The Conjunction of All Planes

So, how exactly does one summon an ancient god from the primeval abyss?

Strictly speaking, it wasn't possible. It'd been Marimneros' earliest intuition and it was absolutely correct; after all, he was excellent at summoning and absolutely earned his moniker as the Summoner King. He knew that summoning the First Gods was both physically and metaphysically possible. He also, however, knew certain tricks around the laws of the many realms, certain ways to temporarily suspend or confuse them.

In many cases, Marimneros leveraged certain configurations of celestial bodies, timing them with corresponding configurations of the many realms. By timing magics at exact moments, he'd been able to amplify or alter the effect of powerful magics, creating a brief burst of power that evaded the laws of the mortal and radiant realms.

Again, he leveraged a conjunction to magically circumvent those laws: conducting his ceremony at the conjunction of all planes, he briefly poked a metaphorical hole through these laws and let the many realms briefly comingle. This weakened the natural barrier around the Cosm such that speaking the True Names was both possible and effective. Speaking the names, he summoned the ancient gods.

The moment he spoke the names, all of eternity seemed to silent and tangible suspend in place. The intonation of the True Names of the Ancient Gods echoed in strange, incomprehensible ways, and the sound of those echoes pierced through the radiant realms and past the boundaries of eternity itself. Somewhere very far away, something stirred in the inky blackness of the Never Was.

Unfortunately for Marimneros, as incredible as his knowledge, and as vast his magical power, it would have been impossible for him to truly understand the gravity of his actions. In his mind, he was going to call the greatest of the gods and command them, obliterating his enemies and permanently cementing his terrible imperial sovereignty. Perhaps he would even become divine, himself.

In a way, Marimneros did ascend that day, becoming an immortal and divine thing. The True Names spoken, there was a pause and a brief silence. Then, doubling over in pain, Marimneros fell to the ground. His form began to bulge, swelling and contorting, pregnant with some unknowable thing too vast for him to contain. And then the First Gods began to flood into eternity, rupturing his body and reality itself.

The truth of beings as vast as the first gods, the universal divines, is that each is, in and of itself, as vast as the next: each was a full universe, a full eternity and cosmic ecosystem. One could not exist inside of the other, for each was infinite. By placing the ceremony at the conjunction of all planes, Marimneros had circumvented this natural volumetric law. However, any time you violate the natural way of things, there are consequences.

The consequences of the summoning, this time, left few witnesses. Those who lived to tell of what happened were already fleeing before the summoning itself, and they could only watch in brief moments as they fled: a cataclysm, the roar of a sudden void, an incomprehensible momentary nothingness, which began to bloom into a terrible whirl of furious alien lights, through which unspeakable, colossal things began to flood.

This was the final moments of the last age. The act of the summoning had broken something permanently in eternity: the barriers between realms had shattered, and suddenly the physical and radiant realms began to bleed into one another. And most horrifying of all: the ancient gods themselves, awakened, and angry, forced into fragments and torn from their homes into the cramped interior of a neighboring reality.

Eternity and the Cosm are structured things, emergent accidents that coincidentally scaffold outward into a complex physical and metaphysical engine. The summoning broke this great engine, filling it suddenly with intrusions from neighboring eternities: sentient and vast, unknowable and alien things, so incredible they exuded new truths and rewrote the cosmos in their wake. Imprisoned, angry, hungry monstrous gods, offended at the pain of the summoning and wrathful: ready to devour this young eternity and return to their familiar, cosmic slumber.