Strangerside Scholar: Creation And The Spheres

Gustav Klimt's Tree of Life (1909)
http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2010/01/the-neuroscience-of-avatar/

Life arises and develops in numerous ways among the million spheres. In some realms, the gods do everything by Committee. First they develop a Process, and then they split into different Sub-Committees to flesh out a comprehensive Work Plan with all the individual Details on different species.

Once everyone is in agreement, and no one stands in the way of the Project or opposes specific Details, then the gods then issue Contracts with individual gods and godlings, farming out creation at the local level. This approach can take years - even centuries - but of course, the gods are immortal. They have all the time in the world.

There are also the Spheres where creation happens when one pantheon of gods overthrows and slays another. These realms often resemble one or more divine corpses on a certain level of scale.

In other spheres, one god does all the work. Often such creations are the work of one blind, idiot god (creation-as-piecework can be boring to the point of inducing madness) or the work of a single obsessive divine being. Who else would create thousands of different species of beetles? Only a Watchmaker.

Still other spheres have always been and always will be. Worlds without beginning or end. These are often called Fortune's Spheres because they are the most stable, fecund, and abundant of all the known worlds. They are the purest expression of the eternal Fortune Deck. If you look carefully, you will see all of Fortune's trumps hiding in plain sight in the land and living things. Often there is also a Tree of Life at the center of such worlds. Its leaves are the glistening trumps of the Fortune Deck itself.

Pluck these leaves at your own risk. But find one pressed between the pages of a book, and you could use it to change an entire world.