Later that night, he stood in his office again, staring out at the window and up towards the vault of the heavens above. The stars above Aurelia were almost uniquely beautiful in their sparsity. It was an old universe, he could tell… the darkness between the stars was deep and quiet, a fallow softness that spoke to immense age. The history of the realm no-doubt extended far, far past the imperial and the ancient, and the long lost myths and legends…

With a wave of palm, he summoned a drink into his hand from his spatial ring. It wasn’t anything fancy. It wasn’t even anything from the Celestial Realm— he’d been forced to leave all his really good drinks behind, bar a little bit of tea. No, it was just a can of overly-sweetened peach soda he’d picked up at one of the local convenience stores a few days ago. The most important thing that’d ever happened to it in its entire existence had been getting placed in his ring.

It was thoroughly mundane. Standing there, lent against his windowsill and looking up at the breadth of the universe, though, it was exactly what he wanted.

No students.

No colleagues.

No distractions but his own thoughts, and the endless circuits they ran in. Except that wasn’t really true. He knew what true isolation was like— to float adrift universes and realities divorced from anyone else, surrounded by dangers terrible enough to rend even an Immortal Sovereign to pieces, simply… adrift. This was not that. The vibrancy of East Saffron still rose up around him, a whole society he’d sunk into so easily…

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The vivacity of the human condition.

He could understand a little better, the sovereigns of Sanctuary, and what they sought to accomplish, maybe. Staring up at that not-dead sky, but still all the lesser compared to burning heat, bright light, furious energy of a young universe, and remembering what he’d talked about with Janus earlier in the day—

He was, after all, only pretending to be a mortal. What they left to the whims of heaven, he controlled; in this little realm, none else but he knew how high the heavens truly were. With a whisper of a sigh of disappointment— or maybe anticipation— he turned his back on the infinite and abounding, and after only a moment’s indecision, pulled out a pen. It would be a fun challenge, to in limiting himself to the bounds of a mortal’s existence, not even on his domain relying, see if he could—

Find them.

Find answers.