2 Prologue, version 1

A man stood and waited, floating in a sky devoid of starlight. He had long black messy hair and a matching beard. He wore a ragged tunic made from the skin of some unknown scaled beast. His face was weathered and scarred, and only one of his eyes was visible, the other covered by a large golden coin that was engraved with a life-like depiction of a great and ancient tree that nestled stars amongst its branches, and burrowed its roots into the void.

The tree on the coin was moving; its leaves rustled and its branches swayed, grasped by an invisible wind. Yet, this was not quite as strange as the rippling emanations of rainbow light that leaked past the coin's edges, holding a terrible divine presence that was difficult to look at and dangerous as well.

The man watched, and only watched, as the shadow reached the last star and slowly began to suffocate it. The shadow knew that when this moment ended, so would its purpose, and so it stretched the moment on and enjoyed the feeling of snuffing out the light that had been far too bright.

Kai knew that this was it; the apocalypse, the Ragnarok, the end of times. He knew this, and yet he did not fear it. He did fear the responsibility that the death of the last sun made for him. He feared the knowledge that what came next, after the end of all things, was on his shoulders.

The last speck of light in this universe flickered one last time, then extinguished as easily as a pinched candle. As the light went out, there was nothing left to define the shadow, and it too vanished, finally able to find peace free from its own grand purpose. Life and death left the world together, as though they were old friends rather than bitter enemies. With the absence of forces that mankind had never recognized, the lesser laws such as Time or Space crumbled, and the universe began to collapse.

Kai sighed. The next part would be painful in a way much more significant than physical. The coin that covered his left eye trembled, and the tree etched on it peeled from its surface and expanded before the man until it reached a size that seemed to scream the insignificance of anything else. The coin fell from its place and revealed an orb composed of an infinite number of multi-colored fractals that slid and shifted as they folded themselves inward and bloomed outward, in an infinite and unreadable pattern that seemed to be a manifestation of the entropy of life itself.

Though the man's other eye, which was brown and quite mundane in appearance, held sorrow and regret, there was not a trace of hesitation. The man stood still for a moment, then in a single fast and fluid motion, reached to his face and deftly plucked the shining sphere from its socket. He crushed the eye in a tightened fist and threw the resulting powder towards the roots of the spectral tree before him, and began to focus.

That eye which he sacrificed contained his memories, his identities, and his ego, and though a trace of residual consciousness remained, he felt it quickly slipping away. The memories of his own omniscience served as a blueprint, one that could guide the restoration of the universe before the stars were eaten, but it was useless without materials. Fortunately, the man had materials, an entire universe' worth. What he didn't have was time; it was becoming hard to remember who he was and what he was here for. He had to hurry.

The man turned his focus inward and grasped at the very fabric of his soul. His conviction, which he had honed and sharpened through countless years of battle, formed a scalpel and bore down on that immutable substance that was neither energy nor mass, and split it open. A flood of lights burst forth from the empty socket where the man's eye once was and drifted towards the Tree, settling amongst its branches like a swarm of fireflies. But these lights were not insects; far from it, they were stars — a near infinite number of individual worlds teeming with life.

The man stepped back and admired the machine that he had constructed from forces indescribable. He saw that it had started the long process of rebuilding a universe. He smiled; his work was done, and now he could rest. As the man felt his mind dissolving into the fabric of his world that was growing from the seed which he had planted, a peace that came with the deepest and most eternal sleep washed over him. He remembered his life and the journey leading up to this destined moment.

It all started when he was no longer a child, but not yet a man, when he had been so alone and powerless.