17 Jan God Four

Part I

My name is Elias Grayson, and until five years ago, I believed in God. Not the vague, modernist platitude of some benevolent creator, nor the cynical skepticism of a philosopher hedging his bets; I believed in a God with capital letters, the Almighty, the Father, the Maker of Heaven and Earth. I was a priest—until I wasn’t.

There’s a saying that science and faith are enemies, but I never saw it that way. My faith drove me to science. I wanted to understand how the mechanics of creation worked. Where others saw contradiction, I saw harmony. God set the stars spinning, I told my parishioners, and physics is the language He wrote it in.

But the Church disagreed.

It began with my papers—long, detailed treatises blending theology and cosmology, proposing that the Big Bang could be seen as divine fiat, and quantum mechanics as proof of a creator’s fingerprints. I thought I was building bridges, but my superiors saw heresy. They demanded a retraction. When I refused, they escalated. I was excommunicated six months later.

My faith didn’t survive the betrayal.

* * * * * *

Five years after leaving the collar behind, I was working in the astronomy department of a small university. My days were spent juggling grant proposals and lecturing undergrads who cared more about passing exams than looking at the stars. It was a quieter life, but a hollow one.

That’s when they came.

I remember the man who approached me clearly—probably because everything about him felt like a caricature of clandestine government types. He had the black suit, the mirrored sunglasses, and the stiff gait of someone who had never blended in anywhere. He didn’t introduce himself.

“Dr. Grayson?”

“Yes.”

“You’re requested for a classified project. It’s an opportunity that aligns with your unique expertise. May I sit?”

He didn’t wait for permission, lowering himself into the chair opposite my desk and sliding a sleek black folder toward me.

“Who are you?” I asked, keeping my voice calm despite my apprehension.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he gestured toward the folder. “You’ll find everything you need in there. Read it carefully. If you’re interested, there’s a car waiting outside.”

It wasn’t a request, and the weight in his tone carried more authority than the Church ever had.

The folder was unmarked, but its contents were anything but ordinary. Diagrams of strange machines, photographs of ancient manuscripts, and a single question scrawled in bold type across the top page:

Does God exist?

There were other pages, too, detailing the terms of the project—security clearances, a staggering salary, and a clause that essentially signed my life away. It was absurd, like something from a spy novel. But the question lingered in my mind.

I had spent my life trying to reconcile science and faith. Here was an opportunity to chase the ultimate answer. I’d told myself I didn’t care anymore, but at that moment, I realized the ember of my curiosity had never fully died.

I didn’t need much time to decide. By the time I walked out of my office, the black sedan was waiting at the curb.

* * * * * *

The facility was somewhere in the mountains, though I couldn’t tell you where. The car’s windows were tinted too dark to see through, and when we arrived, they blindfolded me before leading me inside. It was a strange combination of high-tech sterility and gothic architecture—labs bristling with equipment sat beside halls lined with statues and murals of gods both familiar and obscure.

I wasn’t the only one there. The team was an eclectic mix: physicists, theologians, mystics, and even a historian specializing in pre-Abrahamic religions. They introduced themselves in clipped, professional tones. Everyone referred to me simply as “Dr. Grayson.”

After a brief orientation, I was led to my quarters—a Spartan room with a single bed, a desk, and a terminal connected to a secure network. A man in a lab coat handed me a keycard and a small tablet loaded with classified documents.

“Your first assignment,” he said, “is to familiarize yourself with the basic premise. You’ll find the term ‘God Four’ mentioned frequently. I suggest you pay close attention.”

“God Four?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he left me standing in the hallway, clutching the tablet.

I spent that first night reading until my eyes burned. The documents were dense and unsettling, blending cutting-edge physics with references to ancient texts and rituals. At first, the premise seemed absurd: that “God” was not a singular entity but a recurring force, manifesting in different forms over eons. These manifestations were said to embody distinct divine aspects: creation, detachment, compassion, and now God Four—an iteration described as the embodiment of wrath and destruction. The project’s purpose, I learned, was to study these cycles to determine their impact on the universe and, if possible, uncover patterns that could help us understand their purpose—or prevent catastrophe.

The last file I read was a transcript of a briefing given to the project’s lead scientists.

