The Art of the Small (II)

"Hello Peter. I'm Peter."

A man.

A man stood at the center of the Web of Life, bright with white light over his whole frame. Except where he wasn't. An endless star field loomed within his higher body, deep and grand amidst the shine. His face was the only part of the man-shaped being which looked the part.

Star-Lord stared at him, disbelieving. "What the heck are you doing here?"

The thirty-some-year old version of Spider-man beheld him mildly. "I am the Spider. The Totem of the Web. The Great Weaver. He who Concludes the Past and Gazes into the Shadows of all Future Things."

Star-Lord… he was lost for words. It was irritating in the extreme that he would end up speechless even now and here at the apex of his Self-hood, but there it was.

Fortunately, the man was not in the same predicament. "The Hindus tell a tale of one of the great gods Indra, who, following a caprice, incarcerated himself in the body of a pig. He took unto himself a pig mate, and raised a brood of little pigs. He lost all sense of his own identity, and was thoroughly hypnotized with the idea that he was a pig. The fellow-gods grieved at his illusion and his pitiful state. They called upon him to come out of the pig-state, telling him that he was a great god and not a swinish creature wallowing in the mud. He grunted out a denial, saying: 'I am a pig, not a god – leave me alone!' They persisted, and he continued to repel them. They killed his pig-mate, and his little pigs, but he squealed out his sorrow and rage, and tried to destroy the gods in his wrath. Finally they killed his pig-body, as a last resort, and lo! Indra, the god, stepped forth in all his glorious power, and laughed in astonishment when he realized the extent and degree of his late illusion. By this parable, the Hindu teachers impress upon their students the fact of their Real Self."

Star-Lord listened and beheld the Spider with rapt attention, but he didn't think the story meant what he thought it meant. "I don't feel that different."

"That is because you were never more than Star-Lord in any of your lives. You never rose beyond your personality. You never opened your higher sight. You never stepped outside your personality. You never faced the Guardian of the Threshold, That Which Feeds on Weakness and Arises in Might."

"Are you talking about that… thing?"

"The Guardian of the Threshold is the cumulative evil influence that is the result of the wicked thoughts and acts of the age in which any one may live. It sets itself against all those who would break the confines of flesh, perception and social convention. It is the herd-like thought of easily led fools who fear strength and despise individuality. It assumes to each seeker a definite shape at each appearance, being always either of one sort or changing each time. It is a spectral figure, the abstract of the debit and credit book of the individual and all who share even a scrap of his lineage and karmic debt among all mortal kind."

It sounded incredibly depressing. How bad off was he – not to mention everyone else – If that's the form and disposition it took for someone as ordinary as him?

Peter Jason Quill looked at Peter Benjamin Parker, and the pure white frame that haloed that universe of stars that formed his body. He couldn't help but feel inadequate. But then, why would he even expect otherwise? It's not like he ever compared favourably with most people he met. After all, he was a walking stereotype. A reckless and rebellious manchild. He wasn't Captain Kirk. He was college drop-out James Kirk Junior if he'd been raised by a single mother and never had a father to show him how to be strong yet fit into society.

"Self-deprecation like that is why you grew bloated with all the things the Serpent likes to feast upon. Shame. Fear. Horror. People are often protected from these things by the opacity of the region of Prescription and Custom. But the moment this protection is relinquished, and the human spirit pierces the cloud and enters alone on the unexplored regions of Nature, that Horror will appear. It can be successfully countered only by defiance. By knowing yourself. Confidence. Faith."

That sounded like the exact opposite of his grandpa's disposition, what the hell?

"Contempt works as well," the Spider said wryly. "It is its own form of Faith. Not the most conductive to serenity or fellowship though."

Star-Lord's mouth twisted at the knowing manner in which this stranger talked to him. But considering the replay of his last life showing on the gap in the Web just over the man's shoulder, he figured it was probably pointless to remark on it. "What is this place?"

"This is the Web of Life. The Web of Reality. Every reality. Every past. Every possible future. I see them all. I judge which of the former should linger in Consciousness. And I judge which of the latter is most likely to come to pass. Some consider it a nexus between alternate realities as well, but I think you understand the inaccuracy of that interpretation."

This much he did remember. "There is the past. There are different Dimensions. There is no foreordination. There are no alternate timelines." Except that the past timelines hadn't… dissolved exactly, if the term even applied. That was still an ongoing process apparently.

"Correct."

At least that explained why dimensional travel was possible but never actually solved anything: it was the past all along. You couldn't change the past. Unless the past was actually part of the present in some strange stable time loop that hadn't closed yet. Or something.

Maybe. "Why did you bring me here?"

"I did not," said the Weaver of Worlds. "What you did in pulling upon yourself until you were beyond reach and notice is not unprecedented. Mystics call it the Art of the Small. It is not usually how one goes about contacting the Weaver – there are easier and more reliable ways for that – but it has many uses and benefits. Chiefly in perspective."

"Look, let's skip the rest of the mumbo jumbo. Give it to me straight."

