Anomaly

The Master watched a universe die.

The event took billions of years, and from where he was, time had lost meaning. Civilizations rose and vanished between his gazes. Stars withered and died. Galaxies drew apart and then, caught by the inward pull of collapse, began to converge.

The universe folded in on itself. Its edges streamed toward a singularity that was there only because the laws of physics for that specific space required one. Space itself shrank, time contracted upon its own axis and matter squeezed together with densities that could not have existed within their own reality.

And then… Gone. It left nothing but emptiness. Nothing remained to hint that a cosmos had once been present.

The Master examined the aftermath dispassionately. The implosion threw off barely perceptible tremors that pulsed out into the vast structure that connects all realities; ripples in the cosmic ocean, each carrying infinitesimal portions of energy into the greater cosmic sea.

Physics dictated no other outcome.

The universe simply behaves exactly as expected.

Another universe, meanwhile, had been born by its dead neighbor. Such conjunctions are commonplace: cycles are eternal, universes come and go, and at each beginning there are new realities of physics to support their inhabitants and to ensure that existence proceeds as intended.

The infant cosmos was burgeoning, as all infant universes do. Energy dispersed, cooled, and coalesced into matter, spreading throughout the darkness until gravity began its patient work. Matter gathered into filaments, the filaments into stars, and within those stars, fusion transmuted one element into another. In death, they scattered their contents back into the vacuum, seeding the next generation of worlds.

The cycle repeats endlessly. The details vary, but the foundations remain the same: ores buried within planetary crusts, elements dissolved in oceans, forests rooted in alien soil, blood and bone fashioned from the remnants of dead stars. Someday, somewhere within this newborn universe, one or two sapient creatures will stand upon a world, look toward the night sky, and wonder how they came to exist.

The Master knows these things. Stellar evolution, dimensional topology, the influence neighboring realities exert upon one another—none of it remains mysterious to him. He knows the workings of the galaxies as intimately as a clockmaker would a simple clock.

Yet despite all he knows, one mystery remains stubbornly unresolved.

Himself.

He ponders this periodically, particularly in those periods of calm in the cosmic flux, during the transition of one universe’s ending, and another’s beginning phase. When one ceases to occupy existence, and another is yet to reach its period of interest, in its time. There are, after all, no gains in prolonged speculation. What truth, if there is any truth to be had, remains out of his grasp – and has for so long it may not be there at all.

He existed, and that much was undeniable. However, the mechanism behind that existence remained frustratingly unclear.

Every cosmos he had ever observed, no matter how bizarre its physical laws might appear, conformed to an underlying structure. Some universes possessed more than the usual complement of spatial dimensions. Others possessed fewer. A handful violated principles most realities considered fundamental. Yet beneath those differences lay order - an architecture defining what could occur and what could not, linking each event to the next across time and space.

However, nowhere did he find a category for himself. He had spent considerable effort searching for one, though measuring that effort became difficult once time itself ceased behaving consistently. He had sought other intelligences between universes and beyond the boundaries of individual realms, but found nothing he could definitively identify as a consciousness in exile, or even a ghost. No being seemed capable of existing beyond the lifespan granted by its reality of origin.

He was, by definition of omission and evidence of nonexistence, unique. An error in the cosmological equations, an impossibility made manifest. An anomaly. No comparable existence had ever revealed itself. If existence could be described as an equation, then he was an error that somehow balanced.

But, given enough time, even absurdities lose their power to shock. What might once have disturbed him had long since settled into familiarity. He accepted his condition much as a mathematician accepted an unwelcome theorem after exhausting every possible attempt to disprove it.

However, his attention returns, as it often does, to that same unanswered question.

The question has followed him longer than he can measure. It has survived the birth and death of countless universes, endured the collapse of stars and the erosion of worlds, and yet remains as distant now as it was when it first emerged.

Everything that exists possesses an origin. Particles arise from interactions, and stars form from collapsing clouds of gas. Entire universes can be traced back through chains of cause and effect to the conditions that brought them into being. The Master can do the same for almost anything.

Except himself.