“God Four,” the transcript read, “is the culmination of all prior cycles. It is wrath incarnate, chaos distilled. Its arrival will not be subtle. It will be catastrophic, ushering in a purge of imperfection to prepare the universe for the rebirth of Cycle One.”

The words sent a chill down my spine. Despite my cynicism, I felt something stir in me—a shadow of the faith I thought I’d abandoned. Could this be real? Could the God I’d worshipped as a priest be but one iteration of a much larger, far stranger truth?

I slept fitfully that night, haunted by fragments of scripture that now took on an ominous new meaning:

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

* * * * * *

The first days in the facility blurred together, a surreal mixture of cutting-edge science and ancient superstition. Every morning began with briefings that would have sounded insane to anyone outside those walls: updates on quantum field experiments, analyses of sacred particles, and progress reports on rituals reconstructed from forgotten civilizations.

My task was to bridge the two worlds, to find the common thread between the divine and the physical. The others—those mystics, theologians, and occultists—treated the supernatural as fact, while the physicists relied on data and math. I straddled the line, as I always had.

But as I dove deeper into the work, the line between science and mysticism began to blur.

The first breakthrough came three weeks in, during an experiment I had initially dismissed as pseudoscience. A team led by Dr. Lorena Choi—a theoretical physicist with an unnerving fascination for Kabbalistic symbolism—had devised a mechanism they called the Resonance Array. The device was a monstrous hybrid of particle accelerators and arcane symbols, designed to detect anomalies in quantum fields.

The idea, according to Lorena, was simple: if God had ever acted upon the universe, traces of those actions might still exist, embedded in the fabric of reality.

“It’s like finding fingerprints at a crime scene,” she explained during the briefing. “Except the crime scene is existence itself.”

I was skeptical but curious. The experiment involved bombarding a sealed chamber with high-energy particles while chanting verses from the Rigveda, an ancient Hindu text. The chants, Lorena argued, served as a “metaphysical key” to unlock divine interactions.

It sounded absurd, but the results were undeniable. As the chanting reached its crescendo, the monitors spiked with data: bursts of energy that defied known physical laws. The chamber began to glow faintly, and the air hummed with an otherworldly resonance.

I stood in stunned silence as Lorena turned to me, a triumphant smile on her face. “We’re not just looking for God,” she said. “We’re touching Him.”

* * * * * *

That night, I reviewed the data with a growing sense of unease. The energy signatures didn’t match any known phenomenon. It was as if the universe itself had momentarily warped, responding to the experiment in ways I couldn’t explain.

The old theological debates I’d had as a priest came to mind. What if God wasn’t an omnipotent creator, but something far stranger? Something woven into the very fabric of existence, capable of manipulating it at will?

I went to bed with a throbbing headache, my mind racing with possibilities.

The days that followed brought more revelations—and more questions.

One experiment involved a 4,000-year-old Sumerian prayer tablet, which was placed in a magnetic containment field designed to amplify subtle energy patterns. As the tablet was exposed to the field, the containment chamber began to vibrate, emitting a low, guttural sound that resembled chanting.

Another test utilized a ritual dagger from an obscure Celtic sect, believed to have been used in sacrificial offerings. When placed under an electron microscope, the blade’s surface revealed microscopic inscriptions—symbols that matched those found in carvings on opposite sides of the globe.

Patterns began to emerge. Every culture, every religion, every ancient myth seemed to point to the same truth: that the divine was real, but fractured. Each piece of evidence felt like a shard of a shattered mirror, reflecting only a fragment of a much larger whole.

But the most unsettling discovery came during what we called the Divine Fragment Retrieval.

The retrieval process involved isolating and amplifying energy anomalies detected by the Resonance Array. These anomalies, Lorena theorized, were remnants of divine actions—traces left behind by past incarnations of God.

The first fragment was subtle, manifesting as a faint distortion in light patterns. The second was more pronounced, producing an audible hum that set our teeth on edge. But the third… the third was something else entirely.

It happened during a late-night session, with only a skeleton crew present. The chamber housing the Resonance Array began to glow brighter than ever before, pulsing with a rhythmic intensity. The hum grew louder, resonating deep in our bones.

And then, for a brief moment, we saw something.

