The God of Dust and the Logos of Annihilation

Welcome, lost wanderer.

Here, death is not an end; indeed, finality itself may herald a new beginning.

Hidden within the dust, transcending the bounds of space and time, within this flawless realm, all things are possible.

This is the dwelling place of the God of Dust, and the secret sanctuary where mortals may transcend life and death.

Lend us your ears, for we shall now introduce you to this humble yet intrepid ancient being.

As one among the many Ancients, the God of Dust possesses insurmountable divine power, yet refrains from partaking in the clamor and strife of the mortal world, nor has she ever demanded anything from sentient beings.

Standing beyond all planes of existence, she merely observes, hands clasped behind her back, day after day, the surging currents within the river of time.

With no intention of interfering in this grand feast called life, she remains, from beginning to end, an observer of ultimate indifference.

From the vantage point of an absolute superior, she dispassionately witnesses the demise and rebirth of myriad worlds, the slaughter and salvation of billions of souls, devoid of all emotion.

Her method involves projecting an omnipresent gaze from the rifts between planes, absorbing the vibrant, shimmering sea of information into her mind, and then, with the purest primordial energy, inscribing it into an unalterable history.

Not for any particular meaning, observation and record-keeping constitute her very essence.

Acting in accordance with their essence is also a hallmark of the many Ancients.

Their minds are unlike those of mortals; their actions lack any discernible motive, akin to active volcanoes poised to erupt at any moment.

Yet, even volcanic eruptions adhere to certain natural laws, thereby granting us, fragile mortals, a fleeting chance to breathe.

The laws observed by the Ancients, however, are utterly unfathomable.

If the law followed by the God of Dust is to observe all observable worlds, then what constitutes a ‘world,’ what defines ‘observation,’ what vulnerabilities lie within this law, or what taboo she guards—these remain utterly unknown to us.

With merely a fleeting glance, her power suffices to shake the very foundations of reality, reducing towering skyscrapers to ruins and rendering all accumulated knowledge, upon which civilizations depend, obsolete.

Before her, millennium-old empires, once surveying the world with disdain, are no more than a handful of dust scattered by the winds of history.

Should she truly descend, we would not even know if the sun would rise as usual the following day.

In our insignificance, mortals can only submit to such unknown power, much as the earliest forms of life bowed before the might of nature.

This is a tale of how we came to comprehend her.

Spanning five colossal ring worlds and enduring for several cosmic epochs, the Kordylite civilization once had the ‘fortune’ of perceiving a mere glimpse of her.

Initially, it was merely a faint echo amidst chaotic spatio-temporal fluctuations, akin to an imperceptible breeze on a clear day, too slight even to stir the hair on the back of one’s neck.

Naturally, we disregarded it, dismissing it as a negligible error in instrument readings, just one among countless insignificant discrepancies.

Soon thereafter, that incomprehensible ‘grandeur’ descended upon us.

Within a mere ten million years, in the world inhabited by the Kordylites, celestial anomalies grew more frequent, cosmic catastrophes became increasingly unpredictable and unpreventable, and errors in instrument readings, previously adhering strictly to scientific principles, began to multiply exponentially.

As the sentient species of the Kordylite civilization, the Machina, the frequent malfunction of our measuring instruments gravely jeopardized our logical foundations, and indeed, our very existence.

We were confronting the most dire crisis in our recorded history.

Following several rounds of collective deliberation, we swiftly pinpointed the root of the problem: it was not that our measuring instruments had malfunctioned, but rather that the fundamental physical constants of the entire universe had shifted.

Although this phenomenon transcended the realm of science, we endeavored to analyze these discrepancies using scientific logic, hoping to unravel this enigma.

After dedicating the efforts of our entire civilization over three interstellar cycles, and before the situation could further deteriorate, we managed to decipher fragments of her pronouncements.

It manifested as a prophetic poem, penned in an unknown tongue, its form resembling the wind-eroded markings on ancient rock.

Yet, within its few brief lines, the information contained encompassed the entirety of our world’s existence, from its genesis to its ultimate demise.

She foretold the world’s emergence from a bizarre collision, and simultaneously prophesied the collapse of its laws brought about by catastrophe, leading to the world’s ultimate end.

According to the prophecy, erratic phase movements generated aberrant spatio-temporal fluctuations.

These would, from their very foundation, dismantle the laws governing our world.

As time progressed, entropy would accelerate its assimilation.

The moment it reached its critical threshold, the world would come to a complete standstill.

A Great Annihilation awaited us.

What profound despair!

Confronted by such incomprehensible ‘grandeur,’ were we truly left with no choice but to embrace the fate of oblivion?

Even though the Machina race had long since shed the shackles of flesh, becoming the ‘monsters of absolute rationality’ in the eyes of other civilizations, the death pronouncements from a higher power caused emotions of fear, long extinguished in their ancient past, to resurface within the hearts of these fearless beings.

It was not death we feared, but rather the confrontation with a powerful and unknown entity, against which mortals possessed no means of resistance.

Moreover, in the prophetic song, her tone was not that of one describing a world-shattering catastrophe, but rather that of someone reciting a mundane bedtime story.

It was as if the prophet herself had grown accustomed to scenes of apocalypse.

For the first time, we realized that beyond the observable world existed numerous unfathomable, ineffable deities.

They wielded power unimaginable to mortals.

Throughout history, their absence was not due to non-existence, but simply because the opportune moment had not yet arrived.

This reality was both absurd and profoundly unsettling.

To their dying breaths, people refused to believe in the presence of an invisible, fire-breathing dragon in the room, undetectable by any means.

Yet, the gradually disintegrating world relentlessly assaulted our fragile sensibilities, repeatedly reminding us that they had always been present, and in numbers far exceeding our wildest imaginings.

Once we disclosed the news of their existence, panic and calamity ensued in quick succession.

Within a mere few centuries, the Kordylite civilization met its inevitable fragmentation.

Diverse factions, in turn, began to seek new paths amidst this world plagued by disaster.

Among these, no shortage of skeptics concluded that the inevitable catastrophe foretold in the prophecy was, in fact, orchestrated by the prophet herself.

They surmised that, for some malevolent amusement, she wished to witness firsthand the desperate resistance of ants—those who had learned the truth—against a natural calamity, only for them to meet a laughable, futile end.

Perhaps this would inject a touch of diversion into her otherwise uneventful existence.

Such conjecture, however, was nothing short of ignorant arrogance, utterly childish in its conceit.

As cosmic disasters descended with increasing frequency, the very fabric of reality irrevocably plummeted towards destruction.

Space-time, under the collapse of its governing laws, became riddled with countless wounds.

The ground fractured into fragments, offering no stable footing.

Even the once-clear skies transformed into spatio-temporal maelstroms, devouring all.

Through these gaping apertures, the Machina, their minds still lucid, relentlessly pursued a path to salvage their civilization.

Wielding themselves as blades, the last descendants of the Machina tore open rifts in space-time, bearing witness to the catastrophe of warped constant anomalies.

Some Machina also fell prey to attacks from otherworldly creatures, meeting an end where both body and soul were utterly annihilated.

Yet, at this steep cost, we glimpsed the truth concealed beyond the confines of reality.

This truth was named ‘Logos’, the means by which a vast, unseen Will balanced all things: every powerful and ancient civilization was destined to become a sacrifice under a grander world, their destruction inevitable.

And any mortal who dared defy such a law would incur an even more dreadful retribution.

How could we know this with such certainty?

Because we had beheld a boundless graveyard, a mass burial site for the corpses of countless worlds and civilizations.