No matter how far he follows the chain backward, it eventually vanishes into darkness. And perhaps it vanishes because the answer is not gone at all. Perhaps something still remained in the depths of his memory.

It was not uncommon for fragments to surface. Worlds long gone shimmered at the edge of his perception like distant stars, visible only because some trace of their light had survived the impossible gulf separating past from present. They never remained long enough to be understood.

Perhaps he had once belonged somewhere. To someone. A family, perhaps. A life beyond the endless procession of universes being born, dying, and beginning anew. He allows himself to linger on the thought, something he rarely does anymore.

Normally, such thoughts lacked the gravity necessary to compete with the cosmos. They appeared, lingered briefly, and dissolved beneath the weight of larger concerns.

This one was different.

It possessed mass.

As his attention settled upon the possibility, he became aware of a subtle distortion within the landscape of his own thoughts. The sensation was difficult to describe except through the language he understood best.

As mass bends spacetime, this thought distorted the landscape of his mind. It exerted an influence disproportionate to its size, drawing his attention back toward itself whenever he attempted to look elsewhere.

He briefly considered looking away. Knowledge always came at a cost, and some lessons charged far more than they delivered. If there had once been someone who understood that truth better than him, their face had long since vanished from memory.

Still, the pull persisted, gentle but insistent, exerting its influence through nothing but its own existence.

Eventually, he followed. The fragment tugged his attention to a specific universe. It was no different from the thousands of others around it; its physical laws were unremarkable, its stars followed expected trajectories, its galaxies spun in accordance with principles he had practically committed to his own soul. By all accounts, it should have been utterly mundane.

But the moment he focused, something within him reacted.

Gradually, his awareness receded, and he flowed downward through scales of existence that he had crossed innumerable times before; a galaxy contracted into a solar system, a star collapsed into a world, and that world dwindled until it was a single city of warm stone streets and open courtyards, filled with the faint cadence of conversation carried on a breeze. Then he saw them. A young boy, hand locked around the finger of a taller girl, as they walked across a square in the warm darkness that felt familiar.

Nothing remarkable happened. No revelation, no hidden truth, just two children walking beneath the summer heat, chattering about matters of little importance too far away for him to discern. The reaction came anyway. It rolled through him like a wave strong enough to drown out thought.

Simultaneously, emotions, alien and yet achingly familiar, washed over him: protection, pride, a deep, unwavering sense of responsibility.

They formed fully, coalescing with an irrefutable conviction, far exceeding the pull of the fragment that had summoned them. In some way, some place, in the distant past, someone else's welfare had been more important than his own. The realization disturbed him more than he cared to admit. He couldn't bring the memory itself to the surface - he couldn't place the children, or the square, or the relative time, or existence.

But the emotions latched onto the scene as if it were his own lived experience.

The children giggled. The boy made a comment that caused the girl to roll her eyes before a reluctant smile betrayed her amusement. It was a fleeting moment against the backdrop of cosmic history.

The Master found himself unable to look away.

He searched desperately for a reason and found nothing. Analysis failed. Observation simply confirmed the insistent persistence of the feeling.

It was present despite the complete absence of any source.

Despite the distance. Despite time. Despite the fact that, logically, it should have long since ceased to exist. Other fragments flickered through his consciousness.

A voice, his own perhaps, calling a name he no longer recognized.

A burst of shared laughter under an unidentifiable sky. A whispered promise. The overwhelming certainty of standing shoulder to shoulder with someone, the fierce, unyielding knowledge that he would sacrifice anything to keep them safe.

The visions shattered before they could become memories. The feelings, however, remained. For uncounted millennia, he had watched the universe turn, had seen worlds rise and fall to ruin, had accepted his own lonely existence as a cosmic aberration. Nothing in his vast experience had ever shaken him to his core the way this simple, unbidden wave of emotion had.

He maintained his focus on the single world spiraling around a wholly average star. Somewhere within the scattering of the fragments, there lay the answer. Not to the nature of reality or the grand design of creation. But to himself.

And at the center of the fragments, with the quiet certainty of a star piercing a shroud of clouds, it became apparent.

Sister.

For the first time in all eternity, the Master wanted to remember.