[May the gods bless you, dear readers, with smooth and happy lives. Thank you for your understanding and for reading!]
Chaos was his cradle, and his prison.
He was a consciousness that had transmigrated here, drifting through lightless, soundless chaos for countless epochs.
The breathing of chaos was the only rhythm, inhaling nothing, exhaling nothing, repeating until time itself lost all meaning.
He could do nothing but watch. He watched the shades of darkness, watched particles gather and scatter, watched himself exist little by little within this eternal silence.
Then, on some unknown day, Chaos was born. Light tore a fissure through the thinnest part of the chaos, growing ever more abundant. The chaos began to loosen, and the world began to emerge.
Gaia rose first, swiftly solidifying into rock and soil. Tartarus fell close behind, the abyss split open, and darkness surged out of it. Erebus appeared, giving contours to the unseen.
As Nyx descended with the curtain of night, Eros, without form or shape, appeared last.
The five primordial gods awakened one after another, and the world took its earliest shape in their hands.
Yet he remained a drifting consciousness, silently watching from the void.
An immense gravitational pull dragged him down from the void, and he finally landed on the summit of a mountain. The mountain was called Proeon. Its rocks were soft and warm, retaining the lingering heat of the earth's birth.
He clung to the highest rock face on the summit and wandered no more. Looking down from Proeon, he watched the world grow fuller by the day.
Uranus spread overhead to form the dome of the sky, Pontus seeped out to form the oceans, and mountain ranges rose like ribs.
The creatures of the earth emerged from the soil, tiny and full of life. The deities of the ocean took shape amid the waves, gleaming and mysterious, while deep within darkness and night, beings belonging to the netherworld were born as well.
The Twelve Titans emerged one after another from where heaven and earth coupled, enormous and strong. More deities appeared in their wake, and above the abyss of Tartarus, the underworld began to take shape.
The laws were becoming more complete, and order was growing. The world was changing for the better, becoming richer with each passing day.
But after Uranus ascended to the throne of the God King, he grew increasingly arrogant and oppressive. His dome hung low, and his consciousness blanketed heaven and earth.
He wanted to control everything. His hands seized the Twelve Titans, the greatest threats, one by one and stuffed them into the gap between heaven and earth. On their knees or lying prone, they were enslaved.
Gaia began to resist. She sent warnings to the sky through the pulse of the earth, but Uranus forcibly pressed down, and heaven and earth coupled once more.
Gaia's anger and resentment nurtured new beings within her body: the Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires. They roared at the God King.
But the world empowered the God King. Uranus seemed to be the very will of the laws. Dark clouds pinned the giants down and pushed them one by one into the depths of Tartarus.
Gaia's wails shook the entire world. Deep valleys split open across her surface, and scorching lava surged from her depths. Pontus was the first to answer his mother's call. The oceans surged from every direction, their waves rising higher than the mountain peaks, higher than the clouds.
Ourea of the mountains followed close behind. Every ridge rose from the earth, Proeon among them, swinging fists of stone at the sky.
Ourea was the embodiment of the mountains' will, ancient and heavy, with a child's pure loyalty to the earth.
The earth trembled with every step he took, and every punch he threw carried the weight of millions of years.
But the God King was too powerful. Even together, the two ancient gods were no match for him. During the battle, Uranus even shattered and dispersed Ourea's consciousness.
The laws forbade killing gods, especially important deities like the mountain god, who formed the foundations of the world. Not even the God King dared do so, and thus Ourea did not die completely, but he shattered into fragments.
Those fragments scattered into the wounds of the earth, becoming unconscious mountain peaks, never again able to think as a whole.
The aftermath of the war was devastating as well. Pale foam covered the sea's surface, the shattered remains of living beings. Soil and corpses filled the canyons, forests burned to ashes, and riverbeds dried and cracked.
Gaia's sobs became soundless laments for all her dead children.
He stood on Proeon's summit and witnessed it all with his omnipresent sight.
He saw fear, he saw anger, he saw sorrow...
All manner of emotions converged from across the earth, pouring like a backflowing tide into this ancient mass of chaotic energy. He contained them all, and then he wept.
White tears welled from the depths of his formless consciousness and fell upon Proeon's rocks. Wherever they landed, silver moss spread wildly.
At that moment, something stirred within him, and at last he spoke.
"I have drifted through chaos for hundreds of millions of years, watching all things emerge from nothing."
"Now, I see fear, anger, sorrow, despair, and every other emotion. I contain everything, remember everything, become everything. From this day onward, wherever feelings exist, so shall my name."
"I am Nairmis, and I shall be the Lord of Emotions."
The laws hummed softly, the silver moss surged, and all of Proeon became cloaked in silver light.
His consciousness contracted from the pervasive chaos into a single point, then bloomed outward.
A pair of feet stepped onto the moss, followed by long legs, a slim waist, broad shoulders, and finally a face.
He was an exquisitely beautiful young man, with long golden hair falling to his waist and delicate features, so beautiful he seemed almost unreal.
In this newly formed world, becoming a god through emotions alone was nearly impossible. But the weight of the ancient aura he bore won him the recognition of the laws.
Yet the laws also imposed limits upon him. There were still too few intelligent beings, and the power of emotions was meager. He was only a lesser deity.
Then he sensed a gaze. Beyond the dome of the sky, Uranus stopped crushing the oceans.
The sky god's brow furrowed deeply. He had long since proclaimed that no new deities were permitted to be born into the world.
The laws had recorded that proclamation, making it a covenant the entire world was meant to obey.
But what was going on with this god? A mass of chaos that had drifted for hundreds of millions of years had suddenly taken form, suddenly become some god of emotions?
Uranus's gaze darkened. Surprise, confusion, the anger of being offended, and finally, cold killing intent.
He would never allow anyone to defy his commands, even a mere lesser deity.
Nairmis stiffened all over. As the god of emotions, he was acutely sensitive to the emotions in every gaze.
That gaze from the sky, from the God King, from Uranus, brimming with killing intent, made his heart clench sharply.