## He Who Remains
He cradled a half-bitten apple and a sheaf of papers. One hand rested on a Tempad, making a minor tweak between bites. The gestures were small, disarmingly human.
Tao inspected every aspect of his existence, from the deep wells of memory to his physical form. He sensed no vast energy, only some stabilized, unnatural genetic factors. He was, at his core, just flesh and blood. A human.
This... isn't what I expected, Tao thought, contrasting the man before him with the head-canon he'd built from past-life stories. I thought he'd be a Beyonder variant, a conqueror playing a long game for his own amusement. But he isn't.
Delving deeper into the tides of memory easily penetrating w/o leaving any trace, while being in null state, he saw that HWR was aware of his variants, including the possibility of the Prime Conqueror. The man possessed more years of memory than any mortal should ~ knowledge spanning from linguistics and quantum biology to... dance steps?
But the information on timeline events... Tao focused. This is the bridge. This connects the scientific rules to the superpowers. This is how it all works.
Tao took the seat infront facing him; watching HWR engrossed in his actions without any sense of someone actually analyzing him like some data point.
# Tales from memories
It all started with a deep, philosophical boredom. He Who Remains ~ born Victor Timely in a utopian but stagnant 31st century ~ was a brilliant scientist seeking purpose. He found it by cracking open the multiverse and reaching out to his own variants.
He is known by many names. Victor. Nathaniel. But most variants choose Kang.
The alliance was short-lived. When you're a Kang, conquest is in your nature. The collaboration shattered, sparking a devastating multiversal war. But HWR was always playing the long game. His true goal wasn't just to win, but to turn on the entire Council, to isolate himself from every last one of them, and become the one who literally remained.
••••••••••••••
He had other problems. A formidable Dr. Doom had built his castle outside the timelines, claiming ownership of time itself. To secure his own survival, HWR knew he had to ascend higher. So he did, positioning himself outside of time and his own reality.
He needed an army. Through inventing a cult around a mythical savior, the "Time Twister" ~ a name based on the helical nature of time ~ he recruited a team, including Ravonna Renslayer, who became something of a partner and love interest later.
His main opposition was the Council of Kangs - powerful, organized variants like Immortus, Rama-Tut, and the Scarlet Centurion. Once he knew them personally. To counter them, he needed an institution.
## One man rule
He studied his enemy, Doom, inside and out - his origins, his fighting style, his magic. But the real breakthrough came when he discovered Alioth, a trans-temporal entity. He learned to control it, to lead it. He immediately knew what to do. He unleashed Alioth on Doom, defeating him and stealing his castle at the End of Time for his own Citadel.
"Doom will return to claim his throne," were Doom's famous last words.
Sitting in his stolen throne, which was damaged, HWR knew his work wasn't done.
The first order of business was to mute the creation of new Doom and Kang variants. His solution was brutal and direct: he set Alioth to feed on the raw branches of time itself.
How did he know which futures to cut? Basically he took a hands-on approach, leading his army and Alioth on campaigns of targeted slaughter. Killing numerous Kang variants of his own, variants of heroes, villains; He learned through trial and error which timelines were safe to keep and which were not.
Not in the entirety of multiverse. But in his home reality.
Meanwhile, he dispatched Ravonna and his other followers to neutralize threats from other universe directly.
Not the council. Not yet. They were still largely unaware. But knew the existence of Alioth who can put them in disadvantage. So they thought our guy is mostly dealing with it or died. Why put their head into trouble?
## Building Foundation
He saw what they were doing as a council. He was once among the big five anyway. A zone of greater multiverse is occupied by the council. Preventing any imbalance to their power. Seeking Dominion, they were playing timelines as children.
Incursion? Who cares.
Free Will? We have it. We willed others don't.
Let the lower beings fight for themselves within our rules. While being supremacy, feel the chaos as entertainment.
Being the first variant of his own universe who had done the same he knew letting the multiverse becoming unstable is not beneficial for his own.
