Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Kauku frowned. Something was wrong.

Several somethings, in fact. That in and of itself would not normally be enough to make him worry—things went wrong all the time, and it was usually no trouble for him to nudge them back into place or simply adapt his plans to accommodate them. He hadn't expected someone like Ethan to become his Heir, for instance. He'd expected someone a lot more pliable. Less wary, less intelligent.

More fool him, he supposed. Anyone who could inherit the ability to Anchor was not someone that would be any of those things. The Talent required a certain depth of will to invoke. It required conviction, restraint, an aptitude with Firmament and an intuitive touch with reality. Of course his Heir wasn't some easily-manipulated tool.

But that was easy enough to work with. It helped that Ethan was easygoing and likeable; he had questions, yes, but Kauku found himself surprised by how much he enjoyed their little talks. It had been a while since he'd been challenged in any serious capacity. Ethan spoke to him without cowering or supplicating himself—treated him as an equal despite the sheer gap in their power.

Truthfully, he'd thought that would be annoying, but he found rather quickly that he enjoyed that audacity. Imagine how much more interesting life might have been if the mortals he met spoke to him so freely! Perhaps then he wouldn't have been led down the path he'd chosen...

Ah, but it was far too late for such ruminations, and far too late to change his plans.

It was a pity, really. He liked Ethan quite a bit. Not enough to abandon everything he'd done so far, but enough to that the help he offered was genuine. It would give Ethan more of a chance against everything that was to come, and while that also meant the human had better odds at screwing up his plans, he couldn't really bring himself to care.

He'd give Ethan a fair shot. Why not? The human had earned it, and the odds that anything he could do would interfere with Kauku's plans were minimal even with the help Kauku had given him.

Ethan kept surprising him, though. The hint he'd given about Aspects? He hadn't really expected Ethan to make anything of it. Who would've thought he'd figure it out! And not just figure it out—from what Kauku was sensing, Ethan had managed to layer the revelations into his fourth shift and build a foundation more stable than any he'd encountered since who-knew-when.

A partial shift only a few months into becoming a practitioner. Kauku grinned to himself, feeling that odd sense of pride growing within him. Sure, it was sort of at odds with his goals, but Ethan was still his Heir. If any of the Heirs were going to demonstrate improbable levels of aptitude with Firmament, then it was only right that it was his.

Really, the only complaint Kauku had was that Ethan spent too much time with others. He'd be much more effective if he'd gone at all this alone—who knew how formidable he would be by now had he focused on siphoning all the power he could from the Interface? Yes, technically his companions had helped him, but Kauku was quite certain that Ethan would have been able to handle all those threats by himself if he'd just focused from the beginning.

Ah well. That was only a small flaw, and it wouldn't matter in the long run. His companions couldn't really be a problem if they weren't alive, and something was coming up that Kauku was quite certain would at the very least drive a rift between them. None of this was what was bothering Kauku.

No, that was something else. He was sensing alterations he hadn't accounted for. Changes in the Ritual that would permanently ruin what he had planned. The appearance of the Abstraction was one thing—that had only aided with Ethan's growth, and Kauku liked him enough that he was quite fine with that—but he couldn't allow the Ritual to end early. Where would the fun be in that? He wouldn't get what he needed out of it.

That was problem number one. Interference with the Ritual, interference with his plans. Kauku wouldn't tolerate those. It was one thing when they were coming from Ethan and another thing entirely when it was one of those mortal pests. He'd have to deal with that somehow.

Problem number two was a little more difficult. Something was happening with the Intermediary, and annoyingly, he couldn't tell exactly what it was.

Kauku cast his senses over to the Intermediary once more. It remained broken and cut off from the wider network—both Kauku and whatever was left of Ethan's Integrator friend were making sure of that. He couldn't quite remember the name. Gary?

No, that might have been one of Ethan's Earth friends. Hm.

Stolen story; please report.

Either way, his soulrot was doing a good job of preventing the Intermediary from repairing itself—a good thing, too, or the surveillance that came with the Interface would once again land on the planet of Hestia, and Kauku would no longer be able to operate quite as freely.

So what was the problem here? Kauku narrowed metaphorical eyes, examining it even more thoroughly. Just enough that he had to pull himself back to avoid accidentally collapsing the soulrot with the force of his presence.

Nothing was wrong with the Integrator's soulrot. He was even still revivable, if Ethan really felt it necessary to do that. The Intermediary wasn't healing. Was he missing something?

