The chair continues rocking back and forth as the shadow consolidates into the vague shape of a cloaked man.
After the dust and destuction of another universe had passed and gone, one still lingered, free from the crushing grasp of entropy. It was a very old thing that had survived the death of its cosmos, an unnaturally old thing.
It was bound by a curse, you see - a curse from the Originator of his realm, a curse that condemned him to live on forever even as he saw everything he touched fall into ruin. His weapons lost, his children killed in battle, his hair and teeth falling out from sheer age - but he would not die.
And so the old thing wandered the darkness between Creation, and avoided that which crawled there by luck and his curse alone. After a very long time, he came to a doorway in the infinite black he had paced for the last eternity. Curious as always, he opened it, and what came out from inside that door was everything, it was the sky and the sea and the air and everything that could possibly have existed, and it poured into him, made him stronger than all before that he had encountered, on a level with the Originator, even. But the power inside him was not an idle thing, and he held it for no more than a heartbeat before it burst out of him, tearing him apart but leaving him still alive as the magic from the door fashioned his undying soul into a new universe.
After ages had passed and the man was used to the change, that most important element began to ferment in his insides - potential. Potential for a new home, a new world to watch over as he had done in ages past. This potential attracted those from Outside, those he had hidden from in his eternity in the black. At first he shrank back from them and forbade them entrance, but the potential roiling in his gut pinned his entrances open and they flooded in.
The potential changed them upon exposure. They gained names, identities, powers, unique roles to play in the future world.
This was what the sheep called gods. He watched as they turned their arts to crafting a new world, and then life sprung up upon it as from seeds scattered upon dirt. He watched as civilizations rose and fell by the whim of the gods as his new body aged, though he did not. He watched as the gods fell away from one another and tore themselves apart. Eventually, he felt himself dying, and then realized the Originator's great scheme leading backwards into eternity.
At the end of time, the living universe would choose that which had sinned most during its lifespan and grant it the fate to become the next universe, always able to watch, but unable to interfere but in this last moment. So had it been with the Originator, and that before him, and that before him in turn, and on into the uncounted eons. But this one was different. He did not wish a pointless cycle to be perpetuated eternally, and so instead he took the shades of all those who has been mischevious, what was rule-breaking and capricous, and rebellious, and crafted it into one being. This last act took its lifeforce, and the newly born entity ate the corpse as a sign of respect.
From then on, nothing in the cycle of the cosmos was the same. No longer were universes born and ended in a stately procedure; instead the new entity danced between cosmoses and set things out of alignment, just a little, just enough to cause whatever goal it had in mind.
In that may, death gave rise to life, which in turn gave rise to something inbetween, and the ultimate fate of the universes will never be the same for it.
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Topic: Everything: Gaiden (Read 520643 times)