It was impossible to describe—a shape that defied logic, folding and unfolding in ways that hurt to look at. Colors I couldn’t name swirled around it, and its surface seemed to ripple like liquid glass. I could feel its invasive presence penetrating my mind.

One of the mystics fell to his knees, muttering a prayer in a language I didn’t recognize. Lorena stared in awe, tears streaming down her face.

I couldn’t look away. For the first time in years, I felt something akin to faith—a desperate, terrifying certainty that we were in the presence of something greater than ourselves.

* * * * * *

The aftermath of the experiment was chaotic. The shape vanished after only a few seconds, leaving behind scorched equipment and frayed nerves.

Debriefings were tense. Half the team wanted to shut down the experiments, claiming we were tampering with forces we didn’t understand. The other half, led by Lorena, argued that we were on the brink of a breakthrough.

I found myself caught in the middle. The rational part of me knew the risks were escalating, but a deeper part—the part that had once worn a priest’s collar—felt an insatiable need to continue.

I spent hours poring over the data, trying to make sense of what we’d witnessed. The patterns were clear: these fragments weren’t random. They were pieces of something larger, something coherent.

That’s when I stumbled upon an obscure file buried in the classified archives: The Cycles of God—Advanced Analysis.

The document didn’t rewrite what I already knew about the cycles—it deepened it. It contained data and observations that the project leads hadn’t disclosed to the team, possibly for fear of inciting panic. The file suggested that the cycles were not just sequential events but part of a self-sustaining cosmic mechanism—one designed to purge and renew existence. It also included chilling timelines and predictions: God Four’s arrival was not an abstract possibility, but a near certainty, calculated to occur within weeks.

The file’s final pages hinted at something even more disturbing: not all cycles followed the same patterns. Cycle Four, they suggested, was anomalous, its destructive intensity potentially surpassing anything that had come before. The implications were clear: this wasn’t just the end of a phase—it could be the end of existence as we knew it.

What made the file unsettling wasn’t its theories but its implications. The researchers who authored it had gone further than anyone else, charting the patterns of destruction that accompanied each cycle and predicting what Cycle Four would bring. Their conclusion was stark, underscored by a final, dire warning:

Cycle Four is imminent. It will not be kind.

The words troubled me in a way the earlier briefings hadn’t. It was one thing to discuss theory in abstract terms; it was another to see the evidence laid out so plainly, alongside the unmistakable certainty of what was to come.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. My dreams twisted into a kaleidoscope of distorted shapes, fragments of scripture, and whispers I couldn’t place. They all seemed to coalesce into a single, nightmarish thought.

When I awoke, my lips moved before I even realized I was speaking: “Behold, I make all things new.”

The verse, straight from the Biblical Book of Revelation, echoed in my mind.

The words no longer felt like a promise.

They were a threat.

Part II

The mood in the facility shifted after the experiment with the third fragment. We all felt it—a mounting tension that crept into every conversation, every glance exchanged in the sterile hallways. For some, it was a thrill. For others, a quiet dread.

For me, it was both.

I buried myself in work, dissecting the data from our latest experiments and looking for patterns that might offer some sense of control. But control was an illusion. The fragments weren’t random anomalies; they were pieces of a puzzle we weren’t meant to solve.

And yet, we kept going.

The warning signs began as subtle anomalies: bursts of gamma radiation from nowhere, unexplained gravitational shifts near the facility, and a rise in seismic activity that couldn’t be attributed to any tectonic fault. The data was clear—something was building, something massive.

Then the dreams started.

At first, I dismissed them as stress-induced nightmares. But when I overheard two colleagues describing eerily similar visions—endless spirals of color, a voice speaking in a language that seemed older than time—I realized I wasn’t alone.

It wasn’t just dreams, either. Some team members reported auditory hallucinations: faint whispers that seemed to come from the walls or the air itself. Others claimed to see fleeting shapes in their peripheral vision, too quick to identify but impossible to ignore.

The first casualty silenced even the most skeptical among us.

Dr. Miguel Torres, a materials scientist with a sharp wit and an even sharper tongue, had been vocal about his disdain for the project’s mysticism. “God Four?” he’d scoffed during one meeting. “Sounds like the title of a bad sci-fi movie.”

