“So, in your story, a God made three Gods, and the three Gods made a thousand, and I assume that the thousand made the humans. So in the end it’s just a matter of perspective, isn’t it? What difference does it make?”
“The difference is that you assume too much. Indeed each Firstborn was given some form of gift. Not a divine ability or anything like that, mind you, just an aspect from their creators that they were better at, no different than how some humans are naturally better with swords and others with art. But even Agia, for all her mastery on plants, even if after thousands of years that mastery has reached the point of perfectly replicating a flower, she can’t make a living one, just dead copies.
Life, what makes something alive and not dead, is either too complicated for non-divine beings to replicate, or even something that the third God never put in the language we see and can manipulate.”
“Then the humans?”
“The humans were created by the Gods as well, almost exactly like the Firstborns were made, but not quite. But you are rushing too much, such beings wouldn’t walk the world until thousands and thousands of years later.
As I said, after the Firstborns were made, the Gods retreated back to their realm and watched upon their creations. And the Firstborns were left to do as they pleased in the world. Each one of them was different not only physically, but mentally as well. Some were loners, finding a secluded spot and creating a home for themselves, changing the landscape to fit their tastes, huge pools of lava, oceans, caves, all made by their hand to spend their eternities in. Others roamed the world, curious and with an unquenchable thirst to see everything that there was to see. And others bundled together and made societies, either small groups of likeminded individuals with a clear connecting spot, or more vague bigger groups that their interests span the whole spectrum of an immortal being.
It was those groups that started to decode the language of the Gods. Because no matter how strong these beings were, the language was still whole factors above them. No matter how gifted one was, the language of the Gods can still only be spoken by Gods, can only be fully read by divine beings. But little by little, word by word, the Firstborns started decoding tiny words and started putting them in order, making simple spells that allowed them to just progress a tiny step forward towards their understanding and mastery of the art of using the laws, of using magic.
And it was with that magic they made the first cities. Marvels that dwarfed even the biggest capital that exists now. Spires rose towards the sky, and wells reached towards the depths of the world. Pathways made of air currents, fountains that intertwined lava and water in perpetual motion. Structures, so breathtaking that each and every one of them was a piece of art, and in those buildings, all kind of Firstborn just continued their research, undisturbed by the passage of time as an immortal being should be.
An era that lasted thousands of years. An era where the Firstborns roamed and explored the world, slept in huge domains of their own making, expanded true societies, and deepened their understanding of magic to new heights.”
Master stopped and looked at the empty mug in her hands. As she was absentmindedly playing with it, her eyes wandered towards the boiling cauldron a few meters away, before shaking her head and turning her gaze towards me. Her eyes were clear, but they were eyes that I’ve seen in my past life a lot of times already, tired, remorseful, smiling but only on the outside. She put the mug away, deciding against yet another refill, and started again.
“Nothing lasts forever, not even immortal beings. It was in one those cities, the biggest one, the most splendid and advanced one, that Ao, the second Firstborn, the first one that actually had a physical body, lived. While each one of them had some unique gifts given to them, it was only him that due to the overzealous Gods, being the first complete living being, that his body was made encompassing every aspect the first God could fit inside it, that the third God had given all his might to craft his soul. It was only the very first Firstborn that had a soul more powerful than him, but that one lacked a physical body. Ao, as a complete being, was above all of them, and it was no wonder that the city was built around him and followed his directions.
Ao quickly realized that even though their research into magic, into the laws of the world, grew day by day, that the gift of life was outside their reach. He felt betrayed. He called the other Firstborns and told them that this world was theirs, crafted for their own enjoyment. He told them that they were the Gods of this world. But instead, their creators were treating them like children and had denied them the gifts that would actually allow them to be the true Gods of this place.
He told them that it was obvious that he and his elder brother, the spirit, were created with the sole purpose of imitating their creators. He would be crafting the bodies and his brother, far better versed in the art of magic, the souls. He and his brother were made to be the Gods of this world, the rest of the Firstborns their direct overseers of it, beneath the two of them but above whatever they would create.
In the beginning no one understood his words. It was only after he raised his voice demanding the creators to descend and give them their righteous powers that the rest of the Firstborns started looking one another unsure And it was only after Ao, enraged by the absence of an immediate answer, started razing the world itself in order to force them to come down.
With just one hand he tore apart a mountain and using his immense strength and connection to all matter, he simply crushed it into nothingness. He put his hands deep within the soil, trying to grab the very land they were standing above now and unearth it. Haspith, another Firstborn, quickly rushed to Ao, trying to stop him, to restrain him. And Ao hit him. The punch tore through the immortal body like it was paper. No matter how strong one was, before Ao, he was nothing, and no matter how Immortal a body was, when it got tore apart to such a degree, it simply stopped being, unable to contain the equally powerful soul that quickly dispersed into the air.
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That was the first death ever to happen in this world.
And every single Firstborn felt that death deep within his core. They were immortals. For thousands of years they were together, and they were supposed to be together until the end of times. The concept of death, the concept of finality, the concept that the friend you spent unimaginable stretches of time with was gone, tearing them apart even harder than the actual punch had torn apart Haspith’s body.
