At the beginning of all things, there was no world. No matter, no light, no sky. There was only the Spell.
The First cast it. Not metaphorically, literally. All of reality, everything we know, is a single concentration spell sustained by forgotten gods. Without it, there is nothing. That nothing now has names: the unraveling, the lack, the un. It is the absence of attention. It is the space where the Spell fails.
The First Were Not Gods, Not Yet
They existed before mortals, before animals, before the shape of the world. But they were incomplete.
Shitherga, goddess of earth and water, had only two arms. D, the god of savagery, was a winged child. Nadan was quite normal sized and radiant, a god of light who had not yet known shadow.
They cast the great spell that was The Life Spell and had created room for their domains to flourish. But they were not whole. And they knew it.
So the First Three birthed a Fourth.
He had a name, but it has been lost. Well, removed, but we will get to that soon. The Fourth brought what the others were missing. He was the god of fire and air. Of culture. And of darkness. Of things too broad to be understood, and too precise to remain tolerated. He completed the First.
With the Fourth, the world came into being. The Life Spell made room for the life song. Earth and water formed bodies. Fire and air gave breath. Savagery gave hunger. Culture gave tools. Light gave hope. Darkness gave mystery. The world spun in balance.
And for a while, it was good.
The Fourth Asked for Worship
He had done more than the others. His domains were vast, his touch in every corner. He suggested the First bow, and at first, they did. They gave him reverence. Gratitude. Trust.
But it wasn’t enough.
He demanded more. He wanted service. Submission. Intimacy without permission.
He asked them to peel apart their souls, the souls that he empowered and had right to. He commanded the First to split themselves like logs on the fire of his pride. Without him what meaning could the Life Spell possibly have? Nobody knows how long the First suffered under the logic of the Fourth.
One day, they refused.
And in their refusal, they became divine.
For what is more divine then refusing to be perfected?
Shitherga sprouted many arms, one to hold each of the elements. D split into two cherubs, the duality of savagery and culture in tandem. Nadan grew tall, from the radiance of his light bellow into the shadow above.
For as the First reclaimed what was always theirs, it became clear, the Fourth was not the God of fire or savagery or darkness. His gift was something else. The Fourth was the god of Completion. Completion of spells, of bodies, of stories, of reciprocation, of balance. The First Three had been violated in the name of complete pride, and cast him out.
Completion Was Not Done
Though exiled and surrounded by his own demons, the Fourth still had work. The world within the Life Spell was not finished. He may have manifested enough demons to populate hell (literally) but he was not all pride, he had work to do. Mountains that needed ravines. Forests that needed fauna. And of course, mortals that needed magic.
The Fourth gave it, willingly. And with magic came the wizards. With mortal wizards came mortal pride. And with mortal pride came the war.
For generations, the children of the Fourth fought the gods. And they won. As Completion must. It is not enough to kill a god, they will just return. Their stories needed more, to be completed and closed.
The Final Curse
The last great battle of the godwar was the battle for Wuh-Zhei Hill. There, Nadan fell. In his last breath, he began a curse of light and dark. A curse that reached not upward to the heavens, but outward, toward the Exiled One.
The mortal wizards saw it. Felt it. Knew its shape.
They had been completed by the Fourth. Given magic. Made whole. But even they could see: he was more dangerous than the First Three combined. So what did the mortal wizards do with Nadan’s curse as it formed? They completed it.
Here, my dear reader, is where I must make clear that what happened next is a truth lost to time. All the world knows that the completion spell, Nadan’s curse, it killed the Fourth. If you wish to let us look beyond the fourth wall for a moment to see what the truth is, then read on.
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The curse did not destroy the Fourth. It uncompleted him. He was erased. From memory. From existence. From thought. He became nothing. Yet, unlike the First Three he is not truly dead. Yes, existence has rejected him. But he remains. Those who look upon the Exiled God, cannot remember what they saw. Those who worship the Fourth God, do not know what they worship. Those who are touched by the God whose name was forgotten, forget the moment he is not within their vision. He is just the feeling you’re left with when you know you saw something, but what did you see? It’s incomplete.