No one saw what happened to him. He’d been working late in one of the isolated labs, analyzing energy signatures from the Resonance Array. When he didn’t show up for the morning briefing, a security team was sent to check on him.

What they found defied explanation.

The lab was intact, but Miguel was gone. All that remained was a scorched outline of his body on the floor, as if he’d been burned into the ground by an impossibly intense light. The security footage showed only static during the time of his disappearance.

It wasn’t long before the rumors began. Some claimed he’d been taken by God Four, a punishment for his lack of faith. Others whispered that he’d stumbled too close to the truth and been erased for it.

I didn’t know what to believe, but Miguel’s fate was a warning. That much was clear.

* * * * * *

The final breakthrough came a week later.

Lorena and her team had been working on a method to amplify the fragments’ energy signatures, hoping to force a direct manifestation of God Four. The risks were astronomical, but desperation had overtaken caution.

“We’re running out of time,” she told me during a tense meeting. Her voice was calm, but her eyes betrayed her fear. “The signs are accelerating. If we don’t act now, we might not get another chance.”

Against my better judgment, I agreed.

The experiment took place in the main chamber, a cavernous space lined with reinforced walls and bristling with equipment. The Resonance Array had been upgraded, its circuitry glowing with an unsettling, almost organic light.

As the experiment began, I stood in the observation room, overwhelmed with anticipation and dread. Lorena and her team worked frantically at their consoles, chanting fragments of scripture alongside incomprehensible equations.

The air grew heavy, charged with an energy that made every hair on my body stand on end. The lights flickered, and the hum of the machinery rose to a deafening roar.

And then, it happened.

The chamber was suddenly bathed in a searing, otherworldly light. The monitors went wild, displaying readings that defied comprehension. And in the center of the chamber, something began to take shape.

It was impossible to describe. A mass of shifting geometries, constantly folding and unfolding upon itself, like a living fractal. Colors I’d never seen before danced across its surface, and its form seemed to pulse with a rhythm that resonated deep in my chest.

The voice followed—a soundless vibration that bypassed the ears and spoke directly to the mind.

I AM.

The words were simple, yet they carried a power that rivaled the intensity of a thousand stars.

Lorena collapsed to her knees, tears streaming down her face. Several others followed, their expressions a mix of awe and terror. I remained standing, though my legs felt like they might give out at any moment.

The entity’s presence was overwhelming, its consciousness pressing against mine like an ocean threatening to drown a single drop of water. And yet, I felt a strange clarity.

This was God Four.

The voice continued, resonating with an authority that left no room for doubt.

I AM WRATH. I AM THE SCOURGE OF IMPERFECTION. I AM THE HARBINGER OF PURITY.

Images flooded my mind—worlds burning, galaxies collapsing into themselves, life reduced to ash and dust. It wasn’t just humanity at stake; it was everything. The universe itself would be purged, stripped bare to make way for the next cycle.

And yet, there was a twisted logic to it. The destruction wasn’t malicious; it was necessary. A cleansing fire to prepare the cosmos for renewal.

I wanted to scream, to beg for mercy, but the words wouldn’t come.

YOU WILL WITNESS. YOU WILL REMEMBER.

The entity’s light flared, blinding and absolute. When it faded, the chamber was empty, the equipment fried, and the walls charred–but the entity was gone.

For a moment, there was silence. Then Lorena whispered, her voice trembling:

“It’s coming.”

The aftermath was chaos. Half the team quit on the spot, refusing to continue what they called a doomed endeavor. The rest of us were left to pick up the pieces, trying to make sense of what we’d unleashed.

But the signs were undeniable. The anomalies were escalating, the dreams growing more vivid. The end was no longer a distant possibility—it was imminent.

I spent hours in the archives, poring over every scrap of data, every ancient text, looking for a way to stop what felt inevitable. But the more I learned, the clearer it became: there was no stopping God Four.

The cycle would continue, as it always had. And we were powerless to change it.

* * * * * *

The first thing I noticed was the silence. Not the absence of sound, but a suffocating stillness that made every breath feel like a transgression. The facility had fallen into a tense, reverent quiet in the days following the experiment. Even the air seemed heavier, as though we were intruding on something far greater than ourselves.

