His name was Alcor.

He knew this as he knew the name of the world scorched by the star that had once sustained it; with clinical detachment, and a vague awareness that once it had meant something more.

Alcor the Radiant, Keeper of Shadows. Alcor the god.

Alcor the Dreambender, Lord of Darkness. Alcor the demon.

And once upon a time, so briefly, so long ago...

Alcor hung suspended in the Void, seeing Everything and knowing All, and remembered his True Name.

Such a small thing now. A grain of sand around which Alcor had grown. Once summoning circles and wards could not contain him. Now he had outgrown the intrinsic strength of his very Name. None could bind him, none could command him...and in return, he could touch nothing, be no one.

Just a god, so powerful he was powerless, watching and aware, unseen and unheard, a gatekeeper in the vast universe.

He Knew. He did not Feel.

And yet...

The demon had thought himself omniscient by his ten thousandth year. He never realized what he did not yet know; he didn't understand what he thought he understood.

Souls could only reincarnate in the cycle of their own nature – animals to animals, humans to humans, demons to demons.

His was no longer a human soul. He had been removed from his cycle, transmuted into another, forced to bear a nature not his by birth while he watched his dear, precious, fragile human friends and family traverse their own wheel over and over, birth and life and death so far apart from his own.

He could not rejoin them.

He was wrong.

...yet there was a glimmer in him still.

He wanted.

The sand, the spark at the core of him, miniscule and faint as it was, yearned.

And he knew now that what he thought inseparable was not so. Alcor was a god, and while he could not touch the physical realm, he was a master of the spiritual.

A whisper rose from the depths of his being. He uttered it as quietly as he could, and still it boomed through Void, vibrations traveling though there was nothing to carry them, and burst into the worlds of Dreams, of Hell and of the vast Universe beyond, shaking souls and reducing what demons still haunted the edges of the light to quivering wrecks.

LET

ME

GO.

Once Alcor the demon had drawn all the water – only the water – from a man's blood and body. He had separated solvents from liquid, drawn chemicals from compounds, and cut the bonds of molecules with a thought.

He had never known that the same could be done to the soul.

He searched every vast corner, every particle of himself. He found all the droplets of difference, all the sparse, thin, fragile threads of humanity woven into his being, and he pulled and unraveled, distilling it all into his center, reforming the grain of sand that had grown worn and shattered under the weight of the millennia it could not bear.

And as the grain grew denser, more concentrated, the yearning grew.

He not only Knew, he Felt.

Then, when the gathering was complete and he could bear the desperate want no longer, Alcor returned to the Dream World, the threshold between the physical and the spirit, and spread his wings for the final time.

There, he reached into his chest, fingers tearing apart his essence (pain was no longer searing agony or tingling amusement, though he had felt and known both; now it was nothing) until he found that tiny seed of him, that thing he used to be completely.

He broke the final anchoring ties.

And he set it free.

Broken and diluted and miniscule and faded though it was, Dipper Pines was, had always been, Alcor's center. Now there was a hole, and the vast, luminous shell began to collapse upon itself, diminishing and losing its luster.

A demon or two crept forward – some of those small enough, sly enough, and terrified enough to have escaped Alcor's long and merciless reign – sensing the disappearance of their jailor, already slavering for human dreams and flesh and souls and worlds now theirs for the taking.

And then the remains of the god imploded and burst into a form of void and darkness, a thing that reached out and devoured nightmares and malignant entities. A black hole, a dreamcatcher, to guard the gates of human minds and souls forevermore.

The soul waited between worlds. He was alone, but he was patient.

She had waited for him far, far longer than anyone could ever expect.

Time had no meaning here, and especially not to him. He could not say how long it had been before she came at last, all burning brilliance and overflowing love and the vast accumulated wisdom of a million human lifetimes.

Mizar, his twin star, his Mabel Pines once upon a long ago life, reached out to him.

And Alcor, the forgotten one, dimmer than his sister without the experience to equal all her births and deaths but no less ecstatic than she...

Dipper Pines reached back.

A/N: I seem to have tripped and landed in Gravity Falls, then tumbled further into this thing called the Transcendence AU. I can't seem to get up. I may require assistance...but not just yet.