CREATION

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS DARKNESS. A BLACK VOID WITH NOT A TRACE of light to be found. Empty, cold, no sense of good and evil, right and wrong. As equal as it could be. Life had not formed, the planets and the solar systems not existing in this thick blackness.

There was no concept of time, no living beings to experience its passage. One could almost say that if there were anything in this void, it would be frozen, still as a picture.

And that was how it was, until something miraculous happened.

An explosion of raw energy rippled through the darkness, forming the first twinkling of stars. And as the energy expanded, reaching fathoms and lengths unimaginable, some of it began to coalesce, amalgamating into a new form. A trunk, with five appendages attached – to arms, two legs, and one head. And in this dark vacuum, the form began to take its first breath.

Life had been created.

Millennia passed as the energy continued to expand, and this new life form began to understand its functions. But something was missing.

This form was alone in this vast new universe.

It took many millennia more, but the form soon learned how to create worlds – universes, dimensions, solar systems, planets – and fill them with life. Beings designed to be born, grow, reproduce, and perish over a set course of time, another new concept introduced to this fledgling universe. Over the course of several hundred years, thousands of worlds were created and filled with millions upon millions of life forms to call them home. To accomplish this, a device was created, a device requiring four keys to use. While the device was open, the worlds would continue to be filled with life; should the device be closed with these four keys, all mortal life would cease to be.

But soon, he found these worlds to be too numerous, this singular universe becoming too crowded. And so, he separated them, each one becoming its own universe, each universe having its own set of rules, having separate dimensions to each universe – each dimension similar, yet different, to the prime universe.

It was not enough. He needed others like him, others who lacked a concept of time and death. He needed others who could watch over these worlds, watch over the creatures he had created. Each one would need to rule over a certain domain, each one would need to have a particular job and set of skills to make each world function.

The first of his new children, he named Yahweh. Yahweh was given control over the domain of light of the remains of the original universe, and alongside him, Lucifer was created to hold dominion over the dead. More were created to join them – Zeus, who would command the skies; Poseidon, who would command the seas; Hades, who would join Lucifer in guiding the dead.

More and more were created as the decades and centuries passed. Ra, Ammut, Anubis, Shiva, Asura, Amatarasu, so many that for even him to name them all would take the lifetime of a single mortal being.

As for all the collective universes, he needed someone to watch over them, someone to uphold the laws that he had set forth. Kronos was created to serve that purpose, watching the universes from his cosmic observatory, while Thanatos was created to be the superior to Anubis, Lucifer, and Hades, watching and guiding the dead in their journey to the afterlife.

The children were given their duties, each one assigned a specific task, and warned that they were to not wage direct combat with each other.

With his new children formed, their duties known to them, he flung the four keys to the far reaches of the cosmos, so far that eve he could not know where they would land. By doing this, it was ensured that whoever sought the keys would have to spend several millennia, if not longer, searching for the keys if they wished to close the device providing life to this new multiverse.

But then, long after the creation of these new worlds, his fears became reality, as Thanatos began his quest to gather the keys, soon coming upon three of the four keys.

The fourth key was still out there.