"How is it that you seem to know so much, yet so little about these Egoless?"

Abaddon looked up from his headache to find Shin deciding to ask a question.

He apparently no longer felt awkward about being in a new place and surrounded by those who were supposed to be his enemies and had resumed a business-like demeanor.

AJ and Kayla were still staring at their father rather hard, but they had yet to say anything. Perhaps they still needed a bit more time to get used to this new sight. He couldn''t blame them.

Asherah twirled her fingers around similar to a spider spinning a web. "I know what I know because Yesh shared it with me. To know more, he would have to be awake, I fear." Your journey continues with My Virtual Library Empire

"And why exactly is Big God asleep when a threat such as this is going pitter patter around his reality?"

Again, Abaddon felt Asherah look at him. His headache intensified.

"He''s asleep because of me, isn''t he?" The dragon smiled wryly.

Asherah faltered. "Abaddon, that''s not-"

"It''s alright, Asherah." He said. "I''ve guessed it for a long time now."

Asherah peeled back her veil. He saw her blue cheeks twinged with sadness and her eyes pooling with regret. "...I''m sorry."

He pretended that apology didn''t feel like a kick in the gut. It did.

"Should I not be apologizing to you..?" he smiled awkwardly.

"You didn''t know what you were doing when you merged your powers together all that time ago. I won''t hold you responsible for a fate you never intended to bring about."

Abaddon knew that she would say something like that. It only made him feel even worse.

"Can you fill in some of us who''re new here?" Ziz asked as he obnoxiously gnawed on a pack of sunflower seeds. "What''d the big guy do that is so bad?"

Yemaja snatched away his seeds and punched him in the back of the head for good measure. "Dad is one of the Egoless, you twit..!"

"Okay, what does any of this nightmare fuel have to do with why God himself is unconscious?" Fiona raised her hand.

Abaddon''s expression changed to one of embarrassment. "There was.. an incident in the previous timeline. I became angry. Lost control of myself. I watched my love get impaled in front of me and I reacted as well as you could expect."

Abaddon felt Ayaana squeeze his hand. Her eyes flickered to Sif''s soft red.

"...Zeus and the other gods marched their armies against me and I met them by myself. Many fell by my hand that day, and the landscape of Asgard was permanently altered."

"You''re the reason why the Well of Nothing is in Asgard??" Shin could have spontaneously combusted. "What the hell..."

Abaddon shrugged. "Now that I think about it, after that day, Yesh never felt like himself again. I never was able to put my finger on it at first, but he was weaker.. more feeble.

He started trying to place heavier restrictions on me, and at the time... I didn''t know why. I didn''t care why either, since I felt for the first time that maybe I had come into too much power all at once."

He turned to Asherah again, and his eyes softened to a rare degree. "I know what I did to him. Rewriting the timeline with me inside must have made it worse."

Asherah opened and closed her mouth several times as if she were looking for the right thing to say.

"Egoless are... power beyond mortal comprehension. Since your power was coming from outside, it had to get into Yesh''s body somehow to reach you, so it..." She didn''t finish, but everyone inside got the imagery.

The mood took another dark and serious turn as a result.

"Then two Egoless being here should-"

"It should be the end of all we know, yes. The only logical conclusion is that Chaos is keeping Yesh alive, but not healing him fully. In addition, she must be using as little of her power as possible to avoid strain." Gabbrielle theorized. "It''s why she tried to take Izanami''s body."

"But why?" Karliah furrowed her brow. "Why do all of that for the body of one death goddess who, let''s face it, has no shortage of significantly less guarded variants?"

Gabbrielle grew back to her regular adult size. The gleam in her white eyes screamed loudly that she had just reached a startling revelation.

She looked across the room to the only other person who seemed to have come to the same conclusion as her.

"Because it''s not Izanami that she wants... Isn''t that right, mother?"