For nearly everything that lived, power was taken. It had always been taken.
A seedling in a dark forest grew by stealing light from the seedlings around it, and a predator grew by eating what was slower than itself, and the slower things that survived did so only by becoming faster, or harder, or more clever, or more numerous, until something else learned to eat them too.
That was how life climbed, everywhere it had ever climbed, and no one who had climbed very far had ever found any reason to believe it was wrong.
The same law held all the way up. Newly Risen Immense Ones took from the lesser lifeforms around them, and Established took from the Newly Risen, and Ancients took Narratives and Legacies and whole regions of existence, and the Unfathomables took from everything. The strong survived and the weak became soil, and the soil fed the strong, and existence went on turning. It was not cruelty. It was only the shape of things, as natural as falling.