The final briefing came without warning. A terse message on my terminal ordered me to report to the Resonance Chamber. There were no details, but I knew what it meant.

It was time.

The chamber was unrecognizable. The machinery had been stripped down and rebuilt into something grotesque, a fusion of cutting-edge technology and ancient ritual. Circuitry wound through carved stone, and symbols from a dozen religions were etched into every surface. The air was thick with the smell of burning incense and the faint, metallic tang of ozone.

Lorena stood at the center of the room, her hands trembling as she made the final adjustments to the Resonance Array. Her face was pale, her eyes sunken, but there was a determination in her expression that bordered on zealotry.

“This is it,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We’ve isolated the final fragment. If this works, we’ll have full contact with God Four.”

I nodded, unable to trust my voice. I felt as if the air had been squeezed from my lungs.

The team gathered around the control consoles, their faces a mixture of fear and grim resolve. Lorena raised her hand, signaling for silence.

“Begin the sequence,” she said.

The chamber came alive with a low hum, the machinery thrumming with energy. Lights flickered erratically, and the symbols engraved into the stone began to glow, their light pulsing in time with the hum.

I felt it, forcing its way into our world, before I saw it. The air grew colder, and the hum deepened into a resonant vibration that seemed to reach into the very core of my being, pulling at something primal.

Then the light came.

It started as a faint shimmer in the air, a distortion that rippled like heat waves. But it grew, intensifying until the entire chamber was bathed in an unearthly radiance. The light was alive, shifting and folding in on itself, its colors defying description.

In the center of the chamber, something began to take shape.

It was not a form that belonged to this world. Its geometry was impossible, its dimensions fluctuating in ways that hurt to look at. Every time I thought I could grasp its shape, it changed, slipping through the cracks of my understanding.

The colors that swirled across its surface weren’t colors at all, but something deeper, something that seemed to bypass my eyes and sear directly into my mind.

And then there was the voice.

I AM WRATH.

The words didn’t come from the entity itself but from everywhere at once. They weren’t heard so much as felt, resonating in my bones, my blood, my soul.

I AM THE END. I AM GENESIS.

I fell to my knees, trembling. Around me, I saw others doing the same, their faces pale with terror. Lorena was sobbing, her hands clutching at her chest as though trying to keep her heart from bursting.

The entity pulsed, its form shifting faster, growing larger. Its light filled the chamber, spilling out into the observation room and beyond.

ALL IS IMPERFECT. ALL MUST BE PURGED.

Then came the images, flooding my mind in a torrent of horror. I saw worlds crumbling into dust, stars imploding into voids of absolute darkness. I saw the Earth itself split open, oceans boiling away as fire consumed the land.

And I saw myself, standing on the edge of a great abyss, my hands reaching out toward something unseen. The abyss stared back, promising annihilation and rebirth in the same breath.

The voice returned.

YOU WILL REMEMBER.

The words echoed in my mind as the light began to fade. The entity’s form dissolved, collapsing in on itself until nothing remained but the faint thrumming of the machinery.

When it was over, the silence returned, deeper and more oppressive than before.

No one spoke. We simply sat there, staring at the empty chamber.

Lorena was the first to move, standing on unsteady legs and turning to face the rest of us.

“It’s done,” she said, her voice hollow. “We’ve seen it. We know.”

But her words brought no comfort. The knowledge was a burden none of us were prepared to carry.

We had called forth God Four, and it had answered.

And nothing had changed.

Part III

We didn’t know how quickly it would happen. There were debates among those of us who remained in the facility, most of which felt more like desperate rationalizations. Did we have days? Months? Could we, perhaps, measure the time remaining in years?

It took less than a week.

The first signs were subtle but undeniable. The stars began to shift. Constellations warped into unfamiliar patterns, their light bending in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. Astronomers at the facility scrambled to calculate trajectories, but there was no logic to the alterations. It was as if the sky itself was being rewritten.

Reports from the outside world filtered in, fragmentary and surreal. Coastal cities experienced inexplicable tidal waves, their harbors reduced to ruins without a single tremor beneath the sea. Deserts bloomed with flowers that withered into ash within hours. The auroras—ordinarily confined to polar regions—swept across the globe, bathing everything in an eerie, shifting glow.

