“Why does it look like this?” Tyr asked. He understood very well that fire was energy, it wasn't as simple as the kind of fire that someone lit on the hearth. It could be, but like all things it was something far more than what met the naked eye. All elements had their derivatives, sand and granite all came from the same element ultimately, but they'd never be the same. Fire was the first, it was everything, nothing could exist without energy and thus it was the eldest. Earth came much later and yet at the same time had always existed in concert with it. The universal stabilizer of sorts, bonds between molecules. Before time, energy and substance to make both what they were, to give them form and meaning.

Fire, the element of passion, of love or hate – or of the relation between anything large or small. Beholden to but far more ancient than the prime concepts of light and dark that could not exist without it.

“It looks like nothing.” Fire replied, and Tyr nodded. He was aware of that as well. Just being here, with the briefest contemplation, he understood – a realm of epiphanies where even these ambiguous responses had started to make sense in his skull. These highest of concepts were beyond comprehension, something even a god could only dream of understanding, all they could hope to do was lay the barest tip of a finger on the pages of all things. It was filtered through his mind, this place didn't actually exist at it, not in the literal sense. It was a reality beyond reality, given form in his head to allow it all to make some sense.

He wasn't here, he wasn't anywhere. Once he'd stepped through that gate, Tyr had ceased to exist, and yet he was swimming in the very lifeblood at the root of all existence.

And it was so... Venerable. Older than old, older than time itself, though the concept might stretch the mind a bit. It was possible when one was talking about a thing that transcended even the gods, he supposed, it was okay not to know. One of the highest possible dimensions was where these origins resided. Older than matter, older than the planets and the life that existed on their surface. There was nothing in the entire cosmos older than this except for whatever thing had birthed the dao.

The God, the only one. But that God was not a bearded man with fine robes and a soft hand, it was eldritch, omniscient, impotent. Infinite. Fire came first, energy, but the truth was that light and dark at their highest level were the eldest of all, in contradiction, creation and destruction. They simply didn't have elemental planes as far as Tyr could tell. Standing there, considering how incredibly silly it was to be talking to a personification of infinity as if they were student and master.

“The dao was not always.” Fire said, gesturing forward toward the burning orbs in the distance. “There was a period that I won't name as 'time' where the dao did not exist, and everything was just. Just what? Nothing can ever know that, because it was before God. I say God, as a way to set some sort of standard for the discussion, God being the all defining force that governs everything. Even the dao, there is always, a saying your kind have – a 'bigger fish'. Everything exists because of this omnipresent, omniscient entity that said it should, whether it exists or not is not a question we ask. We can't know, and yet we do, because we have to. Without this thing, nothing would exist. Do you understand?”

“To a very limited extent, but not really.” Tyr shook his head, the thing could clearly read his mind and he was never one for posturing knowledge he didn't possess. It was like asking a person how 'time' worked. Dimensions above their own couldn't be 'known', no matter how long they were given to observe them. And this was a concept that transcended time, something beyond time where it had been – and time hadn't. Tyr existed in a place where that was not possible, time was necessary to dictate and define the interaction of particles, it wasn't a construct, it was a monolith. Something had created time, surely, maybe time was a god in and of itself. There was no 'god of time', you couldn't go back or forward in the traditional sense, even humans knew that. Ellemar had thought he'd managed to do so but all he'd done is transit himself to other dimensions in the so-called multiverse.

Those who had tried, if not meeting instant and irrefutable failure, simply disappeared. There was quite an interesting thesis about the fact that time could be manipulated by magic, because mana was from a dimension outside or linear to time, but some divine regulator found these people and removed them from existence.

Which made it a theory impossible to reflect on beyond the barest shred of maybe's.

Not 'killed', but a wholesale removal of the interfering individual. They had never existed at all, even their own children would have forgotten them and never missed a beat. No confusion about where their family members went, they had never been. It was terrifying, as all things eternal were when viewed through the looking glass, that great abyss. One could slow the effect time had in a contained environment, but never truly manipulate it. Not even celestials could touch it. As time was a universal law that could not be properly observed, it was highly unlikely anything had ever grasped it to use it as an aspect in the first place.

“You couldn't understand, making it a rhetorical question.” Fire replied, but he didn't sound disappointed. For a personified element, he was very... Well, personified. Given tone and body language that communicated what the writhing blaze of his face could not. “With that being said, would you like me to show you?”

“Why am I being given this opportunity?” Tyr asked. “Why me specifically? Does every primus do this?”

