A Divine Mandate
Preface to the Book of the Broken
Materialized before the Empirical Council during a discussion on coastal terraforming to combat the increased threat from Trench Leviathans, 5E211.
In the land of the Gods the rules of moral worlds break down. It is simultaneously true that my personification took eons of mortal time as measured by countless worlds, and I have always existed. In a mortal realm, such a fact would be paradoxical. In the land of the Gods, I have always existed because I want to have always existed. A God might only wish to exist after their personification completes. Such a thing is also possible.
The opposite end of this thread of causality works much as it does in mortal realms. Even here in a place beyond time, just as it is in mortal realms, true immortality is a myth. Any god, at any time during their existence, can decide that they no longer wish to exist from that point on. That point serves as a marker. Moving through time is like walking into another room for a God. I can go back to a time before this marker and speak to a lost God, if I so choose.
The other option is more akin to how I have chosen to exist. It is a choice that my father made. He decided to have never existed.
Despite the magnitude of my observations, I don't profess to understand the moral mind well enough to determine if this would be a surprising thing to learn about a God. After all, with something akin to absolute power, at least from a mortal perspective, why would a God want to have never existed? On the other hand, mortals experience hardships that can push them to the same kind of thinking. I digress, however, the mortal perspective, while interesting, isn't of immediate concern in this instance.
The perspective of the Gods, though? We all are aware of our power, its limits, and its potential. Every God knows this is an option, but my father is the only one to remove himself from all timelines. There is another paradox here. I know my father. I have spoken with him and learned from him, despite him having never existed.
Like the land of the Gods exists outside the linear time and perception of any mortal reality, the memory and perception of each God lives within their own being. He could not remove himself from my or any other God's perceptions and recollections. He could, however, remove himself from existence within any actualized reality, including the land of the Gods. We are beings used to power beyond imagination. To have one of our own removed so utterly is the closest that I would guess any of us have ever felt to true mortality.
He has not, does not, and will not exist in any reality I can visit. I can never know what led to his decision, and never interact with him again.
At least, those were my assumptions before I found the book.
My father's great work was the careful curation and monitoring of mortal worlds. He claimed to be a teller of stories. He didn't create them, but he observed them. While he no longer exists, and never has, his collection has and still does.
The size of my father's library would stretch the mortal mind to breaking. It is larger than most realities. It contains countless books. Some catalogue the rise and fall of worlds that were never seen by mortal eyes. Great cataclysms and unfathomable destruction lost to all perceptions but those of the reader.
Whole tomes are dedicated to unremarkable individuals and great heros alike. There are peoples whose perceptions span their entire species, and their book is a single volume that follows that singular perception. All worlds and all peoples are represented within the library.
Reading a book can be a challenging experience. Each book brings the reader into the world. It is not some trick of recall. These books, in effect, are the realities they represent.
Changes made to a book can affect other books within the library. The consequences of such interactions weren't known to me until I began to discover my father's secrets.
I have never really accepted what my father has done. Without the opportunity to ask him myself, I have scoured that which he left behind for any clue to know why.
To that end, nearly all of my existence has been spent within the library. I worked outside of time, but doing any task, even for a god, requires the passage of subjective time. I have never kept track of the time spent, but I have observed the entire existence of countless individuals in trillions of worlds. It is not a task I would recommend to anyone.
My fruitless labor ended when I discovered an uncatalogued wing of the library. The library, strictly speaking, has a map. The definition of map is a little tricky in this instance, as something like a hand drawn map of the library would fill the entirety of the library. Another paradox that we can hand wave away, because my father didn't not spend an eternity drawing a map of his library. Instead, each room of the library has a list of the tomes it contains and a list of what rooms are next to it. Focusing on any given entry will allow the one viewing it to see what that next room contains and borders and so on and so forth.
In effect, the entire library could be mapped out from the entry room. Another task I would not recommend to anyone.
Perhaps due to how well I know my father and how well I can trace his thoughts, or perhaps due to astounding and statistically impossible dumb luck, I found a wing that existed outside of the mapping system built into the library. This was a place that my father did not want others to enter.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
I moved through carefully, noting the physical layout of the wing, as well as the contents as I moved within.
The layout was different than the rest of the library. Instead of a constantly branching series of rooms, this wing led straight from one room to another.
The first room contained rows of shelves describing worlds that seemed to be pretty well off. The people who inhabited them had magic and power to determine their own fates. Very few had received any sort of direct divine intervention, though the power and influence of the Gods exist in all worlds by our and their very nature.
