How Magic Came Into The World

This piece is unpolished and lacks characters, conversation and all that good, juicy stuff because I intend to use it as a back-story for something epic. For my first portfolio piece, I wanted to share something I hadn't ever shared anywhere before. Enjoy!

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Long ago, there were entities that existed in a universe where there was nothing except themselves: no matter, no energy, nothing. It was unimaginably cold, dark and silent there, like the deepest deep space you could imagine, only deeper, colder and much quieter.

These entities required a certain form of energy in order to exist, and it was the same energy of which they were made. There was no way for the entities to nourish themselves in this universe except by eating one another. Everything else that had existed there had long been destroyed, broken down, consumed by the entities, which was why there was nothing else.

Nature abhors a vacuum. When something is too empty, Nature seeks to fill it, and when something is too full, Nature seeks to make it empty again. And so, in the places where the veil was thin between the empty universe and the others, the veil became weak from the full universes pushing out and the empty universe sucking inward. In some places, the veil between the universes actually ruptured.

In our version of space-time, these ruptures were visible as "black holes", where the gravitational pull was so massive, not even light energy could escape. In the empty universe, the microscopic trickle of light, heat and matter that poured through the ruptured veil glowed like a flaming beacon. The entities sensed this influx of heat, light and matter, and quickly came to flock around these "white holes".

Still, the stuff coming through the white holes was generally of the wrong consistency for the entities to digest. Some of it was good, though, and the entities who stayed near the white holes were able to quit consuming each other. It didn't take them long to begin communicating with one another, though they had become extremely savage from a near eternity of eating one another, so there was much conflict.

What happened to bring them to our universe was that the entities realized the matter and energy pouring through the white holes and into their universe had to come from SOMEWHERE. Much the same way as it is in our universe, in their universe matter and energy could not spawn from nothing.

Since the entities were almost completely non-existent, it was much easier for them to slip through the tear in the veil between the universes than it would be for creatures like us. When they arrived, they found a massive supply of matter and energy laid up in the new universe. Most of it was in large, indigestible chunks and clouds, though, so the entities were forced to scatter in order to find enough to eat.

Billions upon billions of years passed, and the entities crossed back and forth between the universes feeding, growing and reproducing. During this time, they grew larger in stature, became more conscious and complex and slowly, they multiplied. When simple life appeared in our universe, conscious life followed, and it was this conscious life that caught the attention of the entities.

The conscious life that appeared in this universe had a curious quality to it: these conscious life-forms tended to exhude the same energy that the entities fed upon. It only seemed natural for the entities to seek out planets with conscious life and feed upon the excess energy that these life-forms seemed to shed in bulk.

In time, though, it became apparent that as the entities fed upon the leftover energy of the conscious life-forms on a planet, so the planet became less and less able to sustain that conscious life. All other conscious life aside from the entities would begin to die off, as if stricken by some sort of disease. Finally, the entities were finding fewer and fewer planets to sustain their vast numbers. Only a few million conscious planets remained in the entire universe, and these were being consumed rapidly. A famine was on its way for them if something couldn't be done to increase the quantity of digestible energy.

So, in order to stave off the famine and maintain their numbers, the entities took up farming. They took samples of conscious life-forms and seeded them throughout the universe, anywhere they would grow. They left these seeded planets alone, returning to apply the proper stimulus to produce their crop. When the proper level of consciousness had been achieved, the entities decended upon the unfortunate life-forms and consumed the energy they produced until the life-forms died off again. Finally, the planet would be re-seeded for another crop.

It was during this period that they discovered our planet Earth, untouched, unconsumed and miraculously populated by not one but a multitude of highly conscious species. Apparently, it was only the fact that the universe is large beyond comprehension that had saved Earth from being discovered. The entities' collective consensus was that Earth ought to be studied and not immediately consumed in order to discover how to increase their energy yields on the other planets.

A group of entities was selected to inhabit Earth and study it. These entities eventually came to be what we humans would recognize as spirits, gods, djinis, ghosts, fairies, monsters, demons, angels and etc.

One of the things that the entities had discovered though their long years of feeding upon conscious life-forms was that if the life-forms could be convinced to take on certain states of mind, they would produce far more digestible energy than they would in a state of mental equilibrium. These states of mind were what human kind would recognize as "emotion". It didn't matter which emotional state was created, though, the entities often found that it was much easier to create panic, anger, fear, hatred and frustration in the minds of their hosts than it was to create emotional states like love or happiness.

On Earth, this knowledge was used to force individual life-forms to produce more energy, quickly killing or at least severely weakening that individual, but leaving the rest of the life-forms intact for study. Those chosen to study Earth had to eat, but they could not allow themselves to drain the planet or to multiply. Instead of freely feeding upon Earth's life-forms, which would kill them all before the study was even underway, the entities developed a system in order to limit their harvest.

The entities would attempt to make deals, contracts and covenants with the conscious life-forms. These contracts involved the entities granting boons and favors to specific, targeted life-forms, in exchange for the life-forms having to do some ritualistic action or agree to participate in a state of mind that created a greater flow of excess energy for the entities to feed upon. Eventually, the life-form would be drained until it died, or sometimes, the life-form would be mentally weakened and go insane.

One human example of this type of deal was Abram's agreement with God to cut off his own, his sons' and his male servants' foreskins, change his name to Abraham, and proclaim God as his God. In exchange, the entity would grant him great fertility, large land ownership, and an assurance that his offspring would be kings over Abram's (now Abraham's) known world.

Another, more modern example might be the parent agreeing with a demon to trade their child's "soul" for spiritual power.

In each case, the life-form receives tawdry baubles like promises of world domination and/or great spiritual power, while the entity creates a situation for itself where massive quantities of digestible energy are produced. Imagine the kind of stress it would create in a person's life if they suddenly had to go around disfiguring their sons' penises and demanding that they have changed their name because a god told them to do it. Imagine the kind of emotional instability it causes when a parent goes around acting as if their child is not so much a person but a lamb for the slaughter, a battery for spiritual power, an object.

In any case, the entities are still here, still targeting conscious life-forms in order to drain their energy, still studying us to see if they can artificially replicate the cornucopia of consciousness that naturally sprang forth from this planet. Few life-forms have seen them in action, and even fewer suspect their real purpose.