Being a brilliant scientist, HWR recognized that Doom already had technology similar to what he needed, like a Time Platform. He used these designs as inspiration, combining them with his own genius to harness the very axis of time.
The real technological backbone of his empire was built by conquering and manipulating the smartest minds across reality: namely, variants of Doctor Doom and Reed Richards himself. While Doom required careful handling, Reed proved to be a good worker once properly brainwashed.
After all once a scientist becomes warlord, he can't go back to being a nerdy guy. Distribute the work. Efficient.
Once the core tech - the Loom and the proper time-flow sequence was operational, he "removed" these brilliant workers to ensure they could never be a threat again. With Renslayer and a legion of now-loyal workers who faithfully served the myth of the "Time Twister," he knew he could proceed with his plans.
He took the causality information streams of a set of favorable timelines which are essentially the high dimensional memory projection of the base reality and isolated in a space he originally found for his group of followers. A place outside of time, similar to citadel. The TVA space.
He succeeded in completely isolating his Sacred Timeline from the oversight of the Council of Kangs, who remained largely unaware of his manipulations as the access via branches or the streams where cut off.
He systematically eliminated or neutralized every critical threat he could foresee before creating the script of everything:: variants of Doom, alien empires, his own selves, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men.
A perfect picture need to start on blank canvas.
## Isolation
Once his system was in place, his inherent paranoia took over. He trusted no one. He orchestrated a mass brainwashing, turning everyone involved in the TVA's creation, including Miss Minutes and Ravonna Renslayer, into utterly loyal agents.
He understood a fundamental truth: Convincing others uncomfortable truth is difficult than fabricating a lie. But lies bring contradictions eventually. People question a ruler they can relate to, but they obey a myth. So, he erased himself. He became a legend. When employees like Mobius had questions, they were told there were no real answers, that their memories were just myths or urban legends from "Kang's script."
Eventually, he decided the name "Time Twister" didn't sound grand or sacred enough. So, he invented new, more imposing fake gods: the Time-Keepers, the benevolent giants who had supposedly saved them all.
His final masterstroke in all was the Sacred Timeline - a curated collection of parallel realities shepherded to prevent the rise of new conqueror class variants. a.k.a nexus events. For eons for others he maintained this regime, pruning every deviation and encroachment from outer reality while TVA did internal work.
But eternity is long, and he grew weary of the solitude yet unable to delegate control. He began to seek a successor, believing a Loki variant - a creature of chaos who understood the need for control - was the perfect candidate. He is orchestrating events so that one would eventually find their way to him.
And that's his story, pulled from memory.
One last, interesting footnote, Tao thought, pulling a final memory. He figured the best way to keep a self-conceited villain like Dr. Doom in check was to turn him into a hero. For reasons unknown, eliminating Doom always caused his own original variant to appear. He needed his past self for a potential reincarnation plan.
To that end, he had deliberately interfered in the creation of Tony Stark, ensuring the boy who was originally from Latveria was adopted by the Starks.
The game was even more complex than Tao had imagined.
## Impression
After reviewing the man's achievements, Tao had to admit he was impressed. The adaptation he'd seen in his past-life memories had missed so much of the nuance.
The flood of information from him, in Tao's mind interconnected with a startling clarity. He learned of the M'Kraan Crystal, scientific truths, the true cosmic anchor, and saw the architecture of He Who Remains' empire.
It wasn't what he had assumed before coming here.
HWR hadn't crushed the multiverse into a single thread. That was a conqueror's dream, a Prime Kang's wish.
This guy? He was just a real estate agent who had cordoned off a quiet neighborhood in the cosmos. He cleared out his own zone with brutal efficiency, yes, but the infinite rest remained. The blood on his hands, vast as it was, was just a drop in the bucket compared to his variants. He was, at most, the odd one out - the goofball who chose isolation over infinite conquest.
His "Sacred Timeline" wasn't sacred or singular. It was a cleverly engineered island, a braided cluster of realities supporting a similar scripted progression. He hadn't annihilated possibilities; he'd just built a fortress against them.
But Tao had seen little more of the story through earlier divine sense.
