As Kamoshami, the God of Benevolent Dominion, watched the sunset on the summer solstice as he had for hundreds of centuries before, it never crossed his mind that it would be the last time. The deity's physical form stood fifty feet tall in a palace crafted for his size. He moved about the westernmost spire, robed in white with a green sash, and crowned with a wreath of holly that never withered. His oak-colored beard framed a mouth with teeth as white as fresh snow. When he smiled or laughed, which was often, seeds of joy would bloom in the hearts of all who heard it, spreading across continents like ripples in still water.
Tonight was the Harvest of Hope, the most sacred of all rituals. Every four years, when the summer light reached its peak, the sunberries ripened with concentrated divine essence. Each golden fruit contained not mere nourishment, but the crystallized power of answered prayers, the fuel that drove every miracle, every blessing, every divine intervention across the seven worlds. The sunberries were hope given physical form, tomorrow's miracles waiting to be distributed across the infinite reaches of creation.
Kamoshami held open his sacred satchel as the twilight pixies began to stir. Each tiny creature emerged from her own leaf—for nearly every leaf of the Great Tree served as a pixie's bed, perfectly sized for her diminutive form. They stretched gossamer wings and yawned with voices like tinkling bells, their slender forms glowing with inner light—some shimmering rose-gold, others pale green, still others deep blue or violet. Each pixie's luminescence was unique, creating a constellation of living color as they took to the air with the eager energy of children awakening to a beloved celebration.
The pixies were no larger than his thumb, yet their combined efforts would gather enough divine essence to sustain the entire pantheon for another cycle. He watched them work with the tender attention of a father observing his children at play, each one dancing through the air toward her chosen sunberry with graceful spirals and loops that painted rainbow trails of glittering light against the darkening sky.
"Careful with that one, little Shimmer," he murmured to a rose-hued pixie struggling with an especially radiant sunberry, her coral luminescence flickering with effort. "This one carries enough healing to mend a broken family. Handle it with the love it will become."
The pixie chirped acknowledgment and adjusted her grip, her gossamer wings beating with renewed purpose.
Kamoshami's attention drifted downward to the vast gathering of pilgrims below. Thousands had journeyed to witness this sacred night, but his divine sight could focus on each family individually, seeing their hopes, their needs, their quiet desperation for the blessings this harvest would provide.
Near the edge of the crowd, a family of nine had claimed a small patch of ground. Six brothers ranging from grown men to young boys clustered around their newest member—a daughter born during their pilgrimage, still small enough to cradle in her mother's arms. The infant's bright eyes seemed drawn to the dancing lights above, and something in her gaze suggested an awareness beyond her few weeks of life.
Kamoshami found himself pausing to watch her. The infant had not cried once since their arrival, her mother had whispered to her father the night before. It was as if she understood the sacred nature of this place, as if the very air resonated with her tiny soul. Several pixies had deviated from their paths to flutter near the family's camp, their wings shimmering with unusual brightness as they passed overhead.
"Born under the blessing," Kamoshami murmured to himself, making a mental note to ensure this family received extra consideration when the sunberries were distributed. The child would grow up marked by this night in ways none of them could yet comprehend.
His deep baritone voice began to rise in the Song of Gathering, the ancient melody that energized the sunberries and prevented their divine essence from dissipating during transport. The notes echoed through the chambers of his great palace, causing the golden fruit to pulse with inner light. Each word carried the weight of cosmic law, each phrase a command that reality itself obeyed.
He was halfway through the second verse when the air began to crack.
It started as a whisper of wrongness, a note that didn't belong in the cosmic symphony. Black light—an impossibility that bent the very concept of illumination around itself—sparked behind him. The cracks spread like fractures in a vast window, widening and twisting with an unnerving sound akin to metal scraping against bone. Through the growing fissures seeped an oily darkness that moved with predatory intelligence.
Kamoshami's song faltered. He set down his satchel with careful precision and turned to face the expanding vortex. Through the gaps in reality emerged something that should not exist—hands that were bone and metal and rotting flesh melted together, each limb bearing an eye that burned with malevolent hunger. Four of the arms gripped the edges of the rift and wrenched it wider until the entire creature could force itself through.
