Rainbow light erupted around Jay in waves that had no business being as beautiful as they were given the circumstances, colors that didn't have names bleeding into each other as the Gates of Eternity tore open around him, folding space and time the way you fold a piece of paper, carelessly, like it costs nothing.

  Then he was somewhere else entirely.

  The disorientation hit hard. His feet found solid ground and his body didn't trust it, his equilibrium scrambling to recalibrate while his knees threatened to have a conversation with the floor about who was actually in charge here.

  When he finally looked up, his brain took a moment to file a formal complaint.

  The Temple of Eternity.

  It rose from nothing and everything at the same time, existing in a space that wasn't quite space, sitting in the gap between all other dimensions the way a word sits in the silence between two sentences. Massive pillars stretched upward into distances his enhanced vision couldn't resolve no matter how far he pushed it, carved from something that looked like crystallized space itself, pulsing with light that moved through the visible spectrum and kept going past the point where visible meant anything. The pillars were alive. Not metaphorically.

  His feet touched ground that felt solid but looked like condensed starlight, warm under his soles, almost like standing on something that was breathing very slowly. He looked down and saw galaxies swirling in the depths beneath him, nebulae blooming and collapsing in slow motion, entire solar systems rotating in patterns that suggested his footsteps were landing on the skin of creation itself.

  The air tasted electric. Every breath carried ozone and cosmic radiation and something underneath both of those things that his senses had no name for, something that felt like pure possibility before it had decided what to become. The atmosphere itself felt conscious. Attentive. Like something very large and very old was watching him through the medium of the air he was breathing.

  And then there were the statues.

  Dozens of them lined the approach to the temple proper, each one depicting a cosmic entity frozen in a moment of significance. They hadn't been carved or sculpted in any way he could identify. They looked grown, as if reality had reached up from the floor and pulled the essential nature of these beings into physical form because it wanted them remembered here.

  His Comic Book Nerd perk fired up without being asked, flooding his head with names and context as he walked the approach. Task Master's analytical instincts cataloged each one automatically, and his gut twisted steadily with each step.

  Death stood in black marble that absorbed light rather than reflected it, her form shifting even in stone, flickering between something skeletal and something beautiful in the specific way that made both versions terrifying. The statue's eyes tracked him as he passed. He didn't imagine it. He could feel her attention like cold fingers finding the back of his neck, and after everything that had happened between them, that stone gaze carried a weight his danger sense responded to immediately.

  The Living Tribunal loomed with three faces of judgment, Equity and Necessity and Vengeance staring from a head the size of a building, each face expressing a different facet of the same terrible truth.

  The Phoenix burned in crimson crystal that wasn't pretending to have inner fire. It had it. Actual flames moved across the statue's surface without consuming anything, heat radiating outward, and somewhere in the stillness he could hear the faint sound of wings beating.

  Galactus towered in purple granite, at least fifty feet of Devourer made into monument, and even in stone the hunger projected outward in a way that made his enhanced metabolism spike with something embarrassingly close to panic. The appetite was real even when the being wasn't present. That was how deep it went.

  Each statue watched him. He could feel the attention accumulating as he walked the approach, layering on his shoulders like weight, a dozen gods evaluating him with senses that could perceive things his mind wasn't built to comprehend.

  He kept walking anyway. Deliberately. One foot, then the other.

  "Well," he muttered, his voice coming out small and fragile in a way that the space around him was in no hurry to correct, "this is either going to go really well or really badly."

  The temple entrance opened before him. Massive doors carved from solidified space, their surfaces showing depths his eyes kept sliding off, stars rotating in the door's own substance, galaxies spiraling across its face like the whole thing was a window into the cosmos that someone had decided to use as an architectural feature. They stood open, waiting for him with the specific patience of something that has never needed to wait and therefore has no relationship with impatience.

  The doorway felt less like an entrance and more like a point of no return.

  Jay stood at the threshold for a moment. His danger sense spiked, not violently, but insistently, the way it did when it wanted him to understand that whatever came next was going to matter. Every instinct he had confirmed that crossing this line would change something fundamental about something, though it declined to specify what.

  He crossed it.

  The interior made the exterior feel modest.

  A cathedral where the ceiling disappeared into actual infinity, where the walls curved in ways that made his brain ache trying to track them, where the geometry had clearly never had any interest in being Euclidean. The space folded back on itself in patterns that suggested it contained more volume than the universe outside, which should not have been possible and apparently didn't care. More statues lined alcoves in walls that weren't quite solid, their stone forms breathing despite their stillness. Displays made of pure cosmic energy showed moments from across time and space, universes being born and dying in silence around him as he walked, the Big Bang rendered in miniature and somehow more real than reality, the heat death of a cosmos playing out in slow patient entropy, windows into actual events preserved in the temple's substance like insects in amber.

