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From Most High

That_Demiurge
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Synopsis

Chapter 1 - Come to Be

"All things are of beginnings, whether in time or without. For all, even the truth of this statement has beginning. Though what it began from, is without beginning."

- Unknown Philosopher

All tales originate from the beginning, but there is one thing before such beginnings. One being, if a state of existence could even be applied to it, one without reference, one exempt from the laws of rationale, the one who predates nothingness itself. One who is the actuality of it, a pure act and true absolute, where all things are relative only to it alone.

Generations later knew it as Amanah Rah Anu, the Mother of All, the Goddess of Actuality, the Godhead, the One Giver, the Source and many names from those who descended from her. The act of creation was that of conception, the minds of all rational beings witnessed the womb of nothingness looming upon the edge of their thoughts, a memory of the unborn, whether god, demon or man.

Before the beginning, Amanah's fullness predated all and nothing. There is an indeterminance, a contradiction without magnitude nor reference. An axiom proven by its superiority as a transcendent essence. Meaning and truth are one, the absolute from whom springs rationale.

Like a mother's womb, Amanah filled herself with nothingness and fractured it upon birth. Nothingness became co-equal with Existence, co-equal with Rationale, co-equal with Reference. Amanah's fullness permeated and contained the growing child, providing it the truth and meaning neccesary to its existence, feeding it with absolute laws and distinguishing it as a separate and subordinate fullness.

From her fullness, she created heaven and all its inhabitants, angels and heavenly beings, masks and actors of her will. In creation, meaning and truth systematically begat abstractions from the interplays of Nothingness, Existence, Reference and Rationale. Ranks of absolutes descended from the four, spontaneously emerging from within overlaps and individual absolutes. 

Pure act and truths diluted into potential, and potential into possibility and impossibility. All absolutes differintiate and derive until the greatest state of dilution, the lowest abstractions of space, time and magnitude. The three were the youngest and the three had no act, only potential.

Amanah used the three to forge reality, to forge the material world and its endless seas of pure potential. The Mother of All hovered over the waters and pulled out the light, separating it from darkness. And Amanah fashioned the universe from said light.

The laws of physics came into play as hidden numbers guided the motion of creation, endless possibilities ignored in indeterminate favor for one act. Space expanded as fundamental forces fractured from gravity, new interactions diversified the light and layed the groundwork for the growing universe.

As millions of years passed in the blink of an eye, stars swirled into existence and died in bursts of unfathomable power. New stars were born from old stars and generations upon generations of stellar life and death built the foundations for planets and ultimately life. Gravity pulled the rogue stars into galaxies and celestial dust gathered amongst stars, gradually forming planets as fragments collided and devoured one another.

Entropy ensured that the universe did not seek to return to its fiery cradle. All things seeked to spread as much energy outside of it as possible, to reach the lowest energy it could inhabit. From here, planets cooled and the hidden numbers gave birth to life.

The invisible hand of Amanah guided the world as she fashioned it to her liking. Her intervention came in the form of sudden bursts of energy, physical nudges in the right direction and incredibly precise numbers to preserve and grow the material world. 

From all that emerged in the material world, Amanah only favored one planet, one world. Arkhaia, she named it, a seemingly average world, a mere member of a vast multitude of similar worlds in the cosmos. But, Amanah found favor in this world, and personally descended to its surface.

She took the form of a goddess of light. Long blonde hair glimmered under the mid-day sun of the world, a crown of gold adorned in resplendent gems and a dress of purest white with constrasting patterns of dull black and shining gold.

The source walked upon the barren land, coarse dirt becoming smooth under her foot, dampening with the right amount of water. Nature itself served her as she explored the land, red mountains suddenly trickling streams of water and the hissing of escaping gases reached her ears as the planet's atmosphere slowly grew in thickness and pressure.

Her first footsteps began bursting with water, quickly boiling as the pressure of the air was still low and weak, becoming steam and vapor. Amanah reached a cliff overlooking a massive dry and reddish basin, with deep, gaping holes and yellow streaked buttes few and far between.

She leaned and reached down to grab a piece of the grainy soil and brought it close to her smooth lips. She closed her glistening blue eyes and blew upon the soil, summoning a torrent of hot, swirling gas, a titanic gust capable of moving entire mountains with sheer force. The fiery storm of air swept across the land before her far faster than the speed of sound, reacting with the soil and depositing thousands of mountains worth of gases to the atmosphere.

