Rise of the Gods - Prologue
#1 of Rise of the Gods
Somewhere in the endless void of space a being of infinite power pondered what it was to do. It had created the universe that it currently resided in as a means of alleviating its boredom. This being, this entity of supreme power, was not sure how it had been created or if it had always just been. The only thing it knew upon becoming aware of itself was that its name was Sarbon. It spent some time wandering the empty void that it existed in mastering its powers and it had found it needed something else to do. This universe had seemed like a good idea at first, but the creatures that now resided within it had quickly become wearisome for Sarbon. It had hoped for more than the 14 billion years of entertainment than he had received from it.
The thought of destroying it all and starting all over again had crossed Sarbon's mind, but it decided to show the inhabitants of this universe a little mercy. It decided to retire to a different realm and create a new universe, hopefully a better one than this one. This universe would still need a god, or gods, to govern it though. Sarbon shook its equivalent of a head, thinking back on all the times the supposedly advanced races had nearly destroyed the universe with their magic and science. If it was not for divine interference this universe would not have made it past its first billion years of existence and barely anybody was grateful for Sarbon's interference.
It was hard for Sarbon to believe that most of the creatures in the universe did not even believe it existed anymore. The ones that did believe in it were not much better. There were so many misconceptions that existed all over the universe that it was hard to tell that anyone believed in Sarbon at all. Most of them could not even get Sarbon's gender right since they all assumed it had gender for reasons Sarbon could not fathom.
Direct interference in the lives of its creations did not help much either. Sarbon had tried a number of ways to govern the people of this universe. At first it had been involved in all aspects of the lives of its creations. That started out just fine, but then everything started to get lazy and stupid. No one could even follow any basic rules. Don't eat this or you'll get poisoned, seek shelter from extreme weather or you might get sick, don't jump off that cliff or you might die, nothing. They always depended on Sarbon to help them out of every mess they put themselves in and Sarbon quickly grew tired of that.
Sarbon had then switched from being a nice supreme God to a vengeful god. If a population disobeyed it Sarbon would wipe them out or deliver some plague upon them without a second thought. That forced everyone to start depending on themselves for a while and they even prospered for a while, so Sarbon decided to keep adding rules that it adhered to strictly to see what would happen. People really started to resent Sarbon then. Everyone thought it was a demon that had killed and replaced the real Sarbon. Sarbon had never created any demons to begin with and it marveled at the mortal's imagination. It surely would never have been stupid enough to create something that could ever come close to even challenge its own power, needless to say actually slay it. Sarbon did create a few actual demons because it thought they would be interesting. They were not that powerful though, just enough to be frightening to the mortals.
Eventually something the mortals called heroes emerged to challenge Sarbon. It would have been easy enough for Sarbon to finish all of them off with a thought, but it decided to create shadow versions of itself to see just how strong the supposed heroes really were and was, for the most part, horribly disappointed. Sarbon had to drastically decrease the power of its shadows to give the mortals any chance at all and it was amused to see how the mortals rejoiced whenever they would slay one of its shadows. If a demon could defeat something powerful enough to create their universe you would think that they would realize there was something wrong when they would slay something that could not control more than one or two worlds at a time. One especially crafty shadow actually did manage to gain control of a few hundred worlds before finally being defeated, but it was the exception to the rule.
Sarbon had decided not to interfere with the mortals for a little while after that. Even that did not work out so well. Most of the times the universe had nearly been destroyed occurred during that time period. It was like the mortals wanted to cause their own destruction. Sarbon had really been bewildered to find out that on a few occasions they actually had been trying to destroy the universe. They had thought the universe was such a flawed and corrupt place that someone had to destroy it. That attitude did actually offend Sarbon a little bit. Things may not have been perfect, but it was the one that had created the universe and Sarbon thought it was at least good enough to exist. Sarbon took great pleasure in helping heroes to defeat what the mortals called villains. If they wanted to destroy something Sarbon thought they should destroy their own things, not its.
