A Tale In The Dark

I. Of the Narrator

Sit yerself down, cutter. You’ve come far, yes, and you’ve journeyed bravely and what is more, wisely. I’m not an easy one to find. By design, I assure you, and when you’ve supped your fill you’ll be glad of it.

Gold, is that? Magic, too? Precious and powerful, but no. I’ve no need of trinkets and baubles. True power has but one currency and I’m rich enough in it already: knowledge.

I suppose you could say I’m giving you this for free. Even the addle-coved know there’s no power comes without a price, though. One day, cutter, the price will come a-calling, and the deeper you drink, the more you’ll pay. Trust me: there’s a reason I burned my name and shrouded myself in secrets between the cracks 'twixt reality. Some darks are better left dark, some chants are better left unsung. Learn that, cutter, and you might survive my “generosity”.

But if you’re willing to listen, I’ll spin you a tale of the death of the powers and the birth of the gods, of the ‘loths’ love and the trust that fuels the Blood War. A tale, as the old saying goes, of “a time before a time, in a place that is no place, of beings who don’t exist.”

There’s just one warning:

Everything I say is a lie. II. Of the Ages of Existence

In the beginning...

That’s a dangerous way to start. “In the beginning”, we say, as if nothing came before. We should not be so presumptuous. Or should we? Reality is so much more than the limits of our imagination, yet the lessons of the Titanomachy show that our minds proscribe reality quite precisely. But I race ahead of myself.

“In the beginning”, then – and Baator take the consequences – were the ur-powers. Powers of a magnitude unimaginable in today’s sophisticated Cage, powers the size of planes, powers who were planes, powers on whose bodies we little mayflies dance and die.

We cannot say their names now except in mockery of their former glory: Ouranos, Father Sky. Gaia, Mother Earth. Erebus, the Darkness Between. Tiamat, the Great Dragon. Ymir, the World Giant. The Demogorgon – no, not that scrawny baboon-faced pretender, the real one – Demiurge of Life.

All that is, was they.

In an unfathomable age gone by these behemoths lived in alien majesty, unparalleled in their might... and yet, as is the way of things, they were ultimately slain. As the last ur-power came crashing down, their corpses serving as worlds unto themselves, their children-murderers inherited their mantles of power and the multiverse was forged anew.

These new lords were awesome in their majesty, arrogant in their might, the epitome of that which they would be named: power. And yet they would fall as their sires fell, slain by their children, who would break the multiverse asunder and remake it in their image; and so the cycle continues. Who knows what beings will come in time to challenge these children-murderers we call gods? Will Loki at Ragnarok unleash some ultimate unspeakable doom, or will Chronias’ illuminated secrets spill open at the Last Trump? I cannot say, nor does it matter: none of we mere mortals will survive to see it.

Taken aback at my blasphemy, cutter? Didn’t have you pegged as the pious type. Or is that just a healthy fear of the retributive divine? Either way, fret not. You can comfort yourself with this simple fact:

Everything I say is a lie.

III. Of the Might of the Second Epoch

The ages of the multiverse are three, as they should be: ur-power, power and god. One cannot help but wonder if, in the next Epoch, there will be a Rule of Four, with four-sided triangles merging to form the new Unity! Of the first age we know nothing but corpses, husks of their former glory. Of the second, but one name truly remains:

Titan.

Oh, there are others out there still faint-remembered. The proud Vanir and mighty Jotun, forgotten Ea and El... but they are mere shadows. Only one name still strikes fear in the heart of berk and blood alike. Only one force survived the Fall, waiting in frozen malevolence for their chance to reorder the multiverse and revenge themselves upon their wayward children.

Titan.

When you think of the Second Epoch, then, think of a multiverse in which the greatest powers were the Titans in all their exultant glory. And not just great in might, great in spirit as well: the ultimate manifestations of unfettered good. Joyous, boisterous, destructive, uncaring... demanding of worship and fear, lavish in gifts and punishment, all meted out according to their own passionate whims. Pure, chaotic, good.

If that pikes your mind, well, you begin to understand just how much the multiverse has changed. And yet, it has always been this way. Therein resides the lie.

