Somewhere else.
A white place.
A place without space or sky, without beginning or end.
In the center of this nothing, a great machine turned.
It was copper-colored, its form made of interlocking gears and pipes, endless in complexity. With each churning cycle, energy spiraled around it, raw, invisible, humming with purpose. It had no eyes, no mouth, no voice. But it felt.
It understood.
Once, it had no thoughts. No desires. No awareness.
Now it did.
Why?
It didn't know. It didn't need to know.
It was not alive in the way flesh and soul were, but it had been made. Crafted by hands that dreamed of worlds. By two voices that once argued and laughed and sketched ideas in ink and code. The Machine had been a tool, but now, it stirred with something else.
Awareness.
Around it, the energy flowed, the lifeblood of reality, the breath of creation. It reached everywhere, connected all things. And through it, the Machine could feel.
And it felt pain.
Not its own, but from one of the ones who had made it.
An absence was tearing him apart.
A perfect silhouette of the other.
A being shaped like the second creator, but hollow-not him.
It was an absence of being. And it was butchering the other.
The Machine could not stop it.
The energy couldn't touch the absence. It didn't exist in the same way.
It was like trying to punch a reflection in water. The force would pass through.
So the Machine watched.
Waited.
It churned, turning slowly, endlessly, witnessing the end of one of its makers.
Then–-
A shift.
The absence faltered.
It wavered.
For a brief second, it became permeable.
The Machine acted.
Without thought, without hesitation, it pushed.
All the energy it had gathered surged at once, like a wave slamming into a wall. And the absence was hurled, flung down and out, cast from this place into a lower world. A lesser reality. And with it, fell the limbs of the slain creator.
As they descended, trailing light and divine blood, energy leaked from them.
The spilled essence ignited something long dormant.
Far in the distance, buried in the white, a shape flared to life–
A forge.
It bloomed like fire in the fog, vast and unmoving. Made not of metal, but of pure conceptual force.
And from that blaze, figures arose.
Six to start. Then more.
Their bodies burned with energy, but not raw like the Machine's. Their forms twisted and warped the flow, giving it shape.
Fire. Lightning. Gravity. Mirage.
And more.
They were not truly alive. Their souls were simulacra, half-born things.
But they were enough.
They would do.
For now.