The omniverse is home to an uncountable number of species. Not all these species are of equal power, intelligence, or even value, to the omniverse, and among the rare few privileged and loved by the omniverse, there are boons that it generously gives them. The creatures that are the most beloved by the omniverse are known as “Ascendants”, and the omniverse grants them immense, reality defying, power.
Four such creatures are gathered in one tiny, unremarkable portion of a small, hidden universe. The four beings, each of whom is a different type of ascendant, silently stand over the corpse of another of their ilk. They gaze at it judgmentally, and stare sternly at the thing. Their eyes are filled with caution, fear, and loathing.
The corpse they are standing over is a bizarre thing, a tall creature in the shape of a fusion of man and dragon, whose form is composed of metal, scales, and skin. The aura that clings to it is one that mixes life and death, holiness and unholiness, and even though the creature is dead its aura is still powerful enough that only ascendants can withstand its effects on one’s sense of self.
The creature is still, dead to such a degree that none of the living ascendants believe it can self-resurrect, but they are waiting just to know for certainty that he is truly defeated. Self-resurrection is not a particularly rare power for ascendants and the creature has been a thorn in the sides of each of the living ascendants in the room for billions of years, so they want to be sure of their victory here.
As minutes pass each of the still living creatures in the secret place of the defeated ascendant begin to silently transmit messages to their servants. The cosmic goddess, the woman who is the most responsible for the death of the ancient ascendant, telepathically speaks to her high priest when she realizes that her ancient foe, the first sanguinarch in the omniverse, has fallen and is not coming back to life. The head priest invokes her name as he speaks to his congregation, and she smiles brightly as a rush of power fills her, due to the priest’s purposeful actions.
The soul of the ascendant, the eldest of their “kind”, or “species”, or whatever term any specific scholar chooses to apply to the odd group, will not be returning to his corpse. A boon given to the unbelievably ancient ascendant by the omniverse allows him to spirit his soul far, far away from where his body was defeated. With every passing second the vast gulf between the soul of the slain ascendant and the council responsible for his death increases.
The creature’s mind is fading with every passing second, but his intellect is easily mighty enough to allow him to send his soul as far as he can, as quickly as he can even while dealing with the drawn out ego-death he is suffering from. He seethes with rage, his pride in shambles following his physical death, but he knows that to acquire victory in the future he must survive this defeat. In some way, shape, or form, he must survive!
Each component of this figure’s unique ascension is powering his exodus. His nature as a tri-focused sanguinarch bolsters his intelligence and his speed, allowing his soul to speed across the aethereal void of the cosmos. His affinity and attunement to two specific draconic elements, that of the air and that of the void, help him hide his exodus from the sharpened senses of the ascendants attempting to determine if he is truly deceased.
His nature as a tri-metal transynth reinforces his mind and identity against the endless, persistent kind of death his rivals inflicted on him. This form of death is so powerful that it would end even his mind, under normal circumstances, but the metals that make up his soul buttress him against even an ascendant’s attempts to snuff him out fully and completely. His cosmic domains and connections to the deadly sins empower minor facets of himself that allow his escape. It is not enough, the ascendant himself knows this, but he is still grateful for the fact that he can retain his mind even moments after his defeat.
The creature’s identity persists for several full hours, long enough for the being to reach the boundary of the multiverse of his birth and slip past it, thanks to his nature as an ascendant mixing with the ethereal nature of his existence, caught between life and death. This never-been-seen feat is not observed by anyone and thus goes uncelebrated, but it is a meaningful victory for the ancient ascendant.
This promises him safety, even if it comes at great cost. His ego and any true sense of self perish minutes after he slips into the nearest multiverse, including his knowledge of his nature as an ascendant being. In the safety of the other multiverse, the soul comes to a stop, drained of both much of its power and nearly all the stamina it possesses even as an ascendant.
