Before there were names, before there were things to be named, there was nothing. And then there was light and fire brought forth with a power never to be equaled, but quickly it exhausted and what was left cooled into cosmic dust. Almost as quickly as it came to be, the residual shimmer of creation sank back into silence... but not all.

An Ember remained, bound to reality by their curiosity of the cooling universe. It drifted through the cosmos for a time without counting, watching stars birth from cosmic gas, and worlds form in their heat, only for it all to collapse in on itself in a cycle unending.  As it witnessed, it felt a hunger it did not yet have words for: the desire not merely to observe, but to shape. In time that desire grew.

A dream took root in the Ember. Its thoughts wandered to a world orbiting in the warmth of a young star that would be its own. A place whose many moons would dance in the sky and whose mountains and seas and beasts would all, in some hidden way, answer back to it. The allure of creating such a place with its own powers of creation gave way to the will to act upon that dream.

So the Ember chose. It bent its light inward and wove for itself a form with hands and eyes, a body that could stand upon soil, breathe air, touch what it meant to create. Yet in the act of crossing the threshold of existence it no longer tread outside the boundaries of what was possible.

There is no agreement on what happened next. No omen is recorded, no enemy named, and no witnesses to recount. In one moment the Ember strode the heavens, painting landscapes upon a nameless orb. In the the next... it fell.

The body of the Ember plummeted and struck one of the dancing moons with such force that stone screamed and the mantle folded. A crater tore open in the lunar surface so vast it threatened to crack the moon in two. But a remnant of the first blaze does not die quietly. Its physical form vaporized into a storm of pure creation that roiled and fed upon itself inside the crater. Within the tempest seconds stretched into eons as time bowed to the fury of the power unleashed. In this moment, even the Ember's soul shattered.

What had once been a single, immeasurable consciousness splintered into sharper, smaller selves. Anger tore free, followed by joy and sorrow, fear and judgment, the thirst to understand, the urge to choose. Each impulse that had moved within the Ember’s spirit clamored to live outside its boundaries. Even the Ember's indulgence coiled around the thrill of existence beyond the confines of concept... and so death gave birth to the Essences, the siblings of creation.

Age of Pandemonium

In the early chaos the Essences were vast and formless, little more than tides in the storm, but each knew itself as separate from the others. They clashed and tangled in the boiling air within the crater, each trying to bend the storm into its own likeness. Though none alone could claim its shape. And none remembered the dreams of creation that once inspired their progenitor. None except two.

The first was Will, the Hand That Would Not Still. Wherever this Essence turned, the storm leaned. Wherever it set itself, the chaos broke and flowed around it. It could not rest while anything remained unchosen.

The other was Inspiration, the First Spark. Where this Essence passed, shapes flared up in the storm—cities not yet founded, forests not yet rooted, faces that had never opened their eyes. Each vision was clear, urgent, but yet nothing more than fleeting dreams.

Will grew weary of pushing with no lasting mark. Inspiration grew heartsick of calling up worlds that died in the same breath. Around them, the other Essences raged and fed and schemed, but the chaos remained shapeless. No order formed. No cycle took hold. The crater boiled, full of possibility, and yet none were born.

Until at last Will and Inspiration danced together at the deepest heart of the wound, where the storm screamed loudest and the ash of the Ember was thickest.

Neither could deny the other. In that admission opened the eye of the tempest.

It was there, Will offered: let my choosing bind your sights. Inspiration answered: let my sights give aim to your choosing. They stepped into one another and did not step apart.

The two became one and the one became Lord. Roots of luminous dark drove down from this new god into the molten floor of the crater, drinking the storm and anchoring it. Around those roots, land thickened. Vapors cooled into seas. The churning sky bent into a vault that could hold clouds and seasons instead of unending fire.

Formation of the Veil

The Essences watched as the chaos that had birthed them was folded away. Not destroyed, but pushed aside, layered and wound in upon itself until it lay behind a veil that separated that which was and that which was not. Those folded layers became the Sway, a stacked elsewhere of demiplanes and thought-realms that bound the Essences in an eternal simulacrum.

The crater, now a scar given purpose, became the cradle of a new world. Its jagged rim rose like an impossible wall around new oceans and shores. This world, born from will and dreams, would come to be called Hadavi. The Essences became its first admirers and discovered that they could press upon it only from beyond the veil; when they tried to pass fully into its soil, the same order that held the Ember’s power in place drew them back to the Sway. They were bound outside of its reality, forced to bare witness without divine influence as the gods who came next would have.

All but their youngest sibling, Lord, the first inevitable, who called the veil between his domain where he slept upon the buried throne. From him flowed the roots of the world by which growth and decay would follow one another, by which beasts would hunt and flee, by which forests would rise and fall and rise again. In his shadow, the Essences turned inward to their own realms, and the storm of first making gave way to ordered change.

Inheritors of Hadavi

Life crept out along Lord’s roots without any command to do so. Where ash and nameless energies settled, strange growths swelled and split. Fragile things crawled and swam and clawed their way into being from the dreams of the sleep god.

Inheritors of Hadavi

Among all these accidents there came, in time, a stranger shape. From dust and lingering light the outline of the Ember’s old form rose again, not as a single vast being but as a multitude of small, short-lived ones. They stood upright. They shaped sounds into words. They carried within them a restless mix of choice and vision unlike that of any other creature.

Some whisper that the world remembered the body the Ember once wore, and in a quiet act of mimicry, cast it again and again in lesser clay. Some say Lord himself favored this pattern, though he has never spoken on it. Whatever the cause, these beings—humans—were anomalies. They were not designed, but they fit. They took the fire that seeped through the seams of Hadavi and made tools, songs, laws, and sins from it.

Thus the grave of a fallen Ember became a world, and those who walk its dust inherit, without knowing, the last dream and the last decision of a god that died trying to make something other than itself.