Before breath, before light, before sound—there was Yurn Vael.
It did not speak, for there was no language to hold its madness. It did not see, for there were no eyes in the rotting soup of unformed existence. But it dreamed—and that was enough to damn everything that followed.
From its dreams bled the first thoughts: malformed, screaming, hungry. Five gods poured forth from the ruptured edge of Yurn's mind like infection from a wound. They were not born. They were not loved. They simply were, and that alone was blasphemy enough to fracture nothingness into being.
Milath was the first to rise.
A cat with the grin of a skull and the eyes of every fool who ever died laughing. Her body shifted constantly—fur to feathers to fire to teeth—never still, never sane. She bounded across the void, tail dragging madness behind her like a child's ribbon soaked in blood.
She found everything funny. Especially pain.
Then came Hyacinth, slithering from contradiction, a serpent coiled around its own tongue. Her scales shimmered with opposites—ice and fire, law and chaos, love and violence—never agreeing, always devouring. She existed only because she denied herself so absolutely that even the void believed the lie.
She was the goddess of paradox. She spat truth like poison and wept lies like prayers.
Third was Sageth, once beautiful, now revolting, a twin-faced deity weeping molten gold from one side and vomiting black worms from the other. Its limbs were tangled vines of gluttony. It consumed worship and excreted cults. Wherever it walked, purity decayed into obsession.
To follow Sageth was to rot in the name of divinity.
Isoth crawled from the glass between stars. A being of performance, made entirely of reflection, never substance. A god trapped inside his own legend. Mirrors bled when he passed. Eyes bled when they watched. He was endless theater—dying nightly for an audience that could never look away.
Isoth never touched. He was only seen. That was enough.
And finally, hidden in shadow, came Posseth.
A liar. A whisper. A mimic of gods. It wore masks of memory, stitched from the dreams of the dead. None saw Posseth arrive. They simply remembered it always being there. It claimed to be the god of entertainment, and no one questioned it—because to question Posseth was to question reality itself.
It did not rule. It convinced others they wanted it to.
They gathered on the threshold of existence, where chaos still slithered like newborn flame.
And they looked upon the canvas of the void and said, "Let us make something that dies."
Thus, Existence began.
The First War
Milath leapt upon creation like a cat upon a toy, tearing at stars with laughter that split black holes. She built galaxies only to unravel them into ribbons of screaming light.
Hyacinth, bound in endless self-contradiction, struck her with a thought so sharp it cut time itself. Their war began with a joke and a paradox, and it ended only because they forgot what they were fighting for.
But Sageth remembered.
Sageth took the ashes of their conflict and planted seeds of belief. From those seeds bloomed civilizations. Kingdoms. Faith. The more they praised, the more Sageth grew—until its roots choked the laws of physics and turned them to ritual.
Isoth sang of the war before it began. His voice echoed backward through causality, writing prophecy as prelude. Each note a funeral. Each lyric a truth no mortal could survive hearing.
And Posseth?
Posseth whispered to each of them in turn.
To Milath: "You are the only one who understands the joke."
To Hyacinth: "They will never comprehend your truth."
To Sageth: "All worship belongs to you. The others are deluded."
To Isoth: "Without you, there is no meaning."
They believed every word.
They always do.
The war raged not over land or power—but over narrative. They battled to control the meaning of existence. They tore suns in half and wore neutron stars as armor. The galaxies screamed as their creators dismembered reality just to see if it would bleed.
Time collapsed. Space buckled. Causality cracked like a mirror kicked by a furious god.
Through it all, Yurn Vael did not wake. It stirred once—a tremor in the sleep of the eternal—and in that moment, a trillion newborn universes died stillborn.
When the gods grew weary of slaughter, Milath giggled through bloodstained fangs and proposed a new form of violence:
"A game."
Not for power. Not for dominion. For entertainment.
"We make them play for us," she purred. "We give them rules. Rewards. Hope. And then, when they believe they have a chance—we make them kill each other."
The others agreed.
Even Hyacinth, who always agreed and never did.
Even Sageth, who saw in it a feast of belief and heresy.
Even Isoth, who saw the stage stretch before him, wide and endless and full of screams.
Even Posseth, who had already begun to recruit the players before the idea had even been spoken aloud.
And Yurn Vael, slumbering still, released a slow exhale.
Its breath fell upon the new game like divine radiation.
A name echoed through every sleeping mind in creation. A whisper. A promise.
Playing for God.
Those who answered would become contestants.
Pieces on the divine board.
Dancing, killing, screaming, dying—for gods who watched only to pass the time.
The curtain rises soon.
Let the first sacrifice begin.