Chapter 4

Micah brooded, considering all the possible futures, his shattered soul waiting for his decision. He looked hard at his past, hoping for something he could use to change his future. He discovered that his past included more than his most recent life.

His memories included pasts from multiple worlds, lives and times, finally reaching a dim memory of his current conundrum, at the birth of his last universe. Micah remembered what he did when he last contemplated the futility of repeating the same dance with evil. He saw the clues planted so long ago that he had so painstakingly recovered in his most recent life. He also saw the precarious balances created.

Freewill was required for sentient species. Only sentient beings with free will have an impact on the universal balance between good and evil. Other entities without freewill could cause happiness and hope. They could also cause grief and destruction, like the dire wolves of his home world, but they didn’t change the balance.

Micah pushed his memories further back and groaned in futility at what he saw. He didn’t see more lives but caught glimpses of the culmination of uncounted universes and the memories were not linear. Each time a universe ended without a clear winner; a branch was created. He knew another new universe had been created, parallel to his own, and another ‘Micah’ was contemplating the same decisions he was.

He saw hundreds of other battles like the one he had so recently survived. He also saw the horror of universes where evil won, or good won the final battle. Universes with Evil the winner were cold and dead, with no hope of growth or advancement. Universes with Good the winner were pure chaos. Creation ran rampant but there was no structure to build for the future, also creating a dead-end universe with aborted offshoots.

Micah recoiled from the vision of universes created and dying. In his perception, the Universes were like a great tree extending into a murky past. Most limbs of the tree were fruitful, creating souls that provided energy for the great tree. The few limbs with dead universes, like deadfall on a tree in the forest, were static. He could see where limbs with older static universes had fallen away from the tree leaving it stronger. He also saw that the longer a universe maintained the balance, the stronger that limb. Somehow, he knew that if a limb maintained the balance long enough for sentient entities to evolve to their ultimate state, that limb could become a new tree. He now understood his goal.

“Shadow cannot exist without light,” Micah murmured to himself, remembering an image from his most recent youth. It was a circle that was half white and half black. Each half was shaped like a curved teardrop. In his minds eye the teardrops raced around the circle, always in balance.

“Is that enough of a foundation for an entire universe, or a new tree?” he asked himself in wonder. It would mean the sentient species in this universe would experience great heartache and death, but they would also experience great joy and life.

Micah mentally gathered the shattered pieces of his mind and soul. He knew that after he finished planning, and creating, he would need to release some shards of his shattered mind and soul to seed sentient species in this universe. Until then, he would make plans to maintain the balance, like he had in the previous universe but with some slight changes. He had some ideas in this endless moment of creation on how to reach and keep the balance.

The Beginning.

Edited By TeNderLoin