For centuries without end, this world-metropolis buzzed with the tread of countless dwarves, whole civilizations rose and fell within their ancient walls. Philosophers of these ancient days attempted to decipher such mysterious pictograms as "horizon", "stream" and "tree".
Over the generations, these ancient peoples stagnated and the number of young ones born was outpaced by the number who fell into Armok's embrace. The balance of the world's population was given over to tamed animals, to beasts of burden and food and companionship. Less and less were the ancient and insular peoples of the world given to reproducing their own kind. What was the point in such useless activity - there was no more that could be done that hadn't been done for hundreds of years already? The most involved and magnificent of constructions had become ritualized into ancient processes. Every forgotten beast or demon to have ever existed was displayed in trophy halls engraved with intricate detail. There was nothing a new citizen of the World-city could ever aspire to other than dying in one of the million manners so well known that they each had cults and high tradition ascribed to each and every one. So the peoples of the world passed finally into dust, defeated at last by the ennui of their own historical triumphs and the World-city was ruled by the pets and livestock of those who came before.
The world-city slowly crumbled under its own weight, vibrated to dust under the continuous movement of those few surviving beasts. The farm plots ran rampant through great halls flooded then emptied by the world-city's slow demise. Some creatures gave birth to giants of their own kind, some to stranger anomalies, which shied away from the clear air and sought deep lairs from which to wander in their freakish madnesses. A few of the more domesticated breeds sought to roam the rooftops and shallow halls of the upper reaches, avoiding the deep places where the rocks glowed with fire and the slow settling of the ages had deposited odd mixtures to seethe and bubble in the flames. Time continued its inexorable progress and the World-city steadily lost its battle with relentless entropy.
It was once said, by some long deceased philosopher of the four thousandth Golden Age: "Nature abhors a vacuum, seek not fresh carp within your dining halls". He was half correct, for fresh carp was all the rage at the time - being eaten while also eating was a novel way to die and later that century was inducted into the million traditional rituals of dying. No, his first part was the more true. Nature abhors a vacuum and the Gods abhor silence. As the peoples died off, so too did the Gods revert to the timeless forces of nature they had been before peoples trod and shaped the world. Then as now, the forces eventually became satiated with the surfeit of silence and reached out here and there to give voices to those that seemed best able to use them.
Some forces withdrew to the lower fires and mouldering halls of the deeps, touching inert stone to quickening life or shaping flames into malevolent gaurdians, while others merely gave voices and waited - content to see what these new peoples would make of their world.
Time is an arrow and entropy ceaseless, but the arrow is a spiral and entropy tangential. Round and and round this entropy cycles the world: creation, diaspora, transformation, dissoulution and destruction. Round and round in unending variation, worlds without end. What are deities, but aspects of entropy in reverse? All is balanced, all is complete until time itself eats its own tail and every permutation is represented in that one great cycle.
