The heavens trembled, shrouded in the thick veil of Nyx, the primordial Night. Her presence was not gentle like Eos, nor nurturing like Gaia. Nyx was the abyss itself. An endless chasm that birthed the terrible and the necessary. Beneath her, the stars flickered like fading embers, their light swallowed whole by her consuming form.
In the heart of this void, where silence was deep enough to drown the cosmos, a child's cry broke through. It was no ordinary wail of life. It was raw, jagged, and reverberated with a discordant melody that fractured the stillness. The child's voice twisted the void into something alive, bending it to her will.
Nyx stood over the infant, her presence both a shadow and a storm. Her form was a shifting mass of black and silver, and her voice carried the weight of the unending night.
"Behold," she intoned, her words heavy as the pull of the earth, "you who are born not of love nor joy, but of inevitability. My child, my daughter. Eris."
The infant stilled beneath her gaze, black eyes gleaming like pools of obsidian. Yet the chaos that swirled in her tiny form did not rest. It danced, uncontained, unbidden.
"You will know no peace," Nyx said, her voice softening, though no less ominous. "Your name will carry the weight of strife and discord, for such is your nature. Not for you the songs of praise or the laurels of mortals. The gods themselves will fear the shape of you. Even now, you twist the threads of fate."
Eris's tiny hand reached into the shadow that surrounded her, curling her fingers as though grasping for something unseen. Her laughter, unformed yet deliberate, bubbled forth like the crackling of a distant thunderstorm.
"What is my purpose, Mother?" came the infant's voice, though no mortal child of her age could yet speak. It was a voice that seemed to ripple backward, spoken not in time but in the very essence of being.
Nyx's ever-shifting form grew still, her expression unreadable. When she spoke, it was not a blessing, nor a curse, but a proclamation.
"You ask what none before you have dared," she said. "Listen well, for I shall tell you. You are not a builder, like Hephaestus, nor a judge, like Themis. You are the hand unseen, the whisper before the scream. Chaos, my child, is not destruction it is the
seed. It will be your task to scatter these seeds and let others reap what they sow."
Eris tilted her head, her obsidian eyes gleaming. "And what of the harvest?"
"The harvest is not yours to claim," Nyx said. "That is their burden." Her tone darkened, and her form seemed to fold inward, her light vanishing like the last embers of a dying star. "But do not mistake the weight of your role. The gods will call you wicked. The mortals will call you cruel. They will curse your name, yet they will never rid themselves of you. For no story begins without conflict, and no triumph is born without discord."
The void around them seemed to tighten, wrapping the infant Eris in a cocoon of shadow. Nyx's voice became a whisper, echoing as though from the farthest reaches of existence.
"Walk lightly, my child, though I know you will not. The gods will shun you, and the
mortals will fear you. But in the end, it is you they will owe. For without chaos, there is no order."
The light of Nyx faded entirely, leaving Eris alone in the black abyss. The child did not cry. Instead, her small fingers found the threads of the darkness, pulling and twisting them with a quiet, deliberate strength. Beneath her touch, the chaos began to take shape, not into something whole, but into something possible.
When at last the void gave her no answers, she spoke softly, her voice carrying the weight of the ages to come.
"If purpose will not come to me, then I shall craft it myself."
She twisted the threads tighter, her touch like the first stroke of a painter's brush on an empty canvas. Her laughter filled the void once more, rising and falling like the tempest.
From the folds of the night, the first seed of discord fell into the cosmos.