  Beyond all of it lay a lake.

  It had no business being here. No business existing in this space, in this dimension, under any interpretation of physics or magic that he was aware of. The water was perfectly still, its surface so smooth it looked like polished obsidian, and it reflected a starry sky that had no right to be visible from inside a temple. But the reflection wasn't just visual. It had depth and dimension. It felt like the surface was simultaneously water and a window into everything, and as he watched, galaxies swirled in the depths with the lazy grace of things that have all the time there is, nebulae bloomed and collapsed, stars were born in brilliant flashes and lived their whole lives in seconds and died in supernovas that painted the water gold and red and then dark again.

  The lake wasn't reflecting the cosmos.

  It was the cosmos. Somehow contained. Somehow here.

  And in the center of it, sitting in meditative repose on the water's surface as if the water was solid ground and the question of whether it was didn't particularly interest him, floated Eternity.

  Jay stopped walking.

  Eternity was vast beyond any unit of measurement that had been invented for the purpose, and yet somehow present in a space that should have been too small to contain him, the way a concept is present in a room even when it's larger than the room. His form was humanoid in the way a statue of a human is humanoid, recognizable but clearly operating in a different category entirely. He was composed of space itself, galaxies rotating in his chest where a heart would be, spiral arms turning with ponderous grace, nebulae swirling in his eyes like irises made from stellar nurseries where new stars were being born in real time. His skin, if that word applied, was the deep black of the void between things, punctuated with points of light that were actual stars, actual solar systems, actual civilizations living and dying on his surface in the time it took to look at him. Horns crowned his head, curved space bent so profoundly by the presence of him that the bending had taken permanent form.

  The temple's impossible architecture curved toward him. Acknowledging him. Orienting around him the way things orient around the thing that matters most.

  Jay stood there for a moment that he would later be unable to measure and stared, his enhanced mind working furiously to process something it had not been built to process, Task Master's abilities cataloging details that added up to data that was almost meaningless because how do you analyze something that is, in the most literal possible sense, everything.

  He gathered himself. Focused. Spoke.

  "Lord Eternity." His voice came out steadier than he had any right to expect. "It's an honor. The Queen of Nevers instructed me to seek you out."

  Eternity's voice was unlike anything Jay had heard. It was deep as the void between stars and soft as a whisper crossing dimensions at the same time, and underneath both of those qualities was something he hadn't expected.

  Warmth. Genuine warmth. The specific warmth of someone who is glad you came, not because they needed you to but because they wanted you to.

  It was the same quality the Queen of Nevers' voice carried. That sense of speaking to someone who cares about you personally despite existing so far beyond you that the distance shouldn't allow for personal.

  "Jay. The outsider who stole from Death herself and lived to speak of it." A pause that held something that felt remarkably like amusement. "I have been expecting you, though I confess you took your time arriving."

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  No accusation in it. Just a fact, delivered by someone who found facts entertaining when they involved mortals behaving like themselves. The cosmos in his form pulsed, galaxies spinning slightly faster for just a moment.

  Recognition landed. In the comics, Eternity and the Queen of Nevers were partners, two aspects of existence drawn together across the breadth of the multiverse. The Queen, who had always regarded outsiders like Jay as something between a project and a child, would naturally share her perspective with the person she loved. Their similar warmth, their shared patience toward beings so incomprehensibly beneath them, made sense now in the way that things make sense once you have the missing piece.

  Eternity wasn't tolerating a mortal's presence in his temple.

  He was welcoming one of his partner's.

  Jay scratched the back of his head. The gesture came out more sheepish than he intended, which was probably appropriate. "Yeah, about that. I've been busy. Life's been throwing things at me faster than I can sort them. Between adopting my son and dealing with the aftermath of the Death situation and trying to figure out how to be a parent while also preparing for everything that's coming, time got away from me a bit."

  "Indeed." The galaxies in Eternity's chest pulsed with what could only be described as fond amusement, the particular fondness of someone watching a person they like be exactly themselves. "Though I will observe, even for beings for whom time holds no inherent value, making Eternity himself wait for several months demonstrates either remarkable courage or remarkable foolishness."

  "Probably the latter," Jay admitted, and he was smiling slightly despite himself. "Cosmic etiquette wasn't covered in my orientation to this universe. I'm still learning the rules by breaking them."

  Eternity's expression shifted, the cosmos in him reorganizing into patterns that suggested something deeper moving underneath the surface.

