For to be truly God-like, the Gods had to be omniscient. But once the original matter exploded into billions of worlds, and they in turn into yet more billions – like an ocean becoming spray whose every droplet holds another ocean – it became apparent that, if they were to really know everything that happened everywhere, every thought and occurrence and feeling and fact, they’d be forced to spend all eternity sorting through things that, concerning vastly inferior beings, didn’t interest them at all.
And so they took the last remaining part of Norien that hadn’t settled yet, and populated it with creatures whose function – whose whole existence – would be to amass this infinite knowledge, divide it between them and store it till further notice, thus making Ienar Lin the brain of the Ever-Shifting Sphere, albeit a brain permeated with insanity.
However, since knowledge confers power even to those overwhelmed by its sheer immensity, Linners, as the Mad Sphere’s inhabitants called themselves, grew over time exceedingly powerful and wise, even if their powers were erratic and their wisdom clouded by the mental exhaustion of constantly having to sift through the lives, hopes, fears, dreams, desires and accomplishments of millions of faraway creatures from faraway worlds.
And as the Gods rarely, if ever, bothered to inform themselves of what Linners were supposedly keeping in store for their lofty scrutiny, this race of divine lunatics also acquired certain godly qualities, such as a supernatural longevity and prescience, which, combined with the skills they learnt from the intellectual influx from advanced civilizations, allowed them to transcend the planes of reality and the boundaries of time and space, and to transform their selves and their surroundings at will – till Ienar Lin became a bizarre paradise of clashing eras and surroundings, of distant worlds lying at hand, opening and closing as easily as doors which admitted every sort of alien being, environ and contraption.
But then the Runes of Norien were stolen, and the Gods, fumbling through the darkness, turned to Ienar Lin, hoping to retrieve part of the sight they’d lost – and found it to be even more chaotic than the object of its purpose: legions of crazy buffoons playing at being gods. And so they punished Linners for their audacity, and they punished them severely, cutting down their eonian life spans to a few short centuries, seizing their transcendental powers and giving the Mad Sphere a dreary, primitive, unalterable form that would become known as the Eye.
And ever after the Eye would blink, open and shut at the passing worlds and all they contained, and in its dusky orb hunched creatures would meaninglessly rummage through minds and hearts, galaxies and climates, strange deaths and stranger lives.
The Runes of Norien Page 30