To descend as a fragment, I first had to give creation a spine.
Raw reality—left as I had found and remade it countless times—would rip apart beneath even a sliver of my essence. Mortals call it fate when a bridge collapses under a weight it was not meant to bear. The cosmos is no different. If I stepped into clay without preparation, the world would not greet me; it would shatter.
So I began where all architectures begin: I chose a line and called it a rule.
I drew the line through darkness and light alike, threading it through galaxies, pinning it under seas of stars, anchoring it in the marrow of worlds. The line hummed, resonant with a single purpose—containment—and reality leaned toward it as iron leans toward a lodestone. Where the line passed, chaos softened, and order gathered like dew.
I spoke a structure into being, not with words, but with will.
Mortals would one day name it the Tiered Path and carve it into temple floors, scholars would sketch it in ink and argue over its subtleties, monarchs would tattoo its rungs on their wrists and claim legitimacy by proximity to its upper rings. Yet in its making, there was no heraldry, no choir, no thunder. Only patience and precise intention.
Tier Ten I set at the base: the fragile and immediate. Skin and bone. Hunger and breath. The ecology of limitation. To stand here is to be pressed on all sides by loss and need. Yet there is wonder here, too—the kind mortals can taste. I forged the physics of friction and fatigue; I defined pain so that courage could be more than a word.
Tier Nine, where tool and tribe turn struggle into leverage. Fire tamed, languages knotted into agreements, stories passed like torches through dark generations. Here I placed the law of learning: repetition leaves grooves in the mind, and grooves guide the hand toward mastery.
Tier Eight, where craft becomes art and survival becomes culture. Music as architecture for the soul; mathematics as a lantern hung over the unknown. Here I placed the first bright edges of power—vital energy learned, breathed, circulated—so mortals could discover that the body is not a cell but a gate.
Tier Seven, the awakening of will beyond mere flesh. Here I latticed the nervous system of the Path: meridians through which power can flow, concepts that can be practiced until they bend reality's grain. Some will call it magic. Some will call it cultivation. It is both. It is neither. It is a practice made into law.
Tier Six, I sculpted for the first transformations—little deaths that produce truer lives. Bones lighten, senses widen; a person ceases to be merely one and becomes many: the self who was, the self who is, the self becoming. I wrote in about the possibility of failure, and its honest price, so that ascent would be purchased and not an accident.
Tier Five, I made a harbor for saints and monsters. Here, the air is thin and full of hymns; here, the ground remembers every step. Those who reach this height learn that power is not a ladder but a lens: the world does not change so much as it comes into terrible, beautiful focus. Some weep. Some laugh. A few turn back.
Tier Four, where personal law begins. The sun does not rise here because it must, but because the strong say so—and pay for the saying with themselves. I salted this tier with paradox to give birth to humility: command the storm, but fail to command your own grief, and you will drown all the same.
Tier Three, the architecture of influence. Cities respond to thought; nations lean beneath the hand. Here I seeded the subtle lattice mortals will call destiny, not to enslave them, but to give them something to argue with. I want them to have a worthy opponent besides one another.
Tier Two, I made narrow on purpose. Few will breathe this air. Here, one's name becomes a weather system that can flatten or raise a continent. To step wrongly is to erase a century of good. To step rightly is to become a century.
Tier One, the threshold. Bodies become suggestions. Words become engines. Each oath spoken binds not only the speaker but the season. I wove a last restraint into this rung—a stitch of gravity through the heart—so that even those who could lift mountains must still bow to consequence.
Above all these, on the crown of the scaffold, I set Tier Zero: sovereignty. Here are thrones and responsibilities, the high offices of creation. Pantheons will debate here. Judgments will be rendered like lightning. I made it glorious. I made it heavy. Sovereignty that costs nothing is theft; I wanted even gods to sweat.
And then, above Tier Zero, I did something I had never permitted before: I shaped a silence and left it empty on purpose.
Not the silence I had known—sterile, absolute—but a silence with space in it, like waiting, like a breath held before a word. I left that room unnamed. Mortals would not reach it. Most gods would never perceive it. It existed for one who would be both less and more than either.
Perhaps for me, if I earned it.
The scaffold was not enough. Structure without skin is a skeleton rattling in the wind. I needed laws that could breathe—laws that would flex beneath mortal hands and hold firm beneath mine.
So I tuned constants like a musician tunes strings. I tightened the light until it moved as a disciplined legion, then loosened it until it blurred like rain. I set c and G and ħ as anchors mortals could find by experiment, and hid other numbers in the folds where only poets and madmen would hear them. I braided entropy with memory so that loss could be resisted, if only by love. I taught matter how to listen to will in narrow bands—just wide enough to be discovered by monks and sorcerers and mathematicians with dirty fingernails and sleepless eyes.
I carved channels through uncreation, delicate as capillaries, and threaded them under the foundations of worlds. To look directly at those channels is to go blind; to feel them is to learn a new kind of heartbeat. Through them, the impossible can flow—not as violation, but as permission granted in secret.
Then I had to teach the cosmos to keep secrets.
I layered veils. The first veil: habit. Let most things repeat until the mind slides off them. The second: noise. Drown revelations in a choir of trivialities. The third: myth. Bury truth in a field of stories; when someone digs, they will find a story either way. The fourth: cost. If you must look behind the curtain, pay. Blood, time, reputation—choose your coin.
Still, a scaffold and veils are only a stage. I required conflict. Without it, the Path would be a painted stair. So I seeded adversaries whose very existence demands an answer: diseases that teach communities to become hands for one another; tyrannies that force decent people to stand; winters that grind whole nations and leave in their wake a music that could not have been written in spring.
I also planted mercy. Springs that rise unasked. Gentle harvests after lean years. A stranger's hand on a fevered brow. The sun catches on a sword and making even a butcher's blade, for a single heartbeat, look clean. I will not descend into a theater that only punishes. There must be room in it for grace.
At last I walked the length of what I had made—not with feet, but with attention—and pressed upon it from every angle. I crashed waves of probability against its shores to see where it would leak. I breathed uncreation through its lattice to find where it would fray. Where seams popped, I stitched. Where tendons pulled, I slackened or strengthened. I invited a hundred imagined catastrophes—meteors, plagues, coup d'états of gods—and watched how the system bore their weight.
It held.
I stood at the lip of everything and looked down through the clear bones of my work to a single world turning blue and green beneath a quiet sky. Its mountains wore snow like old kings wear fur. Its oceans moved with gravity and moonlight and the secrets of whales. Its cities were hives of laughter and theft. Its fields glowed at dusk like embers laid carefully in rows.
I felt, for the first time since the whisper began, the sensation mortals have when they nail two beams together and know—by the sound—that the house will stand.
In the hush that followed, I named nothing. Names would come from those who needed them. Let the farmers call power by the taste of iron in their mouths. Let the scholars count rungs on paper and swear they have seen all there is to see. Let the priests sing. Let the rebels curse. Let the children ask questions that flatten empires.
The Path was ready.
Only one task remained: to become small enough to use it.