Characters / The Heaven Cycle Alternate Earths

Characters from alternate Earths in the Cycle.

All spoilers are unmarked.

The First Earth

Chayne Summers (Prime)

Appears in: Heaven and Hell (The Ambition of Hell and The Radiance of Heaven)

(Credit)

The original Chayne Summers from the first version of Earth, the architect of the Heaven Cycle, and the Big Bad of the entire series.

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• Alas, Poor Villain: A sad farewell to Chayne is the result of their end battle, where even the heroes express a hope the Black Queen obtains her peace.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In The Ambition of Hell, where she waltzes off with Aria after having successfully used Mint's power to create Nirvana while leaving the rest of reality to burn.
• Big Bad: Of The Heaven Cycle as a whole. All the conflict in the series revolving around Heaven and Hell go right back to Chayne, and the Grand Finale of the series, The Radiance of Heaven, is dedicated to finding and stopping her for good.
• Big "NO!": Gives one when she discovers Aria has killed herself.
• The Chessmaster: Every single character in the series has been dancing to Chayne's perfect tune since the start, and they've been doing so since the beginning of the Heaven Cycle — i.e. trillions of years ago.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: While Chayne seems to be a competent enough cook, she has a tendency to experiment with unorthodox ingredients — leading to stuff like soy sauce pancakes she happily makes for breakfast.
• Death Equals Redemption: After trillions of years of a life lived taking others, all because Chayne could never, ever get over her beloved Aria's death, Chayne finally comes to terms with it seconds before she dies, letting go of her pain and heartbreak and surrendering to Mint — and envisioning a world in her last moments where she made the right choice, persisting even without her daughter and living the rest of her life peacefully.
  And she feels happy again.
• Determinator: Give Chayne this. She never gives up on her ambitions.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: As vile as she is, Chayne's largest redeeming quality is the fact that she still sincerely loves Aria, enough to focus the entirety of her Long Game around her and assure she can grow up in a future free from the Phantom.. Tragically, Chayne's still plunged far enough that she doesn't seem to properly realize the immense amount of grief she puts Aria through in the process.
• Evil Matriarch: The Big Bad of the series, the destroyer of trillions... and Aria's dorky mom. The tension between Chayne the "destroyer of worlds" and Chayne the "doting mother" creates major tension for her daughter, whom Chayne herself would never directly hurt but still causes massive grief towards by means of having kickstarted the Cycle to begin with to create a future for her.
• Face Death with Dignity: Chayne accepts her end with dignity and grace, recognizing her errors and bidding farewell to the heroes as she fades away.
• Freudian Excuse: Like the Chayne in the main timeline, Chayne's entire catalyst for becoming evil was supposedly losing her daughter to the Phantom. Instead of going mad and trying to destroy the world, however, Chayne discovering her latent powers and surviving to a version of Earth where she saw Aria survive gave her the resolve to make a new goal — that being to create a world where everyone, especially her daughter, can live free of the suffering of the Phantom.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: From a business executive and grieving mother to the single greatest threat to reality, and a godlike being responsible for the deaths of trillions.
• Graceful Loser: In her last minutes of existence before Mint and Tango finally destroy her, Chayne finally lets go of her mad grief and peacefully surrenders to oblivion.
• Happily Married: To Nirvana!Mason, where she lives with him and Aria as simple employees of the Association (which, in Nirvana, is nothing more than a common pharmaceutical company).
• Heel Realization: She suffers two: one with Aria's suicide, as she realizes how awful her actions truly are, and at the end when she truly sees how far she's fallen. The second one sticks a bit more than the former.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Everything Chayne does, no matter how cruel or wicked, is done with purpose.
