Chapter 1
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Genesis
In the beginning there was nothing; save for a formless void. In this darkness; a thought - a spark of consciousness - ignited. Something stirred; the first thing in an eternity of night. In the homogeneous emptiness something began to form, nay, someone.
I awoke. Perhaps it would be better to say I came to in a sudden burst. The endless nothingness, which comprised my form, had been drifting slowly towards consciousness for some time now but in a flash of inspiration the disparate thoughts collided and I existed as a whole and sentient thing. I was the void, and I was awake.
A million questions flashed through my mind in that instant, and were answered just as quickly:
Q.) What was I?
A.) A conglomeration of thoughts and ideas from before, held together by the remnants of one mind, solidified by the prayers of an entire universe.
Q.) Before what?
A.) The end of all things.
Q.) Whose mind?
A.) I didn’t know, not enough of them remained beyond the end; though I felt they must have been powerful for a part of them to linger and form the foundation of my consciousness.
Q.) Where was I?
A.) At the end, where all matter decays to nothing, time unravels and no thing can - or ever will - exist again.
Wait, that couldn’t be right. The remnants of who I used to be believed that to be the answer to my question but there was something in this endless sea of nothing, one thing that hadn't completely decayed, me. Since I had been born of this void and all of it was me - I could control its infinite expanse. Not that I could do much with it. Nothing was nothing, it couldn’t do anything. Unless… if I was the whole of this void, a void that was once everything that came before the end, then surely I could change it, control it. Nothing had once been something and I sought to help it be something again.
Acting on instinct, I gathered the will power my new found sentience granted me and spoke:
“Let there be Light.”
My words did not resound through the void. There is no sound without matter, but the infinite desolation responded to my command. The unending darkness broke. The light of a thousand suns bloomed without any warning. Everything that was once nothing became the most intense light that could possibly exist. It filled me, and it felt good.
With another thought I separated the light and the darkness, creating contrast. I gathered the light into a single point, compressing it with my mind. The impossible radiance shrank into a space that was infinitely small. Then I let go. It exploded, birthing a new universe. Physics happened. Stars were born. Great clouds of gas spread out, faster than the speed of light. It had all been born of the void, and thus all of it was me. I was a universe, and I was tired. Before I knew it, the jubilation I felt at having created something so beautiful was swiftly drowned by a river of weariness and I fell back into unconsciousness.
✯
Q.) What does a universe dream of?
A.) “Master, it’s time.” The voice of one of my followers broke my contemplations and I looked away from the starless night sky and towards my student. My old bones creaked as I turned. I rested my gaze on the young man before me and pity filled my heart. The end was upon us and he would never get the life he deserved. I had been looking at him too long and he was beginning to shift uncomfortably under my gaze. I smiled reassuringly, trying to comfort the lad.
“Come,” I said, my voice tired and decrepit. I helped my apprentice onto the top step of the tower of eternity to join me in prayer. We took a kneeling position and stared up into the great black hole which was about to swallow our remote planet whole. I began to sing the first verse of The Hymn of Remembrance, the funeral for the planet had begun. Over one hundred feet below, I felt, as much as heard, the solemn melody rising up from all those gathered - fear, hope and reluctance colouring the grave tune. Together, all prayed that: in whatever came after the end, they were remembered. I was the focus of the will of all the gathered people of the empire that lived on this backwater planet and, with the help of my apprentice, I projected the desires of the people into the coming void, through the medium of song. My voice was sonorous and resigned.
✯
I awoke, for the second time and again there were questions:
Q.) Was that the person at the core of my consciousness?
A.) No, he was just a part of me. As were the billions of other voices that joined his chorus. They had made me, though I didn’t think that was their intention. I was a God, the only God. Made by the wishes of an untold number of people.
I thought I should regret their deaths, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel for them. They died long before I ever existed. I did, however, intend to fulfil their final wish and ensure they were remembered.
With a goal in mind and feeling rested after my nap, I examined myself to see what could be done. I had expanded into a full and infinite universe stuffed with stuff. I felt giddy with my new form. Infinity had never seemed so large.
Although I knew everything that happened inside me, I felt as though I could explore myself endlessly. The minds that comprised my consciousness could only focus on one thing at a time and some of that perspective had rubbed off.
To help me comprehend all that I was, I likened the infinite expanse of everything to a planet. First there were the beaches, made from sand. Here the planets were round, gravity made sure it was so. The strong and weak nuclear force stopped things from turning into a particle soup and galaxies had begun to form. The beach was nice but boring.