"When Ego went on his mating spree, he had no idea what he was doing," Peter Parker bluntly obliged. "But then, he has little idea of most things. His issue has always been a lack of perspective. And when he finally took a form that gave him a perspective to match that of most other forms of life, he allowed his fear to drive him off. His is a strangely reversed sort of ignorance. He sees the biggest picture but almost none of the smaller ones that combine to form it, and none of the others it helps form in turn. 'From big know small' does not occur to him. Neither does the reverse of that. And in terms of power, it is wholly based in his planet-sized, bio-computer brain's ability to perceive, calculate and control substance and motion via his physical form. Force and matter manipulation, essentially. Spiritually, he is no more awake than the most ordinary man." The Spider Totem spoke knowingly, with the sort of tone Star-Lord would expect from God. "There is a reason he needs your power but you cannot use it yourself unless bonded to the planet. You have the energy. You have the software. But you have barely a fraction of a fraction of the hardware needed to put it to use."

That was sort of the opposite of what he expected. But then… the Astral Body was a body, wasn't it? Even if it wasn't exactly dense, it was still a body. Substance. "Are you telling me the only reason I'm not Superman is because I'm a power adapter without the computer to run god.exe on?"

"A pan-dimensional reactor would be a better analogy, and godhood presumes more than power over the physical plane but otherwise yes. Just so."

"Oh that is just bullshit!"

"Ego had no idea what he was doing," the Spider repeated.

Well this was just perfect. His old man was all Motion and Substance but barely any Consciousness to go with the other two. In other words his old man was a moron. The blind leading the blind. The almighty idiot! "The seed didn't fall far from the tree at all, did it?" Star-Lord groused.

"On the contrary, you fell quite far indeed," The Spider disagreed. "In shedding everything that wasn't the You emergent from your mortal self, you discarded everything that Ego gave you when he became your father instead of Jason Quill in your last life and this one. In so doing, you cast off everything that resembled a quick path to power."

Wow. So he not only failed at whatever the Ancient One wanted but he failed so badly as to destroy every relevance he might have had in the universe at large and wait a minute! "Grandpa should've been my dad?" His everything stalled from the shock, for a moment. "Grandpa was my dad?"

"Just so." But he didn't say anything more.

Peter Quill looked at Peter Parker. Questions, requests, bargains and pleas flashes through his imagination, but he followed through on none of them. "You know, you're being incredibly helpful."

It was actually down right suspicious.

"To you it might seem so. To me, this is no hardship." A second gap in the Web filled with light behind him, playing scenes of Peter Parker's own lives one after another. Some were insignificant. Some were grand. Some were petty. And some seemed like a total waste.

Star-Lord looked at the slow motion replay of Captain Universe Spider-Man being drained of all power and life by a crazy psy-vampire who'd lucked into the power to travel all over the ball of wibbily wobbly timey wimey stuff. "Wow. You got taken out like a chump."

"I could have overcome him. I could perceive how to cast off every pull on my power and life force that was not my own, in that moment when my end flashed before my eyes."

"Why didn't you?"

"That timeline was doomed. As were all but one of the others. That was the other thing in that moment of clarity that I perceived. I knew what I did would not matter past the departure of the Spider-Army. I also knew I would resume existence under the Role of a different Peter Parker. One standing just behind me at the time, in fact. I knew how many times it had already happened. And I was sure that even the furthest I could see was not the last." As he talked, the memory showed what Peter Parker had seen in that last instant. Conclusion. Futility. Finality. A glimpse of the Weave. Specifically, the strings making a whole window snapping and being looped back upon others to weave something new from a point much earlier. "So I disclaimed it all. It allowed me to step outside of time where I could spend however long I wished enjoying some repose and making plans. And if my death forced the other Totems to undergo trials of their own, all the better."

Star-Lord wondered what it would be like, to learn that your entire world would be just… canceled like that. No matter what you could do. No matter how powerful you were. He couldn't imagine it. He couldn't imagine himself handling it well either.

The Weaver smiled slightly at his feeling. "With great power comes great freedom. Freedom to take away the freedom of others. Freedom to impose your will against the wish of those who would take freedom away. Freedom to eschew all responsibility. Freedom to assume the greatest responsibility. Freedom to realise when you've already fulfilled all you could fulfil."

And now Peter was getting Grandpa vibes off the guy, because of course he was.

He didn't hate it.

Freedom… it sure sounded nice.

… Wait a second.

Star-Lord thought over the whole ordeal that led him here. And everything before it. Throughout this whole stay at the Overlook and everything his grandpa and the Ancient One had done for him. Done to him. Decided for him. He didn't like what he could finally see.

It had never even occurred to him to say no.

"Until one becomes conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." The Weaver said gently when Peter's thoughts had achieved that terrible conclusion. "But do you really think there was no rebellion in anything you did?"

What was that supposed to mean?

"Doublethink is the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

"What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

"Look." The Weaver raised a hand in a grand gesture.

A third gap in the Web filled behind him, and this time it was Peter's bedroom in the Overlook that came in sight. Not the Attainment Hall. Or any other room for spells or meditation. It was the quarters where he'd slept for the past few months and change. Quarters where he now lay, quiet and still and deathly unconscious.

