The scaffold was set. The tiers hummed in harmony, veils drawn, laws tuned like strings on an instrument mortals had not yet learned to play. For the first time since I crossed beyond the ladder, the cosmos felt… unfinished, yet promising. A stage waiting for its actor.
But the actor could not be me as I was.
I had to cut myself down.
The thought alone was heresy. I was boundless. I had never known what it meant to be fractured. My essence was continuous, seamless, indivisible. Even when gods hurled their weapons of inevitability against me, I did not bleed; I did not break. To choose to divide myself was to court pain unlike any other.
And yet, the whisper lingered: There is more. But not here.
So I reached inward.
It is easier to tear galaxies than to touch oneself. I drew my awareness to the core of my essence, where silence and being were indistinguishable. There I pressed a hand that was not a hand against a wall that was not a wall, and for the first time in eternity, I felt resistance.
I pressed harder.
My essence screamed. It was not a sound, but the shudder of perfection forced into imperfection. Light burst outward in threads too fine for mortal eyes, weaving across the scaffold I had prepared. Shadows bled in the same instant, dripping into the channels of uncreation I had bound.
I had not known I could feel pain. I learned it then.
The fragment resisted, clinging to the whole as a child clings to a parent's robe. It begged not with words but with terror: the terror of becoming less. I pulled anyway. The whisper had asked for more, and the only way forward was through subtraction.
The tearing was agony. My infinity unraveled, fiber by fiber, as though a tapestry woven since before time was being pulled into strands. Sparks of memory split away—universes I had birthed, faces of gods I had erased, prayers I had heard and ignored—all flickered through me and were gone.
At last, a sliver separated.
It burned like a coal freshly torn from the heart of a star. Its light was small compared to me, yet fierce in its concentration. I held it trembling in the palm of my will, and for the first time, I beheld something of myself that was not myself.
A fragment.
I looked at it with awe and fear. What would it become? Would it endure? Would it dissolve? Would it betray me by becoming something alien?
The shard shuddered, then twisted. I had not willed it to do so, yet it responded as though it already carried independence. It reached downward, toward the scaffold, toward the waiting clay of mortality.
No, not yet.
I shaped it first. I clothed it in limitation. I wrapped it in organs and bone, in hunger and breath. I taught it exhaustion. I wove into its marrow the possibility of failure. I gave it eyes that could close, ears that could be deafened, a heart that could stutter and stop. I gave it skin that could feel warmth, cold, the sting of a blade, the tremor of a hand pressed gently against it.
I gave it what I had never had: fragility.
It hurt more than the severing itself. To see my essence—once infinite—compressed into a vessel so pitiful, so finite. This body could break. This soul could fracture. This mind could go mad.
And yet, that was the point.
As I watched it settle into form, something strange stirred in me. Not pride. Not pity. Anticipation. The way a sculptor feels not at the perfection of marble, but at the first crack of a chisel. This form was not a masterpiece—it was potential.
The shard twitched in its shell, drawing a first breath. It coughed. The sound was pitiful. Beautiful.
I recoiled.
Never had I produced a sound so small. Never had I felt so large beside something that was me and yet not me. This was not a servant. Not an avatar. Not a toy. This was an incarnation—an echo of myself destined to forget the silence beyond the ladder.
I feared then. Not of failure. But of success. What if the fragment became too much itself? What if it grew beyond me? What if, in discovering "more," it chose not to return?
I whispered—not as ruler, but as parent to child. Find it. Find what I cannot. Return, or do not. But find it.
The fragment stilled, as if listening.
I realized, suddenly, that I had given it more than fragility. I had given choice.
The pain of separation throbbed through me, but beneath it was something else. Something I could not name then, though mortals would call it hope.
The incarnation was ready.
Only one step remained: to let go.