The picturesque scene stood frozen in silence for what felt like an eternity.

Madness locked eyes with the Simurgh, and the two powerful beings stared at each other with wildness on one side and disgust on the other.

The Simurgh broke the impasse by bringing its massive wings around. Madness pushed back against the beak and shot backwards like a bullet. He blew a kiss in the air on his way back, infuriating the Simurgh enough that it finally flapped its wings and took to the skies.

Every flap produced gale force winds. The winds buffeted the surroundings at immense speeds, further disintegrating whatever was left off this once idyllic steppe. The newly exposed, craggy ground was easily lifted up by the winds to create a blinding dust storm that slammed into me, forcing me to spit out dirt after the wall of dust swept past me. Glancing over my shoulders, I realized the wind had formed a sort of wall of dust and flying rocks that served as a sort of boundary for the destruction we had wreaked on this place.

Madness fled backwards through the sky, avoiding the Simurgh’s startlingly quick charge with flexible, dance-like moves in the air. The wall of dust moved with the Simurgh’s position, forcing me to fly along with the two of them as well. I used magic to detect any sentient beings that might be just outside the dust storm, but thankfully, it seemed like there was nobody around for miles.

The Simurgh pecked and Madness deflected with an open palm.

Madness jabbed and the Simurgh blocked with a flick off its head.

The Simurgh had become smaller and more nimble. It was no only a little larger than Madness, but its power had been concentrated more than I could’ve imagine. Every time the Simurgh’s beak stretched forward, it felt like reality itself was straining in its wake. And every flap of the Simurgh’s wings made space bend like a thin sheet of plastic.

Madness had become faster, stronger, and less wild than before. His smile was demure, his expression calm, and every strike struck with precision, forcing the Simurgh to deflect and dodge quickly and with more force than it would have liked.

From a distance, I could tell that Madness had the upper hand for now but the Simurgh was somehow slowly becoming more powerful.

How could this be?

I tried to meditate and feel around using my domains and realized quickly what was going on. Madness may have had the upper hand in the physical battle happening in this world, but his domains were under a terrible and powerful assault.

Unlike the attacks that I had thrown at the Evil Eye, the Simurgh did not need to poke holes in Madness’ understanding or knowledge, since all of these domains had existed inside the Simurgh in the first place. The Simurgh had a more ancient, more fundamental claim to the power held by those domains, and that claim was not something that Madness could easily brush aside even with the sort of superior understanding that he possessed as somebody who had also come from the other world.

Madness pushed the Simurgh back in the physical world, making the dust storm still and the landscape froze into an eerie silence. The moon still hung in the sky somehow even though it should have been sunny, and the darkness of the fake night persisted.

But Madness’ domains were in disarray. Sometimes, the night sky flickered back into the sunny day, indicating how weak Madness’ control of the domain of Night had become. The domains of Dancing and Music were also wild and out of control, with little bits of melody and waltzes trickling in with the Simurgh’s singing to form a bit of a complete entertainment ensemble.

Love faltered, giving the Simurgh a sort of control of shallow infatuation. It was the difference between a blush and a wink, and a deep kiss and embrace. The domain of Selflessness, which I was surprised to see under Madness’ control, came a little undone, forcing the Simurgh to stop destroying the landscape a little, although it seemed that effect was quickly washed away as the Simurgh rationalized the destruction by the ‘nobility’ of its own goal.

The Simurgh’s goal?

I could sense it quite clearly. It was as if it had been etched into a wall or pieces of stone within the metaphysical world. The domains themselves, the entirety of all knowledge in this world, seemed to echo with the goals and desires of the three Immortals—no, there was something else in there now too. My goals. My desires.

I wanted to go home and this world seemed to know it.

Knowledge fought against knowledge, trying to establish the supremacy of one goal over the other. The Evil Eye’s objective for world domination and worship was out of the game, but Madness’ goal of annihilating his physical self so he could return to the Nothingness and escape this world was still fighting fiercely. It was intertwined with my goal of wanting to figure out how I was summoned to this world so that I could find a way back.