  "Your presence has certainly affected the cosmic order in ways few mortals manage." His voice carried something careful now, measured. "Confronting Lady Death directly. Taking her stone. Forcing her confinement pending judgment." A pause weighted with more than its length suggested. "You really are heartless, aren't you?"

  The words hit Jay like a step into cold water.

  Panic surged through him hard and fast, adrenaline spiking, his danger sense roaring back to life with the specific urgency it reserved for situations where the wrong response ended everything. The instinct to apologize came up immediately, to explain and justify and if necessary to grovel, because he had just said something that might have offended an entity that contained literal galaxies and the social math on that was not in his favor.

  He stopped himself.

  Breathed.

  Forced his mind to actually work instead of react.

  He remembered what Death had done. Not the abstract cosmic entity, but the specific choices she had made, the specific damage she had pursued. FURY sent to slaughter thousands of innocent people just to draw him out of cover. Domino threatened with annihilation as punishment for existing in his life. His son's existence used as leverage against him. Every attack calculated and personal and directed at the people who couldn't fight back.

  His jaw set. The panic didn't disappear but it moved, rearranged itself into something colder and more useful.

  He met Eternity's gaze directly. Looked into eyes containing stellar nurseries and refused to look away even though it felt like trying to outstare the sun.

  "I'm a simple man with simple needs," Jay said, and his voice came out carrying more conviction than he'd known was in him. "But I have people to protect. Friends who depend on me. A woman I love more than I have words for. A son who deserves to grow up in a world that isn't trying to use him against me." He felt his hands tighten at his sides. "If being heartless is what it takes to keep my family breathing, then I will be heartless without hesitation and without apology. If being vicious is what stops threats before they reach the people I love, then I will be the most vicious thing this cosmos has ever had to deal with." He didn't look away. "I'd rather be called a monster by beings who have never had anything to lose than let the people I love suffer because I hesitated when I shouldn't have."

  The silence that followed was total.

  The lake's surface went absolutely still, every ripple freezing in place at the same instant. The galaxies rotating in Eternity's chest paused mid-spiral. The temple itself seemed to hold whatever passed for its breath.

  Eternity studied him with the eyes of something that had watched civilisations complete their entire arcs from birth to dark, and Jay stood under that scrutiny without flinching, though it cost him something to manage it.

  Then Eternity smiled.

  It transformed his cosmic features in a way that made him seem almost human for one single heartbeat, recognizably warm, recognizably pleased, recognizably proud in the way that something immeasurably large can be proud of something very small doing something exactly right.

  "Ah," he said, and the warmth in his voice was genuine and complete. "The most dangerous being in all of reality." A brief pause. "A family man. Of course."

  The weight of those words settled on Jay like something he hadn't known he'd been waiting to hear.

  The tension that had been coiling in him since he crossed the threshold released all at once, leaving him slightly unsteady but upright.

  "Well then." Eternity's form shifted, galaxies realigning as he gestured at the space between them with hands that contained solar systems in their palms. "Shall we proceed to the matter at hand? You know, from the knowledge your previous world gave you, that anyone who reaches my temple first in their respective universe receives a wish. One request, granted by Eternity itself, within the bounds of what even I can accomplish."

  He paused, and something moved through his expression that mixed genuine amusement with something that looked remarkably like exasperation.

  "The One Above All must really be pulling a fast one on me with this arrangement."

  Jay blinked. His brain briefly stuttered at a cosmic entity casually complaining about the literal God of creation, and then he forced himself to focus, because there was something in front of him that needed his full attention.

  A wish from Eternity.

  His enhanced mind kicked into overdrive, processing at the pace it reserved for situations where being slow cost everything. A wish from Eternity. The implications unfolded faster than he could fully track them, each possibility branching into consequences that branched into further consequences. He could ask for power beyond anything he currently possessed. For knowledge of what was coming. For the destruction of every threat that had ever pointed itself at Earth. For safety so complete it never had to be earned again.

  Every option carried risk. He knew that. The more powerful the wish, the wider the blast radius of unintended consequences. He'd read enough stories to know how this went when you stopped paying attention to the shape of what you were asking for.

  He opened his mouth. Words forming carefully after several seconds of deliberation.

  "What more could I want than a hom-"

  "Stop."

  Eternity's voice cut through the air with a single syllable that resonated through dimensions, made the lake's surface rupture with violent ripples and the temple walls shudder in ways that suggested the building itself had flinched. The word landed everywhere at once.

  Jay's mouth closed.

