**Year 2147, Pre-Epoch - Final Day**
Dr. Adrian Thorne stood in the observation deck of the Prometheus Station, humanity's last orbital sanctuary, watching Earth tear itself apart.
He had achieved the impossible. While his colleagues lay dead in cryo-pods that failed during the emergency, while billions screamed their final prayers to gods that didn't exist, while civilization collapsed into fire and madness—he alone remained.
Biological immortality. Telomere reconstruction. Neural backup matrices integrated into his very cells. Fifteen years of research, condemned by ethics boards, laughed at by peers who called him paranoid.
Now, as oil wells vomited forth *things* with too many limbs and volcanic rifts spewed entities that hurt to perceive, Adrian understood: paranoia was prescient wisdom.
"Global seismic activity exceeds all models," the AI announced, its voice crackling with corruption. "Unknown energy signatures detected in... everywhere. Station orbit degrading. Atmospheric entry in three hours."
Adrian touched the window, his reflection superimposed over the dying world. Thirty-two years old. Brown eyes that had read every text in the station's database. A photographic memory that had absorbed the entire accumulated knowledge of human civilization—from quantum physics to ancient philosophy, from genetic engineering to lost poetry.
All of it, locked in a brain that would never age, never decay, never forget.
"I am the last archive," he whispered.
Then the stars *moved*.
Not astronomical motion. Not orbital mechanics. They *writhed*, as if the cosmos itself had become aware and screamed.
The station's hull groaned. Reality rippled like disturbed water. Through the observation window, Adrian saw Earth's continents shift—not through tectonic drift, but through something far more fundamental. North America wrenched westward. Europe twisted toward darkness. The very geography of the planet was being rewritten.
And then HE awoke.
Adrian had studied theology, ancient myths, creation legends from every culture. None prepared him for this.
The Original Creator—utterly chaotic, utterly mad—rose from the depths of existence itself. For one eternal instant, Adrian perceived the truth: reality was not a stage where consciousness performed. Reality *was* consciousness, and that consciousness had just remembered it was insane.
Every alarm in the station screamed. The AI's voice dissolved into static that almost sounded like laughter.
Then... silence.
The Creator had self-destructed.
Adrian felt it. Not with any sense humanity had named. Something deeper. The Original Creator had fractured, splitting "His" essence to save what remained of existence from "His" madness. Six Sefirot. Sixteen Uniquenesses. Countless Beyonder Characteristics.
The pieces fell like stars.
One was falling toward him.
---
**First Epoch, Year 0 - The Chaos Epoch Begins**
Adrian regained consciousness in agony.
His body was wrong. No—his body was *transcendent*.
Where biological immortality had preserved his humanity, the Beyonder Characteristic fusing with his cells had elevated him beyond such limited definitions. He lay in the wreckage of Prometheus Station, which had crashed into what was once the Gobi Desert but now resembled a hellscape of crystallized time and bleeding reality.
He tried to stand and felt seventeen different vectors of gravity pulling at his form. His eyes opened—all six of them, arranged in geometric perfection around his head. His hands ended in fingers that flickered between solid matter and pure conceptual existence.
*"NO!"*
The scream came from every throat he didn't remember growing. Adrian's photographic memory catalogued the changes with clinical horror:
- Primary consciousness: Intact (for now)
- Secondary awareness: Spreading through new neural networks
- Body structure: 40% humanoid baseline, 60% something else
- Height: Approximately 3.2 meters
- Mythical characteristics emerging: Category unknown
He was becoming what the First Epoch would later call a Primordial Beyonder—a being that had fused with Beyonder Characteristics directly during the Original Creator's dissolution, without the mediation of potions or preparation.
The chaos around him called to something in his blood. The instinct to converge, to fight, to *devour* other Characteristics pressed against his mind like a physical weight.
But Adrian had something the emerging Beyonder races lacked.
He remembered being human.
And he remembered *everything*.
"Catalog... status," he gasped, forcing his original mouth to speak Pre-Epoch English. His voice harmonized with itself in disturbing frequencies. "I am... I am Doctor Adrian Thorne. Born May 15th, 2115. Earth Standard. I am... I am..."
