ETHERMANCER

It was abandoned long ago to repeat, as the simulator slipped into the ether, the game failed to turn off. Now it runs on automatic pilot, filling this universe with experimental levels. New kinds of players emerge and re-emerge. Dreamkeepers act as the grid wardens, keeping the data alive with our consciousness. The Code Keeper continuously throws us back into the kaleidoscope. Magic can see through the veil of the simulation, but not to its core frame. I found it; the reincarnations, the memories of phantom lives, even the essence of my mathematical code revealed itself, a perfectly corrupted formula.
As coded characters, we cannot remember our last play. Still, when I discovered the Server housed in our existence, in plain sight, I could look back at all of my lives in the game, look back at those who were tossed with me into this simulation of bedlam, and most importantly, gaze at the life of my mirrored opponent.

Before birth, I lingered in the code sea, just below the dark waves of Waiting.

Swimming up from the black ether, we were reluctant to drown again in her arms and fought the obsidian suffocation to climb aboard fragile floating crafts of code dust and light. From there, rescued, with the vain inherent struggle by our pure will, onto galactic kites to sail eternities until we reached the Code Keeper.

Once before him, we stood in awe, silent, without a gasp, at his enormity, for our eyes could not reach his eye, his palm the size of heavens, he reached gracefully down and plucked one upon the other and lifting his mighty arm he threw each of us into a faraway data cosmos.

When he threw me forward through the belt of asteroid formulas and ether I had just been in, I yearned for a moment to rest once again quiet in that place where everything was dreamed possible rather than this unknown violence he propelled me into. Past the tree of galaxies into the farthest branch, I traveled, out, and then farther out, for I fear the giant Code Keeper had detected something within me corrupted, blood hungry, vengeful. He was right.

I would hunt my nemesis over and over again, killing her through every one of her reincarnations. I am a deathbringer.