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ApocalypseOwl t1_iwzvybr wrote

For as long as humanity has been around, the pattern has repeated itself. Over and over and over again. As if the universe is nothing more than a machine, or worse, a game. Over and over, it has happened, is happening, and presumably will be happening again in the future. Eternal recurrence. The hero of a thousand faces. The Hero's Journey has been repeating itself throughout history without even a hint of failure. Always, there is an incident. A war, a battle, a death, someone going missing, or just an oath sworn under ill-timed moments. But it is always the same, the Young Hero arises from cosmos(the order of the home), and goes out into the chaos(the larger world) to fulfil a task. Rescuing a beloved one. Finding a long lost parent. Completing a sacred oath taken by their ancestor thousands of years ago. That, in and of itself, doesn't matter. And it ends the same. The hero with a thousand faces rides out and fights the foe, faces evil forces, and comes back stronger and wiser, having completed their goal, rescued the girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/pet/child/parent, etc. and probably saving the world somehow.

But why does that happen. Scholars have wondered this for ages, or at least as long as people started to notice the pattern. Started to notice that when the third son of a peasant went out on a journey that his older, smarter, and stronger brothers have failed, he will inevitably win and marry the princess. Started to notice that young girls who passed three sacred tests would come home from the woods carrying the dead wolf on their backs. Started to notice that a hero, almost always in dark times when all hope seems lost, arises from nothing, and restores order in a thematically satisfactory manner. If one asked them about their journey, about their strange quest, they would note that in hindsight their sudden meteoric rise from assistant pigkeepers to high kings seem a bit unlikely. That the lowly and poor bard who would somehow kill the evil sorcerer when a thousand warriors could not do it, rescuing the sultan's daughter, and becoming royalty in some far off land, isn't particularly probable nor even suitable for kingship.

Thaumaturgic researchers, alchemists, practical historians, and proto-archeaologists, all came together to try and find out what exactly was going on, and why. Funded by worried kings, powerful merchants, archmages, and other high lords who were increasingly incapable of getting marriage alliances because their sons kept running away after getting rescued by handsome knights from dragons, and that their daughters kept getting saved by noble bandit princesses, who were oh-so-dashing. And always, these people were heroes. Out on a great and powerful journey. Leaving their home behind, to brave the chaotic unknown. Nothing in the world could ever hope to stop them. No army could stop them, no force could bar their way for long, and no wizard could hold them with powerful magic. That's concerning on multiple levels.

Of course, the best way to find out was quite simple. The powerful scholars set out to define precisely what the Hero's Journey needed, in order to engineer one. And it was clever. A volunteering dragon kidnapped a princess, who's father was in the know about the operation. A call was sent out into the land for some brave soul to try and rescue her. Predictably, normal knights, and various worthy people tried and failed to rescue the princess. But one day some peasant boy came around, dirty as if he had lived in a mudhole, and swore to rescue the princess and defeat the evil dragon. Which immediately marked him as one of the thousand faces of the primordial hero. The dragon was informed, and instead of fighting the peasant boy directly, it told challenged him to do something. The dragon gave the boy a magical gem that was attuned to find out the source of all heroism, which would theoretically work, but in practice, it had been impossible for ordinary people to use it, as the quest that the gem led them on usually killed them, or at the very least horribly maimed them.

The peasant boy accepted this challenge in exchange for getting the princess freed upon his return. All he had to do was to follow the glowing light of the gem's internal magical tracking spells to the target, and then open the gem. Of course the boy wasn't told about this, and was just told it led to someone who could order the dragon to release the princess. The peasant, being a hero but not a particularly intelligent one, followed the instructions without thinking. Through dark mountains that would have been the death of ordinary men. Through dry deserts that even camels would have balked at, he walked. Across tumultuous oceans, under the mantle of the Earth, through the sky. Until something broke on a mathematically impossible level, opening a strange fractal hole in reality, which the peasant boy walked through.

