But his hatred remained.
It was not extinguished by godhood.
The old world still burned inside him.
Every scream.
Every hand claiming ownership.
Every priest hiding appetite behind holiness.
Every ruler calling revenge justice.
Every Argatass researcher calling a victim material.
Every god calling avoidable suffering necessary.
The memory prevented repetition.
It reminded him what a creator must never become.
Kyren could now manufacture entire galaxies with a thought, yet some nights—if “night” had meaning in whatever reality he occupied—he still remembered a boy on a branch saying that falling was controlled descent.
He remembered Neida laughing before an axe made laughter impossible.
He remembered Roselle’s hands.
Aiko’s voice telling him to breathe.
None of those memories softened his judgement of the old world.
They made it sharper.
There had been love there.
Friendship.
Kindness.
And Kyren hated the world more, not less, because he knew how many good things had been forced to exist surrounded by structures that fed upon them.
It could have been better.
Someone powerful enough could have made it better.
The beings responsible had not.
So Kyren would.
Yet one task remained larger than every universe he had created.
Every god he consumed carried fragments of older knowledge.
Creation chains.
Authority passed downward.
Worlds nested beneath worlds.
Gods created by greater gods.
Greater gods born from principles established by something earlier.
Eventually every trail pointed in the same direction.
Back.
Before Zeus.
Before Argatass.
Before Delasai.
Before every race.
Before the first being had feared death or desired ownership.
There had been a first creator.
The god that established the initial laws from which all other realities descended.
Kyren looked across the universes he had made.
Countless immortal beings lived without knowing death.
No ego demanded superiority.
No lust converted another consciousness into property.
No hunger required killing.
No priest could sell an afterlife.
No ruler could exploit mortality.
No child was born owing pain to a creator.
Kyren had proved, at least to himself, that existence did not require the mechanisms the old worlds had treated as inevitable.
He closed his eyes.
Somewhere beyond millions of galaxies, beyond dimensions even the Argatass had never reached, the first god still existed.
Perhaps it had forgotten its creations.
Perhaps it watched.
Perhaps it believed suffering served some purpose.
Perhaps it would have an explanation.
Kyren did not care whether the explanation sounded beautiful.
He remembered what explanations had done in the hands of Virhain, Humans, Argatass and gods before it.
Riss had explanations.
Tyron had laws.
Devin had revenge.
Priests had God.
Argatass had progress.
Gods had cosmic order.
Bodies still suffered beneath all of them.
Kyren opened his eyes.
Millions of his copies did the same.
Across innumerable worlds, stars reflected inside irises that shifted from green to gold to black to blue.
He raised one hand.
A new universe opened above it.
Life waited inside.
Behind him, another.
Then another.
World after world, created without the things he believed had poisoned the first.
Somewhere impossibly far away waited the being responsible for setting the original rules.
Kyren looked toward a horizon that spanned realities.
Once, as a child, he had stood above Delasai and wondered whether anything waited beyond the forest.
He had answered Arkin with one word.
Death.
Now death itself was something he had removed from worlds.
Forests were smaller than planets.
Planets smaller than galaxies.
Galaxies smaller than the structure Kyren now held inside his awareness.
Yet one question from childhood remained.
What waited beyond?
Kyren knew the answer now.
The first god.
His fingers closed around the light of the newborn universe without harming it.
His voice travelled through no air, yet every version of himself heard it.
“I remember what your world was.” Another universe ignited.
“I remember every excuse.” Another.
“I will not repeat it.” His gaze moved beyond creation itself.
Hatred burned as fiercely as it had when he was a child kneeling beside Neida’s severed head, only now it possessed the power to make stars.
“And when I find you…” Millions of Kyren selves turned toward the same unreachable point beyond the known realities.
“…you will answer for the first one.” Then he opened his hand, and another world began.