Nathan sat in the center of the raised platform, a book cradled in his lap. Going by his sleep cycles, which probably wasn’t that accurate of a time measurement system, he had been stuck in the library for sixty five days.
For the first week Nathan had done almost nothing except rage at Knowledge. At the end of that week Nathan had decided that it would better serve his purpose to learn as much as he could about the multiverse that he lived in. The more he knew, the more he would be able to enact his vengeance.
It’s probably a good idea to learn as much as I can anyway. Nathan smiled a thin, plastered-on smile that didn't reach his eyes, as he flipped a page in A Brief Analysis of the Ascendant Capitals of the Multiverse. The book was a three thousand six hundred page monstrosity that was less ‘a brief analysis’ and more ‘an amalgamation of eight books, each of which are a four hundred and fifty page analysis of the culture of a city the size of a world’. I’ve learned so much from the books here already.
The books that he had read with the help of prodigy had slowly painted a vivid picture of the Multiverse that destroyed and rebuilt his entire view of existence.
As a child his parents had told him the story of how the world had been created. It had been a little while, but as far as Nathan could recall it went something like this:
“In the beginning, there were only three things in existence. The first was Sprenfather, creator of the spren and protector of humanity. The second was the Nameless one, creator of the Cryptalborn, who Nathan now suspected called itself ‘Knowledge’, and who, according to the story, was hell bent on destroying humanity. The third was a ball of energy no bigger than a man's fist that was called the Singularity.
Both gods wanted to create the universe in their image out of the Singularity. They decided to duel. Whoever won the battle would vanquish the other and claim the Singularity.
The two gods were so evenly matched that it seemed to the Sprenfather that their battle would never end. The Sprenfather was wrong. Although it was hidden behind a careful veil of blows and feints, the Nameless one knew that it was the slightest fraction weaker than the Sprefather. To avoid its inevitable fate, it made a deal with the Sprenfather.
They would divide the Singularity into two thousand and one pieces. The Sprenfather would get a thousand and one pieces of the singularity, and the Nameless one would take the other thousand. The Sprenfather accepted.
They both immediately attacked each other with their new found power. The Sprenfather used a thousand of his thousand and one parts of the Singularity to destroy the Nameless one’s thousand parts of the singularity.
With the Nameless one banished to a far corner of the void outside of reality, the Sprenfather used his last part of the Singularity to create the universe. Thinking this to be the end of the story, the Sprenfather retired into a deep slumber at the center of the universe.
In the dark corner of the void that it had been banished to, the Nameless one hid a secret. While it and the Sprenfather had dueled, through sleight of hand and trickery, it had stolen a tiny piece of the Singularity.
The piece was half the size of the one that the Sprenfather used to create the universe, but it still held unmeasurable power. The Nameless one knew that if it just used the shard of the singularity for pure destruction, it would destroy half of the universe and then be vanquished.
The Nameless one decided that anything was worth seeing its rival's creation destroyed, but it couldn’t do that with only the energy of the singularity. Instead it decided to split itself into a trillion tiny pieces, and, over an eternity, imbued each one with the power to destroy the mind of, and then empower, one of the Sprenfather’s most prized creations, the creation that had prospered on many planets since the Sprenfather had banished the Nameless one. Humanity.
When the Nameless one had been banished, the Sprenfather had suspected that it would try to destroy the universe with some secret weapon. To prevent the fall of the universe while it slumbered, the Sprenfather created a sentinel that would wake it if the universe was threatened.
The sentinel fulfilled its purpose, and woke the Sprenfather when the Nameless one’s first and final creations, the Cryptalborn, began attacking humanity. During the time that the Sprenfather had slumbered, his weapons had slowly atrophied away. The result of this was that the spren father was too weak to face the threat.
The Sprenfather took the only course of action that was available to it. Using the last of its immense power, it did what the Nameless one had done and split itself into a trillion pieces, each of which had the power to make a human immune to the Cryptalborn’s control and granted them the power to fight back.
These final creations were called the spren.
While the Sprenfather was creating the spren, the Cryptalborn rampaged through the universe. they destroyed all but one of the planets inhabited by humanity. That one planet was the planet that humans currently inhabit.
With both the Nameless one and the Sprenfather dissolved into their final creations, a battle raged for the survival of the final planet. A battle between those of humanity that had a strong enough soul to gain a spren and the husks of humanity that were controlled by the Cryptalborn.
That battle is called Ragnarok, the battle to decide the fate of all things. If humanity falls, and the Cryptalborn win, then, with no opposition, they will fulfill the Nameless one’s last order and destroy the universe.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Ragnarok still rages to this day.”
It was a nice story and, surprisingly enough, got a fair amount correct. The part about the singularity was correct and was also correct about humanity being on thousands of planets before the Cryptalborn swept through. The biggest thing that it was wrong about was the ‘in the beginning there were only three things’.
When the Universe, the formal designation of which is 14.12.7-2.6, was created, eleven billion years ago, there were already millions of pre-existing universes, about a tenth of which have humans in them. A Lot more than three things.
