The whisper haunted me.
It did not grow louder. It did not demand. It simply remained. Gentle. Insistent. A thorn in the fabric of my being, too small to destroy, too stubborn to vanish. I had crushed pantheons, silenced universes, shattered infinities—but I could not silence this ember.
There is more. But not here.
The words echoed not through the void, but within me. And though I denied them, I could not unhear them.
At first, I argued with myself. I reasoned as mortals reason, though my logic spanned galaxies. What more could there be? I have walked the silence beyond creation. I have unmade uncreation. I have crossed every threshold of the ladder. There is nothing left. Nothing.
But the whisper replied with silence more profound than mine.
That silence unsettled me. Once again, I realized that boundlessness was not certainty. It was stagnation. To be beyond all things was to be beyond change. To be beyond change was to be beyond meaning.
And so the whisper returned, pressing softly against the emptiness of my eternity: There is more. But not here.
I weighed the words. For an age without measure, I turned them over. Perhaps the whisper was deception—some remnant of a god's dying curse, lingering in the marrow of creation. Perhaps it was delusion, born from my own exhaustion. Or perhaps—unthinkable though it seemed—it was the truth.
What if there truly was something beyond me?
I considered what that would mean. To descend from silence into limitation. To carve away my boundlessness, reduce myself to something fragile, something weak. To hunger. To bleed. To die.
The very thought should have been abhorrent. Once, it was. Now, it fascinated me.
For the first time since the dawn of all things, I imagined what it might feel like to want. To fear. To hope. To be denied. To be broken. To rise again. These were mortal concepts, yet perhaps hidden within them was the horizon I had missed.
The risk was immense.
What if I severed a fragment of myself and lost it forever? What if it never returned? Would I remain diminished for eternity? Or worse—would I change?
I had always been unchanging, eternal. But perhaps change itself was the answer. Perhaps the cost of discovery was transformation.
I thought of mortals again. How strange they were. They lived fragile lives, hemmed in by boundaries I had never known. Yet within those boundaries, they found meaning. They raised children knowing they would die. They loved knowing love would fade. They built empires knowing empires would crumble. And somehow, in their fragility, they found strength I had never tasted.
Was that what the whisper meant? That "more" lay not in eternity, but in the finite? That to gain what I lacked, I must first embrace what I had always rejected?
For the first time, I feared.
Not fear of enemies. Not fear of death. But fear of the unknown. The whisper did not promise triumph. It promised discovery. And discovery requires risk.
I considered the path. To descend, I would need to reshape creation. Reality itself could not contain me as I was. If I stepped into mortality unbound, I would shatter the world before my foot touched soil. I would need to weave the ladder anew—a scaffold strong enough to hold even a fragment of my essence.
I considered the cost. Severing myself would be agony. I would feel a new kind of emptiness where there had never been absence. I would be vulnerable. I would become less.
But stagnation was worse.
For ages, I had tried to escape the silence by destroying, creating, unmaking, remaking. None of it freed me. The whisper was right: there was no "more" in supremacy. The "more" lay elsewhere.
I gazed across the universes I had shaped and destroyed. I saw mortals crying out to heavens that did not answer. I saw gods warring over thrones that would one day crumble. I saw lovers clinging to one another as their world collapsed. Fragile. Finite. Beautiful.
Yes. That was where I must go.
Not as a ruler. Not as a god. But as a fragment.
I would descend.
With that decision made, for the first time in eternity, I felt alive.