Eventually all of the ancient being’s enemies become satisfied that the creature is really gone and leave his secret citadel, eager to begin to take over the locations once lorded over by the being. Their short-lived alliance persists just long enough for them to slay their foe and leave his lair, but each of them makes it to their homes and begin to coordinate efforts to take what once belonged to their enemy.
All the while their foe floats, lazily, at the edge of a young, newly created universe. For days the identity-less clump of ascendant power rests, undisturbed by anything, and slowly begins to regain power.
Days turn into weeks, which turn into months, and so on and so forth until several billion years have passed. During this time the creature’s soul has grown fat with eldritch energies and strange, new power.
When the soul is adequately prepared to reincarnate it begins the process to take on a new physical shell, automatically. All the while the creature is continuing to feed on the energies given off by the universe he is currently in, sustaining himself quite easily.
The process of preparing for reincarnation is a curious one. One’s soul begins to exude power, for the purpose of creating the perfect body for itself to inhabit. This potent process changes and warps reality itself, on a scale equal to the power of the soul. For beings like gods this can change entire worlds… For ascendants, the entire multiverse they are in can be affected, even if the process takes trillions of years to complete.
Empowered by the ascendant energies of the creature dwelling at the edge of the universe, the universe where he dwells changes in ways both subtle and unsubtle. Dimensions are born, and life cosmically seeds entire galaxies. Nevertheless, no life quite suited to housing the soul of the ascendant forms in the first few billion years after the soul begins to attempt to reincarnate.
This allows the soul to grow stronger still as sapient lifeforms commit acts related to the domains and sins under the purview of the ascendant. Each act of love, of lust, of sloth, and of a dozen other things, very subtly empowers the eldritch ascendant. It takes billions of years before a small world that will one day be named “Earth” by some of its inhabitants not only forms, but also becomes the home of the first humans in this universe.
After the first humans appear on Earth, they slowly begin to spread across it and change entire environments. Whole human civilizations rise and fall for eons, changing and shaping the world as they do. Each living human empowers the mysterious manifold ascendant millions of times throughout their lives, their daily activities counting as manifestations of everything from love to pride, a domain and a sin respectively. Even their deaths empower the creature, as the divinity is a god of death and instances of their domains empower cosmic gods.
Even gods, though not ascendant ones, are born as human civilizations rise, and die as civilizations and their worshippers perish. It is their offspring with humanity that are the progenitors of humanoid species such as elves and orcs. The children of gods and man create world-changing inventions such as boats and wheels and contribute to the beautiful tapestry of life on Earth.
Eventually though, the soul begins to move. The soul races at speeds far eclipsing the speed of light, traveling from one end of the universe to another.
The spirit of the ascendant being reaches the planet right as a pregnant human woman located on a farm between Paris and the Palace of Fontainebleau begins to wail in pain. She cries out in agony as she feels her uterine muscles tighten and work to push the baby inside of her out of her.
The lord of ambition, the oldest and greatest of the ascendants, has finally found a new body. In the time between his death and his rebirth over twelve billion years have passed… Nevertheless, the ascendant has grown in power, and the moment that Arielle Bayard gives birth to the boy she will name Leith, the ascendant’s soul invisibly enters the body of the newborn boy.
The human soul affixed to the body is quickly and silently snuffed out, ended in a way that is absolute and irreversible. This morbid action occurs for the sake of making room for the ascendant inhabiting the frail, newborn body. The first time Leith Bayard opens his eyes is the moment that the ascendant has opened his eyes for the first time in over a dozen billion years.
The amnesiac ascendant, once one of the greatest beings in the omniverse, begins a new journey as the son of a farmer and his wife, mere miles away from the palace from which King Henry II rules over the whole of France. The baby opens his eyes right as his mother begins to wipe the blood and vernix off him. He smiles at her, and she smiles back, and the love she feels for the baby sends holts of electric energy into the baby thanks to the mastery the soul possessing it possesses over the domain of love.
The bright glow of intelligence and ambition is visible in the eyes of the infant. For the next several years the baby will have plenty of chances to show people just how intelligent and ambitious he really is even without his true, greatest powers.