It wasn’t just Earth. Telescopes trained on deep space captured galaxies unraveling like frayed threads, their light dimming until only darkness remained. The entire universe was collapsing, piece by piece.

And there was nothing we could do about it.

* * * * * *

The dreams grew worse.

I saw myself walking through ruinous landscapes, endless wastelands dotted with the remnants of a once-thriving world. Buildings stood half-submerged in sand, their rooftops broken and crumbling. Rivers of molten metal carved paths through desolate plains, the sky above a churning mass of black and red.

In every dream, the voice was present:

BEHOLD, THE NEW ORDER.

It spoke with a finality I couldn’t escape, each word searing my thoughts, carving itself into my mind.

The others began to break.

Lorena was the first. Her brilliance, her zeal—it all crumbled. I found her in her quarters, sitting on the floor with pages of scrawled equations and prayers spread around her like a shrine. She looked up at me with hollow eyes and whispered, “We were never meant to know.”

I wanted to comfort her, but couldn’t find the words. What could I possibly say? That it would be okay? That we’d survive this?

It would have been a lie, and she would have known it.

The next morning, she was gone–no note, no explanation–leaving behind an empty room and the faint smell of burned paper.

Others followed suit. Some fled, trying to return to lives that no longer existed. Some simply stopped showing up to briefings, disappearing into the labyrinthine corridors of the facility, and were never heard from again.

By the end of the week, I was one of the last still standing.

* * * * * *

The final event began without warning.

I was in the observation room, reviewing footage from the Resonance Chamber, when the alarms started. A piercing wail echoed through the facility, accompanied by the flickering of the overhead lights, and I rushed to the central command center.

The monitors displayed chaos. Outside the facility, the sky had turned a deep, unnatural purple, streaked with jagged bolts of green lightning. The ground trembled, cracks spiderwebbing through the concrete as if the earth itself was fracturing.

And then came the signal.

It wasn’t a broadcast, not in the traditional sense. It bypassed our equipment entirely, resonating through every speaker and screen. Even the air seemed to vibrate with it.

I AM COMPLETE.

The voice was unmistakable. God Four had arrived in full, its presence no longer confined to fragments or glimpses. The facility shook as its resonance intensified.

I stumbled into the Resonance Chamber, compelled by forces beyond my understanding. The machinery was offline, twisted and smoldering from the previous experiments, but the chamber itself remained illuminated.

This time, the light wasn’t ethereal or shifting; it was absolute, a blinding white consuming everything it touched. In the center of the chamber, a shape coalesced.

It was God Four, but it was different, its form no less incomprehensible but less chaotic, more defined. It radiated power, its surface shimmering like molten glass.

The voice returned, louder than ever, shaking the very foundation of the facility.

ALL WILL BE PURGED AND MADE NEW.

My knees buckled. Around me, the remaining personnel fell to the ground, some screaming, others silent with terror.

Then, the destruction began.

It was neither dramatic nor immediate, starting with a stillness, an unbearable quiet. A moment later, the walls of the chamber warped, their surfaces rippling as though they were no longer solid.

Outside, the world was unraveling. The monitors showed cities disintegrating, structures crumbling into dust as if erased by unseen hands. Across the globe, oceans evaporated, leaving behind cracked, barren basins.

But it wasn’t just Earth. Far beyond the boundaries of our planet’s atmosphere, stars abruptly flickered and died, their light snuffed out in an instant. The universe was collapsing in on itself, folding back into the void from which it had come.

And through it all, God Four remained, its light growing brighter, its voice echoing throughout the abyss.

* * * * * *

I have no idea how I survived. Perhaps it was happenstance, or the result of some deity’s twisted mercy.

When the light finally faded, I found myself surrounded by desolation. The facility was gone, replaced by an endless expanse of blackened earth. The sky was empty—no stars, no moon, just an infinite void.

I stood there for what felt like hours, staring at the nothingness around me. The voice was gone, its presence faded, but its imprint remained, burned into my mind.

In the silence, a single thought repeated itself over and over:

This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.

* * * * * *

I don’t know how long I wandered. Time had lost all meaning. The wasteland stretched endlessly in every direction, an immeasurable expanse of ash and blackened stone beneath a void where the sky had been.