The Titans were not the only powers, of course, though they were the greatest. [Witness the naming of the planar pathways if you don’t believe me, berk.] The Vanir ruled Ysgard by the jovial might of their arms, though they are nearly the last old powers we remember. Other planes were similarly endowed,; our lack of names notwithstanding, from the heights of Celestia to the depths of the Abyss the powers ruled then as they do now: kindly, cruelly, capriciously, judiciously, the entire panoply of philosophies we call the Outer Planes.

The powers. Not the gods.

Who were they, then, these gods-to-be who would one day wrest control from their fathers? Lesser versions, for the most part. Hopefuls, up-and-comers, filled with ambition and passion and whatever else it is that occupies an immortal’s life. And the multiverse was no more at peace then than it is now: powers warred with powers, the old slew the new and were slain in turn... ever-changing order, as it had always been, and these upstarts should have simply taken their place and been forgotten with the rest.

But this... for the first time in forever, something new. Something that hadn’t been seen since, well, the powers wrested rulership from their sires. Something was coming that would change everything beyond measure, creating an era of angels and insects, gods and mortals, and everything between. Something that for all their might the great powers were powerless to stop.

We enlightened folk look back on Kronos, greatest Titan of them all, and laugh at the simple callowness he showed in devouring his children. We are fools, all of us. We know nothing. Kronos knew, and was terrified in his knowledge. He moved Olympus and Prime to stop it and, after the Fall, he dedicated himself to eternal vengeance against it.

Kronos, you see, knew the power of an idea.

Even if the idea was a lie.

V. Of the End of the Old

Each plane took its own path to the great conflagration, and I have no time or skill to recount them all. The legends which remain to us – Greek and Norse, Sumerian and Babylonian, Egyptian and Faerunian – shall serve as exemplars (“lies”, if you will) of the descent into ruin.

One common theme resonated throughout the multiverse, though. The challengers sought to change views, expand horizons, and invigorate the principles they held so dear. The old guard, in turn, looked down upon their children – in hate or in love – and saw a threat to the existing order and the sanity of existence.

This was the same story as any attempted revolution, played out millionfold every night on the Prime alone. And yet it was new. How?

The simplest explanation – though a lie, always a lie – is that the challengers heralded the death of a paradigm. The very definitions of good and evil, order and chaos, were under assault from those who would personify them and the multiverse would shake from the force of their passion.

It began slowly enough. Disputes ending in blows on peaceful Elysium. Armies falling into disarray on the Lower Planes as commanders took time to personally educate their underlings on the finer points – and spikes, and whips, and blades – of “Evil”. Strange, unnatural alliances between law and chaos against each other. Powers devouring their children or raising Hell against their sires in an orgy of incestuous violence. A multiverse falling into madness, schisming spasmodically until the only recourse was war.

War between the defenders of the old and the vanguard of the new. War between powers, war between mortals, war between existence itself.

Total war.

And the future gods lost.

Looking out over the multiverse today, how can this not be a lie?

VI. Of the Birth of the New

Let me repeat: the challengers lost. Badly.

From the furious excommunications on Celestia to the open war between Titan-led Olympus and the phalanxes of Zeus, from the ruthless genocides of Baator to the unholy slaughters of the Abyss, the rebels were beaten, broken and killed. The elders were too entrenched in their might and too steeped in their treacheries to be overthrown by these striplings, and so the revolution was crushed.

And that should have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t.

History doesn’t say who had the brilliant inspiration, though that hasn’t stopped ambitious priests from trying. The Greeks claim it was Zeus and point to the naming of the conflict for proof. The Egyptians claim that only Thoth could possess such clear insight but that Osiris and Set were the first to make the attempt. The Norse claim Odin wrested the secret from the Tree of Knowledge and that was the true cost of his eye. The Faerunians – well, who cares what they think?

Are you ready, cutter? Are you prepared to plunge into Pandemonium’s shrieking heart, rend the veil of ignorance and pay the necessary price? Then let’s open the balor’s gift and look inside.

What did the children discover? What terror could overthrow a Titan? What force could remake the multiverse anew?