After seeing that it could interfere in the mortals lives successfully in little ways Sarbon had stuck with that. Little miracles were enough to confirm too many people that there was a something in the universe greater than they were. It was unfortunate that many of them no longer remembered exactly who Sarbon was after its billion year absence. Sarbon knew it was a little petty, but it did not like for other nonexistent entities to get the praise that it deserved. Thus, Sarbon would make itself known to the mortals on certain worlds to varying degrees of failure. It did not help that just about all of the mortals had developed different concepts of right and wrong over the course of time. Trying to be a good God, or an evil God, or somewhere in between just did not work out for Sarbon on any world that it tried to reassert itself on.
Now, after about 13 and a half billion years of existence, Sarbon was sick of this universe. It was time to move on and the only reason he was not willing to destroy it like one of those villains was because of the effort Sarbon had put into it. It had decided to turn some of the mortals into gods. They would not have close to the same power that Sarbon had, but it planned to leave them with enough power to govern this universe. Sarbon figured that it would split up the nine times the power it had used in the creation of this universe behind for these new gods to accumulate. Of course, they would have to decide who they wanted to share that power with or if they wanted to share their power at all. Sarbon really was not scared of one of them gathering all of the power it left behind. The weakest of its original shadows, before Sarbon reduced their power, had been that strong. There was no way a being of finite power, no matter how strong, could compare to Sarbon's infinite power. However, that being would be more than powerful enough to govern a universe of mortals from what Sarbon had seen of them.
The question was which mortals to chose? Sarbon was not really concerned about picking beings it thought to be good or evil since it did not have a concept of good or evil. All Sarbon was concerned with was the ability that a being had to govern the universe. That ruled out the less intelligent creatures right away. Of course, the intelligent ones weren't much better. It was them that had purposefully tried to destroy the universe on numerous occasions after all. Sarbon eventually decided to turn a few of the mortals on a world its inhabitants called Ilandre. It was not an especially advanced world, but it had to be that way. Sarbon did not intend to hand the newborn gods the universe on a silver platter. At first the mortals would be able to easily kill them and claim their power for their own. Putting these new gods on a world where gunpowder had existed for a while was just asking for a very quick bloodbath. A world still ruled by the sword was needed for Sarbon's task.
Ilandre was also a very unique world. On most worlds only one or two truly intelligent lifeforms had evolved. Sarbon had done a little tampering on Ilandre to make sure that thousands of them would come around all at the same time. It actually was not Sarbon's own idea. While paying attention to the creatures on one world Sarbon had found out about their fantasy worlds. Sarbon became curious and decided to see if things really would turn out like one of their fantasies, and there were a lot of them. At first it had turned out like they had portrayed in the majority of their works of fiction. The races mostly kept to themselves with the humans living in one part of the world, the elves in another, the dragons roamed where they pleased, the various different beast folk kept to their various tribes, and the list went on. Then things started to change as the populations of the various races increased. Sarbon had even given them a world 40 times the size of the world that they normally had in the fictional worlds that inspired their own world. It was then that ambitious individuals were able to start crafting large multiracial kingdoms and empires like a few of the fictional stories had portrayed.
There was so much variety present on Ilandre. Its people would be in for some interesting times as many of its people began to battle for dominance once Sarbon made them gods. Sarbon itself was uninterested in the conflict that would come. It would take a while before these fledgling gods even became as powerful as those that sought to destroy the universe. Sarbon was not interested in waiting for them to gain the sort of power that would make things interesting. It just planned to give them the power and then leave them to their own devices. It did not matter how they would chose to rule the universe and if they chose to destroy the universe Sarbon would not interfere this time. Sarbon was prepared to give the people of this universe the power to rule over it by themselves and if they messed things up they only had themselves to blame.
Just about everyone was a candidate to become a god to Sarbon. Rulers, masters of their trades, average people that had never really stood out, criminals, madmen, the wise, and the foolish. At least a few people from all walks of life were chosen. Sarbon would give each a little message about what had happened to them and then it withdrew. Someday in the future Sarbon thought that it might check up on the former mortals to see how they had done, but it did not think so. This universe was no longer of any interest whatsoever to it.