Alongside death, other, so far unknown concepts appeared; fear and rage. The Firstborn split. Some joined Ao, either because they agreed with him, or because they thought that if they had access to life giving magic they could have remade Haspith, or because they felt betrayed by their creators that even though they were promised immortality one of them died, or simply out of fear that they could be next. Some others grouped together, vowing to take revenge for the murder or others to stop Ao from destroying the world and them, and a few of them simply because they saw his acts as a betrayal against their creators.
The war broke out. And what was one death soon was forgotten as Firstborns started dying left and right. The land shook and changed. Mountain ranges were gouged out, rivers of fire scorched everything around them and great floods sunk civilization underneath them. The cities were demolished, fire rained destruction upon their gardens as stone hail punched holes into the beautiful buildings, the spires collapsed and the wells caved in.
Brother against brother, Immortal against Immortal, they fought each other tooth and nail, flinging magic that scarred the land itself like it was an afterthought all around them.
In just a few years, what took thousands of years to be built was demolished. The trust and friendship built upon uncountable interactions with each other shattered by deathly attacks to each other in seconds.
The casualties rose to unimaginable numbers. Ao himself killed over a hundred Firstborns before he himself was killed. But his death stopped nothing; it only added further causes to kill each other.
The battle affected everyone. In the far reaches of the world, the loners hid deep within their domains, for the first time of their life afraid. The roamers started running, either away to save their lives, or towards the fray to join one side or another. Others saw how easy it was to kill and for the first time realized that they could grab things from the ones weaker than them, and went on their own personal wars against their neighbors. Firstborns, insane, either from grief or bloodlust, started tearing the world apart, started tearing each other apart without even a reason.
The madness lasted a bit less than a hundred years; a period of time that was deemed the blink of the eye for such beings. But long enough to forever change them, and the world.
And as abruptly as it started, it ended. The third God descended on the world, took a look at all of his warring children, and with a wave of his hand he simply killed more than half of the remaining ones, all the aggressors, but even some others, seemingly random. And as soon as he killed them, he simply coldly gazed the rest of them, and vanished.
The era of madness was over, short but devastating. Out of a thousand Firstborns, only a handful remained, less than a hundred of them. And what followed was for some of them even worse than the war. It was the era of silence. The silent judgment they received from their God, alongside his departure, signaled to them that they had disappointed him, they had betrayed him, they razed the world the Gods had built and killed their creations, and he, them, in turn, had abandoned them.
Each and every Firstborn scattered to the ends of the world and hid there. Too afraid to interact with each other, no one knew when your brother would betray you and take your life, no one dared to casually walk the world they had demolished in their destructive wake.
Unlike the madness that was short but brutal, this carried on for a very long time. A silent, cold treatment, with no one to talk, no one to consult, no one to comfort them. The knowledge they had previously discovered was either slowly forgotten or purposely destroyed after witnessing what it can bring about. Their old dwellings, the few left standing from the war itself, testaments of their civilization, left to decay in the sands of time until only ruins remained. And each Firstborn, once a brother to each other, grew so far apart that some even forgot each other’s face. Alone, in caves, lairs, and nests, prisons of their own making, they lamented for what felt forever.
No one knows how long this lasted, no one counted, no one dared, but then, while at one second they were rotting in their hideouts, the next they were whisked away in a huge, open valley, each and every one of them standing again next to each other, and in front of them stood the third God again.
Only this time the God was different. Instead of the nondescript appearance they knew, this time he had taken another form, one that the genderless Immortals would soon learn that it signified a female. But much more importantly compared to an assumed gender, this God, this Goddess now, was radiating a much stronger power than any of them had ever felt before.
They all felt it, they all clearly saw it. Even though she was the God they knew, their creator, she had grown immensely more powerful than before. And right there, in front of all of them, that existence that far surpassed not only them, but also what she was before, with a sad and tired smile, told them that she was sorry. Sorry for them that lived in isolation, sorry for their brothers that died, sorry for all those children that had grown insane, sorry for taking too long to take action and kill her own children to prevent the madness from spreading even further.”
Master stopped and looked slightly upwards, towards the ceiling and then she stood up, walked around the table, and let her hand rest on my shoulder. Her eyes were dried and her voice hoarse from the long speech.
“Unfortunately, the night has grown too much. You are still a seven years old boy and you need to rest now. Especially given your frail body I cannot deprive you of your sleep any longer. Go and I’ll tell you tomorrow how the humans and the other races were made, and how it all connects to your memories.”
She didn’t wait for my answer as she slowly turned and started walking towards the old, wooden, ladder that led upstairs.
“Master?”
She chuckled a bit as she continued onwards.
“At least you learned something it seems, so not all of my ramblings were for nothing.”
“That story now, it sounded like a fairytale, like a heroic saga or something, but it wasn’t, was it?”
“That’s for you to decide now, isn’t it? Now, go rest, that’s an order as a master to her apprentice. I’ll wake you up with the first rays of the sun, so you don’t have time to spare”