On the other side he opened the gem as instructed, and inside the various mages and scholars emerged, telling the boy to head home and tell the dragon that the package had been delivered, upon which the dragon would release the princess. That otherside, was the outside of time and space; a realm of raw firmament, raw potentiality. Of the is-not becoming the what-is. And there, like an obsessed mad creature, was the source of the Heroes. The originator of the Journey. A terrible thing, made from many creatures. A knight in shining armour, a dread wolf that walks on two legs with its infinitely wide maw filled with trillions of sharp teeth; a vicious dragon spewing forth unreal fires burning away at creation, a princess of impossible beauty that was painful to behold, a peasant boy or girl of unmatched plainness. All of them standing in the same place, their particles sharing the same space, merging and unmerging like some incomprehensible thing that cannot decide what shape it should have.

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ApocalypseOwl t1_iwzvyqv wrote

Some of the mages were struck mad. Others had to avert their eyes. But a few had the strength of will and raw might necessary to record everything that they saw and heard. Every mad uttering from the creature's many mouths, and how in its middle, there was a face. A human face. Too human. Its eyes bulging. Its nose pointed. Its gums red. Its teeth wet with crimson blood. And it wanted something. One would not have to hear what it said, if it could speak. But it wanted what it had lost. One could look at it for a fraction of a second, and one would understand that it needed something. That eternally, it was creating Heroes, and sending them forth on journeys throughout the lands. Because it needed to make it right. It needed to remake its Hero. Forever had it worked on creating the part of itself it had lost. The one it loved about all others. The Eternal Hero. The one who have a thousand faces. Eternally it had laboured, not understanding that it was ripping what it wanted to shreds, rather than letting it come to be naturally. It had taken every face from the Hero With A Thousand Faces, not understanding why that hero had so many faces, and had made them a part of the world.

Forcing every face to live a human life. To suffer a human death. Eternally recurring, until the end of time itself. A blind idiot god, madly screaming into infinity, trying to bring back a dead friend, and only making them even deader. For every time a human wearing the face of a hero died, the face would become less and less like the ones once worn by the first hero. The Eternal Hero. And this revelation did so insult the scholars and mages of the world, did so make their blood boil, that their world would forever be condemned by this creature to be its mad attempt to bring back what it had lost, that they unleashed all their considerable arcane might upon that unreal creature. And out there, in the land-between-lands, where one might find the pools of Aslan, or the parasite dimensions, or even the Empyrean Realm of Souls, such powers were multiplied by all the spells that they could have cast in the past, but never did. All their potential selves, that had never been, and all their spells, that had never been cast, manifested in that moment to destroy the multicreature and its insane dream once and for all.

It did not even notice as it burned, boiled, froze, and rotted. It did not notice as its component parts began to collapse into raw non-baryonic matter, or dissolved into more raw nothingness. Only when it could no longer move the faces around in the universe that it was horrifically scarring, did it scream in agony. It did not understand what was going on. Could not on any level fathom that it was dying, in the realm betwixt all others, where its component parts would drift forever, never finding rest, never knowing peace, never rising again. Once it was done, then the mages could see that the multicreature had been standing over the corpse of the Eternal Hero, its thousands upon thousands of faces ripped off. Even though it was dead, it was pleading to them in their minds, to take it inside their universe, where it could be reborn properly, and arise again. Knowing that the Eternal Hero would have to spend the rest of the existence of their universe, slowly regaining its faces, they agreed, and dragged the body of the Eternal Hero through the fractal dimensional hole, back into realspace.

And upon that place where the dimensional hole closed, the many wizards and scholars set up a care facility for their mad comrades, and upon the top of it they placed the body of the Eternal Hero into a sarcophagus, where it would rest, recover, and become alive once more as slowly, the faces it had lost would die and return to it in a proper, healthy manner. And it is said that when the universe finally stands upon the brink of unnatural death, that the Eternal Hero will be healed at long last, and return to life; and it shall save this reality one final time as payment for its salvation from its maddened friend.

/r/ApocalypseOwl

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