She stopped once there was no more soil on her hands and opened her eyes to see the basin now filled with charred streaks and trails, some still smoldering with heat.

Lifting her right hand and looking straight towards the bright, white sun, she commanded of the earth, "This will be the source of all water, I will it so."

And suddenly swirling dark clouds gathered and pelted innumerable arrows of water upon the basin, each drop of water the size of a human fist. Ponds of water quickly formed and soon, a vast river begins to emerge from the basin.

Then, Amanah gestured her arms towards the ground, elevating the ground in many spots and forming large hollow layers. As she did so, the rain intensified to the point where pillars of water descended outright from the opaque clouds accompanied by bolts of lightning and roars of thunder. The basin quickly became a deep trench of water as the levels rise rapidly.

Amanah watched as the entire ocean formed from this area, water flowing forth from the rain that descended upon the former basin. Sediments and caches of mineral ions were uncovered and dissolved by the crashing waves, filling the oceans with saline water and slightly alkaline conditions.

Then, Amanah rode the winds and like a painter, she drew the landscape. With her fingers as a brush, she drew mountains and hills, valleys and trenches. Flatlands were drawn into existence and every cliff was carved by her hands. Waterfalls were crafted and her breath formed hollow arches and sparse seas of sand.

She made unusual features such as mountain sized shards of each metal, placing them in the drawn deserts and shattering them with powerful waves of sand. Spikes and boulders of glass and metal could be found in the deserts, an intentional oddity in the creator's canvas.

Then, she formed holes of natural magnets and created floating islands from repelling natural magnets covered in rocks and soil. These were randomly placed and spaced, so were their sizes. The smallest was no larger than a humble hut while the largest could be considered a true island in the sky.

The last of her oddities was a system that preserves an eternal whirpool on the sea. A massive hole and an island was configured to form a whirlpool of epic proportions, draining islands worth of water each second. At the bottom of the hole is a hot plate of magma, causing the water to vaporize and be released through deep sea vents of the nearby area, cycling the water eternally.

As the skies and the seas began to calm and her tapestry of earth completed, Amanah began the act of creating life. She began with a simple self replicating chemical, RNA. She coded three templates for it, a chemical eater, a photosynthesizer and a predator.

The templates were wrapped in enzymes, proteins and nutrients, placed in house sized pockets of primordial ooze hidden in all parts of the world, designed to be introduced gradually into the ocean as water erosion slowly open holes for sea water to slip in.

She left the world for millions of years, observing the evolution of her experiment bacteria from afar, while drawing nebulas and celestial arrangements among the nearby galaxies. Her return was marked by the arrival of a meteor, whose impact formed a chain of islands in the south east rich in metals.

She found that life had evolved well, with a diverse ecosystem of variants and species emerging in the early ocean. However, RNA mutated too rapidly and larger cell collectives tend to mutate out of existence. She introduced DNA and left it without a template, placing 10 randomly shuffled pieces of it in newly made cells immediately released in the open ocean.

By random chance, they introduced specialized cells and composites, quickly dominating and eliminating their competition, though not for long as chance dictates the emergence of counter tactics in the single celled community. 

Amanah decided to wait and let nature take its course over 700 million years, as life developed upon Arkhaia in lush abundance. At the end of the period, she placed magic as the fifth force of the universe, placing strange and metaphysical laws upon it, rather than adhering to the mathematical laws that govern the world.

Using that magic, she built a massive array of spells and placed it upon the basin, forming a crystalline palace rivalling skyscrapers in height. Several glowing rings and circles surrounded the structure, with an orderly and systemic summoning of glowing letters in an unknown language. Thousands of spells overlapped in the structure and every week, a burst of light would proceed from the structure, to strike a random lifeform and imbue it with magic, forming a prime beast.

Prime beasts would be made in batches of 7 and randomly selected in terms of how many and what abilities would be granted upon them. Transformed beasts would not be too far from one another, they are expected to breed and evolve into a new species as an aim.

To balance the abundance of magic, gene inheritance between non prime beasts with prime beasts are immensely low, with hybrids being less powerful. Furthemore, Amanah engineered beasts immune to the magical selection in trade of being engineered to the fullest into powerful creatures, generally superior to prime beasts though lacking their magic.

Amanah found that it was all good and right, she left one more time for 500 million years to set the stage of Arkhaia for her greatest work of art, sentient beings.