The Last Mage: a Prologue
Copyright© 2025 by MisguidedChild
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.