  Eternity's expression had shifted completely. The warmth was still there but behind it now was something urgent, something that had reached forward from wherever Eternity kept his genuine concerns and put itself plainly on his face. His eyes fixed on Jay with an intensity that made the mortal feel transparent, like Eternity was reading him at a depth that skin and bone and conscious thought didn't obstruct.

  "Be very, very careful about what you're about to ask for."

  Each word placed deliberately. Each one carrying more weight than the one before it.

  "This opportunity is rarer than a black hole and white hole existing simultaneously in stable orbit. Rarer than consciousness itself emerging from pure chaos." He leaned forward, and reality bent around the motion, space warping to accommodate the shift. "Use every tool you have. Every ability you've taken, every skill you've built, every enhancement running in you right now. Think carefully. The fate of more than just yourself depends on the words you choose next."

  Jay's danger sense exploded.

  Not the sharp immediate warning of something about to hurt him. Something else. His enhanced perception screaming that he was standing at a place where paths diverged in ways that didn't converge again, where the wrong choice led somewhere with no road back.

  He closed his eyes and went inward.

  He ran his intended words through every analytical system he had. Task Master's pattern recognition working them from every angle. Sage's processing running probability trees. Every borrowed ability contributing what it could to a single focused question.

  What more could I want than a home.

  Innocent. Simple. The request of a family man, exactly the kind of man Eternity had just identified him as. A place of safety. A sanctuary where his family could exist without the multiverse reaching in to take pieces of them.

  So why had Eternity stopped him?

  Jay's hands started trembling before the answer arrived. His analytical mind turned the words over and over, and the more he turned them the colder he got, because he could feel the shape of the trap even before he could see it clearly. A home was a location. A fixed point. Something that could be found by anything looking for it, something that could be threatened, something that could be taken.

  He had asked, without meaning to, for a target.

  He opened his eyes. Sweat was running down his temples. His heart was doing things against his ribs that he would need to have a conversation with it about later.

  "At least give me a hint," he said, and the frustration in his voice was real and unmanaged and he didn't bother trying to clean it up. "You can't expect me to solve this completely blind."

  "I am bound by my role," Eternity said, and the regret in it was genuine. "I cannot directly interfere with mortal choices." A pause. "But I will say this."

  He waited, and in that wait, Jay felt the weight of the entire temple holding still around them.

  "You are a family man. Remember that above everything else. That truth, that fundamental truth about who you are, must be what guides you."

  The emphasis landed differently than the first time he'd said it.

  Jay closed his eyes again.

  He reached for his power theft ability and used it differently than he normally did, channeling the accumulated stolen potential of every power he'd ever absorbed into a single focused amplification of his danger sense, pushing it past the ceiling it normally operated under and into something that felt closer to cosmic awareness than anything he'd previously managed.

  The effect was not subtle.

  His danger sense stopped being a warning system and became something that perceived threats the way Eternity perceived time, all of them at once, layered over each other, near threats and distant ones and threats that didn't exist yet but were building themselves from available materials. His family moved through every vision. Luv. Domino. The people he had gathered around himself in the time he'd been here. Every threat that was coming for them from directions he couldn't currently see, dangers too large or too strange or too patient to register through ordinary perception.

  He understood what he needed to ask for.

  He opened his eyes. The sweat on his face was cold. His hands had stopped shaking, replaced by a stillness that came from knowing exactly what you're about to do.

  He met Eternity's gaze and held it.

  "Protect my family."

  The words came out with everything he had behind them, love and desperation and the absolute unambiguous conviction of a man who has identified the one thing he will not negotiate on.

  "I wish for you to protect my family. Domino and Luv. Keep them safe from the threats I can't see yet, from the dangers I can't predict, from the cosmic forces that are beyond anything I can currently counter." He took one breath and finished it. "Whatever is coming. Whatever I don't have the perception to understand yet. Whatever exists beyond my current reach. Protect them from it."

  Eternity was quiet for a moment.

  Then something moved through his cosmic form that Jay had no precise word for. The galaxies in his chest aligned into perfect spirals, every arm settling into its correct position at the same time. The nebulae in his eyes bloomed with color that hadn't been there before. His entire form pulsed once, deeply, with something that looked exactly like what it was.

  Pride. Satisfaction. The expression of something ancient and vast that has just watched a mortal arrive at exactly the right answer by exactly the right path.

  "So shall it be done."

  Eternity brought both hands together.

  The sound wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It moved through every dimension simultaneously, through the temple and through the space between dimensions and through the fabric of the multiverse itself, and where it passed it left something changed in its wake, a promise woven into the structure of things, permanent and without conditions.

  Reality itself had just updated.