Once, I was a god.

My children, you were born from my dreams, naked and wondering at the world I made for you. I gave you the secrets of stone and fire, and you rose up to exalt my name. Over long centuries of honest toil your worship went from wicker mannequins to grand temples, your homes from rude shelters to shining towers. All in my name! All to my glory!

I remember those wondrous days, and the memory is agony.

Please understand, my children, that omniscience is not as useful as you might think. Knowledge and sight of all things seems a mighty tool, but it leaves one vulnerable if it can be compromised. Such was my weakness. I saw all, I knew all, except for one unseen shadow that entered my realm. I had not even the conception that there was something I could not see. Thus, I was blind to it as it grew, as it took in villians and malcontents, as it claimed the innocent and helpless as sacrifices. By the time I realized the extent of the threat it had already gained great power and was posed for war.

My divinity was pit against the darkness of the shadow. You, my children, were my faithful bulwark against the legions of the fallen for so long. You might have been victorious, if not for my… ignorance? Hubris? Perhaps both. I failed you, my children. I believed the intentions of the enemy to be those of a conqueror. What else could be the goal except domination of all of creation? Again, my presumed omniscience was my weakness. I assumed my world was all there was because it was all I had ever seen. It never occurred to me that this shadow had come from somewhere else, not as a conqueror, but as a raider.

The enemy gleefully set the world to burn, and lost nothing as my creation turned to ash. I, however, grew weaker with every act of rampant destruction, less able to act. The conflict reached a tipping point, and on that dark day the shadow swept out and consumed the remnants of my world. While I was reeling from that blow, it reached out again and tore my power from me.

My world, ruined. My children, extinct. My power, broken.

I know you are gone, my children. It gives me some comfort to dream that you are with still me somehow. I believe I am sane enough to recognize this as madness, but it is a gentle madness.

I watched the shadow as it fled with the stolen life of my world, and was thus enlightened to the truth that my world was not everything. Mine was just one world of many, separated by the thinnest of veils and my own assumptions. I found the discovery that life would carry on elsewhere to be of no comfort.

I chased in the wake of that ravenous shadow. Through the feather-soft curtains of false reality, past so many living worlds with their own gods, past worlds drained of life and purpose like my own, until the shadow came to this world, the Oruke. I slipped into this realm like a thief in the night, but I had no power to take vengeance. It was all I could do to stay hidden and occasionally prey on inhabitants of this place that were fool enough to be isolated. There was some small belief to be had in being a dark fable that elders would use to warn the youth against sin and wanderlust. So it was for many years, as I learned what I could of my enemy.

I learned my enemy was no shadow, and I learned my enemy was not alone. Two gods wearing the mantles of Order and Chaos ruled this alien place, and took it in turn to reign. One would go forth beyond the curtains, and become the enemy of some other world. There it would rend and tear away whatever worthy trophy it could, dragging the prize back to strengthen the Oruke. While one was gone, the other would wax mighty and the servants thereof would dominate the servants of the other. Eventually the raider would return to take up the crown while the other went abroad, and dominance would cycle in favor of the resident deity. In such a manner the Oruke grew by leaps and bounds.

I learned that gods, even in tandem, have limitations. The Oruke grew so large that every time a god went forth the edges of the realm would fray. These two gods had a solution in hand, though. Each following raid came back not only with stolen life but with a defeated divinity in bondage as well. Fallen gods were taken into unseen places, broken, and broken, and broken again until they were far from what they once were. My children, the gods that emerged from the darkness were but loyal slaves, tasked to hold the edges of the Oruke and enforce the will of their masters. So it was that three gods and three were taken, broken, changed to be slaves to Order and Chaos.

All through this I consumed unwary mortals, keeping to the shadows, and took what belief I could from the fearful legends of my prey. In truth, my existence became easier with the advent of the new gods. They were made wild by Chaos, obsessive by Order, and they had no tolerance for those beholden to the other. Under their influence the small wars and triumphs that occurred when one of Order and Chaos were away instead became vicious conflicts and near genocides. Each conflict was rife with opportunity for predation on my part.

It is to my shame that I do not understand all of what happened next, my children.

I know that there were beings that were not sworn to endless war. Instead, some strived to grow stronger through peace, while others instead sought easy power by scavenging the battlefields. The peaceful ones found themselves prey to all sides when the wars escalated, and their losses were legion.

I know that despite these losses, exceptional beings emerged. They did not come to my attention until their quest was well underway. They named themselves the Claimants. There was the Dreamer, the one who birthed mad schemes no other would consider. There was the Paragon, who was the stabilizing presence, the steady hand that carried on past distraction and frustration. Last, there was the Traitor, who provided knowledge and power before failing in an attempt to seize everything for themselves.

I know what they carried with them, my children, for I saw them carrying an orb, a map, and a knot of magic. I know the six new gods were pursuing them, for that very pursuit cut my own observation short. So it is that I do not know how these Claimants ended the Oruke.

