Grey was pulled up through the dome, up through the skies, past the clouds, and into the stars. He thought he was going to be blasted by UV rays and cooked to oblivion, but instead he just kept going up, and up... and up...
And then the world flashed around him, arrays of glyphs and sigils buzzing past until it all came to a stop.
And then Grey caught a glimpse of the world beneath him. It was a huge dome of fog.
His eyes widened.
’Don’t tell me that’s Fog of Chaos... Cooked. The whole world is basically cooked.’
Grey’s body finally came to a stop and then he watched as the Fog of Chaos moved. At first he was confused, but then he realized what he was seeing.
’A time lapse? No, is it rewinding? It’s going in the opposite direction it was before.’
The Fog of Chaos started moving faster and faster and faster until it suddenly began to dissipate. A huge pillar formed and then it receded. Grey was sure, now, that it was some sort of rewinding of time because it looked exactly like the reversal of an explosion.
When the Fog of Chaos was finally gone, he saw what had been of the world before. It was like an enormous snow globe forged from a golden, partially translucent glass. It contained swimming galaxies and if Grey tried to focus on any one of them, he could find individual star systems and planets hidden away in their own little bubbles.
But there was no connection or communication between these planets at all, though that wasn’t for lack of trying. They sent out radio signals and waves, some more advanced ones sent out morse code-like pulses with light, some literally made their stars blink in and out as though trying to wink at the universe.
Try as they might, these worlds were stifled from their innovation, starved of connection.
It looked natural at first, but when Grey took a deep look, it wasn’t the case at all. When he focused on these signals, he found that some greater force was stopping them. This force didn’t feel malicious, but was instead protective.
That was when Grey saw another side of the coin. These planets trying to send out signals were only half of the equation, the other half were star systems that set up their worlds and technologies like vast, open nets.
They didn’t send out any signals at all. Instead, they were waiting, listening, patiently. They built weapons, some as simple as spears, some of the more advanced ones building cannons from planets and gathering energy from galaxies.
They weren’t trying to communicate at all. They were hiding themselves, watching silently, and preparing to blast the radius of any location that showed even the slightest hints of life.
There was one thing true about all of these worlds, though. Not a single one, regardless of how great their technology, seemed to have any method of exploring beyond their star system. Even the ones with the power to gather strength from entire galaxies were only able to do so from afar, using unique frequency technologies and an unfathomable control over gravity and orbits to force change.
No matter who they were, they were too restricted by the limits of light speed, unable to take a step beyond it, or manipulate the world to bend it in other ways.
And all the while, an existence oversaw it all, keeping both the side of curiosity and the side of self-preservation separate from one another.
It felt like one existence, anyway. But in reality, it may very well have been many. All Grey could sense was a huge black hole at the center of everything, one that commanded the laws of light to be followed and restricted the flow of travel between galaxies and adjacent star systems.
In this way, chaos remained fairly well contained. The people of individual worlds often fought one another, and sometimes even destroyed themselves. But this destruction remained within their star systems, never spilling over.
The universe almost felt... peaceful like this.
Grey didn’t know what to feel about the entity or entities. Were they a force of good? A force of evil?
Maybe it was just neither. Maybe they were simply just a force alone, no different from gravity, or the laws that dictated the maximum speed of light in a vacuum. There was no difference between it and the reason a body needed oxygen to breathe.
There was no greater truth or purpose.
It simply just... was, and that was all there was to it. The only thing that needed to be considered.
And then everything changed.
The first world learned how to use Neural Frames. Now, human—or more accurately, living consciousness—could take more from the world through methods that extended beyond just following the laws of physics and science alone.
Every world, no matter which it was, could only advance one way. They started with tools of stone and wood, before inventing the wheel and control over water and steam. They learned how better to use this water through methods of coal, and then they progressed to more advanced technologies, grasping greater things from nature, from wind to solar, and then to nuclear energies, before they started to grasp the strength of the stars and the forces of the universe itself.
But what none of these people had considered until the first God appeared was that it was possible to evolve the body in impossible ways as well... they didn’t understand until the appearance of the first God that the greatest technology was the technology the universe itself had already naturally forged...
The living body itself.
But once that happened, the delicate balance that the black hole entities at the center of the universe had forged was shattered to pieces beyond recognition.
And it was then, when civilizations began to interact, when their veneer of peace had cracked, that it first began to appear.
The Fog of Chaos.