Prologue - Thus He Sundered
Our story begins with the Titans. These were an ancient race formed out of the early days of the universe, when the expanding energies and spacetime were yet to be confounded by the passage of aeons. Specifically, we will follow one of their great innovators, one whose name was forsaken long ago so that he may better serve his people: Elder Titan.
As with all protagonists, he has a major part in our story. In fact, it wouldn't exist without his mistake. Yes, mistake. He remembers only vaguely his wrongdoing.
There he was, at the Forge of Creation. Ah, the Forge... it is not an object alone; it has copies, different versions of itself across all planes of creation. Which means that, yes, it existed in the past, in the future, and also in the present. It was everywhere in space, and yet somehow could be approached only through the path of the Titans. Hewn of the earliest rock and imbued with the proto-energies of the universe, this Forge's power to create was deeply revered by all. And Elder Titan? He was the Master Shaper of his people, the only one permitted to lay his hands on it. It was the greatest honor one could be bestowed with.
The title of Master Shaper meant one thing first and foremost: that he alone, among all that lived and breathed in the vastness of the cosmos, was allowed to tamper with the fundamental forces and fine-tuned truths of reality. He alone was allowed to hew concepts out of nothingness. Time, light, entropy, the very nature of space... all could be altered, so long as the change could be conceived in thought. And once the hammer was raised and pounded on the anvil, the changes would take form, for the Master Shapers are the innovators of the Titan race, creating realities and dimensions in the same way peoples of this time invent machines, or craft weapons, or discover technologies.
Elder Titan had a particular liking for the physical universe. It was a nexus, a place of experimentation and diversity. Perhaps it was only this very specific interest that saved all realities from what would come next. Being a Master Shaper was his great power... and his great undoing.
At the very moment he raised the hammer, into his mind came an insidious thought -- a thought of the physical universe allowed to run itself, wherein the fundamental forces ran amok, settling among themselves the disputes of reality. He only realized the true potential of this thought once his strike had landed on the anvil. Immediately, the physical reality he knew changed. No longer bound by the tight regulations of Master Shapers past, the fundamental forces revealed their unbridled power. Rifts too many and too diverse in nature to control began springing up everywhere. A mad lightshow of the energies and forces of creation displayed before his eyes. Time was twisted, reality warped. Chaos enveloped him, and he knew he had done something of horrible consequence to one of the most important planes hewn of Titan toil. He had handed over its fate to forces that could not think beyond their own scope, that could not comprehend anything other than themselves. The other Titans, they would be fine. Living amongst themselves in a specially designed dimension ruled by its own laws and forces, they would see the shaken physical universe as we would see a distant fire. Except that this fire marked the destruction of their greatest experiment. One that could never be repaired, only tossed aside.
In that maelstrom, nothing made sense. In a second, aeons could pass, and every step could deliver one to the very edges of known creation. In his stumbling, he fell. The manifestation of the Forge shattered, and the path of Titans crumbled beneath him. Into the largest rift he fell. He knew not where he would be dispensed, or when; only that what he would see next would be a horrifying version of creation -- one he had created.
Chapter I - The Worldsmith Wakes
What is it like to 'wake up?' If you had asked him this before his mistake, he could have answered you in thousands of ways, for there were thousands of dimensions each with their own equivalent. But in this reality, governed by time and space and entropy and order, he experienced waking up as the denizens knew it.
His memory of the Forge of Creation faded into a blurry haze, and his mind turned to black. And in this blackness it stayed. He didn't know for how long. As a Titan, he had always known of the concept of sleep, though he never needed it. But for the first time, he felt it -- it, a state of unconsciousness, where one is not aware of oneself or the world beyond. It was his first taste of the Void Before... and so when wakefulness came streaming back into him, he embraced it and threw his eyes open, preferring any manner of chaos to the desolate thoughtlessness.
He breathed, his eyes straining to absorb light. All he saw was a vastness of pale blue, stretching up and down and side to side endlessly. He jerked upright and sat for a moment. Soon, his eyes wandered over the area.
Brown rocks. Sharp, brown rocks everywhere, jagged and broken and strewn about on a floor of hot brown sand. Behind him stood a sheer cliff, marked by sharp protrusions and asymmetrical patterns. In front of him stretched a field of brown and heat haze as far as the eye could see, occasionally broken by distant towers and plateaus of rock.
If you saw him, he would not have seemed panicked. His awakening would not have appeared dramatic to any onlooker. After all, he did not crash into the surface of the world like a meteor would have. No crater marked his arrival; that is not how he came to be here. He simply appeared, spit out of the chaotic rift at a random point in time and space. To you, he would simply have been a curiosity.
