matt did not listen. Even bound, even warned, he saw within countless realities a single, infinitesimal glimmer—a version of himself doomed beyond comprehension, where every choice curdled into ruin. That world would become his gamble. If the paradox demanded a price, he would pay it in full.
He gathered the echoes of himself—beings cursed with the same sight, across infinite worlds. Together, they burned their essence into a final act of defiance. His divinity condensed into a construct of reason and evolution: a system that rewarded slaughter with strength, a ladder of survival carved through despair. He offered it to the one version of himself who could inherit failure and make it weapon.
When the act concluded, silence consumed all realms. The gods felt it—the sudden vacuum where an entity stronger than them all had existed. No stars fell, no timelines shattered; only one consciousness ceased across infinity. In its absence spread unease, ambition, fear.
Matt, {The Chained Existence}, was no more. Yet his gamble lingered—an unseen code running through the veins of another Matt, in another doomed world, where the system would awaken and history itself would fight to contain it.