The thing that emerged defied description. Its presence alone was toxic enough to stop the hearts of many nearby pixies. Others fled shrieking, dropping their precious cargo in their haste to escape. The fallen sunberries rolled across the palace floor, their light dimming as the creature's shadow touched them.
Kamoshami stepped forward, unafraid but deeply sorrowful. Even his divine sight could not penetrate the thing's true nature—it existed as an impossibility, a violation of cosmic law that had been twisted and remade by forces from beyond the edges of reality. Its malformed features were constantly shifting and folding in on themselves as though the very act of existing in this plane caused it agony and rage.
"You were not invited here," he said simply, his voice still carrying the harmonies of creation despite the discord surrounding them. "This is a place of giving; a sanctuary of hope. Begone."
The creature's multiple mouths opened in unison, releasing a sound like screaming metal. It spoke no words, for it had no interest in communication. It came with a singular purpose and would not be reasoned with.
The battle that followed would last four hours and shake the foundations of reality itself.
Far below, the pilgrims watched in growing horror as the dance of pixies dissolved into chaos. The melodious voice of their beloved god fell silent, replaced by sounds that made their souls recoil—thunderclaps that carried no promise of rain, only the echo of cosmic forces colliding in ways that should not be possible.
While the cosmic forces clashed above, the Templars among the pilgrims fell to their knees in desperate prayer. Their magic circles blazed to life beneath them—four concentric rings of indigo light, each one representing their connection to divine power. They offered everything they had, pouring their life force through the outer ring toward their dying god.
One by one, the circles began to crack. An elderly priest who had served faithfully for sixty years gasped as his outermost ring shattered like glass, the backlash stopping his heart instantly. A young acolyte collapsed as her circle fractured, her last breath a whispered prayer for Kamoshami's victory. Across the gathering, dozens of faithful offered all they could to sustain their god's battle, and still it was not enough.
Children began to weep without understanding why. Parents clutched them closer, their own eyes fixed on the westmost spire where flashes of light periodically illuminated shapes too terrible to comprehend. The family with the newborn daughter found themselves huddled together as the infant finally began to cry—a thin, desperate sound that seemed to harmonize with the screams of dying pixies far above.
When midnight came and the terrible sounds ceased, silence fell like a burial shroud. The great sadness that filled every heart was not mere grief but recognition—something fundamental had been torn from the fabric of existence. The place where they had always felt their god's presence became cold and empty, an absence so profound it hurt to acknowledge.
For the first time in recorded history, the immortal green leaves of the Tree of Life began to brown and fall. They drifted down like tears, each one marking the end of an era that could never be restored.
The energy released by Kamoshami's death tore through space like a wound in the cosmos, cascading from Hogar and striking the peak of a distant mountain on the world called Solaris. At the base of this mountain sat Jitsuno the sage, deep in meditative thought. He had just finished drawing the lines in the sand in the zen garden at the center of his monastery and was enjoying the work he had done when the impact shook the very foundations of his home. He sighed with resignation as he noticed the tremors had flattened out the sand after all his careful effort.
He grabbed his stick and was preparing to start over when a thought came to him. Whether that thought was his own or the voice of inspiration, he could not say; nevertheless, he obeyed it. Taking his staff with him, he ascended the mountain.
At the summit was a sight he did not expect. The mountain was stony and unforgiving—no life had grown there in all the time Jitsuno had known it, the altitude too high, the air too thin. But there, at the peak, stood what appeared to be a peach tree in full health and bearing fruit.
Jitsuno approached cautiously, his monk's training warning him that miracles often came with costs. But hunger for understanding overcame caution, and he plucked one of the golden peaches and bit into its flesh.
The moment the fruit touched his tongue, his consciousness exploded beyond the boundaries of mortal perception. He saw across dimensions, through time, into the very structure of creation itself. The visions that flooded his mind contained knowledge no mortal was meant to possess—yet among these revelations, he saw purpose. He understood the balance of creation and destruction, saw the Gods in their Pantheon, and the intricate design by which they crafted reality. He saw, with unquestioning clarity, his part in it all.
