Myth of the Ameshas

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Everything began with the Ameshas, who wore a thousand faces and lived a thousand lives, in a world free of death under a bronze sky. Yet in time, even the greatest of beings grow tired of peace, when they have known nothing else - the Ameshas split among themselves, and the harmony of their city was torn full of ragged holes, a banner that would never rise again.

They, as any godly beings should aspire to, recognized these flaws within themselves; and they departed from their city whose name they dare not share, holding its golden memory in their heart of hearts. They walked a thousand worlds, striding from one to the next in the space of a breath. They built. They burned. They twisted the fabric of creation and set entire continents in motion for no reason holier than curiosity.

But in drawing power from their empty home, they were unmindful of its passage, and shredded the fabric between worlds as often as breathing. And that-which-defied held its own sort of power, and the Ameshas unknowing let Chaos out from its cage, until a howling storm split the sky.

They did not understand, and insistently pulled upon their home’s glow, only to find what tendrils they could draw were bent and melted by the passage, and arrived like knives into soft souls used to the amber peace of the empty home unnamed. The way home was no longer safe, they said. They had lost something essential, some sense and awareness beyond sight and beyond sound. They could no longer stride between worlds from one to the next in the space of breath. They could still build, they could still burn - but now there was no escape from their own creations.

Not even in the guise of death, as so many tried and learned in the years following. Though their home was now lost to them, something of its virtue lingered with its fallen children, and warded the Reaper from their pleas. As a desperate alternative to the eons stretching on ahead of them, many opened themselves to Chaos in an attempt to draw even an iota of their ancient majesty.

It worked, but the Ameshas were irreparably changed by forcing their own paths through Chaos. Madness abounded, and their physical forms were twisted and malformed into misshapen, broken things devoid of their ageless grace. Monsters the size of cities replaced the Ameshas who wore a thousand faces and lived a thousand lives, yet death still could not take these Undying under any sky.

Their creations, powered by the will of multitudes, sought to cast them down - godlings bright and dark, good and evil, war to peace and every single idea in between united to cast down that-which-could-not-die, and chained them so that they should never break free and awaken once more.

But no binding is eternal, and somewhere lies an empty city under a bronze sky, feeding strength to a thousand gods unknowing and a thousand Undying tortured by this knowledge.