Zaphenim

Within the center of the Lux Aeterna exists an ancient structure, perhaps the oldest structure in Cosmoria. Due to the bizarre properties of the Aeterna, it had previously taken on a far grander appearance than its actual volume could permit. While its real size is still impressive, with enough volume to contain within it the largest asteroids, the size it once presented was colossal. Now, it appears quite small on the outside, perhaps emblematic of the state of its original creator, Father Zaphenim.

Magi from across Cosmoria brave the harsh journey to the center of the Lux Aeterna as a pilgrimage of sorts. Visiting what was once the most magical place in the universe is quite the experience. The government of Sagittarium, claiming the core of Cosmoria as its domain, often butts heads with the Greater Martial Consilium over the management of what they call "Zaphenim's Mansion." Both states picked its halls clean of valuable objects. These ancient artifacts, much of which now reduced to museum pieces or weapons of war, were the pride and joy of Zaphenim's collection. Now, in the large garden in front of the mansion, statues of great mortal conquerors, monuments devoted to the destruction of the mansion's builder, and all other humiliations exist.

Currently, neither government allows anyone, save for a small contingent of ultra-powerful magi, into the building itself. The soldiers that guard the door have spawned a great deal of urban legends about the happenings inside the mansion. While most of them are cartoonishly grotesque or obviously implausible, it is no secret that someone still resides in there. During lulls in foot-traffic, many claim to hear faint ominous cries, a sound of lamentation in an indecipherable tongue.

Above the entrance to the mansion there is an ornate plaque containing the words:

"Here lies the Overlords"

Father Zaphenim represented the pinnacle of the art of Thaumaturgy. "Deific," was his preferred self-description and, according to the religious inhabitants of Aylathiya, this was accurate. If there were gods, the achievements they could muster would be quite similar to Zaphenim's. The creator of Classical Thaumaturgy, Humans, Zaphenim's Mansion, the other Angels, and the First Aeternal Society, Zaphenim was tremendously influential in the course of universal history.

Like all angels, he emerged spontaneously as particles within the Lux Aeterna collapsed under a force similar to gravity. After becoming conscious, he spent most of his time in the Lux Aeterna. There, he destroyed many of the forces that rendered civilization impossible in Aylathiya, the original Overlords. After ridding the universe of them, he left the Lux Aeterna and established his civilization. Ruling as a god, he held absolute power until he left for the Aeterna once more, where he would construct his legendary mansion. Even as his civilization collapsed, he remained in the Aeterna, influencing events from behind the scenes. He spurred the creation of five other beings similar to himself, known as the Angels, who created empires similar to, but never as grand as, his.

As the other angels proved to have a limited lifespan, he began having them carry out specific missions in service of resurrecting both them and him. Zaphenim's physical form wasted away in the Lux Aeterna, trapping him within it. Father Rinayo and Father Isayo, the twin angels, were tasked with "garden keeping," annihilating the Overlords that reemerged throughout the millennia. Afterwards, Mother Ohko was meant to create a Thaumic civilization capable of building the immense device that could resurrect the angels. However, as Ohko died before finishing her mission, Mother Sydiah was created to finish her task. Millennia after Sydiah died, her creations finally activated the Eye of Aylathiya megastructure, resurrecting all of the angels at once and ushering in a new era.

As the angels aggressively reinserted themselves into the modern political order, the resulting political strain caused a great number of issues. Zaphenim took advantage of the chaos to cause the War of the Ancients, his plan to rebuild the First Aeternal Society. Zaphenim's armies crumbled, Mother Ohko essentially joined the enemy side, and the other Angels were the object of his fits of rage. To reclaim power, he masterminded Aylathiya's Ignominy, one of the largest modern conflicts. The scheme was a bid to wrest power from Mother Ohko, who now ruled all of Aylathiya under the Greater Martial Consilium. The conflict lead to Zaphenim's downfall as he nearly perished at the hands of Mars, however. After this defeat, Mother Sachitel brought him to an unknown location. His whereabouts, or even if he is still alive, is unknown.

