Part 27: The First Schism
The roar that echoed across the Dead Land was not just a challenge; it was a reunion. A call and response from two ancient minds, separated by time and circumstance, now reunited in the grand arena of their own making. Dr. Orion and Jex, the boy who called himself unnumbered. They were not creator and creation, not enemy and enemy. They were friends, bound by a history that predated the very concept of the Chronos Syndicate.
To understand their bond, you have to go back. Not to the lab, not to the Great Apocalypse, but to a time when the Earth was still new, a vibrant planet in its infancy. A time when gods and demons were not myths, but simply other species, vying for dominance.
In this age, Dr. Orion was not a mad scientist. He was an immortal being of pure intellect, a being of light and thought, a member of a species known as the Lumin. They were scholars of the cosmos, observers who came to the nascent Earth to study its unique, chaotic evolution. Orion was their greatest mind, a collector of knowledge, a being who cataloged and understood every law of the universe, from the grandest stellar collapse to the smallest quantum fluctuation.
And in that time, there was Jex. He was not a human, not a god, but a being of paradox. The son of a Celestial being and a human spirit[1], he was born on a primordial Earth, his very existence a cosmic mistake that defied all laws of logic. He was a child of chaos, an unnumbered entity. The gods of that age, in their hubris, sought to contain him, to categorize him, but he was beyond their understanding. He could manifest and un-manifest at will, his power a direct contradiction of the universe's rules.
The Lumin, with Orion at the forefront, saw this paradox. Most of his kind saw it as a threat, an anomaly to be contained or studied from a safe distance. But Orion was different. He saw not a threat, but a kindred spirit. Jex's impossible existence fascinated him. While other beings sought to use Jex's power or destroy him, Orion simply sought to understand him. They became inseparable.
Jex, perpetually bored and untroubled by the mortal struggles of the nascent world, found a strange joy in Orion's company. Orion would tell him tales of distant galaxies, of cosmic dust clouds, of the birth and death of suns. Jex, in turn, would show Orion the true nature of chaos, the beauty in paradox. They would spar, not with violence, but with concepts. Orion would create a theoretical prison with perfect, unbreakable logic, and Jex would simply walk out, a gentle, bored smile on his face. He'd break all the laws of physics, not with force, but with casual disregard.
But their time was not to last. As the old gods faded and the universe aged, a new, younger race of beings began to take hold: The new humans. And with them came a new belief system. The very concept of "good" and "evil," of "righteousness" and "sin," took hold. The Soul Medallion was one of many divine artifacts created in this new era, an attempt to codify the new duality. Orion and Jex knew of its power, of its ability to split and unify souls.
The first great schism began when Jex, in his endless boredom, started to toy with the new mortals. He would grant them impossible power, only to watch them destroy themselves with it. Orion warned him, "This is not a game, Jex. They are fragile. Your chaos will tear them apart." But Jex, accustomed to the raw, primal forces of creation, couldn't see the difference. To him, mortals were just another amusing species.
The breaking point came with the Fall of Olympus. As the ancient gods were overthrown, the new belief systems, spearheaded by the ancestors of the God Seekers, began to hunt beings like Jex. A young, brilliant, but arrogant scientist named Dr. Orion, descended from Orion's Lumin lineage, became fascinated with the idea of creating life, of containing chaos within a predictable, human vessel. The original Orion saw this, a future of his own kind, diluted and arrogant, seeking to trap what he had spent eons trying to understand.
He confronted Jex, begging him to leave this world, to abandon these mortals and their fragile, new beliefs. But Jex refused. He had found a new game, and he was not one to be told what to do. In a final, desperate act, Orion did the only thing he could think of. He created the perfect prison. Not a physical one, but a conceptual one, a cage of pure, chaotic elements that would be impossible to break. He used the new, fragile laws of this world against Jex, hoping it would be a temporary containment until he could reason with his friend. The prison, meant to hold a being of paradox, was deep in the very core of the planet, where reality itself was unstable.
Jex was not angry. He just smiled, a gentle, knowing smile as the prison sealed around him. He understood. This was Orion's way of saying goodbye, of keeping him safe from a world that could not handle him. But he also saw that his friend was leaving. Orion, the immortal Lumin, the collector of knowledge, was going to take on a new form. He was going to become mortal, to descend, to enter the human cycle and try to understand it from within, hoping one day he could find his friend and finally explain.
So, for centuries, the original Orion, now a mortal named Orion, watched as his distant lineage, arrogant and misguided, sought to replicate his work. He watched them try to find Jex, to contain what he had contained, to re-create the very chaos he had sought to understand. He watched them fail, and in his desperation to protect both them and Jex, he made mistakes of his own. The alien crash of 1686, the biogenome experiments, and finally, Black, were all failed attempts to create a vessel strong enough to face the inevitable.
He knew that one day, Jex would get bored enough to break out. And on that day, he had to be ready. He had to have a champion, a creation born not of cold science, but of a shared, lived experience with humanity. He had to have Black.
And now, here they were. Jex, the bored, unnumbered paradox, finally free from his temporary prison. And Orion, the immortal scholar who became mortal, finally with a champion to face his oldest friend.
The reunion was not a conflict, but a test. Jex was not there to destroy Orion, but to see if his old friend had finally found the answers he was looking for. To see if he had finally created a vessel that could not only survive chaos, but understand it.
"I hope you learned a thing or two, you miserable little brat!" Orion's voice echoed with the joy of a friend reunited.
"I hope you learned something too, old fart," Jex's voice replied, a new, thrilling excitement in his tone. "Because I'm here to find out."
The fate of the world would not be decided by a battle between a hero and a villain. It would be decided by a playful spar between two of the universe's oldest, most powerful friends. And the true winner would be the one who could finally bring order to chaos, once and for all.
[1] Human spirit are not human beings. Long before humans were created the human spirits have always been amongst the gods and they are highly ranked in par with some gods...