Some say that the void was created by destruction, an end birthing the beginning. Some whisper of an Elder Being beyond time, life, and the void itself, to whom the universe itself is merely an experiment. Others believe the void sprang from the dying breath of a giant, the potential for life still locked within.
Only the Scribbler can know.
Or perhaps not, for before the beginning, it is rumored that the Master of Creation, the strange and fearful figure we must at once fear and revere - floated in a soup of the universe formless, nameless, mindless. Perhaps she was the last remnant of another, lost word. Perhaps she was the child of the void itself, by some anomaly. No being could name her then and none have since, but it is claimed that she was the personification of desire.
The truth of this tale is unconfirmed. The Scribbler tells nothing.
Timeless eons she lingered, transparent, unknowing - until what would come to be the Scribbler brushed against the only other remnant of order across the void.
An idea.
Desire and Idea - instant and explosive. They collided, swirled, smashed, until from the void plummeted two forms - one a mishmash of jumbled limbs and hair and flesh, and clenched in her warm hand - a solid contraption threaded through with a thin black liquid - ink.
A pen.
The Scribbler could not control the form she took - gangly and tall, bipedal, flat-faced, kaleidoscope eyes pointing ahead. As she soared through the colorless fog of the void, a tingling spread from her soft, five-fingered hand clutching the pen. A pulse beat in what would come to be her mind. She gasped in the airless chaos, a swelling power shook her limbs until, with a scream to end all after, the Scribbler flung the instrument forwards.
Darkness spattered across the void, and from that darkness arose the first semblance of being.
A word.
Creation!
She spun, seized the pen all the tighter - and laughed at the wonder of it all.
Words - the binding force, the fabric of our universe- spun forth.
Land. Solid. Variety. Mud, Sticky, grass, fresh, tender, stone, sharp, hard…
The void was her medium, the pen her instrument, her incredible mind the source of it all.
The Scribbler - the writer - dreamt the world into being.
She gazed at the ink of her pen and named darkness. She watched the difference between it and the void and called it light. She fractured the surface between land and water, then created shimmering spirals of air to blanket them both. She glanced up, and wished not to see the miasmic, sickening void - and so a canvas arose, which she dubbed the sky. She crafted the geological landscape of the world, each minute detail springing from her wondrous imagination.
But this was not enough to sate the hunger of the Scribbler.
She craved color, sound, time, emotion, movement; whatever she wished for came to be with a flick of the magical pen. After shielding her world from the void, she came to need a new material on which to write, and so from the fertile earth bloomed plants of all shapes and size and fragrances, exquisite and deadly. From these she molded substances on which to continue writing, shaping the stars, the moons, every stellar body. But still, she must write; her body burned with the uncontrollable urge to create, to shape, to control. She had formed magnificent beasts - a noble creature with a scaled tail and bony antlers, a maned beast of gold with wings powerful enough to dwarf the winds, a powerful, short-snouted creature who loved nothing better than to hang in a tree and rest, and countless more. None were in her own image - her imagination was too varied, too desperate, for that.
But still, the ravenous passion blazed within. She could not stop.
The Scribbler needed more. Intangible, luscious words - beautiful landscapes and creatures could not be enough. Perhaps a distant recollection resurfaced in her mind, mirages of laughter and love - but the lonely author was overtaken by an urge for companionship.
Placing her pen to her heart, she pulled back and with the device flowed a stream of unimaginable colors, so vivid and bright the Scribbler was overcome. Her pen slipped from her hands, and as she lunged to retrieve it, she met another set of limbs, coarse, numerous, and claw-like. The other creature slashed one pincer through the ground around them, then another, until its creator could make out a mirror of herself, sketched in the mud.
A picture.
Thus, was the Artist born.
The Scribbler and her first companion, the proud, fanciful Artist, who re-painted the skies and seas in colors the Scribbler had not even dreamed of, who shifted the petals of flowers and patterns of stones without her permission, could not always agree. They both conceded, however, that two were not enough for the world - the Scribbler must bring forth others. From her heart came the Scientist, the Mathematician, the Mechanic, the Logician, who saw the world not as a thing to be created but to discovered and catalogued. They classified the foliage, the beasts, studied them, crafted plans for creation without the aid of words, which they did not understand as well as the Scribbler. Next emerged the Naturalist and the Healer, who spent much of their time with the beasts that roamed and gambolled. Last strode the Homemaker, who gathered the others in conversation and laughter, and the Philosopher, who gazed perpetually up, towards the stars, as though searching for the void lurking beyond.