Fire shook his head. “It is you because you came here, as many have before. You denied the divine gift, which is a test, but there was no passing or failing – you just did. They offered you gifts, you refused them – and now here you are. As you've summarily concluded, fire is not as simple as the reaction of flammable material throwing off waste energy. It is high energy matter releasing energy in a reaction, eternally, energy is the only thing that cannot be removed from the universe by conventional means. Any reaction is energy, and thus it is part of us, burning and flames are simply your way to understand it. But there is light that requires no combustion, generates no heat, and this is ours as well.”

Tyr frowned, wondering if he'd made a mistake. Accepting Vestia's gift, or any of the others, would've made everything so easy. They had been telling the truth, willing to refrain from the common way of shackling demi-divines as they might've done to Lucian, because Tyr had either impressed them – or it was true that they needed him. He was a piece of a god like all nephilim, but he'd be lying if he said he wasn't a bit nervous about becoming what he'd seen in his dreams. The bottomless pit, the great maw and the destroyer.

“There are no mistakes, but I'll say this. We are not like your celestials. Dao is not stingy, it is more than willing to speak to anyone who has the will to reach it, and you have shown such will in a manner of speaking simply by arriving here. This is not the path of the daoist, it is not a path of power or ability, or earning, this is a communion of elements that cares nothing for petty wrestling or contact with anything. It is, again not a test. It is duality incarnate, and thus it is more than welcoming to mortal beings who share this element of their being, to do with as they wish. Dao is dao, there are many dao but they are all part of one greater whole, it can be interpreted an infinite amount of ways, but it is one thing – not the many. Under the dao, everything is nothing – and nothing is everything. Simply put, it was you because you've managed to absorb so many seeds, a sort of brute force that has given you an artificial key that a mortal might consider unearned. Even if you consider it an accident, there are no accidents under the dao, it is a living and breathing thing just as you are, and it does not care who or what you are, or what you do. To it, you do not exist, and neither do I.”

“...”

“You don't understand.” Fire continued. “This is right and reasonable, no biological ever could. But I can show you one part of this greater whole and you can do with it as you please. As far as our time here goes, you will glean no further inspiration from this experience, it will be with you always and you'll gain nothing by staying longer. You may choose how you please, it makes no difference to me – it is rare to speak. To be given voice. I am apathetic to the need to communicate, and yet it is simultaneously interesting to be shaped in this way. Given form.”

“...Okay.” Tyr's brows scrunched up, suddenly 'understanding' seemed a bit more trouble than it was worth, trying to figure out what all of that even meant. “Show me.”

Fire nodded and before Tyr knew it a molten thumb was pressed to his forehead, his entire body set ablaze and cast into blackness. Not the black of unconsciousness, but just... Black. There was nothing whatsoever, and then there was... Something. In that moment he was absolutely confident that this must've been a part of what Altrimar had seen that changed him, the virus that dominated all reality, serenity so keen it brought with it stark raving madness.

The place beyond the skies was cast from threads of lunacy, there was no other way to articulate it.

Hovering in the abyss that shrouded everything around it was a spark of brilliant light. No larger than a grain of sand but the power held within it was so vast that Tyr knew had he been there truly he'd be shredded just by daring to look at it from any distance, in a place that had no dimension to it at all. Not from malice, just from the raw sense of significance it carried. First, there was nothing, but everything had came out of its opposite, and that was the spark.

It was everything, all at once. Sat still for eternity, growing denser before a very subtle reaction took place and it began to alternate between a dullness and a blinding flicker. Flashing and dimming, come to the point where it could grow no further, despite the fact that 'everything' could be no more than itself. Lunacy unhinged, before the laws were written, before perspective.

There was a problem, though, even Tyr could see that.

If everything was everything, there was no anything, it was just nothing by another name, and yet turned in on itself to become the snake devouring its own tail. Duality was what it needed, and the sorrow and loneliness washing off the thing was enough to make Tyr want to take his own life had he the faculties to do so. So heavy were the emotions, so inhuman and yet so relatable that he wished in his deepest being for an end. It was lonely, though not by so simple a word could this feeling be communicated.

A regret for existing, an immense need for balance – everything was wrong. And so nothing had been returned, and joined the spark. Darkness by another name perhaps, the concept of... Of nothing, void beyond shadow or darkness – because darkness requires light to define it. That was the key, definition.

It wanted to know what it was.

The philosopher simply asks themselves 'who' or 'what' am I – when they ponder beneath burning candles in the night. But everything was, it knew, and in doing so it knew nothing at all. A contradiction was necessary to define, to be, it wanted to exist in the way that only something like that could. And thus came its twin.

