# Chapter Four
David Griffin sat in his modest faculty office, surrounded by towers of ungraded papers and the accumulated detritus of fifteen years of academic mediocrity. Steam hissed softly through the pipes that ran along the walls, carrying eldritch energy to power the brass lamp on his desk. Through his window, he could see students hurrying across the courtyard, their mechanical assistants whirring and clicking as they carried books and supplies.
All perfectly normal. All perfectly *limited* in scope.
The divine pressure around Miss Ashworth was intensifying. Soon, the gods would begin their clumsy attempts at guidance, and then everything would accelerate beyond control. Which meant it was time to remember things he'd spent decades trying to forget.
David steepled his fingers and allowed his mind to drift back across the centuries, to truths he'd buried beneath layers of academic tedium.
Actually, no. These thoughts deserved proper consideration. He opened the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and withdrew a leather-bound journal that looked far older than it should have, considering he'd purchased it from a university supplier just last month. Some habits died hard, even after centuries of enforced mundanity.
He picked up his pen and began to write in the flowing script of Old Vel'taran—a language that had died with the civilization he'd personally annihilated three centuries ago. Even if someone found this journal, they'd assume it was academic research into dead tongues.
*Reflections on the War of Foundations, as I find myself forced to recall it.*
The Precursors had never been interested in conquest, which had made them so much worse than ordinary tyrants. A conqueror wanted resources, territory, submission—comprehensible goals that could be negotiated with or planned around. The Precursors had wanted to turn existence itself into their personal art gallery.
They had ruled—if "ruled" was even the correct term—for eons before David's rise to power. Their dominion had been absolute not because they crushed resistance, but because they had made resistance part of the exhibition. Every act of defiance became another brushstroke in their grand composition, every moment of suffering carefully orchestrated to complement the broader aesthetic vision.
David paused in his writing, remembering the first time he'd truly understood what they were. He'd been younger then, more ambitious, convinced that power was something to be seized rather than carefully accumulated. He'd challenged one of their lesser servants, expecting a fight.
Instead, he'd been invited to observe.
The Precursor had shown him a solar system where every planet had been sculpted into a perfect representation of a different form of despair. Billions of souls, trapped in carefully designed scenarios that maximized their anguish while maintaining their awareness. Not torture for information or compliance—art for its own sake.
"Do you see the elegance?" the Precursor had asked, its voice like crystalline chimes arranged to suggest screaming. "Each world builds upon the theme of the last. The crescendo of suffering creates such beautiful harmonics across the dimensional barrier."
David had seen. And he had understood that this was not evil in any human sense—it was something far more alien. These beings didn't hate their victims or desire their pain for personal satisfaction. They simply found anguish aesthetically pleasing, the way a mortal might appreciate a sunset.
*The Precursors viewed reality as a canvas,* he wrote in the elegant curves of Old Vel'taran. *Every soul was paint, every moment of existence a potential brushstroke. They were artists in the truest sense—completely absorbed in their work, utterly indifferent to the medium they destroyed in the process.*
His own evil had been far more prosaic. He'd wanted power, knowledge, the ability to reshape the world according to his vision. When he'd begun his continent-spanning soul experiments, it had been in service of those goals. The suffering had been incidental—a necessary component of the work, but not the point of it.
The difference had made all the difference.
David had fought the Precursors not from altruism, but from a kind of professional disgust. Their waste of resources had been staggering. Entire civilizations reduced to aesthetic elements, vast stores of magical energy squandered on maintaining elaborate torture-galleries that served no practical purpose.
Worse, they'd been genuinely confused by his objections. In their final confrontation, as reality burned around them and the foundations of existence groaned under the weight of their conflict, their primary representative had actually seemed hurt by his criticism.
"We are creating something beautiful," it had insisted, even as David tore apart its carefully maintained exhibition spaces. "Each scream is perfectly calibrated. Each tear falls at precisely the right moment. Cannot you see the artistry?"
David had seen the artistry. He'd also seen the inefficiency, the massive squandering of perfectly good experimental subjects, the complete absence of any productive outcome. So he'd destroyed them, systematically and thoroughly, and built something more rational on the ruins.
*I was evil in the way mortals understood evil,* he continued writing. *I took what I wanted, hurt those who opposed me, and reshaped the world to suit my preferences. But I never forgot that souls were valuable resources, not mere paint for cosmic murals. I never reduced civilizations to aesthetic elements. I never treated reality itself as expendable.*
That had been the real difference between them. David had been a tyrant, but tyrants needed subjects to rule. The Precursors had been artists, and artists could always find new canvas.
He set down his pen and leaned back in his chair, listening to the everyday sounds of academic life filtering through his office walls. Students laughing. Professors arguing. The steady rhythm of a functioning institution built on the assumption that reality would continue to exist in its current, stable form.
The gods were preparing Miss Ashworth to face something that would reduce all of this to raw material for an aesthetic vision she couldn't possibly comprehend. And they didn't even understand what they were asking of her.
David picked up his pen again and continued in Old Vel'taran.
*The war was not between good and evil. It was between human evil and something that transcended such categories entirely. I won because I fought like a mortal—with purpose, strategy, and a clear understanding of what I wanted to preserve. They lost because they fought like artists—more concerned with the beauty of the struggle than with victory itself.*
*Now they stir again, and the current pantheon prepares a champion who has never seen what I have seen. Who cannot imagine an enemy that views her very existence as nothing more than a potential element in an endless, beautiful, absolutely meaningless composition.*
*I find myself almost sympathetic to Miss Ashworth's plight.*
Almost.
David closed the journal and returned it to his desk drawer. Outside his window, the normal world continued its blissfully ignorant routine, unaware that its foundational reality was beginning to crack along lines drawn by entities that had never cared whether mortals lived or died, only whether their dying created pleasing patterns in the cosmic background radiation.
He had work to do.