In the time before the consumption of souls, the multiverse pulsed with meaning. Life, death, afterlives, and reincarnations were woven into a cosmic symphony—every living thing carried a fragment of the Astral Tree, a spark that connected them to something greater. Whether mortal or divine, all beings lived with the knowledge that their essence, their soul, would transcend the physical and find its way to higher realms.
That is until Moreno appeared.
It began quietly, as all cosmic tragedies do. No herald announced the coming of the 10th-dimensional entity—there were no warnings, no prophecies foretelling the end of an essential truth. The first signs came in subtle, inexplicable anomalies: souls failed to transition from the bodies they left. The followers of Endpoint reported disobedient spirits that hovered between life and the afterlife. Entire afterworlds became stagnant, filled with the soulless essences of the dead, unable to move forward. Reincarnation cycles stuttered and failed. Divine beings—caretakers of souls—felt something dreadful unraveling, but could not explain what.
Then, in a moment of incomprehensible finality, it happened.
The Threshold of Existence
The first great rift occurred in a distant metaphysical plane—a domain called the Bridge of Ascension. Here, souls freshly departed from their mortal vessels journeyed toward their destined realms, drawn along threads of purpose and belonging. Some would become stars in the domain, others reborn into new bodies, and a few would dissolve into the cosmic unity of the All-Soul. But on that day, the souls never made it across.
Instead, a shadow beyond dimensions appeared—Moreno. Not a shadow of darkness, but a shadow of absence. The very space around them folded in ways that could not be grasped, as though something far beyond mortal senses was forcing itself into the known layers of existence. Time contorted. Matter lost relevance. Even the primordials who witnessed the event struggled to recall it afterward, their minds dulled by the impossibility of what had come to pass. Moreno was there—and suddenly, He was everywhere.
The Bridge trembled under a presence not meant to exist within its structure, and the threads of souls, millions of them, began to fray. Beings of light and darkness, cosmic deities, God-like entities, and divine watchers gathered to confront the anomaly—but they found no enemy to fight, no form to strike down. Moreno was beyond form and intention, beyond words. The entity's awareness merely touched the concept of souls—and in that instant, it began to unravel.
The Consumption
Moreno did not feed as mortals or beasts might. There was no hunger, no desire—only comprehension. He turned his incomprehensible focus upon the concept of the soul, dissecting it across dimensions of thought and existence, as though curious to see how it worked. In his gaze, the meaning of a soul—the form of memories, identity, potential, and essence—ceased to be stable. Moreno reached into the fabric of the multiverse and consumed the concept itself.
It was not a simple act of devouring; it was as if the very idea of the soul was pulled apart at every metaphysical seam. Life and death collapsed into meaningless cycles. Afterlives were erased—not just the places but their meaning. Souls, as they were known, were unmade, stripped of significance, and dissolved into an unfathomable void. What was left behind was a deep and silent absence, a wound across all realms that even the Primordials could not heal.
Some beings witnessed the event and survived, but they were never the same. A slender Skeleton that stood upon the Bridge fell into madness, endlessly muttering fragments of memories that no longer existed. Now becoming a destined Death and wept as he felt his purpose evaporate from within, their dominion now a hollow wasteland. Even mortals—those far from the divine planes—felt a strange unease deep in their hearts, though they did not understand why. The air felt heavier, and the stars dimmer. Life itself felt... thinner. Something essential had been taken, and it could never return.
What followed was chaos across the metaphysical planes. Without the concept of souls, the multiverse's most fundamental structures crumbled. Some Primordials perished, their existence tied too deeply to the meaning of souls. Others abandoned their posts, unable to bear the emptiness left behind. Those who had ruled over afterlives watched their realms wither into meaningless voids. Reincarnation became impossible, and death lost its finality. Spirits lingered, aimless and fractured, without a purpose to guide them.
The mortal world fared no better. Necromancers found that their magic unraveled, for without the concept of souls, there were no essences to bind to the dead. Cults formed, worshiping Moreno in their madness, begging the entity to consume other abstractions—perhaps time, fate, or even love.
And yet, Moreno did not remain. Just as inexplicably as they had appeared, the entity slipped away from the boundaries of the known, fading into the deeper layers of existence. He left behind no explanation, no intention—only the silent ruin of a world stripped of its fundamental truths.
Echoes of the Lost Concept
In the eons that followed, the new generation of primordials and mystics tried to piece together what had happened. Some claimed that the consumption of souls was not a malicious act, but a natural phenomenon—an inevitable consequence of an entity like Moreno interacting with the fragile constructs of mortal reality. Others believed that it was a warning: that concepts, even the most sacred ones, were not immutable. If an entity like Moreno could devour souls, what might he consume next?
Yet the most unsettling theory came from a small, obscure sect—those who believed that the consumption was not the end, but merely the beginning. They speculated that Moreno was not done—that the act of devouring souls was just one step in an unfolding event far beyond their comprehension. Perhaps Moreno was building something new, something that required the raw material of concepts to take shape.