They said In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with Göd. And the Word was Göd. But No. It was not so. First came H¿klør¿m. And the hibernating dominion that saw the first of us born. I know because I was there. I was The First. The first to eat the dark and break oblivion. How on everything binding me to this life, on the dying Amulet of S¿h¿øs¿å, I wish I wasn't. Long before the word and the kith of humankynd there was The Dark and The Deep. They spread out together like a vine across cosmic dots, comingling the filth of mågÿck and thought. They were Åèÿ¿tr¿å and ¿öståghår, the cardinal Mother and Father of us all. For billions of years, in an unclaimed time before time had minstrel or master, there was only the two of them. Lonely in the challenge of unanswered, soundless omnipotence they grew. Their gnawing pitch black power creating the syllable and design of the universe. Together they bound the nothingness and bent blackness into something tangible and sticky, as if night were smoke, and that smoke a breathing, writhing, unending vastness. ¿We were alive. The very first Crÿpt¿ds. The 9 Göds of the Øgdöåd. There in H¿klør¿m, in the time your texts would call Zép-Tëj-Wê, my seven brothers and I lingered for millennia. We children of the infinite dark. Along with our sister. Harsh as sapphire in her eternal malice. Ÿêmøjá. Sky Mother and She who would not burn. I should know. I spent millennia trying to kill her. I succeeded. Once. But when you are of The Dark and The Deep, Death may come. But He can't always collect.