Dream of Forgotten Gods

The Dream of Forgotten Gods   It began in silence. Not the silence of peace, nor the silence of a world at rest—but a silence heavy with absence, a hollow, aching void where something should have been but was not. Across the world, in cities bustling with noise, in forests untouched by steel, in deep caverns where ancient beings slumbered, the dream came all at once. No warning. No herald. Just the sudden pull into a vision that did not belong to them, yet was as real as the waking world. And in that dream, they stood beneath a sky that had been lost to time.   The Forgotten Altar   A great temple, weathered by ages, loomed before them—a structure of marble and timeworn stone, its once-pristine columns now cracked, its walls covered in worn etchings of symbols no one remembered. At its center sat a fire that did not burn—a twisting mass of darkness and light, a paradox, a thing that had never been fully extinguished but had long been forgotten. The air thrummed with whispers, words in a language older than any tongue still spoken. And then the visions came.   The Worship That Was   They saw themselves in another time, another body, another age. Before the ice, before the War of Black Ash, before humanity vanished into extinction, they had worshipped here. They had prayed at this altar. They had spoken his name in reverence, in fear, in desperate hope. Khaos.   The name echoed in the void of their minds, a sound both familiar and foreign, as if spoken through the mouths of a thousand voices across centuries. They knew, without being told, that this was the first god, the oldest god, the force that came before all things and would exist after all things ended. Before the Titans, before the Olympians, before the gods of man had shaped their thrones, there had been only Khaos—the great formless void, the infinite chasm from which creation had sprung. They saw figures, ancient priests, clad in robes of black and deep violet, gathered before the altar, chanting, singing, weaving their voices into the great unknown. They had called upon him not for destruction, not for an end, but for understanding, for the truth that only chaos could provide. But something changed. The world grew colder. The prayers stopped. The fires of Chaos dimmed. Humanity had turned away, seeking gods of law, gods of order, gods that promised stability and control. And slowly, the first god was forgotten.   The Betrayal of Order   They saw the temples fall—not by war, not by flame, but by neglect, by erasure, by silence. New gods took his place. Gods of the sky, gods of the sea, gods of the harvest. Gods who fit within the framework of men’s minds, gods who did not frighten with endless possibility. The people who had once chanted his name no longer remembered him. And in this forgetting, they had chained Chaos itself. The fire at the altar shrank, its shifting form locked into a single, unchanging shape, imprisoned within the world of men. Where once Khaos had been the infinite, he had become a memory, a whisper, a shadow. And when the War of Black Ash came—when the cataclysm raged, when the world was swallowed in ice and ruin—there were none left to call his name. Humanity vanished, and with it, so too did the last remnants of his worship. The dreamers felt the weight of it, the greatest betrayal—not that he had been overthrown, not that he had been defeated, but that he had been forgotten. The first god, unmade by silence.   The Awakening   And then, the silence of the dream shattered. The altar—long abandoned—ignited once more, the flames roaring back to life, wreathed in colors that did not belong to mortal eyes. The whispers grew to a roar, not of words, but of unmaking, of shifting realities, of all things breaking apart and reforming in infinite combinations. The dreamers felt the chains that had bound Chaos for so long begin to break. And then, they saw him. Not a man, not a god as mortals understood them, but a force, a presence so vast, so unknowable that their minds could only shape him into something familiar—a shifting silhouette of shadow and light, eyes like shattered stars, a voice that spoke in a thousand forgotten tongues. He did not ask for worship. He did not need it. He only showed them what had been, what had been stolen from him, what had been erased from history. And then, the vision began to fade, not because it was ending, but because the world itself was beginning to remember. The temple was no longer a ruin. The altar was no longer cold. And the name, once lost to time, was spoken again. "Khaos." The dreamers awoke with the word still on their lips.   And So, Chaos Spreads Again   The nightmare came to hundreds, then thousands. In cities and villages, in palaces and hovels, they awoke changed—knowing, deep in their bones, that what they had seen was no ordinary dream. They did not all understand it. Some tried to forget, to dismiss it as nothing. But the word, the name, did not leave them. Some sought out others who had dreamed the same dream. Some began to whisper the name again, uncertain but compelled. Some fell to their knees in abandoned temples, lighting new fires in old ruins. And some, the most devoted, walked into the wilds, knowing that Chaos had returned, and that he would not be forgotten again. Xyr’athos sat upon his ever-shifting throne in the abyss, his fingers trailing over the edges of the Loom. He did not smile. He had no need to. The dream had been woven. And the world was finally remembering.