The universe had settled into a slow, magnificent motion. Galaxies spun in vast spirals. Stars burned quietly in their appointed places. Worlds cooled from fire to stone, from stone to soil. Time moved among them in silent, measured arcs, tracing the flow of seconds and centuries with his unseen hand. Night followed, spreading her velvet shadow where the light was too sharp, softening the edges of creation. From the edge of the ether, I watched it all, as I had chosen to do. I did not step into the universe. I did not command each star or judge each orbit. I remained at the beginning, the first witness to what my gesture had unleashed.
It was in that watching that I felt the change, so small and yet so vast, it shook the entire fabric of existence. It did not come from a star or a storm or a shifting planet. It came from a single point, on a single world of cooling seas and restless skies. The universe trembled there, not with the birth of matter, but with something far more delicate. A faint spark flickered into being, and I felt a presence open its eyes for the first time. Consciousness. Life.
Night stopped, her silhouette sharpening against a field of distant stars. "Did you feel that?" she whispered, her voice reaching me across the void. Time halted mid-spiral, his rhythm breaking. "Something woke," he said. "Something that is not us." On the young world below, a creature very small and fragile drew its first true breath, and with it, awareness. It did not know the word for itself. It did not know the word for world. It only knew hunger, fear, warmth, cold the first threads of experience weaving together into being. The universe shivered around it, as if astonished by what it had done.
Behind me, the ether-born gathered closer to the edge of my realm. Their forms trembled, their glows bright and uncertain. "Is that… life?" the golden one asked. "Real life?" The silver one answered in a hushed tone. "It wasn't shaped by his hand." They spoke as if I were not there, or as if the moment was too sacred to address me directly. They were right. I had given the universe its canvas, its laws, its first forces. But life, this first small soul, was not my design. It was the universe discovering itself.
As the first living mind stirred, something else answered a resonance, a harmony deep within Night. She flinched as if struck, both hands pressing to her chest. Shadows coiled around her arms and shoulders, circling faster and faster, pulling inward like a storm seeking its centre. "Something's calling me," she gasped. "From that life. From all that might follow." Time reached toward her but did not touch. For once, he did not know what would happen next. I watched, silent, as the darkness covering Night grew so dense that even starlight could not breach it.
Then the shadows tore. A soft shape drifted free from Night's form, as gentle as a sigh. The being that emerged looked almost weightless, its outline blurred as though it were halfway between worlds. Its eyes opened slowly, heavy with distant thoughts. When it spoke, its voice was like someone mumbling words in their sleep. "I am Dream," it said. "Where minds close to the outer world, I will open doors within. I will paint their fears and hopes, their memories and desires." Night sagged with relief as Dream floated away, drifting through the stars like a lantern on an invisible tide.
But Night's ordeal was not over. Another convulsion rippled through her, harsher this time. Her body seemed to crack, splitting along lines of shadow and starlight. A second being burst from her with a flash that made nearby stars flicker. This new figure flickered between forms fragmenting, reforming, breaking, and mending with every breath. Its eyes glowed with an intensity that made even the ether-born recoil. "I am Destruction," it declared, voice deep and jagged. The words shook the orbits of nearby worlds. Then it smiled a strange, almost tender expression as new light bloomed from its chest. "And I am Creation. From what falls, I will raise anew. From ruin, I will build." It held both ruin and renewal in its hands, as naturally as breathing.
Night straightened slowly, and when the next surge came, it was calmer, smoother, like a river choosing a path it had always meant to follow. From her shadow stepped a tall, composed figure whose presence steadied the very space around them. Their eyes were clear, bright, filled with countless branching patterns of possibility. "I am Destiny," they said. Their gaze swept across the universe over the tiny spark of first life, over stars and worlds and the yet-unborn. "I see the paths before every being that will ever awaken. I see each choice, each turn, each consequence. All that may be, I behold at once." Even I felt the weight of that vision pressing faintly against me.
Night stood still then, breathing slowly, her form no longer tearing or fracturing. But she was not finished. Her gaze once again sought the tiny world where life had just begun. "Every beginning carries an ending," she murmured. "Every heartbeat must, one day, fall silent." There was no cruelty in her tone only certainty. She extended a hand, and from the darkness at her feet rose a final figure. This one did not burst or tear. It simply… appeared, as though it had always been waiting for its name. Cloaked in a soft, deep stillness, it moved with quiet grace. Its eyes were solemn, but not unkind. Night rested her hand lightly on its head. "You will walk with every living thing at the last step of their journey," she said. "You will be feared, yet you are mercy. You will be accused of taking, yet you are the guide home."
The figure looked up at her, then at the vastness of the universe. "I am Death," they said. "I will not decide when life begins, nor what it does. I will only close the door when it is time to rest." Their voice echoed softly through the cosmos, and somewhere far below, the spark of first life shivered without knowing why.
Dream, Destruction-and-Creation, Destiny, Death, Night's children took their places in the unfolding design of reality. Dream drifted toward the first living mind, unseen, ready to someday fill its sleep with images. Destruction-and-Creation watched the stars with a restless hunger, eager to break and rebuild. Destiny's gaze turned from world to world, mapping futures like threads on an endless loom. Death waited in quiet patience, knowing that everything born would eventually come to them.
And still the universe responded. With life's arrival and the birth of these great forces, new sparks began to flicker into existence not as primal or vast as Night's children, but powerful in their own right. Across countless stars and worlds, nascent gods stirred. Spirits of fire and ocean, mountain and wind, light and shadow, oath and memory, rose from the matter of the universe, shaped by its energies and its stories. They lifted their eyes, those who had eyes, and instinctively sought the oldest presences in the cosmos.
They saw Night veiling the stars, Time carving moments into order, Dream drifting through unseen corridors, Destruction-and-Creation humming with restless potential, Destiny watching with knowing calm, Death cloaked in quiet inevitability. They did not know my name, did not yet understand the hand that flicked the universe into being. But they knew this much: these were the first. The eldest. The ones upon whom all else would stand.
And from my place at the beginning, I watched as gods, mortals, and mysteries began their long slow dance beneath a sky that had only just learned how to shine.