Wordcount: 420 words
Rating/Warnings: PG-13
Summary: And then there was backstory
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It took six months for Evil to triumph over Good, but it took Brian almost a decade to get all the pieces into place so that could happen. The problem wasn’t undoing the monkey wrench that Good had thrown into the works all those millennia ago –that was actually the easiest of the steps– the problem was making sure that they couldn’t do it again.
There were rules to the contest, but it had been so long ago that the best documentation he could find on it was random scraps hidden in various temples and reliquaries. So he relied on common sense as well as ancient warnings. He broke down projects into smaller parts and outsourced what he could, making sure the people an companies involved were given a believable explanation for the tasks that didn’t include ‘destroying the world’ or ‘bringing about a thousand years of darkness’.
Once the infrastructure was in place, he carefully unwound the rats’ nest of wards and bindings laid down by Good that had trapped the contest mechanisms in a perpetual temporal loop. When the clock was once more in motion he found he’d misjudged the timing and was forced to wait another three years before the contest could begin. He used that time to perfect his strategies, running simulation after simulation until he was certain that he had thought of every weakness possible.
The contest was to decide the disposition of the Veil between the worlds of darkness and light. There were three sides to the fight: Good, Neutral, and Evil. If Good won, the world would have a thousand years of light; if Neutral won, there would be no change in the Veil’s position, and if Evil won the world would shift into the darkness. With the darkness came the predators that had lurked in the shadows of fairy tales and campfire stories. But these were nightmares given mortality as well as flesh. He wouldn’t tip the odds so far as that.
Each side would choose mortal champion to represent them in the battle for control. From what Brian could gather the choosing was normally done by the mortals, as it required touching the corresponding artifact at the time of activation– but it had been so long ago that no one remembered what the three objects were, much less what touching them meant.
Which made it almost embarrassingly easy for Brian to make sure the champion for Good and Neutral had no idea what was happening until it was too late.
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