But that is not how it was for him. Nothing about what he saw was intriguing. No! He was horrified. You'd need to see things as a Titan would have to understand. As a Titan, he saw fragments of his people's thoughts in reality, but not in the reality they were supposed to be in. The rocks littering the ground, why were they broken and malformed? The vast plains of desolate brown, why was it not like this everywhere? Why was there a cliff breaking the uniformity of the landscape? And where was everything's Shadow Soul: that eternal companion to all things that was representative of the object's presence and form in all the other realities? None of this was right. None of it! Why, the very sight of it all... it... it...
His heart began to pound, and his throat tightened. The Titan's limbs and body trembled. He knew what panic was: he had created it, thought it into being to add diversity to the monotonous lives of the Titans. It was hailed as the most intoxicating sensation ever born since the conception of 'fear'. But there where he sat, he experienced his own creation firsthand... and hated every second of it.
Everything he knew as wrong and unbecoming crashed into him. If to be a Titan is to have power and knowledge, then he was no longer a Titan. He did not know where he was, or when he was. He did not know the state of the fundamental forces -- how strong was gravity? What was the rate of entropy? By the Increate, questions innumerable! His mind was drowned in uncertainty, his emotions running high -- and these were the worst parts. For as long as he had worked the Forge, he merely knew of all the many concepts of creation by name. Now, he was feeling them. Experiencing them. He had never before known the feel of ignorance, or of helplessness, or of inadequacy. For a quick moment of hope he scanned the area -- the blue skies of a gloomy day above, the rocks of the fields, the face of the cliff -- for any sign of the rift that had sent him here, thinking that perhaps he could go through it and end up back at the Forge. But alas, it was gone. By now it had vanished, flattened out by the new order of a strange reality. That meant that he was trapped here, shut off from the higher dimension wherein his kin resided. In all of this physical universe, he would be alone...
He hid his face in shame and terror, his ancient mind rendered infantile as his harsh new reality attacked his senses. He screamed. He had never done that before. The sound of his roar was alien to him, too. What did he look like? Was his voice intact? Simply more questions that compounded his newfound despair. Like the reality he once knew, his life was shattered -- and there was nothing he could do about it. Cut off from the Forge of Creation, he could never reach his home dimension again unless the other Titans reached out to him. For this he hoped, but he knew as well that he had failed in their eyes. He had rendered chaotic what his people had so long wanted to order. He could never explain to them why his thoughts turned awry, anyway. In all sensible ways, Elder Titan was doomed to wander a lonesome road.
He did not know how time went by in this reality. But as far as longevity goes, he stayed that way for a while, hiding in the shadows of a sheer rock cliff, cowering from the strangeness of a new world. Crying from the loss of the only life he knew. Lamenting his weakness and his mistake. He could not bring himself to stand and brave the reality born of his wrongdoing.
*** *** ***
That is, until night came. The rocks turned cold, and all was enveloped in darkness. Elder Titan did not open his eyes to this phenomenon, but he did feel it. Naked, left with nothing from his old life, he lay there on the chilling stone. And when the winds came, he shivered. This only depressed him further. Every second he was assaulted by stimuli that you and I would take for granted; but to him, each of these were strange and frightening and not at all what he was used to. Oh, sure, he knew much and was very intelligent -- though this intelligence was almost purely invested in smithing and related disciplines -- but intelligence counts for little without experience. Elder Titan knew how to create. He did not know how to deal with creations that (he believed) turned on him.
He cursed the cold. He did not want to move. He wanted to wallow in his misery and self-loathing for an indeterminate amount of time. But the needs of his new physical body forced him to take his arms away from his face. He had to stand. And when he did so he looked up and saw something that... perhaps wasn't quite as horrifying as the rest of what he'd scene.
There, up in a black sky, was a huge luminous ball of white. It shone with a pale light that lit up the dark world with dazzling contrast; where the landscape was not black as the pit, it was a relaxing shade of light-brown. This was the Moon, of course, and Elder Titan immediately took to this light source, for he saw something of himself in it. Alone in a dark void -- oh yes, they were very much alike.
But no, the Moon wasn't alone. Surrounding it, dotting the blackness, were many other tiny points of light. Like tiny little companions, escorts of the bigger light.
These Elder Titan did not like. They ruined the thought that the big white orb was alone like him. He grumbled as his lightened mood was soured.
As Elder Titan walked towards the cliff (he had determined there had to be some crevice or cave along the face of it), he looked down at his own body. Illuminated by the Moon's pale rays, he saw for the first time his large, robust torso; he saw also his long, muscular arms that ended with hands three-fingered. Last he saw his legs, which were shaped like that of an ox: cloven and thick. And all of these covered by a layer of fine, yellow fur.