Belief.

Belief in a lie.

A god, they say, is belief incarnate.

This is a lie.

A god, they say, is immortal as long as it is worshipped.

This too is a lie.

A god, they say, cannot be slain by a mere mortal.

This too is a lie, the greatest of them all.

Scared, cutter? You should be. That one mere datum will be enough to get you scragged by a million bloods if you rattle your brainbox incautiously, and don’t think the minions of Zeus will be any more pleasant than those of Graz’zt. Gods have notoriously sharp hearing, viciously short tempers, and they don’t take kindly to having their darks lanned.

But you came to me for the truth, so the lie will have to do.

The Outer Planes are fuelled by belief. Even the simplest berk knows this. Every true planar, from tiefling to power, is composed of that quintessence as well as the four mundane elements that comprise lesser – prime – beings. You might think that gods, being the epitome of the Ring, would be something like elementals of belief. In truth – do I really need the disclaimer? – they are closer to genasi. Which is to say, not that close at all.

Belief’s a wild and crazy thing, cutter, and I don’t just mean in a tame, chaotic way. Limbo itself is a modron compared to the reality-bending force of belief out here on the Wheel. Worse than reality bending: reality-shaping. Change the reality, change the belief; change the belief, change the reality. A never-ending cycle of effect and cause, cause and effect. The amount belief needed to fuel a deity, the worship of untold millions, the faith that moves mountains... it simply can’t cohere for more than an instant before collapsing under the weight of its own shifting unreality.

Unless it has something to stick to.

Like, say, a god.

Greybeards of old used to distinguish between two distinct parts of the godhead: the corpus, or seed, and the corona, or shell. The corona is the nigh-infinite aura of belief-fuelled power that makes a god a god, the corpus is the “physical” body of the god within. Without the corona, the god is but a power; without the corpus, the god isn’t anything at all.

Don’t believe me? Riddle me this, berk:

Why is Hephaestus crippled?

What does it even mean that Odin, a greater power, "sacrificed his eye"?

Heck, how do all those gods keep castrating each other?

The corpus is always there, underlying every manifestation of the deity. Change the corpus and the beliefs will change to match; damage it, and the injuries will propagate outward to every church in existence; kill it, and the priesthoods will wail and gnash their teeth as the godhead itself dies. Intact, though, the corpus and corona together can exceed even a Titan’s most fevered dream: pure belief, a million tiny droplets coalescing about the corpus, distilled into raw power.

This, then, was the rebel’s great plan. To transcend mere powerhood by merging their essence with the faith of their followers. To become not merely the object of worship but the substance of the worship itself. To become, for the first time in history, gods.

Many of the rebels did not survive. Those that did are the stuff of legend: Zeus. Odin. Marduk. Ra. The greatest of the great, the holiest of holies, the Kings of the Gods.

And with that, the true war began.

The greatest of all wars. The struggle for Heaven itself. Who am I to try to describe the Titanomachy?

I cannot, so I lie instead.

The revolution sparked by the great gods spread to their lesser brethren as, one by one, they gave up their corporeality for corpi and coronas. Where once a power stood, a god bloomed, its splintered essence commingling with the faith of billions. Mortals, mere vermin to the powers, suddenly provided the food of omnipotence. The war raged for an untold time, since time itself was a weapon and a prize. Space was rent asunder by cascading waves of belief that shattered cities and planes alike. Millions rose and fell in the blink of an eye as brother rose against brother, kin against kin, and all were slain. Driven by the full crusading faith of the Prime, the gods rampaged across the Wheel and for every god that fell another corpus rose to take their mantle and prosecute the war with bloody single-mindedness.

The apex of the revolution was different on each plane, as befits their differing temperaments. Arcadia acknowledged the new order and the old with an Orb of Duality, maintaining their perfect Order in all things. On Celestia, the old merged with the new in an unfathomable process beyond the Veil of Illumination. The Industrious Paradise was cleft in twain, Shurrock the Old and Dothion the New, balanced on the knife edge between paroxysms of belief. Ysgard fell to Odin and the Aesir after a brutal battle, in honor of that plane’s belligerence, though they showed uncommon mercy by letting the Vanir live on as vassals.