As I moved deeper, I noticed an irregularity. In all other wings, the tomes that made up the library were a roughly even mix of realities that had no inhabitants, simply creation and destruction, and worlds that had inhabitants, with only another slice of those progressing to any kind of true intelligence. In the grand scheme of things, intelligent life is incredibly common, but in a given random sample of, say, ten catalogued worlds, only two of those will have any kind of intelligent life.
In this wing, every world had advanced civilizations. Every world had magic. Every world had a unique way to access and use that magic. My father clearly grouped these worlds for some purpose.
In a secret wing, in a lost row of tomes, I found the first hint of trouble.
A section of tomes had warped covers.
As of that discovery, all the tomes in the entire library were immaculate. Something had happened to these. My first and greatest fear was that my father had decided to experiment with mortal worlds and done something to fundamentally change them. Such actions are within the scope of power of some gods, my father undoubtedly included. That said, even Gods have restrictions based on our own social contracts and ethics as agreed upon by our society as a whole. Corrupting an entire swath of worlds fell well outside the bounds of what would be commonly accepted.
This wasn't something I thought my father would do, but based what questions I had around his disappearance from existence, I didn't know for sure. I delved into each one of those worlds.
In each world, they were much the same as all the others. They had intelligent civilizations that grew powerful and determined their own fate. Everything progressed normally until the worlds simply broke. In one moment they were whole, and in another the rules of reality shattered, and the world was unmade in moments of subjective time.
Each viewing forced me out at that moment more forcefully than the typical entropic death of worlds ended their stories. Something had prematurely destroyed these worlds in a manner that corrupted their very tomes.
Based on what I knew, that meant the worlds broke after their tomes were created. Such a thing should not have been possible. The books are the entirety of that world's or person's existence.
Without any explaination or satisfactory theories, I moved on.
The library continued to deteriorate. In some tomes I entered, the breaking was preceded by signs. A shadow of fate. A figure that lurked just beyond perception. Just when I'd catch a glimpse of the power behind the coming destruction, the world would be torn apart.
It was then I made a mistake and an important discovery.
The tomes are not some single use items that must be entered and left from the beginning and the end. That is simply my preferred way to experience them. In an attempt to understand what I had seen in one tome, I rewound causality and time. The figure beyond reality did not rewind with the world's causality. A malevolent intention wrapped around my perception of the world. The message behind that intention was clear.
This world belongs to me, and you are not welcome.
I was torn out of the world before the fated destruction. Back in the library, the tome I examined grew more disfigured. Whatever this force had done, my interference made it worse. As though reacting to the condition of that tome, those that I had already viewed within the same small section deteriorated in the same way. In an instant, I remembered the new details of my time within those realities caused by the changes to the first world. In each, I was ripped out before seeing the world's destruction.
The figure did not notice my interference if I simply observed a world from start to finish. Whatever this force was, it wasn't another God, who would have noticed my direct observation and confronted me if it was unwanted.
Eventually, I found books completely annihilated. They were impossible to view. Only a sense of chaos and destruction without order came from my attempts to delve them. The occasional brittle world held on, but I dared not look inside. In the end, I did not want to be responsible for the destruction of worlds, even if that destruction was all but guaranteed.
Through the unending halls I found an inflection point. The books started recovering. I noticed the same pattern of destruction in reverse. If this library was organized in some kind of cosmically geographic pattern, then the destruction radiated from a point between the two sections.
I carefully measured, then canvased the middle of the destruction. Behind a false shelf, past a door with no lock and no handle, I found my father's secret. The world that I suspect he influenced. The world that might have broken him.
In the center of the unadorned and otherwise empty room, atop a lone plinth made from ash, bone, and blood was a single tome. Unlike the destruction that surrounded it, this tome was pristine. Unlike most of the tomes that lead up to it, this tome wasn't specifically about a world, but a single individual. Unlike any other tome contained within the library, my father named this book.
Book of the Broken.
Every sense I have screams that if I enter this tome, I will never return. Perhaps this is where my father is. Erased by his own creation. I cannot fathom the power that would require. To erase one of the progenitors.
Reading this tome would pull me in and leave me vulnerable to whatever power is contained within. It is a risk I cannot take, but I need to know what happened. It might be unwise to share this tale. I don't know. The mortal mind does not have the power to exist within the tome, so instead it will be presented to you in a way you can comprehend—a story. It should be safe enough. I ask this of you, then, my faithful. Read the tome so that we might know its secrets.
I can sense some of what lies within—the accounting of a life. Parts will be unpalatable. Parts will be challenging. I ask you to read it anyway. This is a book that, more than anything, is about a broken man. That those who delve its pages may find themselves broken is but one of the consequences I will have to live with.