Yet there was something else he witnessed—a deviation in the plan. Something had gone wrong that had never happened before.
Despite being an entire planet away, Jitsuno became a witness to what had transpired. Through eyes suddenly capable of perceiving divine truth, he saw the battle in all its cosmic horror.
He witnessed Kamoshami's final stand—not just a god dying, but the very concept of benevolent dominion being systematically torn from existence. He saw the creature's methodical destruction, aimed not merely at divine flesh but at the fundamental frequencies that held reality together.
Partway through the battle, Tokimi, Avatar of Motherhood, materialized in a flash of indigo light. She moved to join the fight, but Kamoshami's voice boomed even as he grappled with the horror.
"The satchel!" he commanded, never taking his eyes from his opponent. "Take the sunberries to safety—do not let it consume them!"
Tokimi hesitated, clearly wanting to help in the battle itself, but one look at the sacred bag lying vulnerable on the palace floor made the stakes clear. If the nightmare absorbed the concentrated divine essence, it would become truly unstoppable. She obeyed, snatching up the satchel and vanishing just as the creature's attention turned toward her.
A few scattered sunberries remained where they had fallen during the initial attack—too few for the monster to notice, but enough to eventually find their way to mortal hands. Those few that did would mark their recipients in ways none could foresee.
He watched the Templars' desperate sacrifices, their magic circles cracking like glass as they poured their life force toward their dying god. The battle reached its climax as both combatants struck fatal blows—Kamoshami and the nightmare destroying each other in a final, cataclysmic exchange. When the terrible sounds ceased, both lay dead, and what had been merely a horror was posthumously named the first God-killer in the history of creation.
Jitsuno witnessed the cascade of failure that followed: the cosmic infrastructure losing its foundational support, divine networks going dark across seven worlds, and Tokimi's overwhelming realization that with both destroyer and protector gone, the impossible burden of restoration now fell entirely upon her shoulders. The creature was dead, but so was the god who might have guided the recovery. She was alone with a cosmos in collapse and a satchel of sunberries that seemed pitifully inadequate for the task ahead.
The vision revealed everything: how the remaining gods strained to compensate for the missing frequency, how what mortals would perceive as protection in the coming years would be merely an illusion, and how the Universe itself acted to restore balance in the only way it could.
A God had been killed.
The Tree of Life had died.
And this sapling was the new Tree of Life.
But this was not the Tree of Life as before.
The peach he had consumed granted him understanding that mortal minds were never meant to possess—the wisdom of the Gods themselves. This consumption brought with it a calling. He understood now why the Universe had chosen him: only one with divine wisdom could prepare the way for what was to come.
The vision ended abruptly, leaving Jitsuno gasping on the mountaintop. But as his enhanced hearing adjusted to his surroundings, he detected something unexpected—the sound of an infant crying.
He looked up into the branches of the impossible tree. He saw something that defied every law of creation: a baby boy, wrought into existence without mother or father, born from the cosmic trauma itself. The Universe had created this child outside the normal order, beyond the reach of divine stewardship, as its response to the fundamental wound now bleeding through reality.
Jitsuno reached up with trembling hands and carefully lifted the infant from the branches. The child's cries quieted as soon as he was held, and his eyes, too knowing for a newborn, seemed to look directly into the sage's soul.
"What are you?" Jitsuno whispered, though he suspected no answer would come.
The baby reached out with one tiny hand and grasped the monk's finger. In that touch, Jitsuno felt something impossible—a complete absence where divine connection should be, yet also a strange immunity to the cosmic wrongness spreading through existence. This child existed outside of the order of creation.
Jitsuno looked out across the star-filled sky, knowing that somewhere among those distant lights, an entire pantheon was struggling to hold reality together. He looked down at the child in his arms, this impossible being born from catastrophe itself.
"I will teach you what I can," he promised the silent infant. "But I fear your real purpose lies far beyond anything I could prepare you for."
The mountain wind carried his words away into the darkness, and somewhere in that darkness, cosmic forces beyond mortal comprehension began to shift and realign around the existence of one small, anomalous child who should not be, but was.