• It's All About Me: Chayne is obsessed with her own pain, and mitigating it? Well, if it requires trillions to die, one can't make an omelette, etc.
• Kick the Morality Pet: Chayne vows that she would never hurt Aria and sincerely loves her. Unfortunately, her twisted sense of morality doesn't prevent her from pulling Exact Words and mentally torturing her own daughter into a screaming wreck while dismissing it as "education."
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch: Torturing one's minion is usually nasty. When that minion is Naberius, it's a borderline sacreament.
• Knight Templar Parent: She will literally destroy entire worlds, kill countless innocent people and inflict suffering on billions all to create a world where her daughter is safe and alive.
• Long Game: One that stretches sixty trillion years, through means of kickstarting the Heaven Cycle and arranging events loop after loop to finally find a way to tap into the rest of her potential power to create a world where the Phantom never broke out — which, in action, means putting Mint (as they end up having the latent power to create Nirvana) through enough emotional torment to make them wish beyond anything else nothing had ever changed, with thousands of Earths wiped out as lost causes. Chayne ends The Ambition of Hell finally ending this game and creating the world she's sought to make from the very beginning.
• Moral Myopia: Concerning Aria. Chayne fesses up to all the atrocities she's committed during her quest to create Nirvana otherwise, but as far as she concerned, she cannot, never has, and never will harm Aria — not even after putting her through years of misery as a result of having caused the Heaven Cycle in the first place, not after tearing her from her friends and coldly telling her they're doomed no matter what she says, and not after subjecting her to Mind Rape to make her "understand" her pain after Aria rightfully calls her out on her actions.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Upon seeing her actions have resulted in Aria's death? "I did this to her!"
• My Greatest Failure: She has never forgiven herself for letting Aria die the first time.
• Never My Fault: Downplayed. Chayne doesn't even bother denying the monster she's become through kickstarting the Heaven Cycle, but at the end, Chayne seems to think she's automatically above all consequences and leaving all of her daughter's best friends stranded to die should be no problem of hers — which royally pisses off Aria. Similarly, when Aria finally snaps and chews her out on her actions, Chayne seems to gripe for a response before forcing Aria to experience all the pain she has, laughing that she "hardly knows what she's talking about" and stating she simply needs to understand her twisted perspective.
• Omnicidal Maniac: "There is nothing in this world left protecting. So let us burn with it." Yeah, at the end? She's cracked.
• Red Baron: The Black Queen of Heaven and Hell.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: Once Aria dies, her scheme is dismantled, and the tides finally turn against her? Chayne decides nothing is worth protecting and tries to destroy Nirvana.
• Tranquil Fury: When she finally hits her Villainous Breakdown, Chayne becomes eerily calm and quiet — even as she horribly kills the other Jenny and prepares to Ascend to destroy her own Nirvana in despairing fury, she doesn't express her rage visibly.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Chayne's ultimate goal is to create a version of Earth where the Phantom never broke out, thus assuring none of the world is freed from the Heaven Cycle and has a chance to evolve naturally free of the Phantom. Too bad she's murdered trillions of people on other Earths trying to get to that one.
• Villainous Breakdown: Suffers an epic freakout from her daughter's suicide.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Similarly to her primary self but on a much, much wider scale. The Myth Arc overlapping the entire series all falls back to this version of Chayne having seamlessly manipulated events to create a version of Earth where the Phantom never happened – at the consequence of thousands of destroyed Earths and trillions of lives destroyed.
• You Have Failed Me: She subjects Naberius to a nonfatal version, forcing him to experience some nasty agony for his screwups.