The first nine companions were mighty and varied in appearance - a great beaked arachnid, a fanged stallion, a winged serpent, again products of the Scribbler’s overactive imagination. Each held power in their own right, and as they began to mingle and procreate, their offspring gained different titles, different purposes. While not suited to each other’s fortes, often judgemental and irritable, they always forgave one another - for they were something closer than family.
They became known as the Aspects.
The Scribbler was ruler of them all, for it was she who had scripted the world into existence, she who shaped it, and she who, with a flick of her pen, could bring about its doom - for none of her all-powerful creations, nor Aspects, possessed the same hand as she, the only one to properly clutch the fateful pen. But she held no true desire for power, with companions and the masterpiece of the world to maintain, and inscribed only a balcony of glass hung from the stars, from which she and her fellows could look down and observe the world they had bourne.
Thus, all was good.
Until the Scribbler began to change. Bored, impetuous, she grew blinded by her own power, impatient with the sluggish world she had crafted. The Scribbler’s lust to create, to change, which lead a world now capable of maintaining itself, became too strong. Her very nature warped her, corrupted her from within. One by one, the Naturalist, the Mechanic, the Healer and every other Aspect grew wary of their leader’s quick swings of mood, temperamental sulks, the way her pen hand twitched, dying to craft something more deadly than flavors and colors. Finally, even the stubborn Artist admitted the truth: the mighty Scribbler had changed for ill. Time and time again, maddened by the staleness of it all, the repetition, she sought to obliterate the world she had created and begin anew. Only the intervention of the Aspects, barely containing their panic, held her back. The companions had grown fond of their sun, their stars and moon and sky, sea and land and flora and fauna, diverse and wonderful.
And… were they truly tied to the Scribbler and her pen, or would they too vanish into the void, if it all came to an end?
The Scribbler would not deny it.
Restrained from obliterating her world in one sweep, the warped master began to dash off fire and ice, disease and vice and rage, famine and drought, until, one fateful moonless night, she inked out a state of reality as dark as her ever-present pen.
Death.
Upon this eve that the Aspects met, the strain of their situation finally snapping. Gathering in secret, far below the earth where the Scribbler would not look for them, the original beings, their children and grandchildren discussed what must be done to save their world. After much consternation, consideration, the Philosopher spoke, voice soft as a dewdrop growing across a leaf.
“We must band together,” he murmured, “To create yet another creature, like the Scribbler has done time and time again. Surely, if we work as one, it can be achieved. Its shape and size does not matter, nor exact intelligence. But it must have one essential quality - limbs like the Scribbler’s, capable of wielding her pen. For if it is through the Scribbler’s words that all is created or destroyed, surely another with the same ability to write should rival her in power.”
“We must create another Scribbler.”
The others, terrified at the thought of creating a creature designed simply to equal their leader, eventually agreed it must be done. Death could not claim them, but if it sapped all else the Scribbler would have an ironclad reason to destroy the world once and for all.
Thus, each Aspect contributed a part of themselves to this new creature, born of their hearts, their minds, and their desperation.
Thus, out of terror, a new life came to be.
The bipeds, varying in height and appearance, were drab, more like the Scribbler than the creatures of her fantastical mind. But their appendages could curl and clutch, and so they would have to do. The Aspects named them “humankind,” closeting them underground, where they would wait for years, decades, until the Scribbler’s mind and pen struck the final blow. The Aspects agreed to take names, as their humans liked to do, and present themselves as representations of this lower race could aspire to be. They would take control, smuggle their creations sustenance, gain their trust, and tell them tales of the world - the magnificent, glorious world that must be allowed to grow, change, develop, and survive.
The Aspects would wait - as long as they must - for the day when one of their fickle, pen-handed creations was born with the phantasmagoric imagination, passion, bravery, creativity- to rival that of their creator, their ruler, their oldest friend and deadliest foe-
The Scribbler.