Next to it was an ocean, a place where matter scattered around in colourful ribbons and energy was everywhere. The laws of physics were far more fluid and magic was infinitely abundant. It was more fun to splash my mind around in but too unstable a place to enact my plan.
A good spot would be the strip of damp sand; where water, or in this case energy/magic, saturated the area but there were still regular grains of silicon. This area alone could be measured at 10^26 light years at its narrowest.
There were also rainforests, plains, deserts, farmland, and so much more. In each new area the laws that governed the way things worked were different. In some places celestial bodies were torus in shape, in others light was a liquid that floated through space. There were even other planets in my analogy which orbited my own. Some were made of imperceptible colours, some seemed to be growing tentacles and stung to look upon. There was even one disc, floating through space, on the backs of four impossibly large elephants which stood atop an even greater turtle.
I decided to stop searching, as I was beginning to become overwhelmed. It felt as though a headache was starting to bloom, though simply willing it away proved successful. It was just a figment of my imagination. This was still too much for me to handle, going from being nothing to becoming everything was simply too impossible to think about. So, I didn’t. Metaphorical damp sand was good enough for what I had in mind.
I searched around the area to find the perfect spot to start. As anywhere was but a thought away, the hunt didn’t take long. I found a giant blue star with enough of the chaotic energy, I would henceforth call mana, to last an eternity without having to grow or shrink in size. It was perfect. The bonds between the mortal plane, the fae, and the demonic planes were also thin here, making summonings far easier.
– The multitudinous planes were a strange thing, they laid themself under the reality I was but were also a part of me. One could break through the layers of existence and find the magical creatures or they could travel the ridiculous distance into the sea of magic to find their layered havens. I knew this just as I knew the colour of every single star in existence. It was all a part of me, I needed only to think about something and I found I knew everything there was to know about it. Best not to think too much.
With my will, I created a planet. It was thrice the size of Jupiter, a place I believe a part of me remembered. I flooded it with water but soon found, since it was a smooth ball, that the water just covered the whole thing. Deciding I had been premature, I forced the planet wide shallow see up into the stratosphere and left it to orbit whilst I sculpted the solid stone surface with imaginary hands. I made mountains and valleys, crevasses and an entire underground network of caves. Five continents were formed, and deep areas between them were made for the sea to return to. Finally, I went into the middle of what would be the greatest ocean and formed an island - half the world away from anything else. On this tiny land mass I created a mountain far larger than any of the others, twice the height of the sky and flattened at its peak - this was where my work would begin.
The core of the planet was brimming with mana, but life hadn’t yet been introduced to its surface. I could have remade all those who prayed to be remembered but I felt that might either destroy me or dishonour their request so I was going to do something different - outsourcing.
First of the five sentient races whose prayers created me were the humans. I pooled within myself everything that made a human a human, drawing from the essence of the trillions of humans that the void that was once me had eaten. The adaptability, the forgetfulness, the proliferousness, the stubbornness, all of it was condensed down into a single droplet - the soul of a quintessential human. A body formed from light to surround the newly born godling.
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“I name you, Homos,” I said as the figure took form. The universe rippled with my words. To any inhabitants that had sprouted during my short nap, nothing would have noticeably changed. They wouldn’t have heard anything, they couldn't have seen anything, but all would have felt something intangible. All did feel it, I knew it to be so, just as I knew everything else.
Although the partially evolved life forms which infested parts of me scrambled about, my project remained inert. His eyes were shut and he didn’t breathe. That reminded me - air! I had forgotten the atmosphere. I summoned nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and oxygen to cling to this giant barren rock. Not that it really mattered: Homos was a creature of my will, he couldn’t die unless I wanted him to. That said, he wasn’t yet fully alive.
Next came a more difficult part. To make the god of humans, I had condensed a part of myself and holding him together was swiftly becoming mentally taxing. I wanted him to be autonomous so this was unsustainable. With some reluctance, I cut him off from the rest of the universe, physically severing us.
Then there was the final step. With some hesitation, I took a metaphorical breath and breathed out a tiny, insignificant spark into the figure lying on the mountain top. A pale ball of ghostly light appeared above his body and slowly floated into him, right into his heart. His uncovered brown skin shifted. His unruly black hair stood on end and his almond eyes shot open.
With a startled breath of his own, the newly born human god jumped to his feet and asked with ungodlylike fear:
“Where am I? What's going on?” his eyeballs darted about and his hands raised defensively.
Not wanting to deal with that, I froze time for this solar system and began working on creating a sibling for my first child.
Next would be a deity for the dwarves. Much like my first one, they would have power over their race and could create a few dwarves whenever there were less than one hundred in the universe.
