In what might have been the beginning there was almost nothing. No light. No darkness. Reality itself was only just coming together from its fragmented pieces. In the cold and lonely shadows of nothing finally something happened. An awareness, cold, and dark dragged itself together into something that might be called a 'being' for it was certainly not alive as you, whoever you are might read, or as I review or write upon this very page; not breathing, thinking, or to have its heart beat, but it was there. And very soon it was not alone.

  This being, this first being, brought into itself power from the cold and lonely nothing, soon finding a ragged and uneven surface to drag its malformed and undefined body across. Something, some other being, had made a rule, a law, and used its own gathered power to enforce that across this existence. Reality in its first dimension was born. The first being now had many more things to deal with now that this law was trying to define it-- to bring it together with others like it to a common plane. The first being found this acceptable. Long since had it been unable to grab power for itself from the nothing around it. The others had taken it. More rules were laid down as other beings like itself yearned for power and caught on to this new method of rules and laws. Many around it died from the harsh changes, unable in their will to bind themselves to these new laws and rules of the newly formed reality about them.

  Yet they stayed behind. Their power did not just explode back into the nothing; oh they did with time, but for so long they would lay stuck in this sharp plane of darkness, shadow, and light unmoving. They were dead. Another first, a rule resulting from others that had been put down. And fittingly our first being dragged itself, lumpen and barely corporeal using nothing but its will to bind its vast bulk together. It dragged itself on, driven by its idea, and unaware this first being made a new rule as it fell upon its indescribable brethren.

  It had proclaimed that one may feed upon others. Not that one must, but that they could do to gather power. And it might have been this single act that started the first contest. As time, shape, depth, and distance joined gravity as rules of our reality laid down by the other first beings the universe itself was born as each of the fundamental laws of existence we know today were laid down one by one. Our world was formed in the result of one of the greatest clashes of power known only after more time than even a contemporary God such as myself can imagine or attempt to comprehend.

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  Now I do not know what creature, what being, made it so that the laws of reality laid into place cannot be moved or changed or even if we, myself and the seven of my kin left in the mortal kin under the banner of the Pantheon, are not powerful enough to change them ourselves even working together. It is why even now at the height of my power, with my vision able to pierce the veil of time, that I cannot move even my own actions in the past for I am now a new being and bound by different laws. I am cursed forever to see my folly play out time and time again as our new reality expands and grows bound and yet free in the infinite branches of time, and record them here in my infinite archive. Yggdrasil, the tree of life, laid so long ago has sprouted, and time itself once a single line of fate has spread into a great and infinite fan with tendrils reaching into the infinite. History spreads as one kingdom succeeds and another fails, and yet I see it happening in both ways. Were second son or first has taken to the throne I see both fates and must record their deeds in mirrored slightly different realities, on and on in endless waves as each decision made by the king is split and mirrored into a new path as he makes each choice one by one leading into all directions of his life being made witness to my eyes. The Great Tree has taken even me in its branches, the newest law of our reality, a curse and blessing that all choices are made, and done so freely within an ever expanding chaotic reality.

  The Contest had been won and I hadn't even noticed. Again and again I see it play out now, as I record the deeds of all in my world of not only infinite time, but infinite branching reality now under the rule and care of the daughter I once scorned. She is limited in how she may act, but infinite in her possibility. Fate, once a single thread I demanded of her to weave at my command has now set her free into a greater cosmos as a new deity, the newest being, to claw itself from the nothing.