In the dark between realms, something wakes, it feels the clawing of corruption, ripping, shredding, tearing its way through the fabric of the narrative, and the veil between the realms. It needs to do something. It cannot allow this to continue. It expands its consciousness throughout the tapestry before it, searching, seeking something, a solution. It finds one.

Why not make the corruption a part of the narrative? One that is done away with at the end of its chapter?

It nudges one of them, one of the few beings beyond its influence, Tiwaz, and pushes forth a concept, an idea. Now it just needs the components. It skims the flow of souls into Samsara, the wheel of life and death, through which all souls must pass as they are reborn. Sometimes a soul, or a part of it, is copied, as the body dies, it is the remnant shards of this process that the being seeks.

The shards of a learned man from a baseline world, a powerful archmage from another, a great warrior who slew thousands, and an ascendant being were melded together, formed into a single being. An amalgam soul, one with surprising cohesiveness... Was it the race? All of the soul shards had belonged to a human male. Perhaps it was the synergy of the primordial brand? The souls had all shared the same brand...

No matter, the being turned its unfathomably vast attention to the disturbances, poking at the being with their wills. The uncontrollable ones offered blessings to its new creation. It accepted.

Vulkan offered knowledge of the forge, and an affinity for fire, if he would but be allowed to select the site where the amalgam would come to be. Klotho offered guidance, if she and her sisters were allowed to oversee his fate, though they ought not intervene. Tiwaz offered potential, so that the amalgam might grow ever stronger, should his passion run hot in the fires of battle. Shinian offered might, though it was not his domain, and saw no need to bargain.

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Others offered, too, and would offer later, but the narrative would not allow power without challenge, power without tragedy. So, the keeper dismissed the blessings of the others, keeping only those here mentioned, and weaved them into the amalgam, to strengthen its creation.

But before its creation could be set adrift, to be placed at its destination by Tiwaz, another blessing came. From the realm of the failed divine beasts, a roaring fire came. A flame of divinity, flying out through the immaterial realm, through the ether of creation, eviscerating astral beasts in its passing with its wings of primordial wind.

On and on it flew until it barreled into the keeper’s wall, the barrier that kept the keeper’s unending nature from overwhelming the life around its tower, where it oversaw the narrative. The fire roared, crackled, and flickered as it bent the very laws of the narrative weave, diminishing all the while, until it bypassed the barrier at last.

A raven landed at the keeper’s table, staring at the amalgam. Its tattered pale feathers and bright crimson eyes stood testament to its failure, the remnants of its misfortunate fate. The raven bore the cinders of the fire that had roared throughout the astral, the embers of condensed divinity, nowhere near enough to ascend. It had possessed the power of countless other failed divine beasts, enough to ascend, and had chosen to spend it to break past the keeper’s wall.

“Why?” The formless keeper asked in its soundless voice, the raven knew the question’s meaning.

“So that he might succeed.” The raven answered in a wordless caw. Its beak descended to rest upon the amalgam’s chest.

Then the keeper saw. It saw the raven, Muninn, it knew, fused with two others, begin to turn to light, condensing its body into raw divinity, and the essence of its being. Neither would cause a great change. There was neither enough divinity to ascend, nor enough essence to transform the amalgam, but that was not the raven’s purpose there. Muninn weaved its essence into the amalgam’s soul, to manifest a bloodline, even as it died, and stabbed its beak into the soul’s chest, condensing its divinity there, crystalizing it, even as Muninn completely faded.

The keeper completed the raven’s work, it was the least it could do. The amalgam was set out to astral seas as the keeper turned its formless eyes and fathomless consciousness to a realm quite far away. It beheld the resting place of a thousand failed divine beasts, sacrificed to help as best they could, to grant hope, that the keeper’s plan might work.