He'd borrow a page from Ethan's book, he decided.

The Thread of Insight wasn't nearly as easily accessible to him as it apparently was for Ethan, but the benefit of having an Heir was that he could use them as a sort of proxy for these things. Reach through him, take hold of the Thread of Insight, connect it with his own psyche...

Ah. So that was what it was. Of course. This was Hestia; he couldn't forget to look through the dimension of time. The Heart was trying to interfere, then? Kauku examined the scattering of distorted Temporal Firmament with a critical eye. The patterns seemed random, but if he accounted for time and normalized it against the planet's usual temporal activity, he could see what it was doing.

Interesting. The Heart seemed to be trying to instantiate a minor paradox—to create an intentional Tear within the Intermediary. It was trying to use Ethan's future actions to create echoes of that Integrator friend before Ethan revived him. Why?

Leaving aside the fact that this seemed to indicate that Ethan would in fact succeed with the task of bringing his friend back—a task that seemed to Kauku to be quite improbable, for all that it was technically possible—he couldn't figure out why something like Hestia's Heart would care about this Integrator. And even if it did, if it knew Ethan was going to succeed, why bother to bring him back early at all?

Doing something like that wasn't without cost. Kauku could see how it would destabilize Hestia's Firmament even further. It would worsen the state of the Tears across the planet, make the monsters even more prolific, and probably accelerate Anomaly 006.

He didn't like that. Anomaly 006 was one of the few things he knew close to nothing about, and it was the one thing he wasn't quite sure how to deal with once he was free from this makeshift prison. He was confident that he could deal with it, but exploding planets just weren't something he had a lot of experience with.

So... what, was the Heart doing this to mess with him specifically?

That didn't seem likely. The Heart couldn't possibly know that he existed.

The only logical conclusion, Kauku thought, was that the Heart believed Ethan would need his Integrator friend. Before he could actually revive him. So it was creating a small, self-resolving bootstrap paradox, or at least trying to.

Bizarre. Kauku considered this for a moment. Would allowing this interfere with his plans?

Not really, he decided. Not in any way he didn't count as allowable interference. He didn't care one way or the other about the Integrators, but he supposed this one in particular was more interesting than the rest. He was interested in why the Heart felt Ethan would need his assistance, but Kauku couldn't even begin to guess at what it was concerned about. That would have to wait for the Trial's completion and the Heart's subsequent Integration.

Nevermind that problem, then. He might even help if he felt it would be amusing enough. Back to problem number one. The pest messing around with the Ritual and with Novi's soulrot.

Kauku could feel it if he concentrated. It was subtle enough—or rather weak enough that he hadn't been able to find it before, but now that he knew it was there, it was just a matter of looking. He was reasonably certain he could reach out and squash it like a bug. He was tempted to, even. Only one thing stopped him: Ethan's warning.

Try not to let it reach Kauku.

In all his experimentation with Temporal Firmament—limited though that was without the Integration of the Heart—prophecies such as these were not avoidable. And that was what it was, really. A prophecy.

Prophecies couldn't be avoided in any direct sense. Paradox Warning gave Ethan the ability to prepare for whatever he told himself would happen, but it didn't give him the ability to avert it entirely. Not without creating a much more significant and much more dangerous paradox than the one the Heart was trying to create.

The big question was whether this was the trigger event. Kauku was pretty sure that it was.

He was imprisoned. Nothing could reach him save for Ethan, and even that was due to a little quirk in the Interface's programming for Heirs and their Scions.

With the power he held, though? He could technically reach out. The bars of his prison could only hold him back so far. He had power enough to touch the Interface and to interact with any instance of soulrot.

Kauku almost scoffed at the idea that some pest would get the better of him, but he knew better than to ignore such a warning. And yet, what was there to do?

Prophecies couldn't be averted.

But... perhaps the details could be nudged in his favor.

Nothing about that warning said it would be detrimental to his plans. Only that Ethan wouldn't like the outcome. That was technically already a given.

Just in case, though, he'd leave a few things behind for Ethan. Nothing he wouldn't have given him anyway—the rest of the Inspirations he was set to get, maybe a hint or two on the nature of Firmament and what he'd need to do to bring back that Integrator friend. Just because they weren't on the same side didn't mean he couldn't also root for the guy.

Who knew? Maybe Ethan would surprise him.