- Prologue -
In the beginning, there were gods. A time came when their familiarity with the usual other-worldly pursuits lead the gods to seek a new outlet for their creativity and imagination, lest a tedious cycle of infinite boredom set in.
And so a great work of art became reality, and the universe took shape under the careful touch of the everlasting. Yet still they were dissatisfied, and many were no longer content simply to observe the void that they had made. And consequently some among them conceived the idea that they would bring a world into existence, and when it was done they lit the world and they walked upon it.
These gods were spiritual beings, yet they took it upon themselves to go about in physical form for their own benefit, and they explored their world and they perfected it, until a point where those other than themselves could be relied upon to survive in it. This balance was reached after some seven thousand years, and once it was done, the gods saw it to be good.
Here it was that they deigned to design and create people, in their own image and likeness, and unreservedly they granted these creatures of flesh and blood dominion over all those things which might perturb them in their journey to populate and subdue the world. And they gave them a soul, an animating force of the supernatural.
This soul gave these creatures rationality, an ability to weigh good and evil, right and wrong, and the inherent practicality to live above their instinct.
Some small time passed for the gods, as they revelled in the manipulation of the tiny lives they had created. But for the people of the world, a great many years went by, and when the point came that man should define time it was found to be many thousands of years since their genesis.
By now man was restless, hell-bent on the engineered evolution of himself and his knowledge of those things that were. And still he grew, both in proficiency and numbers, populating the world of the gods as fast as he discovered it. In the heat of myriad revelations, man waged war against himself, and some small knowledge was lost.
But each time, man recovered from his blows, and slowly he developed resilience to the instinctively aggressive nature with which he had been gifted.
Then the time came when man stood, united, at the forefront of a crusade of cognisance.
Mankind's understanding expanded with an unpredicted velocity, encompassing many of those things which the gods had thought should remain undiscovered until such a time as they had gained the responsibility to do with their knowledge things that were good, for themselves and ultimately for their planet. Their minds, their bodies, their understanding of things, all had evolved beyond the god’s control, far past what they had predicted.
A woman was born some small time after this unification, and it was her lot to be the one to discover perhaps the greatest and most unstable science of all – the knowledge that would enable the manipulation of the fabric of the void and of time itself.
Eva, as she was named, followed her childhood with a meteoric rise in the eyes of the world. Within five years of her educational completion, she had become the leading researcher at the world’s largest corporation, Ryuura Bio-Technologies. Project Talon, the title her work was filed under, explored the nature, possibility and science of travel between parallel universes.
Within a short time, humanity was on the brink of an event that would alter the course of its future irreversibly.
Eva's ‘Talon’ was, within two years, a logically viable possibility. A year on, the mathematics was fully explored and the machine itself that would perform the role was under construction.
On the 38th calendar day of the twelfth period, the machine achieved completion, built in the southern regions. Under attack, the governing board of the state of humankind, united under its single banner, issued a statement addressing the aims of the machine, in response to critical abuse of the scientific research that provided it.
Mankind, claimed the faceless leaders of a race, was the greatest force in the universe. No single thing was greater than them. The gods, they claimed, were inferior in terms of aim and potential. Their acumen was poorly developed, and their immunity to natural microevolution rendered them unsuitable for the supreme governing role in which they had placed themselves.
So it was that the army of man armed itself, readying its destructive force. To a man, the force passed through the machine, taking with them all that they would need to eliminate whatever they might find.
Man traversed the path of ages, coming at last to the infinitely perfect copy of the world upon which the gods walked, observing the beauty of things and governing man with thought of mind.
And man raised his weapons, unthinking in his arrogance, blinded by artificial prowess, and unleashed a torrent of destruction upon the beauty of the place and the perfection of its creators.
So the world burned, and the blood of the god's forms ran in red rivers through the husk of their creation, and over the shells of their deities stepped the god's greatest creation; humanity.
On our earth, the sky was a blood red, the heavens rent with streaks of flame and flashes of burning light. Clouds, heavy and ominous, released their rain upon the watching populace. But not a drop of water fell, and the flames licked at the clouds as all the moisture of the skies was consumed by the heat, its thirst raging, as it held the cosmos in its heated grip.
Consequently, our world began to decay. Living things, desperate for nourishment, died, wilted and became rotten and malformed, leaking the decay of their veins into the rivers and seas that had failed to sustain them.
Then it was that our army returned from its crusade of violence, blood-spattered and scorched, men’s eyes hollow and haunted with the sight of the atrocities they had so readily indulged in. And they breathed the air of this world, and they died. In the millions, their bodies lay, piled in the scorching sun, with the tools of their downfall strewn about their corpses. The skulls of thirty gods were returned with the army, but as they lost their lives so to was lost this treasure, and it was scattered about the world by a great tempest.
The gods chose then to abandon us, their children, and they took themselves away to another place where they could begin again. They took with them our souls, ripping them from us as they went. But many of us remained human, with but a few becoming feral. Those of us, then, began to carve for ourselves a new way of life from the barren land of our idiocy.
Acanthus, Colony General
Extract from “Modern history: certa 4+”