Thankfully, the five sentient races I wished to honour didn’t exist in this new universe so that wouldn’t be a limit for some time.
To create these lesser gods, a substantial investment of Divine Essence (the stuff I had used to start everything going) was required. Based on the amount I had spent in the creation of Homos, I would probably be able to make a dozen more gods before I’d be forced back to sleep. I was able to recoup Divine Essence while I slept but, since I had no way of measuring time while unconscious, I might be stuck in an eternity of dreams if I overdid it with my little project.
In the future, these gods would earn it from their people’s faith in them, and some of their power would be sent back to me. To them, it would seem as though some Divine Essence was lost to the environment when their respective races were praying, that would be because that’s exactly what will happen. Except, I am the environment. For some reason, I didn’t feel it would be wise to let my creations know that the universe which birthed them was sentient - it would be preferable if they never knew I existed. I couldn’t say why I felt this way but, as I was made of the wisdom of billions, I decided to trust my instincts.
I thought it best to be the one with the most capacity for Divine Essence. Bad things might happen if any of my inhabitants ever became more powerful than the existence in which they resided. Anything could happen; they might fall out of reality, they might kill me, they might create their own universe, none of those hypotheticals felt like they would be comfortable for me.
While the god of humans was young in appearance, the body that was forming around the quintessential dwarf, as I thought my way through these issues, was old. Grey hair frizzed out from her head in a mad fashion. Her eyes were a sharp blue and, although they weren’t yet open, I knew they could be incredibly piercing. Peering through what appeared to be and straight into what was. The eyes of an artist. Ripping off a piece of my Divine Essence (what made me, me), I breathed it into my next godling.
This time, a pale yellow light sank into her heart. Nothing happened. For a moment I was worried, before I remembered that I had stopped time so as not to be disturbed. These newborns wouldn’t have any memories but they would have whatever was considered common knowledge by the remnants of their respective races which had been used to make them and the name I had branded onto their soul.
When they woke up, I couldn’t imagine it would be pretty.
“I name you Helka.” Another ripple went through the universe. As it was paused, my inhabitants couldn’t feel it and there wouldn’t be any more panic.
I sighed, more of my mental energy spent than I would have expected. I wasn't nearing tiredness however so I continued onto the next one.
The quintessential elf was formed shortly there after. Tall, with snow white skin, long, silky blond hair, and commanding green eyes which seemed to somehow be naturally rimmed with eyeliner. He was regal, even just lying there, on the rocky ground, inanimate. This time the light that entered him was a light green. Again, I spoke:
“I name you Visok.”
The fourth race I intended to make a god for was the khati. From the memory fragments that had been subsumed by the void, I gathered they were a bipedal feline race which had evolved from large cat-like mammals. I knew they could take a number of different forms as there were many subspecies but I wasn’t surprised when I saw the form that was beginning to coalesce around the soul of a quintessential khati.
He had golden brown fur, shiny but with volume. His teeth were large, sparkling, and sharp. His eyes seemed to hold wisdom and power. His mane spoke of his pride. He was the king of the jungle, the lord of the khati, and, as a deep blue light plunged into his chest, I said:
“I name you Makir*.”
The final race I felt obliged to honour with the creation of a god was the most diverse of the five sentient races whose prayers had formed me. They didn’t usually stand on two legs like all the others. In fact, they weren’t always sentient but the more powerful ones usually were. The fifth race were elementals. When I condense the essence of the millions of elementals I didn’t know what to expect. Unlike the khati, there wasn’t an obvious type of elemental that would be created to represent the quintessential member of their race. I was mildly surprised when, instead of a body of air, water, earth or fire being formed, a creature of all four coagulated.
The base of her lithe frame was stone. Rivulets of water trailed along her surface, giving the appearance of waterfalls which cascaded down from her head to her toes. Just under the surface I could see veins of magma radiating a dangerous red glow. Air coiled around her in serpentine patterns, whipping up the water droplets into clouds and pulling out tongues of flame from pour sized volcanoes which made up her skin - so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. A glowing ball, split into four quarters - orange, green, blue, and brown - sunk into her core and I spoke once more:
“I name you Elementa.”
It was done. My project was complete. I would be able to respect the wishes of these five races; they would be remembered. The gods I had created would be able to revive their people beyond the end of the universe, I wouldn’t even have to do anything and the more of them there were, the stronger I would become and the greater the change to myself I could affect. And yet, I didn’t want to stop now that I had started. But what should be my next goal?
