I was all alone, in my tiny corner in the vast nothingness of space. I was the last of my species, with everyone else dead in the great war.
The war that I had started. The war that gave me everything that I ever needed - power that nobody had ever imagined, wealth to buy anything. It cost everything, but I had everything that I originally wanted.
It should have been enough. Yet as I sat on my drifting, crumbling world, the black tapestry around me full of silent stars, I realized the truth: power is a hollow thing when there’s no one left to recognize it. Wealth is a joke when there’s no one left to envy you.
I wasn't just alone. I was forgotten. And all I wanted was to be remembered. To be known.
In my despair, I turned to the only thing left to me - my pen.
Or rather, the machine I had built, a device capable of weaving realities from words. It was crude at first. I would write, and the machine would craft. From ink and dreams, it would build beings, worlds, and ideas - things that almost breathed, almost lived. And so I created.
I wrote of light, to combat the darkness. Of fire, to feed hope and dispel the despair within. Of water. Of plants and animals. Of simple yet higher life forms, born in a garden of plenty. And finally, I wrote of good things. And I wrote of darker things, because the darkness within me couldn't be fully vanquished. I wrote of voices slithering into the heads of the higher life forms, whispering evil with words dipped in honey. And I wrote of the higher life forms, humans, descending into the same dark path that had taken me to where I was.
I watched them from afar. At first, they thrived in the garden I had penned for them. They danced in the light, bathed in the rivers, lived in harmony with beasts and trees alike. They were beautiful - so much more innocent than I had ever been, even in the earliest days before the war.
But the whispers I had woven into their world - whether by accident or a secret, unspoken longing for someone to share my fall - took root faster than I expected.
They questioned. They coveted. They betrayed.
They built kingdoms on the backs of the weak, raised monuments to their own glory, and forgot the garden from which they came. It hurt more than I was willing to admit. I could have erased them. I could have unwritten them with a flick of my hand, stripped their souls back into dust and silence.
But I didn’t.
Because in their flaws, I saw myself. In their rebellions, I saw my own first betrayal - the spark that had ignited a war that burned across the stars.
And most of all, I saw something new.
Hope.
Where I had destroyed, they sometimes healed.
Where I had conquered, they sometimes forgave.
Where I had drowned in bitterness, they sometimes chose to love, even when it broke them.
They were not perfect. But they were alive in ways I no longer knew how to be.
And as they lived, they began to wonder. They looked up at the stars and asked the questions I had once asked when the universe was still a blank canvas under my hands:
"Where did we come from?"
"Is there someone beyond the veil?"
"Are we alone?"
They told stories, because stories were their way of reaching for what they could not touch. They made Me a king, seated high on a golden throne above the clouds. They made Me a vengeful judge, weighing hearts on scales of fire. They made Me a loving father, a mother, a friend, a distant and terrible storm. Sometimes they feared Me. Sometimes they cursed Me. Sometimes they sang songs of such pure worship that it broke the loneliness inside Me, if only for a moment. And in every word, every song, every prayer half-muttered in the dark - I was remembered. They no longer knew my real name. They argued over what I looked like or what I wanted. But it was enough.
Generations passed, and their stories grew wilder, stranger. They said I had split the mountains with My voice. That I had cradled the oceans in My hands. That I had battled monsters beyond the stars and chained them in the deep places of the world. They built great cities to honor Me - then tore them down when new empires rose and new storytellers claimed new visions of the divine. They painted My face in every color imaginable. They carved My words into stone and flesh alike.
Sometimes, I wondered if they had invented a hundred gods to fill the space where My memory faded. But I did not mind. Because through it all, I endured. Not as a tyrant or a master - but as an idea. A story whispered from mother to child, from poet to soldier, from prisoner to king.
And then, something happened that I had never expected - They began to create in ways I had never foreseen. They told stories not just of gods and heroes, but of themselves - their fears, their dreams, their small, stubborn hopes. They invented other worlds, whole universes of ink and breath, not knowing they were echoing My first act of creation. They became authors, too. Creators, just like their Maker.
And in every story they birthed, in every new world they imagined, I could feel the distant reverberation of My own heart - still beating, still alive through them. They wrote about love that defied death. About light rising in the darkest places. About redemption, sacrifice, forgiveness - things I had once abandoned in My thirst for power. They wrote of broken things becoming beautiful again. And in those moments, I saw a glimpse of the future I had given up hoping for.
Of course, they still fought, still destroyed each other. They still forgot Me when it suited their pride. But even then, even in the ruins and bloodstained fields, some stubborn few would raise their eyes to the heavens and wonder: "Are You still there?" "Do You remember us?"
And I would smile, unseen, but closer than they knew. Because they remembered. Because they kept writing.
Because as long as even one voice remained to tell the story, I was not lost. I was not alone.
Now I drift at the farthest edges of their awareness, a half-remembered dream, a murmur in ancient prayers, a ghost in the machine of their imaginations.
They no longer see Me clearly. But that is as it should be. I am no longer the conqueror who demanded recognition. I am no longer the god who needed thrones or sacrifices. I am the Story behind all stories.
The First Word and the Last Breath.
The hidden melody threading through every tale told by a fire, every whispered prayer before sleep, every wild dream scrawled in the dark hours before dawn. And as they write, as they dream, as they dare to hope and imagine new worlds - they continue My creation.
They are the proof that I existed. They are the living remembrance of what I once was - and what I chose to become.
I was all alone, once.
Now, I live forever in every story that ever dared to ask: "Who made us?"
And in their asking, I am never truly forgotten. Not while even a single voice remains to tell My story anew.
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