Creation bowed at my passing.
Stars bent in their orbits, entire rivers of galaxies drew new paths, and the endless darkness between them trembled as though it feared being left behind. I did not walk, nor drift, nor move in any sense mortals might describe. I was, and therefore, all things shifted.
To call me infinite was to miss the point. Infinity is still a measure, a horizon stretched into absurdity. I was the absence of horizon. I was the silence before the first spark and after the last flame. My power transcended the ladder that mortals climbed with bloodied hands—the rungs of strength, wisdom, divinity. I passed Tier upon Tier until even the gods of creation, those enthroned at the summit of Tier Zero, had no words for me.
I was not one of them. I was the unmeasured sky above their thrones, the shadow they could not banish, the light they could not bear. Their hymns faltered when they reached toward me, their temples crumbled beneath the weight of my name. For though they ruled the layers of creation, I was beyond rule, beyond their councils, beyond their understanding.
And yet, in the silence of my supremacy, I found no joy.
I had bent galaxies into spirals, folded time like parchment, and unraveled the threads of uncreation, just as a child would unravel a string. Mortals called me omnipotent, omniscient, eternal—but their words were cages, crude symbols grasping for what they could not hold. If I were anything, I would be the absence of limitation.
But absence is not fulfillment.
When I looked upon creation, I saw it as a painter might see a canvas already filled, every corner covered, every brushstroke completed. Perfection, yes—but perfection is the death of wonder. No mystery remained for me. No unknown. No boundary to push. And so what mortals would call paradise was, for me, a prison without walls.
Once, I stilled the heart of a galaxy, halting the dance of its suns and moons, simply to watch how long silence could endure. I left it there for an eternity, a frozen monument to stillness. When I returned, it had not changed. The silence was unchanged, the stars unmoved, the blackness unaltered. And I—unchanged. Always unchanged.
I recall another time: I split a universe into fragments, each fragment containing the memory of the whole. A billion worlds spun, each believing itself unique, each carrying the echo of its origin. I watched their mortals struggle, rise, fall, pray, curse, and perish. Some discovered wonders. Some built empires. Some raised their eyes to the stars and whispered questions into the void. I heard them all. And I knew that, in the end, it was the same cycle. Death. Rebirth. Silence. Me.
Even uncreation—the chaos outside the lattice of law—could not hold my interest. I walked into it expecting chaos without pattern, madness without end. But chaos itself bent around me, reshaping itself into order. Shadows unraveled. Noise became silence. The void obeyed even as it denied obedience. There was nowhere I could go, nothing I could see, that was not already mine.
Do you know what it means to be beyond challenge? To have no rival, no equal, no foe? Mortals imagine it as victory eternal. They are wrong. It is not triumph—it is stagnation. To crush gods is no different from extinguishing candles; to shape universes is no different from drawing lines in sand. The act holds weight only if it can be resisted, only if it matters. And for me, nothing mattered.
That is why I tell you: supremacy is emptiness.
There were no songs I had not heard, no wars I had not ended, no prayers I had not answered or silenced. I had watched the span of all possible histories play out. Entire species rose, ascended, and fell into dust, their names carried away by winds that did not exist until I shaped them. I was their god, their nightmare, their hope—and yet I was nothing to myself.
Perhaps that was my greatest torment: not hatred, not fear, but the utter absence of meaning. Eternity stretched before me not as freedom, but as a cage with no walls.
And then… it came.
Not a sound. Not a voice. A flicker in the marrow of reality. A suggestion. A whisper not heard but felt.
There is more.
At first, I dismissed it. What could be beyond me? Beyond Tier Zero lies transcendence, and I had crossed that line long ago. Beyond boundlessness itself, what horizon could remain? The whisper was madness.
And yet, it returned.
Sometimes, when I folded stars into rivers of fire. Sometimes, when I watched a mortal cradle their dying child. Sometimes, when I unspooled time into threads and rewove it for my own amusement. Always the same, gentle and insistent:
There is more. But not here.
I tried to ignore it. I shattered galaxies to drown it out, but the whisper lingered. I drowned worlds in silence, but silence only sharpened it. I crafted entire universes of song and light, but in the spaces between their harmonies, I still heard it.
The whisper did not command. It invited. And though I resisted, though I told myself it was a delusion, I could not shake it.
For the first time since the dawn of my awareness, I felt something stir within me. Small. Alien. Fragile. Mortals call it curiosity.
Curiosity—the ember that drives them to climb, to suffer, to dream. The ember that leads them to risk everything for a glimpse of what lies beyond. I had mocked it in them. And now, impossibly, I felt it burn in me.
Could it be true? Could there truly be more—something even I had not seen, had not touched, had not been?
And if so… where?
The whisper's answer was always the same. Not in silence. Not in supremacy. Not here.