In the beginning, before everything changed, the cosmos wasn't just one universe. It was countless realities, woven together like threads in an endless net.
Each one had its own rules, its own story. Some were war zones where machine empires fought across star systems, their fleets blocking out suns in battles that lasted thousands of years. Others were quiet places where beings pulled energy straight from the void, shaping worlds with thought alone.
And then there were the young ones—a single planet orbiting a dying star, or oceans just starting to bubble with the first simple life.
They all connected through something called the Aetherium. Think of it as invisible roots running through every reality, carrying faint signals from one universe to the next. You couldn't touch it or see it, just feel it—a background hum in the fabric of things.
A few advanced civilizations learned to tap into it, slipping across borders for quick glimpses of other worlds. A trader from a tech-heavy reality might step into a magic-woven one and watch knights fight with spells that bent light into blades. A mystic from a dreamlike realm could wander into a clockwork universe where everything ran on gears the size of galaxies.
They'd come back changed. Eyes wide with wonder, or broken by the sheer strangeness of it all.
Gravity wasn't the same everywhere. In lighter universes, cities floated on air currents, people leaping between drifting buildings on personal grav-boots. In heavier ones, worlds crushed into dense cores where a single step could shatter stone.
Time played tricks too. Most places moved straight forward—sunrise to sunset, birth to death. But others looped back on themselves, civilizations rising and falling in eternal cycles, learning the same lessons forever.
A few ran backward, where people remembered the future and couldn't escape their past. In the wildest corners, time split and merged, letting you live a dozen lives at once.
Life came in forms that would make your head spin. Not just flesh and blood—there were gas clouds that thought in chemical storms, crystals that sang messages across the void, fungus colonies spanning continents with one shared mind.
Empires grew fat trading these differences, or conquering neighbors who had what they didn't. Stars died in supernovas, new ones ignited in the wreckage. Build, break, rebuild—an endless cycle.
But one question haunted the sharpest minds across all realities: Where did it start?
They called it the Mega Bang—a single explosive moment when everything burst from nothing into everything. Echoes of that blast still rippled through the Aetherium, faint but insistent, like a drumbeat you feel in your chest from miles off.
Civilizations chased it with probes and prayers, simulations and rituals. But it stayed locked away, a puzzle with pieces scattered across the stars.
In one cluster of realities, silicon-based nomads built the first cross-universe relays—massive rings that punched holes in the Aetherium. Their scouts mapped a hundred worlds in a decade. But the Mega Bang signal? Too raw, too old to pin down.
In another thread, a hive-mind of energy beings tuned their collective thoughts to the Aetherium's hum, tracking the Bang's origin like bloodhounds. They got close once—visions of blinding light, infinite expansion. The feedback fried their network, leaving survivors adrift in static dreams.
Word spread through the Aetherium's web. Traders carried tales of "the Echo," that primal roar hinting at forces that could unmake or remake everything. Scholars debated in vast forums. Warriors saw opportunity. Priests, a divine test.
But no one cracked it. Not yet.
Then three civilizations, built on time and code and light, started listening closer.
The Vortexians noticed anomalies in their time maps—gaps where causality skipped like a scratched record.
The Synthetos ran numbers that didn't add up, their algorithms spitting errors tied to some external pulse.
The Luminari felt a chill in their meditations, a shadow over the cosmic mind.
Independently, they chased it. Built tools sharper than any before. Probes that folded space. Computations that burned out cores. Trances that bordered on madness.
Piece by piece, the Mega Bang's blueprint emerged—not as myth, but as mechanism. A code, waiting to be read.
By the time they connected, the multiverse had already shifted. Borders thinned under their prodding. A Synthetos outpost vanished into a time loop. A Luminari crystal shattered under Vortexian energy wash.
But they pressed on, driven by that shared hunger: to know the why, to hold the how.
They didn't realize the Echo wasn't just a signal.
It was a beacon, pointing to something buried deep—a key to the lock of creation itself.
And three keys, carried by three civilizations, were about to open a door that should have stayed shut forever.