End it they did. Everything, gone. The curtains had fallen. Not just the Oruke, but all the worlds were undone! No light, no dark, just oblivion. In those moments I was but a fading spark, burning dimmer and dimmer in the face of annihilation, and it was wonderful. Peace, at last, to rest alongside you in sweet nothingness, my children. Oh, to be gone with you forever!

Yet before the end of all, there was light and dark. The spark of my self grew again, and I watched a new world being born.

Picture, if you will, a glass-like orb floating in an empty void, belted by a plane of roiling smoke. The smoke was the stuff of chaos made manifest, a cloud that churned with bursts of energy and matter, riven with coiling lengths of unthinkable life that would gel and swiftly dissolve in the turmoil. It was the most nightmarish of creatures swept from the depths of the sea, warping and melting among impossible geometries, all mercifully shrouded in its own steaming, burning detritus. Distinct from this writhing horror was the grand orb, perfect in curve, a translucent sphere rendered opaque by its very mass. The orb would be much simpler for mortal minds to survey, though it was just as terrifying in truth. It was the defining power of order triumphant, where all things end in final, unmoving death. Such were the divine mantles of chaos and order, rendered through the lens of mundane senses.

That I could see those wonders at all was due to a distant light. Low and far away shone an orange sun sunk deep into the plane of chaos, blazing wildly with sweeping flares of solar fury. A massive vortex circled the sun, leaving a wake of nothingness as it carved through the chaotic plane. Through the blur of passing months the sun would rise up out of the chaotic plane to shine down from high in the void. As any months passed again to see the sun set back down in the swirling cauldron. All through this cycle the vortex orbited the sun, spinning in a comparative blur that obscured in flickering cycles of light and dark.

Time was passing, faster and faster.

Over blurring decades the orb and the smoke made contact, and where this happened matter would accrete. Nearest the orb, order dominated, defining potential into a mountainous shell of stone. The shell was riddled with pockets of trapped chaotic energy, just stable enough to form into endless flows of fire and water. These flows built tremendous pressure within the stone, splitting and melting the surrounds to vent out into the void. The shell grew further out in towering formations of stone. Over the passing years some spires collapsed under their own weight as the burgeoning mass achieved its own gravity. Only near the soon buried orb, where the influence of unbreakable order was at its greatest, did the spires stand strong.

These spires hung below the orb as well. They were defiant and precarious as the roots of some vast tree digging into the uncaring void. The underside was a landscape only blessed by the light of the sun for a few days each year. It is here I found that the act of observation had consequences. I had seen the sun-kissed side of this spreading mass and believed that to be the surface. This belief had imprinted upon the reality of this place. Below, in the cold and the dark, the masses of stone too weak to resist gravity spiraled away into the void rather than crash to rest. In places those falling spires tore away whole swaths of territory, leaving the median of the world exposed. Within these breeches were rivers and seas of roiling chaos, vomiting forth water and fire in uneven measure.

Matter churned out of the tides of the far reaches of chaos. Things alive, things never alive, things that should never have been, the land was pushed ever outward from the central orb while chaotic detritus washed upon the shores of the upper world. The incursion of order had stabilized the edges of chaos into turbulent seas and occasional pockets of endless flame. Deep below the waters the primal chaos vomited forth strange structures from places that never were, shattered towers drunkenly leaning against each other in the deep. They created a seabed made of broken dreams and ruined nightmares beneath the spreading sea. Living masses borne misshapen from the liquid womb of chaos were pushed relentlessly by the waves toward land. They were doomed horrors, nightmares of flesh and bone that were gasping in death before they even fell shuddering on solid ground. The beaches of this world were open graves, where the gathering carcasses would gently desiccate under the flickering glare of the sun.

So it went, until a tiny shard of life succeeded within the charnel wreckage. I do not see it myself, but I saw its wake. Rot took hold, turning the mounds of dead into a riot of putrefaction. Ghastly as it was, it was assuredly life, and it begat life. The rot grew thick, innovating with the empowerment of chaos. Plants and fungi began to bloom in lethal competition. Massive leaves that hoarded the sun’s blessings challenged roots that tore the hardest stone. Floating masses of acidic algae raced against grasping carnivorous kelp to be the first to consume the endless bounty of death upon the waters. Parasitic growths, ambulatory foliage, incendiary secretions, this world became a long emerald war that never truly found ceasefire.

It was inevitable that once plants had taken hold, higher life would follow. Small creatures of chaos struggled against their own bizarre biology in the spreading verdance. They were so unstable it took scores of generations for bare handfuls of the beasts to develop any strains of stability, and always new abominations came tumbling out of the waves. My observation was a blur of years where life would haltingly take hold under starless skies, beaches were checkered white with flesh-stripped bones, and the land beyond grew green.

The push of green toward the central mountains slowed, grinding down, finally halting at the foothills of those peaks of crowned stone. It was not that the march of life had reached a limit, but that the march of time had slowed to what you, my children, might consider a normal pace.

So it is that now I look out on a virgin world and feel only despair. I see past the illusion of that sun and that vortex and instead behold my enemies, two gods dancing contentedly in the firmament. The curtains that separated the worlds remain fallen, and all other worlds are gone. This is all there is, one place, one time, one song in the void.