His legacy was forever tarnished by his involvement in this conflict. Aeternalists, those who worshiped the angels, are currently embroiled in a number of religious conflicts over which new variant of their faith takes precedent. Even in his absence, his influence still looms over the galaxy.

Biography

Origin

The first thing Zaphenim ever felt was a gentle breeze. The center of the Lux Aeterna, like an eye in a storm, was hardly the tempest the rest of it was. After several months of only feeling, his other senses began arising. Once he was capable of seeing, his eyes were opened to the great world around him. Father Zaphenim was a spirit who, like a planet forming under its own gravity, formed out of the random particulates that floated throughout the Lux Aeterna.

Perhaps because there was a great deal of intelligent life with this form or perhaps by chance, Zaphenim stood upright with two arms and two legs. For the first few centuries, however, he stayed rooted in place. He was unaware that he could move, so he stood and observed the streams of gas flowing around him. Bolts of energy similar to lightning arced across the sky, even striking him a few times. The first time Zaphenim realized he could move was when he observed a small spirit ambling about. The small point of light simply went back and forth, but resisted the winds that pushed most other particles. With this insight, Zaphenim attempted to change his position, a difficult task for a spirit for which the concept of movement was new.

While Zaphenim did not have physical muscles, his limbs demanded that he flexed portions of them to move. Clenching and relaxing various parts of his body would move him. Eventually, he was able to stumble around without falling too often. After several weeks of practice, he was able to stride throughout the center of the Lux Aeterna. Once he realized that flying would be no different that walking, the Lux Aeterna has no objective up or down, he was free to explore all of it.

Early Encounters

As Zaphenim found other spirits similar to himself, it became clear that he was quite rare. Most of them seemed unable to react to stimuli, or would refuse to interact with him. Sometimes they even went so far as to attack him, but he proved difficult to injure, causing his attackers to usually flee. After being caught in a particularly strong jet stream that he did not have the experience to resist, he ended up far from the center. Normally, he tried to keep the Aeterna's center in sight so he would not lose his bearings. However, now that he was so far, he had no idea where he was.

He wandered for a great deal of time through the pink and orange clouds of the Lux Aeterna. As he was pushed about by various streams of particles, some visible and some invisible, he began interacting with more of the Aeterna's inhabitants. Everything from wriggling beasts with no ability to understand that other intelligent beings exist to microbe-like assemblages of energy inhabited the Lux Aeterna. While an ecosystem did not exist in a conventional sense, predation certainly took place. Even after decades of moving throughout it, Zaphenim did not meet a single creature that could meaningfully hurt him, not that he knew what being hurt was.

Zaphenim's First Creation

Zaphenim had spent a lot of time pacing through his elaborate mansion as of late. Situated near to the core of the Lux Aeterna, Zaphenim had spent years perfecting everything about it. From immaculate carvings stretching throughout its entirety to luxurious finishes representing rare materials from across Cosmoria, it was truly a labor of love. One particular hallway in the vast complex was designed to appear infinitely long; the rules of the Lux Aeterna allowing for all manner of visual tricks to be played.

Lining the great hall and evenly spaced were ornate podiums about as tall as Zaphenim's waist. Studded in blueish-white Osmium, the rarest non-radioactive metal in Cosmoria, the cylindrical podiums each had on top of them an artifact, some substance or object that was more than simply the atoms that made it up. From bizarre anomalies Zaphenim did not yet understand to simply rare and beautiful crystals, the artifacts were the pride of Zaphenim's mansion.

One such artifact was probably by far the most unusual however. A large flask of quartz glass sat underneath a lamp that was effectively a miniature star. Contained within the flask was a solution of saline water, nutrients such as phosphorous, and an untold number of microscopic organisms. In aggregate, they gave the water a green tint; their bodies so small that their effect on the macroscopic scale was indistinguishable from green pigment.

Zaphenim created a series of lenses by bending space time using Thaumaturgy. These concentric lenses, of various sizes, worked to magnify the microscopic creatures to larger than Zaphenim's head. Here he was able to study them, documenting every detail from their reaction to certain proteins or which light level they preferred.