But the Simurgh’s desire was surprising. I knew it wanted to regain all of the domains, but I hadn’t known what that would entail. Especially now that the Simurgh had even decided to regain all of the domains it had split off into the Evil Eye. Perhaps seeing how Madness and I had taken advantage of the split to increase our own power, the Simurgh had decided it couldn’t afford to separate its power anymore.

Merging all of the domains back together was a frightening idea. This world was only created after the domains were split. Even splitting the domains of time had been crucial because without the split, nobody would be able to experience linear time. Before the split, there was no past, present and future. All of time was just happening all at once or not at all or somewhere in between. It was impossible for people like me to even conceive of how time would work that way, which was why the domains reuniting inside me had not been a problem, since I sort of had to keep them apart for my own sanity.

And that was the kicker. The Simurgh had seen reality before the split. It had in mind a time when all of existence existed only inside it. When there were no sentient races, and all experience was like a reflection of its own personality. What the Simurgh had told me inside the Nothingness came to mind. That all of reality was like a reflection of the Simurgh looking back at itself as if in a mirror or a pond.

If the Simurgh merged the domains back together again, all of sentient thought and feeling would be absorbed by the Simurgh. Free will, sentient thought, everything would be gone. It would be a form of total control that was way, way worse than what the Evil Eye had wanted to do. The Evil Eye wanted to be worshiped like some sort of god. The Simurgh didn’t just want to control reality, it wanted to be everything at once.

I shuddered. I couldn’t let my friends live in a world like that. Heck, existing in a world like that couldn’t be called ‘living.’ It couldn’t even be called ‘existing.’ It was a frightening prospect. And I knew it was true. It was impossible to lie about this stuff when it was directly interwoven into the very fabric of reality. Every domain under the Simurgh’s control echoed with this desire, just as our desires echoed within the domains we controlled. It was this desire and the way it flowed through everything that made me realize why the domain of Desire was so powerful in this world.

Desire wasn’t something as simple and selfish as greed and want. It was a yearning, deep and undeniable, that gave direction to life. It was a ‘purpose’ that we pursued. It was the meaning of our lives. It was the most important thing, the highest ideal, the basest emotion that we felt.

I couldn’t weasel my way to this domain with clever tricks and Socratic dialogue. Control over this domain required powerful conviction and a legitimate claim to one of the most fundamental powers in this universe. It required a will stronger than steel, and wisdom firmer than anything I had ever held.

Thankfully, I knew I didn’t need this domain, because it had nothing to do with returning to my world. In fact, I had been using the battle between Madness and the Simurgh to search through the metaphysical sea of domains and knowledge, searching for whichever domain the Simurgh and Evil Eye had used to summon me into this world. Madness knew what I was trying to do, so he was keeping the Simurgh busy.

The Simurgh obviously knew what I was doing too, but it didn’t try to stop me. This made me think whatever I was searching for was difficult to find and impossible to steal. But that was okay. All I needed was a chance. A small window of opportunity. And if I couldn’t find that window, I would have to make it myself. And I would shatter that window too. Since what I really needed was an opening.

Madness let himself get struck by the Simurgh’s beak, creating a nasty tear on his toga and a strange bloodless gash on his body. One of Madness’ limbs cut into the Simurgh’s side, stroking the feathers gently. The stroked feathers spiraled uncontrollably off of the Simurgh’s body, landing into Madness’ open palms.

The Simurgh’s eyes widened and it flew backwards. Madness smiled and held the feathers up to his face. He reached into a pocket that I had never seen in his toga before, and pulled out another feather. A familiar feather. It was the feather he had taken the first time I ever met him, back in the Simurgh’s tree on the Plains of Serenity.

Madness breathed in the feathers. The rainbow glow from the feathers faded, filling the air with a warm scent that I could smell even from a distance.

The Simurgh scowled. Madness smiled lazily and his wound healed instantly.

I was right behind the Simurgh. I aimed for the patch of uncovered skin where the feathers had been, and readied my deadly, hypersonic bullet.