Elder Titan regarded himself for a moment, taking at least some wonder in his appearance. For as a Titan, he never had just a single form. Indeed, just as there were many versions of the Forge, so too are there many versions of all Titans, all coexisting together across all the planes of creation -- Shadow Souls, if you recall. If you and I looked upon a Titan unbroken, we would simply see layer after layer of luminous energy enshrouding an indiscernible physical core. Here, all his other selves were stripped away -- and though this worried him further, making him think on the fates of his alternate selves, he was still strangely satisfied by finally being (forcefully) shown a form that was definite.
"Now if only I could see my face," he said in a deep, smooth, elderly voice. He paused for a moment, putting a hand to his throat. "So this is what I sound like."
It wasn't an unpleasant sound, his voice. It was actually quite soothing to him, the way it was deep but kindly, powerful but gentle. Incomplete, deprived of the simultaneous intonations of his other selves, perhaps... but he took solace in the knowledge that his physical voice, at least, was not rendered grating and unpleasant by the chaos he had wrought. He would take whatever comforts he could.
When he was done digesting the mild wonder and delights of his physical form, which he had always taken for granted, he walked up to the cliff. As with the concepts of cold and panic, Elder Titan knew climbing, too -- only in a theoretical sense, of course. He had never done it before, along with just about every physical activity you and I would take for granted. The old Titan had spent his whole existence thinking and smithing out his thoughts, and so in hammering and pondering alone he excelled beyond all others.
This of course was neither of those two, and Elder Titan kept this in mind as he clumsily grabbed at the nooks and crannies of the cliff. It was hard at first. He fell a few times and landed hard on his back, cursing, considering many times just giving up. But after so many mistakes one starts to get better. He found that with his thick fingers he needn't fear the sharp edges of the rocks, and that his hooves felt nothing at all. These he planted firmly onto razor-sharp stone to support his weight, and he climbed higher and higher up the cliff. His own massive size helped, for more often than not a surface to grapple onto was just within his reach, but for us would have been too far away to get at even by jumping.
After several hours and many, many attempts, and even more close calls, he finally reached the top. He had hoped to find some shelter along the face of the cliff, but what Elder Titan saw here was even better... in a way. Tall, dark shapes sprouted up everywhere, creating a region well-protected from the cold wind that had tortured him during his ascent. Elder Titan walked into what we would call a forest.
He strode in cautiously, his giant legs thumping into the dirt and crushing leaves and twigs. These were the sounds of a living world. These were trees. And surely, there would be creatures here, too. Elder Titan was not sure how to feel about this. In letting loose chaos upon the physical universe, he feared for the fate of life. Could it survive the upheavals and wild energy he had unleashed? Here was the proof that it could and had. He should have been glad. The thought-children of the Titan race existed despite his mistake. But all the while one question kept his rejoicing at bay: what was this life like? The universal fundamentals existed in the very atoms of matter now, and they would manifest in the lives of all that lived. The fundamental of chaos, over all the others, worried him the most. He had no way yet of knowing the extent of randomness in this universe; just how much disorder was there, and all the vices that came with it? He had yet to see.
Now, it was not that he wanted to face chaos in all the ways it could manifest, but he knew it could present itself anywhere and anytime. This was no longer his orderly, obedient home dimension. This was a potentially hostile world, and he had to prepare.
He crouched low underneath the trees, taking cover underneath the shadow of their leaves. Then he looked at his hands. Perhaps he had already been stripped of all honor and recognition by his kin back home, but Elder Titan was still a Titan. At least, he was physically one. He did not know the state of his other selves, but the fact was that all versions of all Titans had power. In the same way that you and I may take our bodily functions for granted, the Titans too -- for all their brilliance and forethought -- sometimes neglected themselves. In Elder Titan's case, he did not know what his physical form was capable of alone.
He tried everything he was able to do effortlessly when he was whole. He tried to think something into creation. He tried to alter on a quantum level the state of his surroundings. Nothing worked. The trees and the wind continued to exist as they always did. He growled and slammed a fist into a rock, smashing it.
At this, he paused. No, no, he was doing it all wrong. He had a physical body now -- and what was that ancient science his people dedicated to the study of this specific aspect of their being? Oh yes, biology. And as he recalled, it was known that the brain released constant waves of psychic energy. This energy was not nearly powerful enough to alter matter on a quantum level, yes. But if he could somehow focus that energy, make do with physical changes in a physical world, with his physical body...
