This is the Earth.

It spins through the blackness of space like it has done since time immemorial. It is home to hundreds of races, all connected in one way or the other to the Essence, the very stuff of creation, that runs beneath the firmament of the world in a vast river of light connecting everything that lives to itself.

This is the Earth, and it is not as it once was.

Once, eons before, the world was natural and worked according to natural laws. Humans grew in their cities, beasts thrived in their fields, and all was correct in the balance.

And then came one man, who with his disciples reshaped the world in his image. It was he who created the Essence, and used it to bind the world to his will. It was he who reshaped the continents, who infused humanity with the Essence, who warped and changed creation itself to his whims.

This is the Earth, and it is built upon the foundation of the Essence. The creation-stuff flows through every fiber of the world, manufactured and sculpted by one man to be a perfect existence.

But it is not perfect. It is a system created by man, and maintained by man's creations. And none of man's creations are perfect. Had he observed nature, he would have known that perfection is impossible. But he did not, and so he strove for it, and believed he had attained it.

Stolen novel; please report.

Then he died, and left it to his creations to uphold. And they did, for thousands upon thousands of years. And for a time, the world seemed perfect. And indeed, why should it not seem so?

So complex were the systems set in place, so minute the man's attention to detail, that it seemed like nothing had been overlooked. Systems upheld secondary and tertiary systems, which flowed into backups and falsafes and logic vaults that governed the workings of the world from every conceivable angle and form. Even if it were possible for something to go wrong, it would only be found in the smallest of chances, the most infinitesimal of odds, so small as to be virtually undetectable and certainly of no threat to the man's grand scheme.

But that is the thing about imperfection. There is always a chance.

And sometimes that chance occurs naturally.

This is the Essence, the pillars of creation, upon which all the systems of the world are dependent. If you think of it as a river of light, connected to all of creation by individual strands of invisible color through which the System enacts its dead master’s will upon the earth, you would be utterly incorrect and yet somehow also understanding the nature of the thing.

And these are the systems themselves, which all feed into the System, and upon which the entirety of the world rests. If the Essence is the earth itself, then the System is the foundation, and the systems within it are the mortar.

And here, in one of the most critical systems, there is a glitch.