14 In The Beginning There Were The Lords

But first let's get a misconception in the letter. We are not old.

Your species is old, your world is old, Creation is old. We are ancient, younger than none and older than all. Now back to the story.

In the beginning, or rather the time before the beginning , there were the Ancient Lords. Amica, Ordina and us, Sator Ni'Mad. In this age before time there was only the shapeless void. This place was where we all resided, time and space, change and stasis, life and death, nothing had shape, not as long as it remained there. This void was of perfect order and we slumbered in contentment, but our sisters wanted something that could never form here. They wanted change.

They shaped the void, bending and tearing it away from itself and through their actions time was somehow born though they do not know how. With it came the change that they had wanted.

As time flowed space chased it down as it came into being and made what would later be dubbed Creation for it was that act that birthed it. In the early point of its existence Creation ran wild colours, energies and possibilities you could not imagine nor perceive bounced through time unbound by such petty rules like logical causality. Ordina looked upon this place and was content for it was as chaotic as she was and could in be so easily molded, Amica saw the sea of wild power as too chaotic and random and wished to improve it, and we saw it only as tainted by chaos, something that had to be drawn back into our void. Whether we liked Creation or not we were unable to enter it for it existed separately from the nothingness beyond and it seemed that this maddened realm would blight us forever.

That was until from the infinite fates of the primordial chaos the First Gods were born. Beings of incandescent light and corporeal sound and possibilities who's presence pained the soul and deadened the mind, they were in all sense of the word souls formed from the wild magic of Creation coalescing into a sentient framework.

They converged and chanted their eldritch songs writing the laws that would govern the world seemingly on a whim so as to make it easier to shape. They were cleaver beings back then, they built great things and never died, with their introduction of laws to bind reality the energies slowed and condensed leaving the world black.

Then a light appeared, the first star. The First Gods were enraptured by its glow and sparked a thousand dawns. These stars moved and grouped forming galaxies and clusters growing and dying in a great harmonic cycle that spanned across the great innumerable vastness of reality.

Amica was pleased and enraged, for though a harmonic cycle had been born the First Gods lived outside it and would push back the laws they wrote if they began to inconvenience them. But they continued unabated making things built on dead constants and destroyed laws and held they figurative heads high for they were the sole rulers of their lifeless dominion. That was until they discovered the Ancient Lords, and our intentions.

For the first time in their existence they felt an emotion that was later named fear. So they shaped Creation into vast bodies so that they could fight us and they made the greatest of their stars into a cage to house our remains and sang their songs to draw us into their realm.

But instead they were dragged into ours.

From their souls we forged our body a great draconian void that shimmered like the stars that had cherished so dearly , from their corpses in all their variety Ordina made her patchwork form and from what was left Amica made a great crystal tree that glimmered with their light. What entered Creation was greater than even the First Gods had been, we each had seven souls each making up a part of our being with our prime soul at our centres. We drifted into different points of existence our minds adjusting to a vast but finite form, and prepared to shape Creation as they had. Only one of them survived past this point and gave us each the first of our many titles based on their songs.

She Who's Melody Deadens Thought.

The Song That Unfolds Reason.

And last but not least. He Who Shall Sing The End of Time.

Then space collapsed. Apparently opening existence itself into a realm who's sole defining feature was its lack of being never ends well for anything. Every star, every world, every God was lost to the dark and with the collapse of Creation it was born anew with just enough force to push us into slumber. So we slept through the births and death of stars and worlds, and when we awoke we were each introduced to something new.

Life.

The living things of creations were lesser than those that preceded them, they did not articulate concepts, they did not build like the First Gods had done, they were small, their lives measuring in years at the most and days at the least, they were merely animals who did not resist as we and Ordina began our crusade against what was and shape it to our ideals. Each of us bore seven souls to house our sentience, even one of which could easily oppose a First God, ours bore names that even now dragons and their relative species associate with their gods, Tiamat, Bahamut, Leviathan, Behemoth, Kur, Apophis and our central soul Sator, we traveled through the streams of time like you would through air feeding on the magics of worlds and stars, Ordina took a segments of Creation and made places where time moved oddly, days could become centuries, millenia could become seconds. As for Amica, she took root around a star and stretched her roots across time so that she could raise and tend to the harmonic cycle of life and death that life had introduced to her. Of us all Amica was the most content, happy with the world's she'd built and guarded, but in time even she saw fault in her perfect realm, a fault the rest of us happily accepted. The first sentient beings.

They were no stronger than the beasts they shared their world with, yet they were clever, they made tools and fire to push back the wild, they grew crops to last through the winters, and they in time built civilizations and other great things, like the First Gods.

Oddly like the First Gods.

Suspiciously like the First Gods. Because in a way that was what they were, because there is really only one thing that separates sentient beings from animals is that their bodies are vessels for their souls, the only real thing that differs between a pony for example and a First God is the amount of magic that makes up their soul, which meant that if we took souls we could make them into little First Gods and with enough of them reach a point of power where we could sing the end of time, and with it retroactively omit Creation from ever actually being.

Our plan went from large scale genocide, to metaphysical annihilation which we dubbed the Blackmarch.

Amica's went from cultivation of life to extermination of sentience lest they become like the First Gods before them.

And Ordina... Went on being the same but now with someone to 'appreciate' her work.

So we marched through time devouring civlizations and then destroying them again two thousand years later amassing souls from their bodies and their gods and in turn power leaving only an ever growing trail of paradoxes behind us. After the first two billion years of linear time we were really the only thing holding the timeline together. A detail that became really important later on.

When we reunited with our sisters.