The Lower Planes were silent. Every single being, from Acheron to Pandemonium, was slain. Such are the wages of sin.

What of Mechanus and Limbo, you ask? Order and chaos are eternal and ever-changing. New patterns, old formlessness... all are the same to the Concordance. They may have adopted new guises in the wake of the Fall but those would merely be superficial manifestations of the deeper truth. If traces of the old remain, not even the gods know the dark of it.

The Spire, you say? Not even I am cruel enough to inflict that on you, cutter. And trust me, this gift of mine is plenty cruel as is.

Two planes deserve special note because of the legends surrounding them. The Beastlands had seen an epic struggle for dominance between the old and the new. When the new lords proved themselves alpha, the old lords accepted their defeat in the way of animals: they left. Where they went I do not know, only that they wandered out of this lie and into another.

The Elysians watched aghast at the unfolding horrors of the Titanomachy. Riven by conflict like the rest of the Wheel, the guardians of Perfect Good still could not bring themselves to wage true war. After intense debate they hit upon a peaceful, though tragic, solution and signed a pact: when their paradigm’s defeat was inevitable, the losers would simply resign their posts. Sure enough, as the gods stormed triumphantly around the Ring, the Elders of Elysium regretfully handed their mantles of power to their children and retreated to the deeps of Thalasia. The chant is that they’re merely sleeping, ready to be called forth for one last battle against Perfect Evil... but that’s a lie for another time.

And then there was Olympus.

IX. Of the Battle of Olympus

Olympus.

Home of the Titans, mightiest of the powers. Citadel of Kronos the King and his eleven Titanic siblings. Surmounted by Othrys, greatest fortress on the Wheel and the last bastion of the powers. Within, an army of heroes led by Iapetos the Mighty and his son Atlas World-bearer. All around them, the monstrous brood of Gaia and Ouranos: Gigantes and Cyclopes, manticora and hydrae, sphinxes, cockatrices, basilisks, gorgons... and at the forefront, howling with fury, the last, most terrifying power of them all: Typhon Hundred-Headed, Titan of Vengeance.

Olympus. Understand this and begin to scan the lie: in the original War Zeus had battled Typhon and lost, crushed under a mountain hurled by the Hundred-Headed. He lost, cutter, no matter what the Greeks may tell you. The gods-to-be didn’t turn to belief out of some addle-coved mercy for we mere mortals, they did it for but one purpose: power. And they needed power because without it they had lost.

Zeus was crushed, Poseidon and Hades beaten down, Hera, Hestia and Demeter scornfully cast aside, as the Titans thundered their challenge to their wayward children. They would not submit to these pretenders, these weaklings: Olympus would stand as a bulwark against the fury of the storm, proud and unyielding, until the Spire itself came crashing down. And while their children were but powers, the Titans laughed and smashed with joyous abandon, unstoppable as Olympus itself.Then the transformation, Zeus and his siblings waxing wrathful, fueled by the supplications of a million worlds. Then the battle was truly joined. Then the Titanomachy.

Armies clashed on Olympus as the Beastlords walked away. Armies fell on the slopes of the great Mount as Arcadia and Celestia changed into a new, eternal order. Armies were raised from the dying Lower Planes and hurled to their deaths on the walls of Othrys as the Industrious Paradise calved and became two. The Elysians slipped into the deep, the Aesir screamed in triumph on the battlements of Ysgard, and still the battle for Olympus raged on. Army after army after army was thrown into the fray, to be slaughtered, resurrected and destroyed once more, and still the Titans held: the forces of belief endlessly shattering against the forces of the multiverse incarnate.

The Titans, locked in their terrible battle, barely noticed that all around them the old world was crumbling and that all their friends and foes, their sometime allies and occasional nemeses, had fallen. It took the conquest of Ysgard and the subjugation of their Vanir brethren to jolt them from their bloody reverie. Furious, the Titans turned their hate-filled gaze upon their rebel children and saw them clear for the first time: each as an individual was weaker than any Titan, but the miniscule strength of mortal belief – less than vermin, they were! – amplified a billion times over made these “gods” the Titans’ equal. So very simple, and thus admitting of a very simple solution:

Kill the mortals.

