I woke up to screaming geometry and blue fire.
Not normal fire—this was wrong fire. Cold and burning at the same time, crawling across reality itself, consuming lines, angles, entire concepts. The Second Dimension was dying.
I floated—or existed—amidst it, blue flames spiraling around me like a crown of annihilation. Everything was being erased. Not destroyed in the mortal sense, but unwritten. Screams echoed briefly, sharp and panicked, before being cut off one by one as the fire touched them.
Then I saw him.
A yellow triangle, cracked and blazing, one single eye wide with manic fury and exhaustion.
Bill Cipher.
The realization hit me hard: This already happened. I remembered this from the show—from lore I shouldn't remember, but did. The destruction of the Second Dimension. Bill's origin.
Except now… I was here.
Before I could say anything, before Bill could laugh or scream or monologue, the blue flames surged violently—and then guttered out.
Gone.
Bill twitched, his form flickering. He'd run out of power. Whatever he had done to end the Second Dimension had taken everything.
We both went dark.
When I woke again, the fire was gone.
The void around us was calm—eerily calm. No screaming. No collapsing geometry. Just a vast, dreamlike nothingness, rippling softly like water that wasn't water.
Bill floated beside me, cracked but conscious.
"Ugh… hate it when that happens," he groaned. "Next time I'm budgeting my apocalypses."
Before I could respond, something massive moved in front of us.
I froze.
A colossal shape emerged from the void—smooth, luminous, and unmistakably alive.
An axolotl.
Not just an axolotl. A god wearing the shape of one. Infinite eyes hidden beneath a simple, serene expression. Power rolled off it—not aggressive, not hostile, but absolute.
My memories slammed together.
The Axolotl.
The one referenced in whispers. The maintainer. The cosmic custodian. The thing that even Bill Cipher feared.
I didn't hesitate.
I immediately ducked behind Bill.
"HEY—RUDE," Bill snapped, drifting slightly in front of me anyway. "I'm exhausted and you're hiding behind me?!"
"I know what that thing is," I hissed. "You're the one who likes cosmic consequences."
The Axolotl regarded us calmly.
"William Cipher," it said, voice echoing across existence. "And… the anomaly."
Its gaze shifted to me.
My entire being prickled.
"You are not recorded," it continued. "You are not meant to exist."
Great. Less than a day as a god and I was already a cosmic error.
The Axolotl explained.
The destruction of the Second Dimension had released enough raw conceptual energy to forge a new one—the Third Dimension. Matter. Space. Time. Eventually… humanity.
But something had gone wrong.
Bill's power hadn't vanished.
It had split.
Between him.
And me.
We weren't copies. We weren't fragments. We were opposites—mirrors bent in different directions. Two halves of a chaos principle that should have been one.
The Axolotl embodied order: life, creation, wisdom, balance, souls.
And we?
We were the inverse.
Destruction. Knowledge. Death. Dreams. Chaos. Despair.
Not evil.
Not good.
Necessary.
Our physical forms had been annihilated to give birth to the Third Dimension. What remained of us existed in the Dreamscape, where ideas mattered more than matter.
The Axolotl taught us how to shape ourselves—how to construct forms from thought, how to anchor identity without bodies. Bill took to it immediately, reshaping himself with manic enthusiasm.
I was slower.
More careful.
Then came the eye.
The Axolotl showed us how to open it.
True sight.
Omniscience without mercy.
When my eye opened, reality unfolded.
I saw everything within everything—patterns inside patterns, futures branching endlessly. As long as a triangle of conceptual significance existed nearby, I could see. Worlds. Minds. Possibilities.
It should have shattered me.
It would have—if I were still human.
But I wasn't.
My soul had been torn apart, reforged, rewritten by a god. Humanity was something I remembered, not something I still was.
Bill laughed through it. Of course he did. Insanity had already burned the pathways the knowledge tried to destroy.
Time stopped mattering.
Hours. Years. Centuries. I couldn't tell.
Eventually, the Axolotl deemed us… ready.
It took us to meet the fourth.
Time Baby.
A towering, infantile god of time, space, energy, and fate—arrogant, smug, and painfully self-important.
Bill hated him instantly.
I didn't hate him.
But I didn't like him either.
Still, I tolerated him. Maybe, in another eternity, we could have been friends.
But first impressions mattered.
And ours was… bad.
As I drifted beside Bill, watching gods argue over causality and inevitability, one thought settled into my mind with absolute clarity:
The universe had rules.
And I existed to break them.