At one point in the past, a pantheon of Tier Zero gods raised their weapons against me.
They gathered on the rim of existence, where creation brushed against the silence beyond. Their thrones of fire burned with defiance, their weapons forged from concepts—spears of inevitability, blades of causality, shields woven from the promises of time itself. They summoned storms that split suns, hurled lightning that cracked space, and their voices shook the multiverse as they proclaimed me a usurper, a threat to all they held dear.
Their struggle shook the firmament. Worlds cracked and burned. Stars screamed as their cores were ripped open, spilling light like lifeblood. Mortals knelt in terror, believing the apocalypse had come, for the skies themselves had turned against them.
To me, it was nothing but a flicker.
I let them come. I let their blades strike my essence, their storms wash over me, their cries ring in the silence. They fought with valor. They fought with fear. They fought with desperation. And in the end, they died in silence. Their essences unraveled like threads of smoke scattered on a wind that no longer blew.
I felt no hatred. No triumph. Only the dull weight of repetition. I had seen this play before, enacted by others, in other ways. The faces of gods changed, but the cycle did not. Opposition. Struggle. Collapse. Silence. Always silence.
It was then I realized that no matter how many times I shattered resistance, I was not defeating foes—I was extinguishing candles in a void too vast to notice within the dark.
I turned my attention inward, seeking new diversions.
I folded uncreation into creation, and creation back into uncreation. I unraveled universes thread by thread, then rewove them into patterns so complex mortals would call them miracles. I spun worlds where oceans floated above the sky, where suns were woven into rivers that bent across the horizon, where life sang itself into existence. I allowed mortals to climb, to discover, to build. Some reached for the divine, touching the edges of my silence. I erased them before they could linger.
Then I erased the erasure.
Each attempt returned to the same end. No matter how many cycles I spun, no matter how many shapes I gave to matter, it all led back to me—alone, untouched, unfulfilled.
I shaped mortals who could dream across time, their minds flickering across centuries as easily as a flame flickers in the wind. I made beasts that devoured galaxies, whose roars toppled pantheons. I gave them wars to fight, truths to seek, heavens to reach. Some loved, some hated, some despaired, some triumphed. But always, inevitably, they died. Their ashes joined the silence. And I remained.
Even the void—the chaos that lies beyond all order—failed to hold me. I walked into its shadow, expecting madness without structure, chaos without anchor. Instead, the void bent around me, reshaping itself into stillness. Noise collapsed into silence. Disorder folded into pattern. Chaos itself obeyed, for it could do nothing else.
And with its submission, I learned a terrible truth: even the absence of law bowed to me.
Once, in desperation, I tried to erase myself. I unraveled my essence strand by strand, cast it into the abyss of the void, scattered it so widely that even I should not have endured. Yet the void would not permit it. The attempt folded back upon itself, reknit me whole, as though reality itself mocked my efforts.
I could not end.
Thus I lingered. I lingered as mortals rose and perished, their names carried on winds that I had spun and forgotten. I lingered as pantheons shifted, empires of gods rising like tides, only to fall again into dust. I lingered as even stars dimmed, collapsed, and reignited in cycles too many to count.
And always, I remained.
Do you understand what eternity tastes like when there is nothing to discover? It is not wine, but ash. Not sweetness, but dust. An eternity without opposition is a prison without walls. I thought myself free, yet I was caged in boundlessness.
And then—through the monotony of cycles—I felt it again.
The whisper.
Not a sound. Not a voice. A tremor in the marrow of existence. A suggestion so small it might have been overlooked, yet so persistent it could not be denied.
There is more.
At first, I rejected it. It could not be true. Beyond Tier Zero, there is only transcendence, and I had crossed that line long ago. Beyond infinity, what horizon could remain?
But the whisper persisted.
I heard it when I bent galaxies into spirals of light. I heard it when I shattered worlds into fragments of memory. I heard it when I watched mortals live and die, clutching their fragile dreams as though they mattered. In their laughter, in their tears, in the silence of their graves, I heard it:
There is more. But not here.
I fought against it. I drowned it beneath storms of creation. I silenced it with the collapse of a thousand suns. I hid from it in the black between universes. And still it followed.
It was not a command. It was not a demand. It was an invitation.
And for the first time since eternity began, I realized I was not untouched.
I felt something stir within me. Small. Alien. Fragile. Mortals call it restlessness. It gnawed at me like hunger, though I had never hungered. It pulled at me like longing, though I had never longed. It was absurd. Impossible. And yet it was there.
Perhaps that is why the whisper lingered. Not because it was strong, but because I was empty enough to hear it.
I began to wonder. 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 never changed. Not here.