”God”/Alison "Mint" Witzenberg (Prime)

Appears in: From Heaven's Door | Before Heaven | Heaven and Hell (The Radiance of Heaven)

The mysterious eldritch horror lurking in Heaven that serves as the catalyst for the plot in From Heaven's Door. They are, in actuality, the original Alison Witzenberg — or, rather, Mint, who accidentally created Heaven and decided to spend the rest of the Cycle slowly dismantling Chayne's plans to take down the Heaven Cycle.

• Badass Adorable: One of the strongest characters in the setting, being a full God — and also an adorable, dorky ten-year-old kid underneath that.
• Beware the Nice Ones: This nice, adorable and dorky ten-year old is also a Chessmaster Eldritch Abomination who's powerful enough to destroy the planet.
• Big Good: In their nature as a foil to the original Chayne Summers, and as it turns out, the biggest force going against her.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Cryne speculates that God may have wanted to enter Earth again because it was missing its human life, noting that's an anxiety that most Gods learn to get past once they Ascend — even in spite of the fact it seemingly nearly destroyed Earth trying to get back to it. As it turns out, that was a major bit of foreshadowing; Mint doesn't subscribe to Blue-and-Orange Morality and rather wholeheartedly embraces their role as the Big Good of the setting.
• The Chessmaster: On the same level as Chayne (even lampshaded when Mint compares themself to a Queen on the board, opposite to Chayne's Queen) perhaps even more proficiently as they can't directly interfere with Earth without destroying it all. Unlike Chayne, Mint is thoroughly benevolent.
• Composite Character: Alison and Mint, instead of being two different people sharing the same body, are one character here : Alison adopted a good part of Mint's personality after their self-inflicted Heel–Face Brainwashing.
• Deity of Human Origin: The Touch of Heaven reveals that God is one of many people who were capable of Ascending – that is, instantaneously evolving into a perfectly evolved organism in complete harmony with their mind. As we knew Mint could do.
• Eldritch Abomination: Through human terms, God can no longer be described as anything more than a horrific, unfathomably cosmic presence capable of annihilating the entire universe just by existing. They do, at least, take a recognizable form
• God Was My Copilot: God was the original Mint the whole time.
• Heel–Face Brainwashing: Self-inflicted, oddly enough. God was, after all, the original Alice, with the key difference between later versions of Alice being that God gained the power to physically alter themself in disgust with their own lack of empathy.
• Leitmotif: "Ashes to Ashes" is a persisting song throughout Radiance that goes hand-in-hand with the identity of the first God, with them even dubbing themself "Major Tom."
• The Reveal: Bits and bobs were dropped to foreshadow the mystery of God from the beginning of the entire, with it finally taking center stage in the last act of Radiance. As it's revealed in the climax? The first God is the original Mint.
• Self-Harm: Indicates they did this to themself back when they still lived with their abusive dad Sheldon.
• Shrouded in Myth: For the majority of the series, we know virtually nothing about it. Not who it once was a human, not why it wanted to come back to Earth (although Cryne speculates as early as The Touch of Heaven that it was missing its old life as a human), nothing except the utterly bizarre, lurid descriptions it gets in From Heaven's Door that are nothing short of a pure, unthinkable Eldritch Abomination. This is all cleared up in the climax of Radiance where it's established God is actually the original Mint.
• Some Call Me "Tim": 'Major Tom' to be exact. God's a fan of Bowie. As it turns out? Mint fell in love with "Ashes to Ashes" before they Ascended, even teaching the song to Aria.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Inverted. God started out as the first version of Alice, and that included Alice's sociopathy — but the key difference is that Alice got the chance to make something better of themself, and proceeded to do so by studying humanity and eventually changing their own mind to become much kinder.
• Walking Spoiler: One of the biggest in the setting, right up there with the original Chayne.
• Was Once a Man: Like all Gods. Speciifcally, "God" used to be the original Alison Witzenberg before they Ascended. What separates them from becoming a full-on Eldritch Abomination is that Mint retained their humanity even after they Ascended.
• When She Smiles: Unbelievably cute when they smile there.

Aria Summers (Prime)

Appears in: Heaven and Hell (The Radiance of Heaven)

The very first version of Aria Summers to exist, and the catalyst for all of Chayne Prime's grief.

• Brought Down to Normal: Aria ascends to live with God, beyond Heaven, for almost the entire duration of the Cycle. When Prime!Mint descends, Aria's brought down with her, and Aria later notes how strange it is for her to finally be in her own physical body with physical sensations again when she returns to her own recreated Earth.
• Doom Magnet: A particularly destructive example; Aria's existence is the catalyst for the Heaven Cycle, with her supposed death having been the lynchpin for Chayne's Start of Darkness. Every subsequent version of her that's existed since? Ends up supposedly dying and triggering Chayne to madness, over and over and over.
• Only Friend: To Prime!Mint, for the longest time. At the end of the Cycle, Aria's very first action is to change that by introducing Prime!Jenny to Mint.

Jenny Waits (Prime)

Appears in: Heaven and Hell (The Radiance of Heaven)

The very first version of Jenny Waits to exist. Only appears in the series' epilogue.

• Doomed by Canon: For most of the series. The first version of Jenny, due to Prime!Mint's Long Game, is destined to become Tango — and die in the process. When the Cycle is broken and the Earths are all recreated? Prime!Jenny never becomes Tango, and thus is free to live her own life.
• Shrinking Violet: Adorably shy and reticent, being first seen clinging to her father and averting her gaze from almost everything.

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