Once a universe is created, it has a lifespan of somewhere between a hundred and a thousand billion years. Because of the way that universes die, they are only habitable for about half of that.
When a singularity is formed out of bits of dead universes, it is extremely unstable. Within a few microseconds of reaching critical mass the singularity can explode, but there have been some singularities that stay dormant for millions of years. When a singularity explodes it sprays energy and matter in all directions. Because of what is commonly assumed to be an ancient magic of unbelievable scale, there is a force that works to keep newly formed universes together.
The universe still expands, and continues to do so for the rest of its life. As the universe ages, the strength of the force–called the Arol’iftash effect after the woman who proved its existence–fades. The Arol’iftash effect that holds universes together has been calculated to be more or less equal for all universes.
Singularities have varying amounts of energy. The more energy there is the faster a universe expands and the more matter it has. This means that bigger universes, that is the ones with more energy, tend to have shorter life spans.
As a universe ages, the Arol’iftash effect gets weaker and weaker. The rate of expansion of the universe expands faster and faster until it tears itself down to lone molecules, speeding through the void, never touching each other.
There are certain places where space gets, for lack of a better term, sticky. These places appear and disappear seemingly at random. The dead universe bits clump together at these places, where they form new singularities that give birth to new universes.
The system for mapping the multiverse that was used by almost all trans-universal societies split the multiverse into five hundred and thirty two sectors. In each of these sectors there are up to a thousand clusters, each with an average of four hundred and thirty-ish universes.
The universe that Nathan grew up in was the seventh universe, in the fourteenth cluster, in the twelfth sector, and was a magnitude 2.6 universe. Hence the designation 12.14.7-2.6.
Over the last two months Nathan had gotten what he felt was a pretty good grip on what the books had called multiverse theory. The workings of reality itself could be reduced to a couple dozen principles. To Nathan, many of them felt intuitive so he learned them quite quickly. I bet heaving an ability that lets me comprehend knowledge and master concepts faster didn't hurt either.
Despite all of his newfound knowledge there were still two things bugging Nathan. The first time he had seen it was in The Most Powerful Ascendants of Berecovin: An Encyclopedia, and now in A Brief Analysis of the Ascendant Capitals of the Multiverse.
“... It is abundantly clear that there is something that makes Endish, City of Lights, capital of the Androvician empire special. It is currently home to over one hundred and seven million ascendants. That gives it an ascendant percentage of three point seven, the second highest of any city in the multiverse at present.
It lags zero point two percent behind Berecovin, the capital of the Republic of United Civilizations, and is thirty one point four percent behind the capital of the League of Ascendants, which, during the fifty four years between its formation and collapse, reached a peak of 2.8 million ascendants to 5.2 million mortals.” Nathan read out loud, scanning the text.
Aha! There It is! “It is clear,” Nathan continued, having skipped to the end of the chapter, “that in the two point three trillion years since humans first settled there, Endish has greatly prospered.”
Nathan massaged his temples in frustration and confusion. “But how the hell did the world exist for that long?! It’s universe should have disintegrated down to a molecular level around it in the first trillion years!” Nathan slammed the book shut in frustration.
With a sigh he stood up and dusted off his increasingly more ratty and threadbare wool pants. “Here we go again.” he muttered to himself, a habit which he had developed in the past two months of isolation, as he stood up to begin the search for a book that would explain the mysterious phenomenon.
\\\\
It had been a few hours, and Nathan still hadn't found a book with the information he was looking for
I get that Jullian committed suicide because he was depressed by the eternall-ness of Anorev, and that the city would never die, But why won’t the city died? Why won’t the universe die? Just tell me how the hell that works already! Nathan slammed Willlium Thunberg's Romania and Julian back into its spot on the shelf.
“Thump!” A tiny book, no more than thirty pages long, fell onto Nathan's foot. “Huh, I must have knocked it off of the shelf.” Nathan muttered curiously, as he picked the book, an extended pamphlet really, off the ground.
Nathan’s interest was piqued when he saw the title. “The life of De’rak A’vertash, Son of the Genius Inventor of the Astral reinforcement technique.”
Nathan immediately flipped open the book, scanning the pages. Nathan stood there, rereading the explanation. The explanation for how it was possible to do something as grand as reinforcing the Arol’iftash effect. It is surprisingly simple.
They switch universes.
Using an extremely advanced technique that only “The most powerful ascendant, or any transcendent magic types”, whatever the hell that meant, could use to transport a planet between universes. That makes sense! Nathan grinned triumphantly.
With his first question answered Nathan moved on to the second, and more important question, the grin melting from his face, a contemplative frown replacing it. Where do the spren come from? What are they?
Nathan wouldn't accept that they were made by the Sprenfather anymore. The spren had been referenced in many of the books he had read, and it was already established that the creation myth that he had been told as a child was mainly just that, myth.
As Nathan lay on the platform before he fell asleep, he was plagued with questions. Who created the spren? What is their purpose, if not to empower humanity to fight back against the Cryptalborn? In the years that followed, although Nathan would read through every single book in the library, he never would find an answer.