All of them.

Thus, instead of hurling their armies against Zeus, the Titans sent them out on missions of destruction and ruin. An act of evil to the new gods, it was but an act of necessity to the old; how the multiverse has changed, indeed. World after world was attacked, slaughtered and eradicated. Millions more were placed into perpetual torment as the Titanic monsters spread death and disease, mayhem and madness... and, above all, disbelief and despair. Disbelief in any “gods” who could permit such atrocities; despair of a paradigm that allowed such horrors to exist. The gods, who had been unstoppably on the ascendant, suddenly began to wane. Entire pantheons are said to have been extinguished, lost in the disintegrating sands of belief, though none now know the dark of it.

The Titanomachy had previously been something of a civil war, each individual plane grappling with the transition from the old to the new. No longer: no petty disputes could stand against this kind of genocidal insanity. For the first, last, and only time in history, the gods united. Olympus had only been besieged by Zeus’ armies; now it was assaulted by Paladins Of The Mount, spirits of Harmony and Eternal Good and savage Beasts of the wild. The monstrous armies were beaten back, hopelessly demoralized when Odin One-Eye and his berserker einheriar joyfully took the field with Zeus Stormfather and the Hekatoncheires, together trapping terrible Typhon Hundred-Headed under the same mountain that had once imprisoned Zeus, there to howl for all eternity.

The battle raged on and on but the Titanic forces were outmatched and, slowly but surely, they were ground to dust. As the end neared, all that remained of the great Olympian army were the twelve Titans and their captains, arrayed against the whole splendid Host of Heaven. Still they fought on, raging against the dying of their light, until at last they were subdued and dragged in chains to the newly-crowned Zeus for judgment and oblivion.

Except that – as all else I’ve said – is a lie.

Just one more act before the conquest was complete: Judgment and Punishment.

Which, as everyone knew, meant Oblivion.

The captains were simply slain. This seemed both expeditious and just.

The Twelve and their kin... therein lay a problem. The Greeks’ll chant that Zeus took pity on his fallen sires and so condemned them to exile. They must think we’re bubbed up addle-coves to swallow that. Dark of it is, the gods couldn’t figure out how to kill the Titans. Masters of the fundamental forces of existence, they’d somehow insinuated themselves into the fabric of the multiverse so that killing Hyperion, say, would disrupt the very essence of light itself. One thing’s for sure: no matter how they did it, the Titans didn’t manipulate belief. That’s what vermin do. No, they probably tapped into some primordial secrets of their forefathers, making themselves to their forces what Ouranos had been to the Sky. No godly powers necessary...

[Consider yourself a marked man, cutter. There’s many an archdevil and tanar’ri lord who’d pay dearly for that information, and your pretty say-so's won’t stop them from taking you apart to see what else you know.]

So it was that the Titans were punished, hurled from the high Mount of Olympus to the stygian depths of Tarterus. Olympus itself was then shattered to prevent anyone from ever leaving. Finally, in their first sanctification of The Rule Of Three, the assembled gods forged the plane into a magical prison, the one we know today as Carceri. The imprisonment complete, the gods dispersed back to their home planes to contemplate the new order and prepare for their rule. All was as it would be. But that, of course, is a lie.

XI. Of the Titans’ Fall

And thus it was that the Titans fell. [Stupid word, “fell”. They didn’t fall, they were thrown with all the force the gods could muster. But who am I to buck tradition?]

Imagine, if you will, what it must have been like on that fateful day. The multiverse, calm at last after the fury of the Titanomachy, suddenly stills in anticipation. Waiting. Waiting for something it cannot name, but which it instinctively fears.

Up on high Olympus, gold-crowned Zeus and his royal siblings stare imperiously down at their forefathers. The assembled gods – wise Marduk, cunning Odin, glorious Ra – also look down in dispassionate triumph. Battered and bloodied, the Titans stare back. Never models of self-control, their faces now are blank, emotions roiling imperceptibly below the surface. Too proud to beg, too mighty to die, they await the verdict.

