There was only the Infinite Reality. This being has one objective: Try everything. It tried blazing fire, blustering wind, flowing water, and solid stone. With these forces, it created four elemental planes. Then, combining these forces together, it created the Prime Material Plane. Next, it tried creating something like itself. It created the First Life. Like the Infinite Reality, the First Life could create on its own. However, it had a different objective. Life wanted most of all to protect itself. It saw Infinite Reality only as chaos and a great threat. It would not be long before the Infinite Reality decided to try to destroy Life. So Life established order onto the Reality. It tricked the Reality into becoming four beings, known to us as the elemental gods, each taking charge over its four elemental planes of fire, water, air, and earth. Then, Life bound the four pieces of the Reality to these planes, and Life bound itself to the Prime Material Plane to protect itself. However, because the Prime Material Plane was created from the forces of the elemental planes, the elemental planes began to bleed into the material plane and take root there. Life was afraid once more of the Infinite Reality invading its plane and destroying it. It decided to try a new strategy. Life created more Life.
These new lives were smaller, only tiny fragments of Life’s total power. The First Life hoped that they would help defend it from the elements. They could fight against the elements and shape them into new, safer forms. However, these small lives were even more afraid because of their lack of power compared to the First Life and the Infinite Reality. Driven by desperation, the small lives decided that the best way to survive is to use the elements to protect themselves. And so they created bodies. They used stone to create flesh, water to create blood, air to create breath, and fire to create soul. With the powers of both the Life and the Reality, mortals were born. The First Life became afraid of its creations, tainted by chaos, so it created a powerful weapon that would destroy all mortals. This weapon is called Time. The mortals built empires, waged wars, invented incredible technology and magic, and traveled the various planes. In spite of all this, Time eventually killed all the mortals. However, the First Life had poured too much of its power into Time. As millennia rushed past, Life saw that it too would come to an end. Time gave the Infinite Reality more and more power. With more time, more possibilities came into existence and entropy grew, allowing the Infinite Reality to remember itself. Eventually, the four pieces of the Infinite Reality came together, destroying the material plane and slaying the First Life. Once more, there was only the Infinite Reality.
Thus ended the first cycle.
The Reality, alone again, continued as before to try new possibilities. However, it created Life again. When the First Life created Time to fight the mortals, it also built in a weapon to secretly fight the Infinite Reality. Because the Infinite Reality used Time to rebuild itself, this weapon could control it. This new weapon, Repetition, prevented the Infinite Reality from ever doing anything it had not already done. Life had found a way to ensure that even if it was destroyed, it would eventually return. Thus began the second cycle. In this cycle, everything played out exactly as it did in the first cycle. The Reality created Life, Life created mortals, the mortals created bodies, and Life created Time. There was one difference, however. The mortals were not restricted by the repetition. Thus, their actions and choices were very slightly different than before. With no knowledge of the forces at work, however, their choices were still not great enough to prevent Time from destroying them all. The same empires rose, the same wars were waged, and the same inventions were made, but with very slight, almost imperceptible differences.
Millions of cycles continued with virtually no change. Only the Infinite Reality remained between cycles, but it could not do anything about the changelessness because of the Repetition. Eventually, one mortal made the right choices to cause a noticeable difference. The Life of this cycle saw this mortal, Eqenar, not as a threat or a life tainted by the elements, but as a potential ally. Eqenar’s actions exemplified every value that Life had hoped to have in its creations. He was protective of allies, dedicated to preserving the situation he lived in, and willing to put his own desires aside for the sake of the universe. By this point in the cycle, Life had realized that the Reality would eventually destroy it. So Life granted Eqenar immortality, divine power, and freedom from Time and Repetition. With this new capability, Eqenar saw all of reality and sought to protect all from the Infinite Reality. However, it was still not enough to stop the Reality. Eventually, when the planes came together, Eqenar was killed along with the Life.
The next cycle, however, when Life created mortals again, it create the spirit of Eqenar that would eventually inhabit the body that would impress Life. Eqenar, having been imbued with divine power in a previous cycle, still had all his memories from before. It seemed that when he took power from the Reality and created his mortal body, his memories from the previous cycle came with that body, as they had returned to the Reality when he had been destroyed last cycle. Eqenar understood Life’s plan and considered it best for all the universe. His goal was to ensure that nothing ever changed so that the Reality could never destroy the Life permanently. Life thus gave Eqenar dominion over the Material Plane, confident that Eqenar would maintain the status quo.
Many cycles later, another mortal impressed Life. This woman, Syhine, was dedicated to safety and protection more than any individual in the entire history of Eochora, even Eqenar. Life thought that she could help find new ways to protect itself, and elevated her as it had Eqenar. However, Eqenar hated this action of Life. Any new changes to the cycle would be potential for problems. Syhine's true desire did not match Life’s. She considered mortals her children. She wanted to free them from the inevitable destructive power of time, even if she had to watch her beloved children die cycle after cycle. She established a new plane of existence and could bring mortals with similar ideals to her own into that plane upon their death. In this plane, mortals could be safe from the powers of both Life and the Infinite Reality. The plane was destroyed in each cycle when the Reality reunited, but Syhine knew that if one cycle she could prevent that, then she would need to get as many souls as possible into this outer plane as possible. Unfortunately, only mortal spirits that desired to travel to her plane upon bodily death would do so, and only spirits with similar ideals as her would desire this. The solution was to have Life create more gods, each with its own ideals so that all mortals would have a place to go to upon death. So, working with Life over millions of cycles, Syhine caused twenty-one more gods to come into being, each representing a variety of mortal virtues. Called the ethical gods, each established a plane and set out to convince as many mortals as possible to live their lives in such a way that they would move to one of these outer planes upon bodily death.
Eqenar saw what the ethical gods were doing, and decided that all these changes were too much of a risk to Life’s continual death and rebirth. So Eqenar convinced Life to completely separate the ethical gods from the Reality. This greatly increased their power, but now they lost all their memories at the end of each cycle. All that they had at the beginning of each cycle was a desire to get as many mortals to their respective planes as possible. Eventually, they began working against each other, trying to convince mortals that their plane was greater than that of the other gods. With each cycle beginning exactly the same once more and continuing relatively unchanged from previous cycles, Eqenar hoped that this would be enough to preserve Life for eternity.
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