And again for eternity they swam around one another in a lazy ellipse, two sparks of black and white gently spinning. From the reaction of everything and nothing, came something, the gray at its middle. So many things, though they were things that could never be explained, not yet defined themselves, and this bred imperfection.

Things that no longer existed and never had. The light gave, and the darkness took, the cycle of balance. And through this eternal tempering came the most basic concepts that define the universe. Each of them working together to further define themselves as twin components of a singularity, an impossible intelligence at the center of anything that had ever been or would ever be, was now.

Tyr could have related it to the most beautiful song he'd ever heard, the light and the dark slamming against one another in formless waves of energy. One might think it some tug of war, some life and death struggle. But it wasn't, both forces understood their need for one another and so they remained in tune. There wasn't even a 'both' then, not yet – they were one in the same. And eventually, in a place with no numbers, nothing even remotely quantifiable, they became truly 'one' when filtered through Tyr's perception.

A black that wasn't black. A white that wasn't white.

Before time, space, gravity, color, arithmetic...

A split circle of half light, half darkness, with a single drop of each located at opposite sides of the shape, a shape he had seen before. Below the elemental pillars atop the mountain, worn on Daito's robes, and in the gray skies of his dreaming mind. And from the two contrary concepts of existence, all was one, eternal balance never to be separated no matter where the cards fell. At no point had either force truly 'thought', they were both above and below the petty concerns of agency, instinct, need or want. Impossibly complex, and simple at the same time, a machine intelligence so perfect it didn't need to think. True duality, or perhaps it was so incredible in its complexity advanced that Tyr couldn't hope to guess at it.

If anything, it was depressing just to know. They said ignorance was bliss, and while he couldn't explain it, staring at this thing in front of him weighed on him with all the force of all the seas and suns. To face this gargantuan force beyond worlds and gods and 'self' was too much, though fortunately it relaxed gradually, allowing him to breathe again. And around this union of everything and nothing came more, fractals tracing their way around the shape in a text he couldn't read, yet understood it just with a glance. True light and darkness at the core. Energy, matter, other things – more complex and fundamental mechanisms that might have been space or proto-time. The concept of infinity, everything given name and reason... Purpose?

A sound like dropping water and everything stilled, it was finished – and yet it wasn't. There was no end, there'd never been a beginning to define what might've been, was, would be, could be.

Just when it looked to be at its terminus, it froze suddenly and shattered.

Violently tearing itself apart, again and again. There were rules now, but the rules were imperfect. It restructured until it found a form that suited itself, infinite times in a way that infinity couldn't even possibly begin to quantify. To him, it looked the same, but he knew that there was nuance there. It was learning, calculating and shaping itself so quickly as to boggle the mind. Like fireworks in the night sky it was creating and destroying realities and universal laws at a ferocious clip, looking for true balance.

There was no integer for 0, just as there was no integer for infinity. This thing, and it knew it, couldn't exist – but it had to. One could weigh 50 against 50 and say they were the same, count down to the base of atoms that constituted the matter that lay on a scale. But numbers, even as humans considered them, were endless – because the universe was. There was always another calculation, another 0 until the pages they were written on consumed every tree on every world, under every sun. A thing could never be equal to another, equality was anathema to reality, and that was where the great shattering began.

The machine that had begun to go mad.

Balance never came. Even to this thing, even to everything, balance was impossible. Existence, as it had done unto itself, was to live in a constant state of imbalance, everything was. Fuel was consumed, things changed, and while it needed change – it wanted for stillness just as keenly. Destroying itself in the process, purposely, sending a vast nebula of sparks in every direction, infinite copies of itself that clashed again and again until all was a static of flickering black and white. Forever, even in his modern era they crashed together in an attempt to define and chisel themselves independently. And in that clashing Tyr saw the sun that warmed his world, a ticking clock that would one day reach its last second, unaware of it but struggling to exist in that conflagration of energies as long as it 'lived'. Gravity, spatial enforcement, an attempt to gain more mass – conflict and chaos on every imaginable level of reality.

The monolithic intelligence above it all, things that looks like universal concepts, but were alive as all things were.

All things wanted to be everything, until it all ran wild and nothing was left. And then it would start again, this great cycle. Destroying itself in the pursuit of perfection, balance, impossible even for something so grand.

He saw shoots and reeds struggling up through loamy earth, reaching for that sun. The constant, unceasing struggle. The void pressing down in an attempt to claim all, that's what these things were made to do. Definition had been a curse, the source of all chaos that was at the same time so necessary to the fundamental fabric of existence. If anything, it was the most cosmically grand exhibition of an acceptance of failure, the only component among everything that didn't exist in the duality was the realization that it wasn't perfect and could never be.

