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