He breathed deep and focused. He wanted an element, a very particular element known for its usage in Titan terraforming tools. Astatine it was called, and it was known for its highly radioactive nature; so radioactive, in fact, that enough of it to see with your own eyes would radiate heat so intense it would literally disintegrate itself. Elder Titan did not know if this world had any Astatine, but he wanted it. He needed it. Used just right, it could be a powerful weapon.
He could feel his brain waves exerting themselves across the whole planet, reaching deep into the earth. This was a taxing endeavor. His whole being had always worked in tandem to achieve feats that would be considered godlike, but now he had only his physical form's power. Great it was, yes, but merely a fraction of what he once had. Worse was the fact that Elder Titan simply wasn't used to relying on and focusing a single one of his abilities.
Still, aeons of experience won the day. After many excruciating minutes, from the earth in front of Elder Titan burst forth thousands of tiny, green-glowing motes of dust. Elder Titan could feel the heat as the astatine radiated its radioactive light. Had he not been keeping the miniscule amount together with his force of will, the precious motes would have evaporated and scattered to the wind.
In his mind he was visualizing a weapon: a hammer of stone and steel imbued with the powerful heat of astatine. He merged the glowing astatine motes into a single, larger mass. Their combined heat was so great that the nearby twigs and leaves were beginning to smoke, though Elder Titan himself felt only a comforting warmth. The nearby environment did not have his durability, though, and he had no intention of going around starting fires. If Elder Titan was going to weaponize this element, he had to work fast.
He set to it immediately. Still keeping the astatine in a single mass, he extended his will over the nearby rocks and sand. He pulled them towards him, gathering them up in a pile for him to survey. Like he had done with the astatine, he pulled out the elements he needed from the very stones of the world, and began forging a hammer for his usage.
A perk of having a very experienced, ancient mind: abruptly challenged as Elder Titan's was, he nonetheless required very little practice to become proficient. Minutes after he had begun using his telekinetic prowess, he was already throwing matter around expertly, multitasking with extreme precision. Crushing rocks with his mind and melting them together with the heat of the astatine, he tempered the form of his new hammer. By removing unwanted elements from the sand, he created grains of fine, translucent compounds. These, too, he smelted together. His weapon was taking form: a massive thing with a heavy head and a handle of stone, coated in a layer of thick steel composed of elements wrenched straight from the rocks. Within this hammer was a hollowed area coated with lead, and into this compartment Elder Titan placed the astatine mass with his own hands. He then sealed the opening with freshly molten steel, which he cooled with water taken straight from the atmosphere.
And there it was, floating before him. His weapon of choice. A hammer imbued with the extreme heat of astatine that only his thick hands could handle untroubled. The steel-coated head of stone was rippled with veins of tough, translucent material where the heat was even greater; one strike from this hammer and any opponents of the Titan would be left with fatal burns, if the sheer force of the strike didn't outright kill them.
Elder Titan was proud of his first worldly craft, though he wished he didn't have to use it. He had spent all his life creating and breathing life into things, and though he approached existence with logic in mind -- for example, that 'killing' something wasn't quite the dilemma it was made to be; it was merely changing the state of a living being's body such that the integral functions of life were stopped -- he still would rather not need to prematurely end what nature birthed, however wild and disorderly a nature it was. This whole plane was still his, after all, even if it was nothing like it should have been. He would give his thought-offspring the greatest of considerations before resorting to force.
Elder Titan grasped the hammer in his hand and got a feel for it. Oh, it was quite heavy -- for us it would have required many bodies to lift, let alone handle as a weapon. But for a Titan, it was as easy in the hands as would be a sword for us. For testing purposes he approached a nearby clearing, where a large rock was surrounded by a sparser treeline. Here, for a few minutes, he swung his new creation into the ground, and into the stone, and into the trees. The rocky matter was crushed and cracked and turned red from heat, and the trees broke in half and were burnt and smoked. At one point a fire started; Elder Titan panicked, but quickly stamped it out.
At last he sat down and calmed himself. He did not know if his new body needed to eat or drink, or even to rest, as he knew other forms of life needed to do. Certainly he felt drained, but that could be partially attributed to the somber state of his thoughts and emotions. It also didn't help that, apparently, his physical form was that indeed of an elder Titan. But as of the moment, he felt he could go on further. He had to, if he was to learn more about this new world and of its life. He still had some of his old power. Perhaps he could at least put it to use. He would search for a way to return to the Forge and right his wrong from there, certainly -- but if this could not be done, protecting and ordering this world's life was the least he could do. His thought-children deserved that much.
Elder Titan sighed, and looked into the dark forest. After a while he stood, clutching his hammer, and strode into the trees.
