I returned to my castle in the ether, where silence had begun to feel like a wound. Her absence echoed in every corridor. Every hall felt emptier. I shaped her statue from the mist silver light folded into the form she once wore, frozen in the moment before she vanished. It stood in the great hall, head bowed, serenity carved into eternal memory.
"You were gentle," I whispered. "And the ether remembers you."
But I did not linger. Mourning could not undo what had been lost.
The ether-born watched me from the shadows of the chamber. Fear clung to them like frost. They had seen what ambition could do what violating the boundary between realms had cost.
"It ends now," I said. "No ether-being will ever enter the universe again."
The decree rippled through the ether, binding itself to every being born of My plane. Some bowed their heads; others looked away, their ambitions smothered before they could spark. None protested. They understood the necessity, if not the depth, of My resolve.
Still… the universe needed protection. And I would not, could not, set foot within it again.
So I shaped something from the border between what I was leaving behind and what I refused to touch.
From the seam where the ether pressed against the skin of the universe, I drew breath.
Mist swirled. Stars bent. Light coiled.
A vast serpentine body formed scales shimmering with ether at one angle and starlight at another. It stretched across the boundary like a living horizon, coiling around the universe in an endless loop. Its eyes opened two suns burning with purpose.
"You will guard the boundary," I said. "You will keep the ether from entering, and you will keep Me from returning."
The serpent lowered its head in a slow, cosmic bow. It slithered into position around the universe, each movement shifting the dance of galaxies. Its body encircled creation like a crown or a warning.
The universe now had a guardian. One that did not belong to it. One that would never step inside.
And I stepped back.
But creation is never clean. Not even my decisions can prevent consequences from unfolding in ways no plan can predict.
Where the silver ether died, shards of her essence had scattered. During the moment before the serpent sealed the boundary, a sliver had slipped through tiny, weightless, unnoticed.
That sliver found matter. Found gravity. Found the universe's laws. And those new, young, uncertain laws tried to understand what it was.
They could not.
So they changed.
They bent. They absorbed. They combined.
And something was born.
I did not see it clearly. Not directly. I only felt a disturbance quiet, faint, impossible to place somewhere beyond the serpent's coils. A presence that pulsed with silver and starlight. Something neither universe nor ether would ever fully claim.
An anomaly.
Born not from My will, not from My touch, but from an accident of grief and law.
I watched from the ether. Silently. Without reaching. Without influencing.
I would not cross the boundary. Not for this. Not for anything.
The anomaly drifted into the universe, unnoticed by gods, uncharted by pantheons. A small ripple in the greater sea.
The universe moved on.
Night taught her children how to mould realms. Time shaped the foundations of pantheons. The gods gathered, forming alliances, courts, and councils. The anomaly learned from the shadows of creation, never knowing what it truly was.
Mortals continued their brief, trembling lives beneath the unfolding sky. They prayed to storm gods for rain, to sun gods for warmth, to dream gods for guidance in their sleep. They offered their hopes to the pantheons, shaping temples and myths from fear and wonder.
And when they died, their souls rose not to Me, not to the ether, but to the gods they believed in. Their final breaths whispered the names of deities who shaped their fates, their storms, their destinies.
They worshipped the pantheons. They built legends. They forged faith.
And I remained where I must remain:
Outside. At the edge of everything. Watching the universe live without Me.Guarding its boundary.
Never again to cross. Never again to intervene. Never again to touch the realm I created and surrendered.
I am the First.
And now, I am only the witness.