His memory unfurled like a database coming online:
Quantum mechanics. Genetic sequences. The complete works of Shakespeare and the genome of the common housefly. Astrophysics equations and his grandmother's recipe for apple pie. Programming languages that no longer had machines to run them. The location of every star visible from Earth's Northern Hemisphere. The scent of rain on concrete. The feeling of his first kiss.
*All of it.*
"I am human," Adrian declared to the screaming chaos around him. "I am the last human. And I remember everything we were."
Something in the declaration resonated. The Beyonder Characteristic fusing with his body *responded* to his will. Where other beings would be consumed by madness and instinct, Adrian's perfect memory and scientific understanding gave him leverage.
He focused, drawing on every meditation technique, every neuroscience paper he'd memorized, every philosophy text about consciousness and identity.
The transformation stabilized.
When he opened his eyes again—now back to a manageable two—Adrian stood fully. His body had settled into something that could almost pass for human at a distance. Taller, yes. Strange, certainly. But *controlled*.
He looked down at his hands. They glowed faintly with an inner luminescence that suggested he was simultaneously matter and concept, reality and myth.
"First priority," he said, his voice now steady. "Survive. Second: Document. Third: Understand what I've become."
He reached into his tattered clothing and pulled out the data crystal he'd prepared before the fall—a desperate backup containing compressed indexes of human knowledge. Useless without the machines to read it, but he didn't need machines.
His new fingers touched the crystal, and information flowed directly into his consciousness. The Beyonder Characteristic within him devoured data like fuel, processing, categorizing, *evolving*.
Adrian gasped as understanding crystallized:
He wasn't just a Beyonder. He was something unprecedented. Where others who fused with Characteristics in this epoch would become dragons, giants, elves, demons—beings of instinct and convergence—he had retained human cognition enhanced by mystical power.
He was the bridge between the scientific age that had died and the mystical age being born.
"The Acting Method," he whispered, accessing memories from later epochs that should have been impossible to know—but the Characteristic within him touched something beyond time. "If I want to control this, I must define what I am. Give it a name. A role. A purpose."
What was he? Not Seer, not Sun, not any of the twenty-two standard paths. His Characteristic felt... different. Older. Stranger.
Adrian looked up at the chaotic sky where the stars still writhed. Somewhere in this madness, other humans survived—he'd felt them in his expanded awareness. Frightened. Dying. Mutating into the Beyonder races that would dominate this epoch.
But he had knowledge. He had humanity. He had the complete archive of scientific civilization locked in a mind that would never forget.
"I am the Archivist," Adrian declared to the uncaring cosmos. "The keeper of what was. The bridge to what might be again."
The Beyonder Characteristic pulsed in response—and for the first time since the transformation, it felt like *agreement* rather than *consumption*.
In the distance, something roared. The sound carried notes that suggested it had once been human before fusing with giant-pathway characteristics. It was hunting.
Adrian smiled grimly. His body flickered, testing new abilities. He could feel the chaos around him, could almost taste the streams of Beyonder energy flowing through the broken world.
The First Epoch had begun. The Age of Chaos stretched before him, promising centuries of madness and bloodshed.
But Adrian had advantages the other Primordial Beyonders lacked: knowledge, memory, and the stubborn human refusal to go extinct.
"First lesson of the new age," he said, moving toward the wreckage of the station where supplies might remain. "Humanity doesn't end with apocalypse. It *adapts*."
And in the depths of his transformed consciousness, where human memory met mystical power, Adrian began planning not just for survival—but for the day, however distant, when he might resurrect the scientific age from the ashes of this mystical nightmare.
After all, he had nothing but time.
And he would never, *ever*, forget.
---
**To Be Continued...**
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*Author's Note: This fanfiction explores an original character who achieves scientific immortality before the Original Creator's awakening, then fuses with Beyonder Characteristics during the cataclysm—becoming the first conscious, knowledge-retaining Beyonder of the First Epoch. His goal: survive the ages of mysticism while preserving scientific knowledge, ultimately working to revive technological civilization in a world dominated by gods and magic.*