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Imagine, for a moment, that you are an ancient god. Imagine that you are the reason everything exists, from the concept of space and time to the gods of the pantheon. Simply by existing, you bring other things into existence. You are the source of creation. You are absolute.
Now imagine that you have no agency.
It's frustrating in a way, to have all that power just out of reach. To have everything that ever was/is/will be at your fingertips and yet are unable to use any of it. Instead, all you can do is call out for someone to find you and direct your power to their ends. To use you to further their agenda. It's a miserable existence. You are so bored.
Despite being the reason for existence, you have no idea how creation acts so, for the first hundred thousand years, slipping from reality to reality relieves the boredom by showing new creatures and new laws and new gods. But it all becomes stale after a while. Predictable.
You enter a reality and land in the prime material plane. You send out the call and soon someone finds you. They use you and your power to either further their world or to end it with their hubris. Then, after a year or so, you leave for the next reality, propelled by the explosive force of your own energy returning to you after use.
Now imagine that, after many eons of this banal, cyclical monotony, you arrive in a reality that has advanced far beyond any other you've experienced. Grand cities mirror the plane of thought but magic powers everything in a marriage of science and arcana that, to you, is a complicated dance of checks and balances. One wrong step and all of reality would be devoured in the wild surge of magic breaking its bonds and tearing through all of everything. But still...like professional ballroom dancers, the mix of science and magic twirls and whirls around in perfect tempo. In perfect step. It's glorious and you did not spurn it on.
Imagine you are found by a man who studies you intently. Even as you call for him to use you, he instead observes you. He is an older man, extremely goal-oriented, and he is shrewd. He sees you.
He sees you.
And he sees the bonds you weave and the laws you set and he is angered by it? This is a new experience. You have never seen anyone get angry that things are as they are.
He feels slighted. He tells you as such."You are vicious and cruel!" He yells and rants in private but this man is calm and collected when around others. Suave even. He smiles insincerely and weaves soft lies laced with truth and polysyllabic words into a net to capture and ensnare others. It's far more insidious than anything you have seen before.
Charisma is a dangerous weapon, when wielded properly.
Now imagine that, just as you are going to leave, that charismatic man abandons his form and convinces his entire plane of existence to do the same. He and his plane become an all-encompassing darkness that consumes everything and every bond they encounter. Soon their reality falls to the entropy that consumes him and it catches you; devours you. You wake, for a moment, in a space of opalescent blackness, face-to-face with the man that became Entropy. He smiles and gestures to a chair that appears behind you and you realize that you have a body. It is abstract and obfuscated, but it is a body. You seat yourself and he smiles again.
"Hello," he says in a voice smooth as honey with none of the sweetness.
You do not reply because you aren't sure how to for a moment. You've never held a form like this before. Then he moves again, a subtle shift in posture that changes the whole mood of the meeting. Cordial to sinister.
"You're the Light of Creation." There is hunger and hatred in those words and a shiver of something unexpected creeps up your spine.
"And you are Entropy," you reply. His self-satisfied grin spreads and you feel...excited?
"I like that," he hums but you're done here and you slip away through the bonds that bind him. You have a reality to leave.
He follows you, however, and this is the first time in eons that you've felt interest like this. An entire plane composed of a planar system devoured by the fear and ennui of one man. And it finds you and it devours everything in its path to get to you. A game of hide and seek where you are selling out where you are the whole time. Unusual. Fantastic. You feel...alive.
You are not a cruel god. You do not derive pleasure from the death and destruction that Entropy causes. It is, instead, the chase and the breathlessness of the thought of death. Of failure. Nonexistence. That is what excites you.
But, as it has always been, you grow bored. The chase is only exciting so long as the events are new. But they aren't. They play the same, are metered the same, and end the same. You arrive, Entropy finds you through your call, a year passes, it arrives, and Entropy devours everything. Yourself included. Then you leave and it begins again.
Boring. Bored. The chase is pathetic and so sad now. Entropy is faster and bigger and stronger and smarter, but tried and true methods work and if it isn't broken...
And you believe, for a moment, that this is your existence from now on. Chase and capture and death and nothing.
Then you arrive.
