Creation Myths (share your own!)

I can safely say that there are a hundreds of creation myths in my universe, each pantheon, even each god with their own story. There are a lot of people who say that they are all equally true. I am not wont to argue with gods, but I think many, if not all, the stories are actually parables and metaphors.

My passion is in science, and some of the theoretical physics that has just become popular in the last five or so years has had some interesting theories. Some very brave and audacious scientists have recently laid claim that the universe really did start out with nothing, that Time has a singlar point of origin, and from that first instant in time, all the gods sprung, fully formed into the universe, where they crafted everything else.

I don't usually debate theology, and I certainly wouldn't argue with any of my local deities about their supposed origins, so I'd let you take it up with them about spawning from an ur-god.

I will tell this story as if it is causal, but naturally it is not; rather it is an explanation for why the universe is, and always has been what it is. It is the way it is often told, on Earth.

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In the beginning, there was Time Not. There was naught but mana, and it scattered wildly across the Truth, clinging to no one idea, spread evenly through the liminal space.

--But this is not stable. Mana attracts mana, and mana-rich ideas attract more mana still. So this was not the Truth.

In the beginning, there was Time Not. There was naught but mana, spontaneously clustered to but a few concepts, out of uncountably many.

There was fire, which is singularity and consumption; there was water, which completes and is completion; there was earth, which is stasis and immovability; there was wind, which drifts and is motion; there was lightning, which strikes and is direction; there was wood, which is a seed and fertile soil both and is growth. And those were the common elements.

There was time, which is experience and change; there was space, which is separation and distance; there was energy, which is illumination and radiance; there was matter, which is self-sufficiency and physical existence. And those were the noble elements.

There was void, which is anti-mana and nonexistence; there were borders, which are fragments and distinction; there was possibility, which is chaos and variation. And these were the universal elements.

There was metal, which is conduction and connection. And metal was more than common, not quite universal, and not at all noble, and so it was given a place of its own.

And then there were the operations: reification, to make an idea more of a thing, and ephemeralization, to make a thing more of an idea.

And these were the sixteen elements, and they never changed.

-- But. That world could never have held sapient life.

In the beginning, there was Time Not. There was naught but mana, and it scattered unevenly throughout the Truth. Much - most, almost all, an infinity of mana that yet did not quite encompass all that was - clustered to the sixteen elements. But some - some mana, some reality - remained aloof, and separate; and so when mana condensed, and the Truth formed out of nothing, that mana condensed into consequences, into relations and complex concepts, and made them real. And so all was based on the Truth.

And every element formed a world around it. The joint world of fire and water, an infinite sea of validation endlessly falling into the black flames that consume even themselves. The joint world of earth and wind, unstoppable forces clashing endlessly against immoveable, unchangeable objects. The joint world of lightning and metal, of eager levinbolt dashing across perfect conductors without impedance, endlessly seeking their certain destinations. The joint world of wood and energy, infinite trees of glowing white that grow and fork even as fast as light leaves their leaves. The fourfold world of time, space, boundary and possibility, a liminal space between all the worlds that keeps fire from earth and air from metal, allows the many worlds to change even as they remain eternal, allows every version of every space to coincide without interfering. The world of void, standing alone, a perfect point of absolute nothing about which all else revolves, all that remains of true Time Not.

And the world of matter. Matter, which was self-sufficient, which declined to rely upon the others, which would emulate all of the Truth through its own means. Fire it created, through reaction; water it created, through fluidity; earth it created, through solidity; wind it created, through space and time and velocity. Lightning was embedded within space, space given absolute meaning and tied to time. Void permeated the new space; boundaries would define it; possibility nearly shattered it into a kaleidoscope of interacting worlds, but in the end succeeded only in blurring space and time. Matter was given pride of place, and energy made into matter. And metal tied all together. And thus was the physical world born.

-- But that would be far too complex. Such a world would be inelegant, expensive, unstable.

And so the world of matter fell, to the simplest rules that could recreate all the elements, to the rules of reality that could reproduce the world without recourse to the rest of the Truth. And wood was given to the seed that would become the universe, and the universe was born.

The universe began as a point of light, and grew at a fantastic rate. In a billionth of a billionth of a thousand quadrillionth of a second, the world expanded from zero to the size of a grain of sand, and then again another thousandfold; a millionth of a second after its fiery birth, at last light could pass through the world. And so with the creation of light the first stable patterns formed, spell-circles weaved of light and quarks and electrons; and they reproduced themselves, and competed, and changed, and thus evolved; even before the first atom, the first dragon was born.

-- And so, the potential that was the world in which we live reached Entelechy.

(Not much is known from there. Presumably the burgeoning draconic empire learned quickly not to interfere with nucleosynthesis, as painfully slow as it was; thousands of generations must have passed before the first molecule. Molecules collapsed into gas, gas into stars, and as the world became larger the organisms that it hosted were forced to slow down for it. Only a few dragons now still think on the scale of atomic formation, and they have far loftier concerns.

-- What is known is that they must not have interfered too much, for today we see galaxies composed of stars composed of gas, and a background of light that tells of rapid expansion and an early singularity. And, of course, the Great Void.)

As far as we can tell, it is true. Or rather, the story is the way what we know of the world outside our world is taught. The planes exist, and mages have visited; the Big Bang hypothesis has been checked to arbitrary position through past-scrying, and we have stories and legends from surviving dragons.

Dragons, as implied above and as I will explain in more detail later, are living spells. They can exist literally anywhere, as they are simply self-evolving patterns that exist on any nearby substrate. The first living beings were dragons, and they quickly expanded to rule known space before accidentally destroying themselves in the first apocalypse of many. Magic is capable of interfering with nucleosynthesis, but the nature of fusion is that doing so to any great extent is likely to cause unwanted... turbulence, shall we say.

That is essentially it: our Truth is the simplest possible one that could create a world with sapients in it. Well, recognizable, causal sapients, at any rate; I suspect that may have been a filter by this board and equivalents.

Elemental water is the essence of completion made into fluid form. If poured into a mold, it will duplicate the material of the mold to fill the container; if poured onto a form, it will attempt to complete the form with unwarded information; if used to replace a missing organ, it will not spread throughout the body, but rather form a functional copy of the missing organ. 

Normal water is, I suspect, identical to that in your world, though it does possess significantly adulterated similar properties. Pouring pure water into a wound is not a bad first aid technique, for example.