A COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE COSMOS

PART TWO: THE ORIGIN OF THE MULTIVERSE

It's time to take a look at the origin of the Cosmos, at the birth of all the Multiverses and of the Normal and Mirror Tetraspaces.

Sometime, when time didn't have meaning, the Cosmos was born. What was the Cosmos? Nobody knows. The Cosmos had its own essence, a roaring chaos of anything, mixed together in a single particle of infinite extension. But the Cosmos, though it was a single particle, was filled with "minds", with "intelligences", beings of pure thought. The Cosmos was a combination of Substance and Thoughts. These Thoughts didn't know how nor when the Cosmos had been born. Maybe it had always been alive. And they were alive since the Cosmos was alive, since they were part of the Cosmos, and Time still didn't have any meaning.
Each time a Thought was thinking, it shaped the Cosmos around him. So the Cosmos changed and changed under the influence of the Thoughts. The Cosmos were filled with universes, unliving expressions of the Substance shaped by the Thoughts. Then, creatures were born, when the Thoughts begun to think of things that were Substance but shared of their abilty to think. The Thoughts were the Gods. And the first races of beings were born: Athanatoi, Dragons and Draedens.

While the Gods were pentadimensional creatures, the creatures (that they had generated with their Thoughts through the Substance of the Cosmos) were not. They were four-dimensional creatures. When the four-dimensional creatures were born, the Cosmos was drastically changed: Time was born, because their lack of the fifth dimension made to them not completely possible to alter and change the Cosmos around them. They were able to dream and think and even create, but they couldn't compare with the powers of the Gods.

Time passed. Maybe millions of millions of years, maybe seconds. Although Time was born, it had still little meaning, as it was not able to influence significantly the immortal creatures. Time was a Thought generated when the Thoughts generated sentient non-pentadimensional creatures. Time became thus one of the Gods, although it was not born with the Cosmos itself.

Time passed, and the Gods, helped by the races that had become mostly their servants, shaped the Cosmos. However, a fracture came between the Gods. One group of Gods wanted to shape an orderly Cosmos. Another wanted the Cosmos to be the most chaotic as possible. At the moment this fracture between the Gods erupted, the Cosmos separated itself in two Tetraspaces, the Normal and Mirror ones. One was as orderly as its masters. The other was chaotic and everchanging like its inhabitants. But what scared the Gods at this point was that they couldn't use their fifth-dimension powers anymore, since the fracture...while a third group of Gods, that enjoyed the mixture of chaos and order that the Cosmos had been until now, and had no desire to change it, was still able to do so.

From the Normal and the Mirror Tetraspace, the Gods vowed war and destruction upon the Ulterior Ones (the gods that still retained their fifth dimension), because for the first time in Time they had fear. They had enjoyed the dominance of the Cosmos, the dominance upon their servants, and didn't want to lose their power and the grasp on the Cosmos. If they were banished to one of the two sides of the Cosmos unable to control all of it, they vowed, then nobody should be able to control both.

A terrible Battle was born. The Ulterior Ones fought with their sons and servants, most of whom were terrible Discontiguates, creatures partly "normal" and partly "nightmarish". The Gods fought each with its Athanatoi servants, with the reclutant Dragons (who had refused to serve the Gods, but had chosen to live in the Normal Tetraspace) and Draedens (who had chosen to live in the Mirror Tetraspace). In the end, the Ulterior Ones were dominated and forced to renounce to one of their dimensions. Instead of being able to control the whole Cosmos, they became "discontiguated" themselves - they lost a random dimension, that they would forever lack; moreover, this lacking dimension would not be the 1st or the 5th, that would enable them to be Gods in one of the two Tetraspacess. However, although this had the effect of preventing the Ulterior Ones from dominating the Cosmos or sharing its domination, it made them very dangerous, as they are, from the Battle of Birth of Universes, the only ones that can draw upon the resources of the 1st and 5th dimension at the same time.

After the defeat of the Ulterior Ones, the Gods took each their way: part, from that moment called the Mirror Gods, ruled and shaped the chaos of the Nightmare Dimension; part, called the True Gods, would shape the Multiverses. It was only after the Battle of Birth of Universes, that the Gods and the Ulterior Ones noticed the existance of the Vortex.

After the Birth of the Universes, the Ulterior Ones and the Mirror Gods would be known in the Normal Tetraspace with the common name of Outer Beings, although the purposes of the two groups differ greatly. In the Normal Tetraspace, meanwhile, the True Gods were taking steps to insure the preservation of the part of the Cosmos that they controlled.

The True Gods agreed to split the Normal Tetraspace in many smaller parts, separated from each other. To do so, they used an incredible amount of energy to bend the newly discovered Vortex's extremities. Although they tried to divide the parts completely, to prevent any contact between each part (named Multiverse), they didn't manage to separate them completely, and they continued to share a region, that would become known as the Inner Planes. Their continual effort, however, resulted in the birth of the Elemental Planes and of the common Ethereal, and the confinement of the ability to forge new "thoughts" in a small area of each Multiverse - its Prime Plane.

When the True Gods did this, they also told the Athanatoi, their closest servants, that they would retire from the Tetraspace and give them the duty to watch over the Multiverse. To insure that part of the Tetraspace would survive even if the Athanatoi failed to defend it from possible attacks from Outer Beings, however, the True Gods didn't tell any of the Athanatoi of the "splitting" of the Tetraspace, separating the Athanatoi from each other and putting only some of them on each Multiverse. So even the oldest Immortals on Mystara, as an example, don't know the truth, fooled by their former masters. Moreover, not all of the True Gods "retired" from the Multiverses: many assumed the form of new Athanatoi, or of Athanatoi that had died during the Battle, and in this disguise they continued since then to influence and control directly the Athanatoi.

Contrarily to the Draeden and Dragons, races in the true sense of the term, the Athanatoi were individual immortal and very powerful beings, but were "technically" sterile. The Athanatoi retained a certain ability to "create and shape thoughts", thus altering the Cosmos, creating new demiplanes and planes, re-shaping the nature, creating new races. In creating new races, however, they were less succesful than their masters, and were only able to create "incomplete" four-dimensional beings, mortal races that suffered the weight of Time and ultimately died, planets and moons that were eroded and transformed. This happened because no Athanatoi was able to have a complete control on its creature or on the parts of nature, and all the other Athanatoi influenced with their thoughts and actions the work of the other. In the same way, mortals interacted with the others and were free to war each other, and erase races and destroy places in the Universes. Mortal life was born.

The Mortals began to worship the Athanatoi as superior beings, and the Athanatoi discovered that the Mortals who worshipped them in the Prime Plane, that had retained the strenght of Belief, enhanced their powers. The Athanatoi, however, were even more surprised by the incredible power of the Prime when some powerful mortal heroes managed, through their will to survive death and the worship as superheroes by their race of origin, were able to ascend their rank. Depending on the Multiverse, the Athanatoi had different reactions to this situation. Some reacted with indifference, others hated these "parvenu-immortals"; others created a strict chaste system to prevent the new gods from learning of the origin of the Multiverse.

And this is the end of the Old Cosmos, and the start of the Cosmos as we know it today: there are ancient gods, mortals that can become gods, outer beings and dark sinister secrets, hidden by layers of lies forged by godlike creatures to hide the truth from the grasping hands of any creature, mortal or immortal, that wants to reach the ultimate meaning of the Cosmos and of Life...

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