They stood on two legs, tails balancing their weight, scales catching the light of a young sun.
Lizardfolk.
Sentient.
Talking.
I hovered above their world, invisible, watching them gesture with clawed hands as they spoke to one another in a language that hadn't existed long enough to be stable yet. The sounds were rough, clicking and hissing, but meaningful. Intentional.
They understood each other.
I felt something warm settle in my chest.
Pride.
"I knew you'd get there," I murmured, though they couldn't hear me.
They acted a lot like humans would one day—arguing, laughing, forming small groups, telling simple stories about the sky and the ground beneath their feet. Civilization at its most fragile and hopeful stage.
I hadn't been able to resist helping.
Nothing dramatic. No miracles or divine proclamations. Just dreams.
I slipped into their minds at night, gentle and careful, showing them symbols. Patterns. The idea of counting. The concept of sharing information instead of hoarding it. How sound could carry meaning if shaped the right way.
Language bloomed faster after that.
Time Baby noticed immediately.
"You're interfering," he said, floating in front of me with his usual smug expression. "That wasn't scheduled."
I rolled my eye. "Relax. I nudged them a little. I didn't hand them nuclear physics."
"The timeline—"
"—is flexible," I cut in. "You of all people should know that."
He frowned but didn't stop me. He rarely did. Mostly he just complained.
The Axolotl, as usual, was asleep.
Drifting somewhere between dimensions, dreaming whatever it was that order dreamed about. Life. Balance. The slow turning of existence. Sometimes I wondered if it trusted me precisely because it wasn't watching.
Or maybe it just didn't care.
That left the four of us.
And somehow, I was the only one who wasn't male.
Which was… irritating.
I floated there, watching the lizardfolk build their first crude shelters, and sighed.
"Seriously," I muttered to the universe. "Why am I the only female Origin God?"
Bill was chaos incarnate. Time Baby was an arrogant clock with legs. The Axolotl slept through eternity.
Who exactly was I supposed to talk to about anything?
Existential dread? Fine. Cosmic responsibility? Easy.
But girl problems?
Absolutely no audience.
I laughed softly at the absurdity of it.
Then my thoughts drifted, unbidden, to Bill.
I hadn't seen him in a while.
That wasn't normal.
Bill liked attention. Liked chaos where someone could see it. The fact that he'd gone quiet set off alarms in my mind.
I reached outward, brushing the Dreamscape, searching for his presence.
Nothing obvious.
Time Baby was busy, eyes locked on branching timelines, muttering calculations under his breath. The Axolotl slept. The lizardfolk dreamed.
And Bill?
Bill was somewhere else.
Planning.
I folded my arms, unease curling in my gut.
"Please," I murmured to the void, "don't let him be doing something catastrophically stupid."
The universe, as usual, did not answer.
But far away, something laughed.
And I had the distinct feeling that the quiet wasn't going to last.