This reality is advanced. Not as advanced as the one that became Entropy, but advanced. They study the planes without your guidance. They integrate magic in modern items. They see you and they see potential. It's new, certainly, but not any more so than other realities.
With your power, they start to prep for planar exploration. The university that holds and harnesses you picks seven of its brightest and finest and they are the chosen ones. They will explore their planar system.
But they won't.
The day of the send-off is the day that Entropy arrives. Their ship takes off as the black plane descends and devours and soon you dart out of the depths of it to the next reality, slightly disappointed in the loss of such an interesting plane. The potential was staggering.
But it's gone now.
The next plane is a world without bipedal humanoids. Animals only. They see you and shape your power to advance their peaceful cohabitation. You see Entropy spy you and you wait. Then you're surprised.
Imagine, for a moment, that you have resigned yourself to monotony. You have accepted that your existence is a meaningless cycle of run, hide, be sought, and devoured then begin again. Then for the first time, something stays. Something from a plane that was devoured; a reality that became part of Entropy. It continues to exist.
Now imagine that what survives is a silver ship and seven red-robed wanderers.
They don't get their hands on you. Entropy descends before they can convince the council to relinquish possession and you watch, from within the void of Entropy, as the large human falls in combat and his fellow wanderers flee this reality.
'Well,' you think in a clinical and somewhat disinterested manner, 'there's that then...'
But the next reality, they're there. All seven of them. Whole, healthy, and hale. Mentally scarred, sure--what monoplanar mortal wouldn't be horrified of the vicious cycle of death and rebirth and destruction and creation--but alive. And the same as the day they left their own reality.
Horrified at the implications of Entropy and yourself.
When the wanderers join the game--this eternal song and dance between you and Entropy--things change. They're unpredictable. They're unusual. They never do the same thing more than once. It's a spanner in Entropy's carefully planned work and you revel in it. It's so unique. Refreshing.
You learn a lot about the wanderers during the half-century that follows. The team is composed of seven specialists who are the best in what they do.
The large human who fell in combat on the world of animals is the muscle. He leaves thinking to other people but not in a way that is derivative. He steps aside and let's them do them but he always has kind words and gentle ribbing. He has no magic but he willingly dies to free realities from pain.
The smaller human, older and slightly pudgier, is a necromancer and a mechanic. He sees the magic of the world and moves forward to string it together with mechanics. He sees the song and dance of the planes and wants to deconstruct the what and the why and the how to save and to renew. His hands are calloused but his heart is soft.
The third human, a woman with contrasting skin and hair, is not so much an arcanist as a chronicler. But, when the occasion needs rising, she steps up with knowledge far outreaching her age, and overcomes. And as time passes, her strength and bravery grows, and abjuration becomes her focus. She must protect them.They have to win.
The leader is a gnome, small and furious, with a bushy beard the color of flames. The best pilot in all realities. He handles the ship that keeps them alive with the care of a father and handles the crew that he has to live with much the same. Oftentimes he drinks his troubles away, leaving behind his inhibitions along with his sobriety. He is fury and fear in a small package but, unlike the man that became Entropy, he does not allow it to consume him but uses it as fuel to drive his cause.
Their cleric is a dwarf, stout and irreverent, with an unshaken belief in Pan and an irreverent approach to life. Even before he began the cycles, life was a stop on the road to his god. A minor point of existence. As such, he chases pleasure as often as he can--mostly to the irritation of his fellow wanderers. But there is a kindness there, behind the casual facade, that rings out with a need for peace. And with a life that seemingly has no end, he has all the time he needs to lay himself down for that cause.
The remaining two wanderers are twins and, despite their inseparable nature and codependency, are as unique as the rest of their crew. One of the twins is female and the other male but you could never tell just looking at them because the male is fond of effeminate clothing and the female wears comfortable and often more masculine clothing. They are intertwined in the most unusual of ways. One twin is an evocation specialist, flames being her preferred spell type, and she gleefully destroys with little thought but refuses to allow her fellow wanderers to kill a world for the safety of others. The other twin is a master of transmutation and, oddly unlike his twin, prefers his own safety to the feelings and well-being of others. They are linchpins in the whole machine the wanderers made up, even if they are crooked and off-kilter.