Kronos and Zeus lock eyes, father and son, for an instant closer than any two beings in history. In that moment, Kronos knows that the prophesy has been fulfilled and a new one is being written; in that moment, Zeus knows that he is truly King And God, and a marked man besides; in that moment, both know that the Titanomachy is over but the war has just begun.

The survivors hush as Zeus Cloud-Gatherer issues his doom upon the Titans: eternal captivity on the Prison Plane. A moment of stillness as the Titans are raised up by chains of iron and faith, and then... a nothingness, a terrible empty place in existence as the Titans scream downwards, too loud to be heard, too fast to be seen, too agonized to be felt. A bolt of Titanic lightning hurled by the Stormfather, a burning meteor of ruin hurtling down from Heaven. Golden fire, incandescent in the Twilight of the Powers, spearing Wastewards towards their new home. A brief moment’s respite as the Titans disappear into the darkness of the Lower Planes: the multiverse holding its breath, the Wheel itself seeming to stand still, all of Creation waiting for the inevitable.

Impact.

A shattering of all existence. A reality-quake so terrible that peaceful Ossa surges upwards, devouring everything in its path. Broad-shouldered Olympus shudders under the blow, rockfalls cascading down its slopes like Malbolge’s beneficent twin. Crystal spheres crack like children’s baubles, their contents spilling into the void, entire Primes annihilated in a flash of terrible light. The Lower Planes, already lifeless, sterilize in the cataclysm, an unholy purification that forever consecrates them as fields of death. Storms and shuddering fury ripple out in Titanic shockwaves as the old paradigm finally chokes its last, strangled in the smoking ruins of The Red Prison.

And then the Wheel broke.

What a glorious lie.

XII. Of the Wheel’s Despair

The Wheel broke, cutter, no two ways about it. [Yes, that’s a lie. Deal with it.] Snapped like a Guvner in Bedlam. Shattered like a Taker’s smile under oath. Splintered like a baatezu’s generosity after a peel. Split open like a greenskirt in a tanar’ri brawl.

But I digress.

Carceri bore the worst of it. The plane was shattered into innumerable pieces, tiny fragments not much bigger than... well... no, not the orbs, it’s more... oh, fine. It broke into the orbs. I’m too tired to lie more convincingly.

The ripples spread out from there, though. The ‘loths call the fractures the Weirding Way, but most folks call’em the Paths of the Damned. Whatever the name, chant is you can travel from Nessus to the Abyssal Chasm without even the powers peering your passage. As long as you’re willing to face unreality itself, mind, something I’ve heard makes even altroloths blanch.

Oh, the gods patched up most of the damage all right. Carceri wouldn’t make much of a prison if the Titans could just waltz up to Olympus any time they please. But they’re only gods, cutter, they’re not omnipotent. A job that big, especially given they had to break off chunks of Mount Olympus to seal the Red Prison, they’re bound to have missed something.

Maybe that’s why the fiends are so ill-tempered and why the Blood War rages on eternally: the very fabric of the multiverse was ripped to shreds and inexpertly sewn together Down There. Maybe it’s all part of vast Titanic plot to free themselves from the gods’ prison. Maybe fiends’re just vicious evil sods who’d as soon pike your skull as give you the time of day. It’s all the same in the end.

Just a small lie this time, cutter, to cleanse the palette. Only one to go, but it’s the biggest of them all.

XIII. Of the Multiverse and Belief

Here we go, cutter.

This is it. The Big One. The lie to end all lies. Are you ready to hear the end of the story, the gods’ last laugh and the Titans’ last hope? Are you ready to pay the price?

I can wait.

All right then. Time for the truth.

The Outer Planes, they’re the planes of belief. Every berk knows that. But what does that actually mean?

Yes, yes, I know. “Change the reality, change the belief; change the belief, change the reality.” You bandy that mantra about as if you know what you’re saying but you’ve never even thought the words. Three little words, in the original at least, each more subtle than the next. “Change” seems obvious, though it’s not; “belief” we know to be complicated, so we dismiss it; and then there’s “reality”. We always take reality for granted, you know – you’re doing it even now in this most unreal of places – but, if you’ll forgive the pun, we never stop to ask what it really means.

