The room was dark, lit by a large aquarium that took up one wall. Sean sat on the large bed in the room kept for him, but had noted long ago that anything of real worth shouldn’t be kept there. He could hear the laughter and loud goings-on of his step-siblings in the hallway and other nearby parts of the house, but he was disinterested in joining them. It was surreal for him to know that just days before, he’d had end-stage brain cancer and had come home only to say goodbye to his father. Nothing was supposed to have been able to take away the cancer, let alone take it away in a matter of seconds.
Sean still didn’t know why the gauntlet had been passed to him. He didn’t feel he was worthy of it, yet no one but himself or Billy knew about the transfer. He’d requested for Billy to not tell anyone that it was Sean’s now, and he’d agreed. Sure – having a gauntlet that made you the omniscient, omnipotent Creator Of All sounded great. In reality, it was a heavy burden, and he could understand why Billy didn’t want it anymore. He held up his hand, letting the light of the fishtank gleam over the gauntlet.
Looking at it, it was easy to see where Jim Stalin had gotten the inspiration for the Infinity Gauntlet during his run at Marvel, though it wasn’t exactly the same, as there were no gems. Infinity power…infinite possibilities. He leaned his head against the wall and sighed heavily. As far as everyone else was concerned, they knew Billy to have had the power, and they assumed Billy had taken away the cancer, given Sean a clean bill of health. He had initially hoped life could resume more or less the same as he’d always lived it. Those hopes were dashed when, upon visiting his best friend, Andrew immediately averted his eyes and took a stance of subservience.
Andrew’s body housed the soul of a fallen Elohim; more specifically, one of his Reapers. Before this turn of events, he and Andrew spent a lot of time hanging out, taught classes together, and he’d even been a godfather to Andrew’s twin daughters. Andrew had helped him through a lot of rough patches and stood up for him to others. Now it felt like he’d lost his best friend, and though he let on as nothing were different, he hadn’t stayed long, and he had yet to go back.
There was the matter of his father, who was beyond elated his son would live and kept striving to get Jett’s kids to accept him. Most of them might, with time. Mark and Warren never would because of what had happened with Laura, even though he’d apologized, attended therapy and rehab, and she’d forgiven him.
Bored with reminiscing, he instead practiced flexing his capabilities a little, primarily focusing on ways to not have the power and knowledge overwhelm him. Being as gifted as he was intellectually, as well as being able to pick up on the knowledge he had access to, it wasn’t difficult to devise a more permanent means of keeping the knowledge filtered, and accessing it only if he wanted to. Satisfied, he moved on to peering at the threads of fate, seeing what was what, and what was to come, limiting it only to the universe he was currently in.
He’d known a multiverse existed years before, having been pulled from an alternate dimension his father’s soul had been transferred to (all in the effort to teach a lesson). In that universe, he’d been bullied for his intelligence, and abused by his mother in a multitude of fashions. In this universe, many saw his father as nothing more than a vampire and a villain. Sean had always seen it as Brandon having saved his life – even if, later, he’d made the difficult choice to have Sean banished and damned to torment because he’d been twisted by Val’s teachings.
He puts his hands to his face. So many mistakes on his part. But being intelligent didn’t make one less vulnerable, and that’s what Val had targeted – his insecurities, and offered promises and power and temptation, and he’d fell for it and had taken it. Moving the gauntlet hand away from his face momentarily, he gave himself a rough thud to the temple, to jar him out of reflecting. It wasn’t his past he needed to be reflecting on. It was this word’s future.
Looking through the loom was both tedious and interesting, depending on where he was looking. He tried to avoid the temptation to look at his family and their threads, though he did eventually look to them. The more he looked, the more he felt a sense of dread. The problem existed with his step-family. As a vampire, Jett should never have been able to reproduce. Somehow, however, Caine (the wily bastard) had found a way to make it happen. It was a bit like a fertility drug on steroids, whatever trick and magic he’d managed to pull. One child should have been impossible, let alone the twenty-three the man actually had. They’d been artificially aged in order to be ready for Gehenna, to act as Caine’s soldiers in his war against Lilith.
If that war were to come to pass, it would have devastating effects on the world. Worse, it would fan a butterfly effect through the multiverse that could ultimately end existence on all of them. Sean put away the Loom of Fate and thought deeply about what could be done about the issue. He could remove them from existence, but nothing stopped it from happening again, and those consequences could be even worse. Removing the problem of Caine and Lilith was also difficult, as they had many entanglements in and of themselves. In the end, he ran some simulations on various possibilities and came to a conclusion of what he had to do.
He stood up, flexing his hand in front of him to pull up miniaturized holographic style projections of each person in the town, then gradually picked out the ones he felt were deserving. His hand hovered when he came to Mark and Warren. They hated him more then they hated their father, and only refrained from actively trying to kill him on a regular basis because Laura had begged them not to. After mulling it over a few minutes, he put them aside with the rest of the deserving, then cast the other holograms away once he had finished.
Left with only the deserving, he touched each in turn, tapping on the third eye, whispering under his breath, essentially activating them, in a manner of speaking. It would happen when they were all asleep, he decided. Holding them all within his field of visions, he spoke a phrase in a language without words, the images fading away after he did so. That night, the chosen slept well, hearing his message. Their souls departed their bodies, and scattered away from one another, spreading out across the multiverse. They would be reborn, none of them all in the same universe, though perhaps one or two. None would have access to such dangerous powers as Caine had granted them in this world, if they were one of that murderer’s chosen. He hoped they all would make better choices, and have better lives.
With a heavy heart, he did what he concluded he must once he’d confirmed they were all in line to be reborn elsewhere, and snapped – thus erasing the current universe from existence. “Go then – there are other worlds than these.” he muttered, fading from that existence to find another to reside in, at least for a time.