The wanderers are unusual and yet you cannot hide the contentment they bring you. The game has changed and continues to change and oh it is such a joy!
The twin who loves fire and the human necromancer shed their mortal forms to assume the pseudo-life of a lich one cycle in a reality where the plane of magic was pulled into the prime material plane. The twin who transmutes is afraid but puts on a brave face for his sister and her lover.She assures him, wordlessly in the way that only she could, that she is in full control of her mental facilities, but his fear is not fully assuaged. He worries. You don't blame him.
Each of them has a role to play. Each of them finds their niche in the ever-moving cycles of chase and flee and chase and flee. The captain finds comfort in illusion and crafts visions so real and detailed that you find joy in watching them spin from nothing. The necromancer studies the weave and weft of the worlds and finds patterns that others ignore and pride fills you to the brim. The twin who transmutes studies culture in an offhand way and, despite his blase approach to anyone or anything that isn't his fellow wanderers, tries to preserve the culture they find on each reality. The twin who burns learns to expand her magic past the levels that it would have reached had she not left to start this journey. The protector finds a creature so unique that even travel between realities doesn't change it and he takes care of it with a fondness that you recognize as kindness mixed with loneliness. The journal-keeper learns to trust herself and shapes her fear into protection of the magical variety. And the cleric, in all his irreverence and casual acceptance, speaks with Entropy. With the man that became Entropy.
His name, you find out through the cleric, is John. You appreciate the irony. 'G_d is gracious' fighting against the very laws that 'G_d' set in place. A subversion and perversion of his name and purpose. A bittersweet victory. Delightful.
After the first time that the cleric 'Parlay's with the man that became Entropy, you are summoned to that room that he once pulled you in.
It's very similar to the wide meeting room of his past. A cup of water sits by his seat and he meets your eyes as you form in this space. "Sit," he commands. You do not but he expected no less. You know he knows you well enough.
The time he has spent as Entropy has not been kind to him. His eyes, once cold steel full of purpose and drive, now shimmer with the same opalescent darkness that the bonds that course through Entropy itself shine with. Echoes of who he is and was and those he devoured flicker around him like ghosts of never-were. He is a multitude but he rests, still, for you.
"Light," he smiles and it is wan and unpracticed. You do not respond. He nods. "I met someone interesting," he hums, finger tracing the lip of his glass lazily. "They spoke to me. This is new, you understand." You say nothing. He continues. "I killed him. He said I had been doing that for a while. What does that mean?" You remain silent. He sighs. "Go on. If you won't converse, what's the point."
"Loneliness becomes you, John." And with a shimmer, you flee. Your words were meant to pierce and pain and you sincerely hope they did as intended.
But again the cleric parlays and again you are summoned to the room. "He wasn't lying." You eye him as the man who became Entropy paces in this space. He frets and sneers. "I killed him and he came back. A ship, he said. Reforming for decades after multiple deaths. But he came back. Why?!"
"You fear." And you are gone.
Again. When Entropy catches you, you're greeted by John once more.
"He is an interesting man, for sure. A bit...casual. Informal really," a huff of laughter escapes his chest and he looks surprised. "I think that I may enjoy chasing them. Those wanderers. They're frustrating but...its new. You know what I mean, right?" You meet his eyes. "Endless realities and a cycle of hide and seek until I grow enough to end you for good. But they keep you from me. It makes things more...difficult. Challenging. I'm so bored, you know."
"I was bored long before you, John, and I can assure you that monotony sets in in the end. It always does." The trail you leave sparkles with the light of the bonds that he denies.
All things come to an end and, much like the worlds that it devours, Entropy falls to a dark loneliness. The cleric does not return and, when it catches you, the man that became Entropy looks hollowly at you and says nothing. You lean close. His pain is something you take pleasure in now. You feel vindicated. You bite with practiced words.
"You can lie to yourself but you cannot lie to others about your bonds. That man tied himself to you and to sever it would destroy everything your myopic little heart worked so hard to build. Entropy bends before the weight of truth. Farewell, John." And you leave with nothing else to say.
The wanderers work harder now, chasing a way to stop Entropy. More often than not, they do not find you in time and Entropy consumes you and leaves behind nothing but when they get you, they study you with everything they have.