Either he'd changed or some else did change the local rules of cause and effect itself just by coincidence, creating a fourth - layer meta temporal axis that coiled back onto itself.
Who is responsible for the Kang war in his memory? Was there a Lokiyggdrasil leading to it?
The war I saw in his memories, Doom's defeat, his rise, Loki,... they might not be unique events, but a play on repeat. Everyone else was still acting on the second and third layer, unaware the stage was a loop; though something is obviously going wrong in the current iteration.
It is not definitely not converging back. No wonder many multiversal entities began interacting sooner as seen in movies. Eternity, Living Tribunal, Knull all has made appearances.
He looked out the vast window and realized the space outside was the literal universal barrier. The meta temporal projection of timeline here isn't a complete universe but bigger part of it. A higher fold of space time time structure essentially carrying the entirety of structure within the projection,.
This high-dimensional space didn't restrict him, and he could feel his domain itching to recreate the white streams of spatial construct he perceived.
One of those branches might have been my entry point. The fragmented time streams I saw... they were part of the illusionary future within this very timeline.
The Void next to this place felt like the bedrock of this universe and others nearby. The Quantum Realm was simply in phase with it, while also being part of a greater Microverse that ran throughout all of reality.
## Fiction Problem
The weird nature of this place was now clear: it was actually easier for a mortal to control the time field here, but not in the right way ~ at least, not how he knew. Control was mostly dependent on the observer, and the effects you could create were disproportionately large.
For He Who Remains, a mortal in an atemporal shell, his perception was everything. Tao saw through his technological means how he perceived the causal rule. He didn't live one life for thousands of years. He lived through his normal lifespan, all of it, many times over.
The mind, the soul... whatever you name it, it was wonderful.
If a soul was powerful enough, more sensitive enough, it could see its entire life story at once, like a book, because the absolute rule of time was absent. And if it was powerful enough to influence the causal rule, it could detach its "self" from any point in its own story and appear at the axis mundi ~ the center of it all.
You could live your life story again and make different choices.
When you decided to restart from a moment, beings with a lower perception would appear stagnant for an instant before their worldline resumed under your new influence. For those still caged in their worldline, someone "time-slipping" will make others appear to be literally going back in time.
It's all about the observer's influence.
Through magic, or a domain like mine, you could pull others into this state and converse as if you were both outside time.
This explained the "time control" he'd seen in the memories. No one was truly controlling time; they were just slipping their perception to see effects trace back to causes.
If He Who Remains made a change on his Tempad, the impact was almost simultaneous. Maybe Loki and Sylvie will appear here the next moment he finalizes something.
For the beings inside the timeline, this Citadel had always existed, even beyond the war. Removing him here was meaningless unless he allowed it. He could always go back to the beginning ~ a form of controlled reincarnation.
It's a fiction problem, Tao realized. The only way He Who Remains truly lost was if he was killed and chose not to re-engage, surrendering his perception to a new observer, like Loki.
The version when the possibility of past variant of Sylvie killed HWR in the earliest and he didn't try to go back, will be the moment he loose his perception over his time. Coupled to an effect. As now the observer effect changes to Loki.
## My Axis Mundi
So, why couldn't Tao perceive his own life in this overlapping story form?
Two reasons, he reasoned.
One, I'm still in a null state. Two, my shielding prevents the influence of external causality. I just exist momentarily.
The implications were fascinating. If he killed He Who Remains inside his domain, it would be a superposition state ~ both dead and alive until he left, at which point the event would nullify, leaving no memory. If he killed him outside, the cause and effect would hold, but the man could always come back unless every piece of him and his tech was instantly disintegrated.
Anyway enough of time travel findings. I am getting lost thinking too much.
He was a proficient warden, using Alioth to keep out pests. Tao sifted through another memory. Most of the "pests" are his own brilliant relative, Reed Richards, poking his nose where it doesn't belong.
And mutants? He'd systematically pruned them. They were too unpredictable, their powers too chaotic.
You can't run a tidy, authoritarian regime with wild cards like that in the deck.