There were no signs of life, no landmarks.

I was alone.

I replayed everything in my mind. The experiments, the fragments, the manifestation of God Four—it all seemed distant, like memories from another lifetime.

And yet, the voice lingered. Even in the silence, I heard it, faint and persistent.

YOU WILL BEAR WITNESS. YOU WILL REMEMBER. 

It was both a command and a curse. I was alive, but for what purpose? To bear the burden of knowledge? To serve as a monument to the end of everything?

I had no answers, only questions.

Eventually, I found something—or maybe it found me.

A shape appeared on the horizon, shimmering faintly against the bleak backdrop. At first, I thought it was a mirage, a trick of my strained mind. But as I drew closer, the shape grew distinct. There, amidst the devastation, stood a structure, impossibly pristine.

It was a tower, inexplicably tall and narrow, its surface smooth and featureless. It glowed faintly, casting no shadows, as though it existed outside the rules of this broken reality.

I felt an irresistible compulsion to approach. My legs carried me forward, each step heavier than the last, until I stood at its base.

There was no door, no visible entrance—just the seamless surface of the tower. And yet, as I reached out to touch it, the wall dissolved, opening into a vast, empty chamber.

Inside, the air was still and cool, untouched by the decay outside. The walls glimmered, pulsing in a slow, rhythmic pattern that felt oddly familiar.

At the center of the chamber stood a pedestal and, upon it, an ancient book, its leather cover cracked and worn. Its title was embossed in gold, the letters faded but legible: The Cycles of God.

I approached it cautiously, hesitating, before placing my hand over the cover.  Instinctively, I knew that opening the tome would change everything–but had no other choice.

The pages were filled with indecipherable diagrams, symbols, and text. As I turned them, however, their meaning became clear, as though the knowledge was being whispered directly into my mind.

The book detailed the now-familiar cycles of existence, each one governed by a different iteration of the divine—creation, detachment, compassion, and, finally, wrath.

The process always ended in destruction, a cleansing of imperfections in preparation for conception. And it was endless, an eternal loop stretching beyond our wildest comprehension.

Then, on the final page, I saw it: Cycle Five.

The section was incomplete, the text fragmented, as though even the book had struggled to describe what lay beyond “wrath.” But one phrase was clear, etched into the margin in trembling script: The Cycle Breaks.

My breath caught. The cycles, I realized, weren’t immutable after all. Cycle Five wasn’t simply another iteration—it was unprecedented, unmeasurable, and unfathomable. In possession of this newfound knowledge, a single question came to mind: was this rebirth a continuation, or were we truly in uncharted territory?

I closed the book–and the voice returned.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE. YOU WILL UNDERSTAND.

The tower began to tremble, growing brighter, its light filling every corner of the chamber. I staggered back, shielding my eyes, to no avail.

When the light finally faded, I was no longer in the tower.

* * * * * *

I awoke to the sound of birdsong.

For a moment, I thought I was dreaming. But as I opened my eyes, I marveled at the green fields stretching out before me, dotted with trees that swayed gently in the breeze.

The sky was blue, the air warm and sweet.

I’d been created anew, in a world reborn–but it wasn’t our world.

The constellations were unfamiliar, their arrangements unbound by the patterns I had studied. The sunlight was too golden, the gravity subtly different—familiar, yet wholly alien.

This was something new… or was it?

My mind churned with memories, excerpts from The Cycles of God. Was this the promised renewal, the first act of a new iteration? Or was it–and I–an aberration, a break in a previously eternal loop?

In spite of everything, I stood there, serene, taking it all in. It was not the tranquility of closure, but the fragile, trembling peace of uncertainty. Had Cycle Five begun, I wondered, or had the cycles malfunctioned and left me suspended in some sort of limbo?

I don’t know if this place is heaven, purgatory, or something else entirely. Perhaps it really is the beginning of a fifth cycle—or the absence of order altogether. Whatever the case may be, I am an anomaly, the sole survivor in a world made new.

Was this our creator’s final act of wrath? Or His first act of mercy?

God Four has gone silent, and the answers elude me.

As I stand here, waiting for whatever’s next, three questions remain:

Who am I responsible to?

What have I become?

And where is God Five?