So what’s “reality”? It’s a million things, cutter, love and hope and faith and magic and gravity and life and death and the color of the grass and the way a baby smiles; all that and more, but one thing most of all:

Time.

More precisely: history.

Think about this, cutter. What if a million people – what if every person in existence were told, time and again, that the gods were mightier than the powers? That they were infinitely more powerful? That the powers were really just glorified paramortals with delusions of grandeur?

What if they were told that this was the way it had always been?

You begin to understand.

Now imagine this lie repeated endlessly, clawing its way into the hearts and souls and minds of believers everywhere – and I mean everywhere. Imagine that newly risen deities are themselves indoctrinated in these lies so that even the faith of gods might be harnessed to the dread task. Imagine everyone in existence believing, in their very cores, that the gods had won the Titanomachy outright because their forefathers were weak, stupid and frail.

Then the Titans might be extricated from their roles and rendered truly mortal. Then the old powers would truly fall. Then the gods would truly reign triumphant.

As they always have.

Now, at long last, the lie is clear. Nothing I have said is true. It was never true. It could never have been true. The gods have reigned immortal and unchallenged since the beginning of Creation, as it was and ever shall be, amen.

And yet...

Consider this, cutter: if the multiverse had been changed to cripple the Titans – which, I remind you, it hasn’t – could it not be changed back? Could the Titans not reclaim their former glory, rising wrathful to revenge themselves upon their wayward children and restore the primeval order? They’ve waged war upon existence once already – except, of course, they never did – and they’ve doubtless learned a lesson or two during the eons of their imprisonment. A few strategic alliances with the fiends, some ambitious celestials, a handful of inscrutable concordians, and you’ve got the making of a war that would make the Titanomachy look like a picnic on Amoria.

There’s more...

How would they begin? Why, they’d tell people – cutters like you – the truth about the old days, which is to say they’d lie about the past. They’d tell stories about the glories that never were. Smart, able cutters like you, who’d be able to find someone like me to tell them the lie. Smart, able cutters who’d know when they were being peeled, and who’d know when they’re being played straight. Smart, able cutters in whose minds the knowledge would burn like acid, eating away at this reality to the buried one underneath.

With every person that got told, the lie would spread. Every mind that thought about what might once have been would weaken the walls that separate the New from the Old. One step closer to the Glorious Resurrection. One step closer to Revenge. Endless repetition of a lie until it became the truth it never was once more.

Of course, the gods wouldn’t like that. Not one bit. Zeus, in particular, is deathly afraid – and I mean that quite literally – of what might happen if his father were to reclaim his full stature. As for those who aid the Titans... well, Prometheus was sentenced to eternal evisceration and he was one of the good guys.

Now you’re a smart, able cutter, and I can see you making plans about what to do in this hypothetical situation. Let me think some things through for you. Styxwater’s a nice trick but there’s always a desert bloom and the Titans’ reach is long. It doesn’t destroy the memories either, just sends them down the river for the ‘loths to play with. Imagine that: the ‘loths with the power to play kingmaker between realities. I’ll bet the Siege Malicious just got all tingly thinking about that. Then, of course, what the ‘loths want, the tanar’ri want to. [On principle, dontcha know.] If the ‘loths and the tanar’ri both want it, it must be valuable, so the baatezu’d want it too. Why, every fiend in existence would want your pretty little head!

Maybe you should go Joywards, hmmm? Maybe if you ask the archons real nice, they’ll let you play in the Lethe. I mean, they surely wouldn’t erase you from existence for the greater good, would they?

Would they?

So there you go, cutter: my gift, free of charge, just as I promised. You’ve drunk deeply; now you’ll start to pay the price. And cutter, even if you stay ahead of the billions who’ll want to scrag you, you’ll be paying that price until the day you die – and beyond.

Not bad for one little story, eh? A small price to pay for finally knowing the truth.

Thank god it was just a lie.