"What animates them?"

They were made out of remarkably complex molecules that he had never seen anywhere else in his centuries of existence, and yet the substance that seemed to power them was a simple sugar. These bizarre creatures somehow converted light into sugar and would die without a light source.

"There are no gears, no wires, no motors..."

Months of trying to answer this question yielded almost no information. Whatever that allowed them to transmute light into chemical energy was far too small for even Zaphenim to resolve. He has been trying to figure out how to study the complex molecules, but without a clear way to visualize them, Zaphenim's magical ability was all but useless in synthesizing these substances. As for their origin, he was even more clueless. A lone world orbiting a black hole of all things was covered in a meters-thick layer of water made viscous by its high concentration of these small... there is still not a good word for them.

"Creatures... beings... chemical machines... organizations..."

The last word in that sequence is what Zaphenim decided on. Their complexity prompted him to coin a word meaning "organized." Some process arranged these things into the complex form they were in. Zaphenim had a sudden idea. He scooped a decent number of these cells into a secondary flask and gave them a great deal of nutrients. Once they had built up a significant mass, he killed all of them by using his magical ability to sever them. He spent days going through the flask with his microscope, killing every cell in it without denaturing the molecules that made them up.

His thinking was simple; if he filled a container with all of the things that composed these cells, whatever they were, the cells would reemerge given a significant enough amount of time. Since spherical membranes naturally formed when phospholipids were left to their own devices, surely cells could emerge in the same way. Satisfied with his own genius, he left the experiment to run. He assumed that such a phenomenon would take a long time, what with the violation of entropy that it was. Physics came far more naturally than biology to the angel.

After a few days of waiting, Zaphenim returned, eager to see the laws of biology unravel before him. When he got to the secondary flask, it was still as dead as it was. In fact, the ultra-violet radiation did a number on many of the proteins, leaving Zaphenim with not new life but a solution more dead than when he started. Zaphenim stared into the flask for all of thirty seconds before suddenly smashing it onto the ground. He had enough of this infuriatingly complex material; he had enough of this mansion he spent months in trying to learn about the universe. Bolting out of the door, Zaphenim's journey to the edge of the Lux Aeterna was similar to a sudden increase in density. As he left the Lux Aeterna, he appeared as though he were falling instead of traveling laterally, the Lux Aeterna effectively spitting him out like a heavy oil sinking below water.

After several moments, he found himself in Cosmoria. It was as grand and empty as he remembered it, not a single other soul seemed to call it home. He had wondered for years if those machines were like him, aware of the universe and capable of moving about, or if they were just chemistry-based automata. Zaphenim bent spacetime once more, not to create lenses but to create a bubble, propelling himself forward at speeds approaching the speed of light. Even at these velocities it took some weeks to get anywhere worth visiting, meaning that Zaphenim always had time to think. All he could think about was how the simple rules of physics somehow allowed for seemingly infinite complexity. As he moved towards a random star that seemed interesting enough, he thought about how potentially there could be simpler or even more complex cells that could tell him how the green sludge functioned.

The small nameless star Zaphenim flew to was quite unremarkable, but since ultraviolet light seemed to harm these cells, a star that hardly emitted any must be better for them. After nearly two weeks he reached the star, which appeared quite strange once he was a few thousand astronomical units away. It seemed to have a large dim hoop around it. As he grew closer it became a disk, a structure of unparalleled size that quite frankly put his life's work to shame.

Resting atop the disk that would later be known as Eos were seas that dwarfed the shallow ponds he was accustomed to. On the surface was a great amount of green material he assumed were large collections of single cells. However, as he got closer, the green color belonged to macroscopic plants. There were more on this disk than there were cells in either of his flasks. It was incredible but also humbling. Using his lenses, he confirmed that the plants were indeed made up of trillions of cells. This discovery caused Zaphenim to quickly leave, despite desiring to study these plants more than anything, he knew it would be frustrating. The cells were a puzzle he was not yet equipped to piece together.