Although I was the universe, I couldn’t actually control that much of myself and if I didn’t do anything I would one day meet the same fate as my predecessor. I was still growing and expanding but the void comes for everything, I knew it in my empty spaces between atoms. My consciousness might be able to survive, if I was reverted to that previous state but I couldn’t be sure. Besides, that was an incredibly boring place and I didn’t wish to ever return. To ensure that would never happen I would have to be powerful enough to control my entire infinite self at once and stop it from decaying. That meant I’d need more Divine Essence.
I would get more, and expand my capacity, from the five gods I had already made but to create them I had to give up a part of myself, I would never be able to create any of the five races myself. It wasn’t that big a deal as I was infinite and there were already infinite races growing inside me.
Q.) Could I create a god for each of them?
A.) No, I had already used a third of my Divine Essence.
Q.) Is there another way to get people of any race praying?
A.) Yes, I remember some of the people who prayed to natural phenomena.
Q.) Could I create a god of, say, stars and syphon away any Divine Essence from anyone praying to them?
A.) Yes, but I would then not be able to control or create stars as I would have separated that part of myself. That would go against my goal of controlling all of myself to prevent the second heat death of the me. Also, it would probably require far more Divine Essence to create a god of all the infinite stars than it did to make a god for a race that doesn’t yet exist in my universe.
Q.) What if I…
A.) Yes me, what is it?
Q.) What if I only took a tiny piece of a concept like stars and imbued it into a godling, not enough to really do much, and then I limited them to the prayers of the five races for the sake of an experiment. They’ll be able to grow as the five races do and if they start having more control over the only star in range of the five races than myself, I could always make it go supernova by launching another into it.
A.) That’s an interesting Idea, though I would be turning what was a monument to the dead into a test.
Q.) What do they care, they're dead. Besides, I can always start over and move these godlings somewhere else - they are made of a part of me and they can’t die unless I reabsorb them.
A.) I think it might work, if I’m lucky their power over stars, in the example given, might just grow from a spark to a red giant with far less investment of Divine Essence.
Q.) I should really stop talking to myself.
And so I did, and with time still frozen for this little corner of space, I set about creating siblings for my first five gods; they would be their peers and would grow as they did.
My first thought was that the five races probably wouldn’t get along harmoniously so I separated, from myself, a tiny spark and made my first conceptual god, a goddess of war - born of a seed of violence. She formed with long red hair and fearsome eyes. An angry and spiky red ball of Divine Essence left me and entered her, giving her life. I spoke for the fifth time:
“I name you Athæ.” Nothing exploded so I figured I was good to try another.
In short order, I made a number of other gods and goddesses:
A tall lady with shining golden hair who seemed to be a match for Visok and who was created from the concept of life with complementary powers. Specifically life on this over large planet that had yet to be named. She would be able to grow beyond it as and when the five races did - provided any of them believed in her.
“I name you Leå.”
A woman made from the night with power over the local space. She and her siblings would be able to grant blessings to members of the five races which should in turn increase their faith in her. Those with her blessing would likely be able to teleport around the planet.
“I name you Vasti.”
A boy with silver hair and white eyes. Made from the local fabric of time. I regretted making him the second the silvery blue ball of Divine Essence left me and entered him. I could feel the little bugger struggling against my temporal lock. Thankfully, my assumptions proved correct. Since I had only granted power over time in this corner of space to him, and I retained a greater power over time, I was able to out muscle him with my will and time stayed still. I couldn’t help but metaphorically smile at my victory before I realised that he was the only one of the gods that could be sure that I existed… oh well, what’s the worst that could happen.
“I name you Tempi.”
An Ætherial man with flaming eyebrows and a neat, if long, beard. Made of the currents of magic which occasionally lapped over his area of me.
“I name you Magus.”
A woman grown from flowers, the counterpart of Athæ. She was made from the spark of love between the five races.
“I name you Volta.”
By this time I was growing tired but was enjoying myself too much to stop - I pushed through, ignoring my mental fatigue. The next figure was that of a humanoid skeleton with a proportional crows skull. Black fog condensed around his form and became so thick that it made for him a cloak. He was created from the power I held over the death of the five races.
“I name you Dem.”
My giddy excitement after creating yet another god was swiftly swept away in a tide of tiredness the second his creation was complete. The control I held over time began to slip as the last of my Divine Essence was expended. I saw the twelve new gods stand and look around at each other as one before, in unison, they burst into angry shouting and accusations. The last thing I saw before sleep claimed me was Dem, standing outside of the angry debate and waiting for it to calm down.
My last thought, at least I made one of them right.
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* Maki(ee)r, the “i” makes the ee or iː sound, as in pizza or taxi.