...thinking might be the wrong word for what's going on in there.
The golden man is dominated by his senses—and there are an unimaginably large number of those. He can see, but the spectrum he can see in is so wide it's misleading to call it sight. He can hear, but his sensitivity to the movements of particles of all matter in an extremely large radius around himself is so great it's incorrect to call it hearing. He's aware, aware of every mote of dust in the air, aware of every neuron firing in Epic's brain, aware of every leaf being consumed by the flames—
—he's aware of possibilities, aware of the short-term consequences of all of his actions, aware of the tangled web of causality stretching in all directions—
—he's aware of alternatives, aware of other worlds in this same place, other ways the Earth could be, Earths that couldn't be, places that don't even have an Earth, countless worlds all superposed and noninteracting, connected by nothing but his own presence—
He's distracted by his senses from something so big and different and layered and multidimensional and abstract and alien it can't be described as sadness. There's a void where his heart should be, an emptiness where his other half should be sending messages, where the only one who could make sense of all that information should be telling him what to do, what to be. A gaping maw, trying so hard to be filled by something, anything—maybe if he puts this fire out it'll be alright, maybe if he saves one more city, one more person, one more cat, maybe then it'll be okay again, he'll feel whole again, he'll know what he's meant to be.
He can't think of any alternatives—literally, he is unable to do that, even his more creative half
(gone, missing, dead)
couldn't compare to the most unimaginative of children on this planet, there's nothing he can do to come up with a new way to do things.
And compared to it all, Epic is merely a tiny blinking light, of less note than a dust mite, of less consequence than a single cell in a human body.
But he has enough space, enough computational capacity, enough of a habit to reach out for understanding. He observes the air vibrating according to Epic's instructions, he disentangles that from the chaotic, Brownian motion inherent to the gas, he removes the component inspired by the heat, the flames, and he translates that into words, into meaning.
Then he stretches his awareness even more, burning off a few weeks of his life to look farther, to find the object of the boy's worry, and understand—yes, a projection of the green man's many shards
(all of them hers, gone, missing, dead)
—Scion never understood why the green man would produce these creatures and then proceed to fight them, and never cared to understand. Lack of curiosity is only one of the myriad differences between his species and humans, only one of the things prohibiting comprehension. Ironically enough.
He looks further, though. The boy isn't human, there's no shard attached to him, and yet he teleported there, he can fly—
Scion really does not give a shit.
He finishes putting the fire out, locates the best path to reach the new monster, and flies to it at nearly the speed of light.