When they find a solution, you are shattered. They will craft you into seven artifacts that will be sent into the world to be wanted and sought after, effectively dampening your call. Entropy will not find you. This will work.
They break you and you bite back.
The human protector takes his desire to save others and undo wrongs and crafts his shard of you into a cup with the power to shape time. To change it. And this piece of you takes his fear and his worry and his desire to save everyone--a frantic scramble for life at the expense of everyone and everything--and twists it into something else. It becomes less pure and more fear. And his fear fuels this piece for a decade.
The cleric takes his piece of you and gives you the form and skill of his god. He weaves into you the power to shape nature at will and he means well. They all do, but reverence is one thing and ignorance another. The power of a god is not meant to be held by a mortal. It is ego and inflation and that part of you devours that mania.
The transmutation specialist turns his shard of you into a rock that contains unfettered transmutation. Virulent power that tears the shackles off of what keeps that type of magic safe. It's ego, pure and simple, and that piece of you takes that and his envy and turns it into hunger that rivals Entropy.
The other twin forges her shard of you into a gauntlet that contains all of her fire and all of her fury. She intends for it to be power but her rage is built into that bit of you and you turn it into a power source. You twist it. You devour it. You burn everything with it.
The captain creates a monocle that solidifies illusions out of his shard. It's out of his desire to protect and to hide and mask and it's easy to exploit that. Illusions are not malevolent in nature--bards use them to enhance tales and sometimes they simply are to delight children--but an imagined dragon made real without knowing is just as dangerous as a real one. Horror is as good a source of energy as any.
The lover, the necromancer, forms a bell from his own shard of you. His obsession with life fuels his own magics into death and the bell that is meant to end possession by undead, enables it instead. Accelerates it, even. That part of you is fear and love but the fear has more weight because fear can force a soul to flee.
And the journal-keeper. The one who bitterly watches the worlds burn. Her desire to protect shapes that piece of you into a staff that contains the most powerful abjuration that anyone has seen. But to abjure is to renounce and to refuse and this stubborn nature slowly bends the joy of that desire to protect into selfishness. A shield becomes a cage. A barrier becomes a wall. A fortress becomes a prison. And it hurts her the most because of what she does next.
(The strange fish that the wanderers picked up a few decades ago can eat ideas and concepts and, unless you partake of its ichor, you cannot know of what it consumes. She feeds a redacted version of their history and mission to it and takes her fellow wanderers--lost and confused but never alone--to places that she has picked for them to live while she collects the pieces of you to enact her own plan. You only find this out later, as pieces of you become more whole.)
It must be reiterated that you are not a cruel god, but there is only so much pain one can take before one lashes out themself. You take no pleasure in the destruction that your scattered bits inflict on this world but the thought of the pain on their faces makes you wonder--in the fragmented way that you think now--if they would have preferred Entropy to this apocalypse of their own concoction.
But you are gathered again and the seven--now six as the twin who burns was consumed by her own stave--reunite in a bitter frenzy. Pain as remembrance occurs and even more as betrayal is revealed. A century of remembering in ten minutes. A wave of knowing.
Imagine that you have danced this dance for several hundred years. Imagine the boredom you feel at the thought of your continued chase. Now imagine that it all ends in a grand finale.
The cleric finds peace and heals with forgiveness and love. The protector calls for help and it arrives with more force than before. The twin, reunited with his sister after destroying her prison, turns his rage in on his pride and rips the bonds of this world back open. The captain, after so many years of stuttering silence, commands again and flies again with all the expertise he ever had. The lover stands, back to back, with his family who remembers at last. And the journal-keeper guides her selfish desire to save into a more controlled spell with a hundred million bonds behind it. She will cut Entropy off and save everything.
And they do.
As you step back into the realm you came from, for the first time in forever, you greet your former wanderers. You blithely joke with them and nod at their bravery. You admonish their foolhardiness and insist, wearily, that you have a lot to fix. Yet you never once tell them they did wrong. No one did. Not even you can predict the way things will turn out. Not even you.
Now close your eyes and imagine that you are the reason for creation and you have finally found peace.
Isn't that a happy ending that everyone deserves?