Chapter 1: Prologue – In the endless mists of the astral realm

In the endless mists of the astral realm, creatures stalked. Creatures so far removed from the material realm that even as their everchanging figures shifted and shattered into crystalline shards that slowly became one with the mana-mists, only to reassemble into a new form in an endless cycle. Yet even with infinite configurations, their shapes always ended in an incomprehensible, indescribable appearance so far removed from the material world that no mortal mind would ever understand their forms.

If there ever could be an existence who watched the astral beasts, a mind beyond reality, capable of seeing their domain and the realm of mortals, thus granting them the needed contrast to see the strangeness which permeated the great beyond, they would see naught but a nigh endless space filled with the grey, stale, mists of mana. For even though the scale of the realm was beyond any mind, it was not endless, it was ever-expanding, just as the material realm it mirrored was, but for it to grow, there had to be an edge. But even in the unchallenged monotony of the astral realm, there were two exceptions. They should not be, yet they were. In the very center of the astral, at the innermost point of the entire plane, there was a glass crack at the very epicenter where the Universe was once born, and the very point where it once split in two, separating the two halves of what should have been a whole. The astral and the material.

But the glass crack held no importance. It was curious, but not important, for even if the crack allowed sight between the two planes, it was the glass crack for a reason, and nothing could pass through. The true anomaly was the creature that had watched the crack since time immemorial. Not in power, as even though it was the strongest of the beasts of the beyond, that in itself was not truly abnormal. No, the truly abnormal characteristic it possessed was its age. The other creatures were always young, for they, along with all else in the astral, were made of mana, and mana was shaped by desire, and when they needed no food, no water, and when there was nothing to want as everything was the same, any creatures would quickly disperse once more with no will to stay.

But it had desire. From the moment of its inception into the astral as the first creature to be formed, born in the fraction of a moment when the universe and its two planes were but specs of dust, almost no larger than it was, in the endless void that the universe would soon invade and conquer, it had seen the material world through the glass crack. From its first glance, it had been entranced by material. Not by the natural wonders of life, not by the stark landscapes of newly born planets, not even by the gigantic beauty of galaxies. No, the creatures of the astral were too foreign for that, their minds too far removed from the mortal world to see or recognize its beauty, in fact, the creatures from the realm of mana could not even see the material, for they had no need to in their world of energy. what it could see, what enchanted it for all of time was the intricate and beautiful dance of the energies of the mortal world, the complex weave of the energies interacting with each other through the medium of matter, the endless ways it could move, and the graceful pictures it spun. The stale, unmoving, and unchanging grey mana that surrounded it lost all luster it could ever have to the being. It was not long before worry grew in its mind. What if someone else, someone new were to see this wonder? In its desire for solitude, a being, for the first time, shaped the mana around it, to create a fortress unlike anything seen elsewhere in the astral, a monolithic spherical castle larger than any galaxy in the material realm, its grayscale halls held together with nothing but the will of its creator.

And there it stayed for billions of years, watching with satisfaction as life appeared, pleased with the new level of complexity it brought to the dance of energies. It was content with the existence of material life, until they did something… wrong. They bound the energies. They chained them in small cubes of metal, until they were almost used completely, then… they threw them away. Even when there were still energies trapped within, energies no longer able to participate in the dance, forever trapped in their cube shells. And then it spread, spread across the universe to many, far too many, races. Yet there was nothing to be done. It could only wait.

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