I hate it so, my children. For one blissful moment, everything was gone, and now there is this fresh heartache. I want this misery to be over.

I gaze from the point of one of the great central spires, watching as new lights shine in the celestial dome. They are points of radiance shining down in a plethora of colors, and they are moving. These lights trace grand arcs across the vacant sky, drawing toward this fledgling world in ever tightening spirals. The lights shine so brightly as they approach the collective glare creates a false dawn. Recall that time has slowed to a mortal pace, my children. These lights are moving at unthinkable speed, and they are coming closer.

I can taste three of these stars. I know them. One is the Traitor, who provided knowledge and power before failing in an attempt to seize everything for themselves. One is the Paragon, who was the stabilizing presence, the steady hand that carried on past distraction and frustration. Finally, the Dreamer, the one who birthed mad schemes no other would consider. Those wonderful heralds of destruction, those self-styled Claimants.

My children, let us depart this spire. We take flight down bloodcurdling heights, past a trapped node of chaos spewing boiling water down the mountainside, wreathing the stone in thick steam. We descend where the waterfall was trapped for an age by the foothills before the relentless flow ripped a path free. We follow the path, now a river, moving inevitably onward toward the girding ocean. At times small creeks meander away, but the river does not cease, encased in thirsting green growth as it drives through the land. We fly above it all, to where the river finally breaks to flood the plains and sands at the ocean’s edge. There! A handful of these stellar sparks, coming down in the heart of a delta.

Legions of stars land all over this world. They touch lightly upon solid earth, and halt, and the world moves beneath us as if struck with force. Shadows peel away from what we have observed, duplications and variations of the land and of time. Each is a potential now, all of it less real than when this divergence began. There is no true reality bar the great crowned mountain at the centre of it all, and the far reaches where the tides melt into chaos. Ah, and the stellar masses that bring night and day to it all. Alas, those seats of power remain unshaken, for now.

After many hours of travel from that spire, now lost in the distance, we are near enough the array of fallen stars that we pursued to give them scrutiny. Lying flat on the sands they resemble crystalline jewels, if jewels were commonly two meters long and a meter wide. Oh, how they shine, blazing bright as the great vortex orbiting the sun is at its furthest from this world. That solar sphere is bordered by the visible darkness of the vortex. The result is a black halo that heralds the point when the might of Order is at its nadir. What better time for the Claimants to awaken?

Do you see how within each crystal is a singular shadow? And this one! The shadow contained within is moving, my children! The shadow lashes with one limb against the inside of the monolithic structure, the other limb clutching some object. The pounding goes on for a time, growing weaker with each blow. The encasing star gives way before whatever is within succumbs. The top slides to the right, just a crack, and there is a gasp as the thing inside scrambles desperately for air. The revealed panel is forced further away, and…

Oh, me. He looks so much like you did, my children. He is unlike the creatures of Oruke. He is of flesh and bone, limbs and senses. He looks so much like you did.

Existence is endless, mindless cruelty, my children, as evidenced by this egregious insult. I would crush this mockery of your grace into dust! I would bring my divine wrath upon him! Yet I achieve nothing, and when my impotent fury passes I realize this man is not even a Claimant. The Claimant I sought remains trapped in one of the crystals, these Manifest Chrysalids.

The man tumbles helplessly from his crystalline cradle onto the sand, a tangle of limbs in awkward positions. After a few moments his boneless flailing puts him onto his side, revealing a small wooden box that had been clasped to his chest. His legs continue to kick weakly, slowly levering him over onto his back.

Look at those eyes, my children! The dilation is such that the irises are tiny slivers. The body twitches in tiny increments, the breathing shallow yet labored. As the minutes pass, he seems to be trying to gain purchase against the sands with his right hand. He makes increasing headway and nearly an hour after having fallen he manages to sit up.

His jaw hangs open, slack. A trickle of swiftly-cooling saliva dribbles from his lower lip and lands in his lap, eliciting no reaction whatsoever. This lasts for but a moment as the weak momentum from sitting up fails him, and he falls back, prone once more with an audible thump. The wooden box tumbles nervelessly from his left hand, and in doing so the lid loosens. There is a burst of multicolored sparks from within, and then a silence only disturbed by the quiet shifting of sand as the man turns his head. The eyes seem more normal now, and… oh! Sentience! That was not there before.

It is unfortunate that this is not the Claimant. This one cannot teach me what I need to know.

In defiance of all reason, the least of beings rose up and succeeded in shattering the very foundations of the Oruke. One of those aforementioned beings is cradled in a yet unbreached chrysalis, here on this ossuary shoreline. So close! Yet for now, I must remain hidden from the eyes of those who conquered us before, my children. A movement on my part at the right moment will see the Claimant awakened by this vile parody that apes your likeless. With that awakening, I will watch, and I will learn. I will find the strength I need, and I will be the ruin of the gods and their slaves, of this new world, of everything. In the end, when there is nothing else, I too will embrace the end. My children, all of reality will be our honor guard and our funeral pyre.

I love you so much, my children. I promise you that we will be together again, after all.