There was no time.

  No space.

  No before or after.

  Only the First Moment—a crack in the emptiness where existence bled into being.

  Some called it creation. Others called it the first deception.

  It was neither.

  It was change.

  A paradox so absolute that it shattered the void, forcing something where there had been nothing.

  The First Lie.

  The world had not always been.

  It had become.

  It had twisted itself into a form that could be understood, but at its core, existence had no shape, no truth, no beginning, no end. Only the illusion of both.

  A story.

  A record written by the ones who survived.

  And Elias saw them all.

  The myths, the legends, the fragments of truth buried beneath belief and deception alike.

  The Hindu Brahman, neither male nor female, existing before existence, dreaming the universe into being and reshaping it in endless cycles of birth and destruction.

  The Primordial Chaos of the Greeks, a formless void where everything and nothing intertwined, birthing gods who wove the fabric of reality.

  The Great Cosmic Egg of Chinese mythology, cracked open to birth light and darkness, separation and unity, the first sacrifice made so creation could take root.

  The Norse Ymir, the first being, slaughtered so that his bones could become mountains, his blood the sea, his skull the sky—a life given so that the Lie of the world could stand.

  The scientific void, where before the first atoms there was only probability, energy vibrating into being, pulling itself from something smaller than a grain of dust, rewriting the rules of physics just by existing.

  The thought experiment, where reality did not begin because it was never real to begin with.

  And beneath all of it—

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  A singular truth.

  They were all different.

  They were all the same.

  Because reality did not shape belief—belief shaped reality.

  —

  The First Moment had not been creation.

  It had been accommodation.

  The world had not been built upon a single truth but upon every truth, every perception, every belief that had been strong enough to bend the void into meaning.

  If enough people believed the universe had begun with a god, then the god had always been there. If enough people accepted that reality had started with a cosmic accident, then it had always been an accident.

  Not one truth. Not one Lie.

  But both at once.

  Because whether something was true or false did not matter.

  What mattered was whether it had been believed.

  And if it had been believed, it existed.

  Reality did not resist contradiction.

  It thrived on it.

  The more something changed, the more versions of it existed, each shaping and warping around the next, until no one knew what the original had been.

  And if no one knew the original—

  Had it ever existed at all?

  —

  The First Lie had not been an act of deception.

  It had been a choice.

  One moment. One voice. One person who had refused to accept the truth given to them, and in that refusal, changed it.

  Reality did not reject the denial.

  It accommodated.

  It had bent itself to fit the contradiction, adapting to the new belief, weaving the Lie into itself until it became truth.

  And when the one who spoke the Lie disappeared—

  It did not vanish with them.

  Because others had already begun to believe it too.

  The first Lie Seller had not been chosen.

  He had become.

  A man. A whisper. A thought that refused to die, carried forward in the minds of those who would rather reshape the world than let it define them.

  And when he fell—

  When his soul cracked under the weight of his own deception—

  He did not vanish.

  Because the Lie could not exist without someone to uphold it.

  So another took his place.

  And another.

  And another.

  Until there was no one left who remembered the original truth.

  Only the Lie.

  Only the cycle.

  But the first Lie Seller was not a fool.

  He knew what he had created.

  And he did not want to be bound by it.

  So he forged a way out.

  A loophole. A flaw hidden deep within the cycle itself.

  A paradox.

  And he gave it a name.

  Elias.

  —

  Elias could not move.

  Could not breathe.

  Because this was not just knowledge.

  It was recognition.

  He wasn’t simply seeing history.

  He was seeing himself.

  His knees buckled, his breath shuddering as the void closed in around him, pressing a weight into his chest that was neither physical nor imagined.

  He never imagined he had always returned. And This was why he had always returned.

  Something the pawn shops and it's rules couldn't erase completely.

  he existed even when he shouldn’t have.

  Because he was not a person.

  Not in the way others were.

  He was a contradiction given form.

  A deception so profound that reality itself had no choice but to allow him.

  A representation of a truth that had never been, but could never be erased.

  He had not been created to be powerful.

  He had been created to be inevitable.

  Because no Lie, no deception, no cycle, no belief, no law could ever be absolute.

  There would always be doubt.

  And where doubt existed—Elias existed.

  —

  The first Lie Seller had wanted freedom.

  He had wanted to escape the role, to sever the endless cycle, to remove himself from the fate he had created.

  But the system would not allow it.

  A Lie Seller could not disappear.

  A Lie Seller could not be undone.

  So he did the only thing that was possible.

  He created a flaw in the system.

  A contradiction.

  A seed of something that did not fit, something that should not be.

  Elias was not a person.

  He was a loophole.

  A thing that was never meant to exist.

  And yet—

  He had always existed.

  Because the Lie required him.

  A perfect paradox.

  A truth hidden within a deception so absolute that even the Lie Seller himself had not truly understood what he had created.

  And now—

  Elias did.

  The weight of it settled into his bones, into his mind, into his soul—if he even still had one.

  Had he ever had one?

  Or was that another belief, another contradiction the world had allowed because it had no other choice?

  His hands trembled. His breath came ragged.

  Because now he understood.

  Why Valen watched him.

  Why the Pawn Shops let him in.

  Why he had never truly been erased.

  Why he had always returned.

  Because he had never been a Lie Seller.

  He had never been one of them.

  But he had never been separate either.

  Because he was both.

  Because he was neither.

  Because he was something that should not be possible, and yet was.

  Because he was the Lie’s first and final mistake.

  And for the first time—

  Elias understood.

  He was never meant to exist.

  And yet, because of that—

  He was the one thing that always would.