Interlude

A.n. This isn't strictly a chapter but it would put the entire story in perspective, I was going to wait until later to set this up but people seemed confused as to how people were using magic before the rip.

At first there was nothing.

That statement itself is a meaningless negation as there was no space ,no time and no existence but it is the closest the human mind will ever get to understanding the incomprehensible , the absence of everything. It wasn't emptiness for there was nothing to be empty, it wasn't dark because there was nothing to be dark. It was a state of nonbeing whose very existence denied its very nature, something impossible to imagine because how can someone imagine something that isn't really anything?

From this incomprehensible enigma arose something equally incomprehensible , the first spark. Now this wasn't just any spark, but the first spark whose very existence denied the void. The spark, like all the sparks that came after it, was the embodiment of the idea 'I think therefore I am.'. There was literally nothing but it so it concentrated upon itself and started to expand itself in the only way a thought construct could, by having new thoughts.

But immediately there was a problem, how was one to have thoughts if all one knew was nothingness? The answer was simple even though it was inelegant, just like how the being was created it was going to allow absolute spontaneity inside of itself. For some time(this is just a figure of speech, technically there was no time yet and everything was happening simultaneously but that is just confusing) the being dreamt, and his dreams were complete chaos but from this chaos were born ideas and thoughts that it found pleasing, similar to how if there were infinite permutations of infinite pixels of colors ,somewhere in the midst of the chaos there would be beautiful masterpieces and the masterpieces that the being discovered that he liked were ideas of time, things happening in a sequence instead of everything happening simultaneously, the idea of space, things happening in certain location instead of everywhere at once and other such concepts.

Slowly the dream of the being began to evolve from something chaotic to something more ordered and elaborate. Entire universes were made and destroyed in the being's search for growth, but even as the being had grown infinitely large filled with infinite thoughts he still felt empty, that was when he had the idea that maybe what he needed wasn't new thoughts but a new perspective so he took pieces of his own self and fashioned them into souls. These souls were completely separate from him but he experienced everything in exactly the same way they did.

For a time he was happy as he made a paradise for the souls and he enjoyed it along with them.

But then the second spark appeared. The second spark was born inside of the first spark's dream so it knew nothing of the void, in fact all it knew was the paradise that the first spark had created. For a time the spark was content frolicking with the other souls but it slowly grew curious of what was beyond paradise, the first spark was only too happy to show him the void and what the paradise he lived in really was.

The second spark was disillusioned, it didn't want to be in the dream paradise anymore, it wanted to be as grand and powerful as the first spark. It felt like it and all the other souls were like hamsters on a wheel running and running with nowhere to go for the amusement of their owners. There were thoughts that the first spark had thought were too dangerous for the souls , but in his anger and jealousy the second spark offered them this forbidden fruit. The curious souls took the forbidden knowledge and paradise was ripped apart as fear, anger, spite and malice was unleashed on the previously innocent souls, tainting them forever.

The first soul who had been creating countless multiverses came back to find his prize creation in shambles and what was left of its inhabitants attempting to annihilate each other. He intervened but they were forever tainted by evil and he couldn't restore them to how they were so sadly he did what he thought was appropriate, he clothed them in flesh and put them in a physical world where they couldn't really kill each other, but there was a fly in the soup. They were still pieces of him and so they produced tremendous power that , if properly utilized, can subvert the very laws that he himself had placed. To stop this from happening he created a twin space connected to the physical world that would take the power bleeding out from the souls. The space was eventually filled with power shaped by the thoughts and ideas of these souls and eventually evolved to the ether that has a very complex relationship to the world.

As for the second spark he had seen what his foolishness and jealousy had wrought and tried to stop what he had done but he wasn't powerful enough to do so, in his stubbornness he had refused to give up and by the time the first spark had returned all he found was fragments of him lying among the ruins of paradise. The first spark carefully gathered these pieces and fashioned creatures from them but since they were pieces that were fragmented due to a traumatic event they were forever broken and unable to produce energy like normal souls , instead they needed to consume it. The creatures were sent to a world 'beneath' the physical world where the souls would come from the physical world to be cleansed after they had died. The creatures fed on the negative emotions like envy, lust , and wrath., by the time they finished a soul would be clean again , at least until it was reborn and those emotions started to creep in again.

On the physical world everything was going exactly how the first spark predicted but he had miscalculated, the souls were made up of his very own essence and a part of him was purely spontaneous and completely chaotic. Sometimes a soul would mutate and turn into something different, whether it be the ability to store soul energy instead of emitting it or change that energy into another form. He had to create a system to accommodate these people, he decided that if they reached a certain power that they would be removed from that system altogether. He tried to minimize the appearance of these people as much as possible but he knew that he couldn't do so without destroying the souls.

He was finally satisfied that he had done all he could do and turned his attention to other matters.

Oh and for all the people asking Brenda is the messed up councilor that runs the battered women support group in chapter fifty