"My child… come closer. Yes, just there. Where the cold doesn't bite and the fire still breathes."
The old man's voice was brittle, like the bark of a dead tree. Smoke curled around his fingers as he leaned closer to the flames. His eyes, grey and slow, looked far beyond the circle of firelight.
"What I'm about to tell you — no one remembers it rightly. But it remains, buried deeper than stone, older than the bones of the world."
The boy nodded, small and silent, his hands tucked into his sleeves. He had heard many stories. This one felt different before it even began.
The old man coughed. Not a sick cough, but something dry, as if the years themselves caught in his throat.
"Before the stars. Before the rivers. Before the hunger of men was given a name… there was only One."
Not a king. Not a god.
It had no name — there was no mouth to speak one.
It had no shape — there was no eye to behold it.
It had no purpose — it contained all that could ever be.
It was silence, whole and undisturbed.
But even silence has weight.
Even perfection cracks.
"The One looked upon itself…"
The boy frowned.
"It could see?"
"No, child. But it saw all the same."
And in that gaze — that first moment of reflection — something shifted.
A fault line. A breath too long held.
The beginning of a fracture.
And then… it broke.
Not like thunder. Not like shattering glass.
Like a great thought collapsing under its own weight.
From that break spilled three fragments.
Not creations. Not offspring.
But scars of what once was whole.
Divine Attributes.
Omniscience. The one who knows all, sees all, remembers all.
Omnipotence. The one who can do all, shape all, destroy all.
Omnipresence. The one who is everywhere, in all things, all the time.
They fell — not into space, for space did not yet exist — but into the stillness beneath being.
Where they touched, the world began to form.
Not from design.
Not from will.
But from consequence.
Stone.
Sky.
Fire.
Flesh.
And then… man.
Men were not born because the fragments desired it.
They were born because the fragments needed to be witnessed.
So came the first hunger.
The first lie.
The first death.
And so began the cycle.
Empires rose with the shadow of Omnipotence.
Prophets spoke with the voice of Omniscience.
Tyrants reached with hands full of false presence.
They built.
They burned.
They forgot.
And the fragments moved, slow as glaciers, deep as grief.
The boy shifted.
"But if they're still here… why doesn't anyone stop them?"
The old man smiled, thin and without warmth.
"Because the cycle does not care for heroes, my child. Only for pattern. Only for repetition."
Each age thinks it begins something.
Each war thinks it ends something.
But everything that was… will be again.
So long as the fragments remain apart, the world cannot escape its rhythm.
But there is something more.
The old man fell quiet. He poked the fire, watched the embers fall like dying stars.
"There is one among the three… more cruel than the others."
Not Omnipotence. Power without purpose is just noise — it burns, it passes.
Not Omnipresence. To be in all places is to belong nowhere.
But Omniscience…
Ah.
Omniscience is the one that never stops seeing.
It remembers every fall.
Every scream.
Every betrayal, even the ones not yet born.
It sees the ending in the beginning.
And still must endure the middle.
It has no faith to hide behind.
No ignorance to soften the blow.
No power to make what it knows untrue.
It is not a sword.
It is not a crown.
It is a mirror, turned inward — and it cannot close its eyes.
The boy's voice was quiet now.
"Could someone survive it?"
A long pause.
"Perhaps." The old man breathed the word like ash.
"But if they did… they would not be a god.
They would not be a man.
They would be something else entirely."
"What, then?"
"A witness."
The wind stirred the coals.
"And when all voices are gone — all names, all prayers, all light…
his silence would be the last thing left."