“How was the world made? What is this, a school test?”

“Just entertain me please” She smiled as she laid her back in her chair.

It did indeed seem like it would be a long night. With a sigh, I started.

“Then here it goes. Orenia, the goddess of the night and Vertis, the god of the sun, fought. The blood of the goddess spilled and created the oceans, cold and dark like the night, and the blood of the god fell like liquid fire, becoming magma. And where the two of those touched, the lava froze and solidified as land. Then Barran, the lord of the mountains, descended and carved the solidified lava into mountains and valleys, and Agia, the goddess of nature, filled that land with trees, forests, and meadows. The rest of the gods were either the offspring of those four, or created during that battle, or descended from wherever the others came as well. As far as a creation myth, I have to say that it’s pretty much a standard one, but with the exception that the gods actually walk this place, so we know that it’s true.”

“I see… the teachings of the church of Orenia. How proper for a teacher in the Faidenth Empire to teach you those fairytales. You were correct in two things, that this is a myth, and that those who you mentioned walk this land. But make no mistake, even if they are powerful enough to wipe out a kingdom without blinking, they aren’t gods.”

My eyes almost popped out of their sockets from the unexpected sacrilege. I mean, even if in earth religion was much more vague, here it was different. Here Orenia literally lived in the head temple in the archipelago that bordered our capital, at least according to my teacher.

“That’s blasphemy Neven. The church could have your head if they hear talking like that.”

“I told you before, and I wont repeat myself, to call me master from now on. And blasphemy? Towards the church, sure. Towards those you call gods? Not even close. And only in this particular church that’s so popular and strong in these parts. Travel a few months to the east and you’ll have a different myth. Go to the frozen kingdoms in the north, and you’ll have a different story again. And that goes on and on for the rest of the civilized world.

You’re still young and obviously that question isn’t appropriate for you. But if you were an old traveled sage, I would have asked you, have you ever heard any of those entities refer to themselves as gods? Or, perhaps, it is only their clergy that does so?”

Neven, no, master, better entertain her as such until I get my answers at least, winked at me and waited for my answer.

“So, you’re saying the priests are lying?”

“Lying? The highest seats in a given church may know the truth. Others may never had the courage to ask those that they believe are gods for their opinion. Others may be bound by their flock, after all, even if an archpriest would claim that their god isn’t actually a god, will the faith be dissolved or the priest banished? There are a lot of reasons why traditions persist even if erroneous. But sure, some of them are simple lying.”

“And why are you telling me this? Even if it’s the truth, which I only have your word for it, is the reason for my reincarnation to fight against those false gods as a hero?”

For the first time since I’ve known her, I saw her expression changing to one of complete shock and surprise.

“Fight them? Hero?”

Her composure completely collapsed as she suddenly burst into loud laughter that filled the room. I sat there, equally stunned, watching the always dire, always serious, old lady, trying to catch her breath in between uncontrollable laughter for nearly a minute.

As she finally regained her senses, she wiped the tears from her eyes, and looked at me, trying to regain the admonishing and serious face she had before.

“Why fight them? What have they done against you? But no, seriously, you shouldn’t. As for you being a hero… no. The reason I brought religion up was exactly that though; to tell you another creation story, one that you are unfamiliar with, but one that’s vital to learn to better understand what you are. Not who, but what.”

“And why should I trust your story over the ones told by thousands of people for hundreds of years now?”

“You do have a lifetime of experience despite being seven years old, don’t you? You make the call which one sounds more genuine. But for the sake of everything that’s alive, I do hope that you will at least listen and consider my story seriously.”

“For the sake of everything that’s alive? Isn’t that kind of melodramatic?”

Master simply smiled at my question, and then completely disregarded it as she started her story. Maybe that was the whole point of such exorbitant statements, to capture my interest.

“In the beginning there was just one being. Or maybe it was a concept, or a force. This… entity, is so detached from this world, so far away from the regular workings of it, that we can’t even call it a simple God. This being will not trouble us, since the whole world should be nothing but a speck of dust compared to it. But for the sake of clarity, I’ll be referring to it as the Supreme one, the one above all.

It was in that vast nothingness that the Supreme one created the first God. It gave him the divine abilities to rule and create all things, anything you can imagine and more. And it tasked him with creating the worlds. And like a diligent offspring, the God did exactly that.

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He started creating the various worlds that are in our universe. He shaped them and sculpted them into works of arts. Grand gorges made of stone, mountain ranges made of pure obsidian. Lagoons and valleys intricately woven in the most mesmerizing patterns. Caves and caverns littered with crimson red rubies and veins of adamantine. Each and every one of the God’s works being so carefully planned to be it’s own unique masterpiece. And he didn’t do that once. The God kept making one world after another, filling the void with beauty.

But even for such a divine being, even for something that was devoid of the concept of time altogether, making and piecing together each and every one of the myriad worlds solely though his divine powers, would have been burdensome.