Sitting on a chair at his bedside was his red-eyed, exhausted mother. "How much longer will he be like this?"

"Until he dies or makes it back," Jason Quill said quietly across from her. He sounded like he was repeating something he'd said dozens of times before. His grandmother or the Ancient One were nowhere to be seen.

Star-Lord looked at the scene, enraptured.

The daughter tried and failed to suppress the latest sob of many. "How are you still so calm about this?"

"Failure has never been Peter's problem," Grandpa said, looking over him with that understated pride and love that ached. "It's always overachievement with him."

"… Sometimes it feels like you love and believe in him more than I do."

Jason Quill said nothing. But then, he didn't have to, did he?

Star-Lord couldn't look away from the sight. He knew without asking that it was happening in the material world even as they spoke. "How many timelines have collapsed?"

"Many."

Yes, very helpful. Many dead timelines involves a multitude of dead timelines. How wonderful. "And in how many of those was I his actual son?"

"All but one and this one."

Well…

Well.

No, you know what, fuck that shit. This was in no way well. "What the hell is up with my family tree?" Also his grandfather was stringing an electric guitar and lowly singing something to himself. No seriously, what?

The Spider did not reply.

Star-Lord tore his eyes away from the sight of his grandfather with a musical instrument he didn't even expect him to want anything to do with and beheld the other man who wasn't a man. "Why am I still here?"

"Because you do not know how to return. And my help comes with a price."

Star-Lord tensed and felt abruptly exposed. He realised that the state of razor-sharp focus and intent that had let him escape the Horror and stay Himself had lapsed. He rushed to re-establish it. And when his rush ruined it, he rallied a second time and refocused himself more carefully.

The Spider watched and waited for him to master himself, calm and steady.

It did nothing for his peace of mind. "What do you want?"

"In shedding all that which the Dweller on the Threshold fed upon, you renounced everything that qualified as a swift path to power, so called. This contravenes the whole point of this endeavor and is a great waste besides."

Star-Lord felt… surprised. Then he felt disbelieving, indignant and finally resigned. It figured that even now he'd jump the hoop and make assumptions.

"I will enable you to reclaim the boon that Ego so selfishly bestowed upon you. I will see you through the process that will enable you to understand and use that boon as well. I will even restore your memory of all the lives before, if you wish it."

That sounded way too good and convenient. "And in return?"

"Three favours from you over the next three years."

… Of course it would be something like that. "If you think I'm the kind of guy that would sign off on a vague deal like that, no matter how big the rewards, you haven't been paying attention. And did I mention I've been warned against the quick and easy path?"

"This path will be quick and easy for me. For you it will be a trial lasting lifetimes upon lifetimes." Well… that's him told. "And anyone will agree to anything if they think highly enough of the one making the request."

"And you think I think highly enough of you to agree to this? This is the first time we've met!" Well, second if you counted the baby spiderling in the last future, but who actually took that kid seriously really?

"We are at the Center of the Web," the Weaver gestured all around them. "My character witness is literally the entirety of history."

"Show me your life then," Peter challenged. "Or all of them. Even just highlights will do. The good ones and the bad ones."

"Very well."

He agreed. Just like that, he agreed. He showed him. The good, the bad and the ugly, he showed him. He showed him everything. And Star-Lord doubted he was fabricating any of it after the tenth misfortune and accidentally snapping his girlfriend's neck that seemed to be a staple of every other life Spider-man ever lived.

By the end of it, Star-Lord could only gape at Spider-Man, aghast. "Holy shit, dude. How does your life always go so badly? You're a bigger Boy Scout than Superman!" Except a lot less lucky. By kilometres. Holy Phoenix on a stick did his lives suck. "You have issues, man."

"Peter Parker does indeed develop rather self-debilitating complexes."

What was this, understatement day? But he seemed to have closed that topic, so…"Three favours, huh?"

"Yes."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you are free to try and find the way back on your own. Or wait until or if the Ancient One finds you instead. It might not even feel that all that much time passes, for all that your body will stay empty in the physical world."

Well gee, that's not blackmail at all. "I don't suppose you can just give me a first-time waiver?"

"Everything has a price." True. "Whether or not you accept mine is entirely your decision. Just like the consequences of that decision will be entirely your responsibility as well."

Whatever happened to 'with great power comes great freedom?' "Why not just tell me now?" He was probably crazy for considering it, but given the circumstances…

"Because they may turn out to be things you will do anyway, through plan or choice or circumstance. A favour done incidentally is no favour at all."

"Maximum return on investment, huh?" That… that actually made the entire proposal feel more legitimate and trustworthy than almost anything else he said. "You know I could promise to do your favors and change my mind later."

"You could."

"Terrible retribution would ensue for breaking trust I'm assuming. Great plagues on me and mine? Fire and brimstone?"

"Nothing of the sort. However, being Forsworn in the eyes of every entity in the Universe will invite more than enough hardship on its own. I will not need to meddle at all in your future."

He just had to ask, didn't he?

"… You know what? Fuck it. I agree to your terms. Let's do it."