But it would try, flaws running wild until the sea of blinking lights and universe spanning aurora's were thrashing about like the sea amidst the storm.

Even this 'God', the supreme creator had failed, recognized its failure and yet still attempted to perfect itself to this day. To struggle was to will for something, while accepting that a lack of struggle was giving face to what would happen otherwise. Which was a flaw, and therefore imperfect, the great lie at the center of all things. To be nothing, not even nothing wanted to be nothing. Nothing was a thing, a concept, and that made it something – the first law broken. Things had to be, from the most simple to the most grandiose design of the universe. This was the dao, what had come first. God was the dao and dao was God. Everything, always, on a level where no word existed for it.

From the original dao came concepts beyond the gods, and from them came the gods themselves in their earliest state. Celestial entities that sat sovereign over one of infinite threads, to put it simply would to say that indeed – time was a god as any other because it'd been made construct and real by the dao. 'God' had no meaning, the trees, a patch of dirt, the space between atoms, these things were all gods in their own way by that reckoning.

Things that wanted to be, ideas, the most primordial being thoughtless and eternal. Order and chaos came first of all, these twin concepts waging another war until others came of it. Destruction, existence, creation, entropy. From these came life and death, and from life came more easily understood things. Life, reality, existence, matter, the reaction between bonded atoms – radiation and decay. Nature, knowledge, mountains and streams, worlds of vast imperfection – half made things – they were destroyed and remade eternally until their perceived imperfections were hammered down. Made uniform under competing forces, cubes and all manner of harsh geometry became smoother. And they considered, changed and altered, made more of their kind to aid in their grand labor of cosmic architecture. And from these others came more literally defined universal laws like physics, gravity, time, everything a man might know or hope to understand.

All at once, the clock hadn't started yet, not yet. Worlds might have bloomed with continent spanning forests and seas rife with fish – but to these primordial entities, that had never happened at all. Outside time, all stacked up in so many layers of glass before they shattered it. Remade, and did it again, the loop unceasing, and each time more was added until the imperfection became maddening.

They watched, made alterations as it went, all of these things. To call them gods couldn't be accurate, a misnomer born of oversimplification, but they were not the dao. Dao didn't do, it just was. They were just products of it, the dao was above all of these beings and they were akin to its children. The first 'living' things. Devouring one another in an endless cycle of gluttony until those that came first were torn apart to give form to the cosmos.

Endless struggle to pursue perfection, despite knowing very well it would never come. A sea of stars built atop the skeletal remains of celestial titans, and it was terrifying to behold how willing they were to accept this end. An end, but also an eternity, they did not think – they just did. A storm of order and chaos, a war in the heavens beyond the very concept of a kingdom in the sky. Failed, imperfect products of cosmic blunder. There was no duality without imperfection, and both sides of this cosmic conflict wanted the complete opposite for the future, magnetism. Nothing and everything. It scratched at his mind so fiercely that he willed for death yet again. And with this thought, his perspective changed.

Fire acting as some sort of cosmic pilot to settle the scene on a barren world of molten rock, blistering storms scalding its surface. It started small, but would grow larger as orbiting satellites slammed into its surface, boiling with the rest of it. Elements forced together through insane chemical reactions of such complexity he could barely understand even though it offered him the truth. The gravity of the sun forced it into a shape, and it became a world, a very early example of one, now that time was a construct by which his perception could be filtered.

As it cooled, water came, both from within and without, its atmosphere developing from the gases released by the burning earth. What had once been a scarlet marble became dark and gray. And what was dark and gray was cooled by rains of carbon, methane, sulfur freezing over as it catapulted through space. Finally settling in the orbit of a larger newborn star, the icy shelf slowly melting. Gradually wreathed with moss and lichen, algae seas providing a bounty of life. Bacteria evolved, devouring one another for eons, becoming tiny little eels that would later become fish. Arthropods and mollusks of every size, shape, and color filled this ocean of theirs and the struggle continued.

Everything became the kill, survival, all things both wanted and needed to continue existing and so they evolved and developed to become more efficient at it. The rip and tear. The end of be ended.

He saw infinite variety, the beauty of life, some crawling from the sea to hunt and take. More blood, tearing, the teeth, plates, and claws. An all consuming hunger simply to exist causing all of this madness to take place. From the very first, the universe was defined by a cycle of kill or be killed down to its most basic level. It was the only thing this grand intelligence considered sacred.

The struggle.

Only through struggle could it reach the realm it craved.