And so, in order to actually visualize those works of arts that would much later on be the worlds, he first created a language. And now, instead of having to make everything by hand, he simply had to name something, and that something was brought forth into existence by that name alone.

Time didn’t exist back then, or maybe it did and it simply didn’t matter. But after the God was done, him and the Supreme being were left looking at all those masterpieces around them, like visitors in an art gallery admiring the various paintings. One cannot tell for how long that lasted, but the Supreme being created the second God right then. To him, he granted the gift of forces, and he tasked him to make all those beautiful worlds, all those stationary pieces of art, alive.

The young God looked at the scenery and he saw that everything was basically a bunch of words pieced together. He used that same language to make the forces that are scattered all around us. Heat and cold, speed and gravity, lightning and sound, and everything else you know or you don’t know because they do not exist in your old universe.

Then he went and changed the language his brother had made previously. In every single piece of matter that existed, he changed the words to depict how they would interact with each other, with the forces he had already made, how to change and create and how to absorb those forces.

In essence, in order to make the static worlds alive, he took and made the whole language alive. And from that point onward, that language would be forever everchanging, evolving, the words interacting with one another, changing, breaking and reforming.

That is the true essence of the language of the Gods. An alive language that each word couldn’t even be described in ten tomes written in the common, human, language. A language that in effect is the law that govern this land. A language that whoever can use it even in the slightest bit is called a mage.

And the end result was truly breathtaking. The static water began to move and shift, following invisible currents made due to how the water now interacted with heat and cold. The clear skies were filled with clouds made from altered water, and moved to other locations, pouring down that water and changing the valleys to lakes. Thunder and lightning struck down the mountain peaks, breaking them into jagged knifes. Molten earth started to move beneath the surface, until it erupted as magma and shaped the land around it. Where there was nothingness, light and darkness, suns and stars, suddenly formed. The calm and quiet worlds burst into life with a bang.

The myriad worlds changed from static landscapes, from pictures in a gallery, to living, changing, motion pictures. Breathtaking changes happening all over the globes in an everchanging, but perpetual circle as the two gods, and the supreme being watched over them, content in their creation.

But what are we in front of Gods?

What seems in our eyes as pure chaos, in the eyes of those who wrote the script of how each and everything can interact with each other. In the minds of being capable of such creation that can read and predict those changes for years to come, all those mastercrafted worlds were nothing but a story they could read along and guess the end.

Still not content, the Supreme one created a third God. To him he granted the gift of life. His gift was much more complex than either of his brothers, and so instead of diving head first into the deep, he first tried the simplest thing he could imagine. He looked at the worlds and he created the very first tree. A thing but not a thing. Something alive, but not sentient.

The distinct characteristic of that tree, as opposed to every other thing that existed was that despite being made, like everything else, by the language of the gods, it also contained, in raw form, that exact same essence that was used to form this language, something that much later on would be named as mana by some scholars.

Seeing his success, he went on and populated the most suited one of the worlds, the one he liked the most, with trees, flowers and bushes. And then he really started working. He started pilling words upon words, sentences of God’s language so lengthy that could fill a library, he kept putting more and more interactions into it, until it became so complex that not even his two brothers could fully unravel their meaning. And then, finally, he stopped and smiled at his creation. And the creation smiled back.

That mass of words and raw mana that had no physical form, that in the current era could only be described as a spirit or a ghost, with no distinct form, was the first soul. That was the first sentient being that was created purely with the laws of this world.

Elated, the youngest God asked his eldest brother to craft a vessel. And the first God happily obliged. He started crafting his most perfect creation yet, a titan so sturdy that it wouldn’t be harmed by anything, strong enough to carve mountains, so beautiful that even the Gods admired it, a body made of rock, crystal, gems, diamonds, and gold, a massive body dwarfing small hills. And while he worked, the third God went back and started crafting the second soul, the one that would inhabit that vessel. And thus, a second life was born into the world.

The second God, feeling left out, asked his younger brother if he could also make a body, and the third soul, one with the physical appearance of a pure flame was made.

And so, the two older Gods started crafting one vessel after another. Some made of stone, others from lightning, others combined forces with matter, and others crafted by only one of them. And the third God kept making souls for all of them, one after another, until a thousand of those beings finally came into existence.

Each one was different, some stronger, some weaker, but all of them… perfect. A thousand beings, each one given form and souls directly from the Gods, with bodies strong enough to cleave mountains, fiery enough to melt stone, with souls capable of understanding and using the language of the gods in mere seconds, with enough mana to create and shape their own domains upon the world.

They looked at their creators, and their creators gifted them the world to do as they please upon it. And with that, the Gods retreated back to their domain, to once more watch at their work. Only this time, they were alone, the Supreme one, content now by his children's creation, leaving them alone to admire it.

Those were the Firstborns. Immortal, immeasurable, immutable."