The Soul Maker
The artist will live after and lived before our time. He is a paradox that you might understand if you see time as something to be traversed cyclically. The artist will be our creation, and he was our creator.
He lives in a world quite similar to ours, with things to touch, see, and hear. Sensing animals, rivers, and winds, he imagines friends in them, as no similar soul is nearby. The rivers are gorgeous, and the winds sing of the past and future.
Born knowledgeable, he skillfully constructs a house from the simple stones close to his being. As the work progresses, he often looks at the numbers on his papers, planning the room where he'll do his duty. The finished workshop is spacious, and inside it are spread mystical tools and materials. The devices are sharp and dull, of blue and white metal, and some are complex. The substances are of changing state, from solid to fluid and gaseous, but always of many colors and pretty. He calls the materials 'women' and the tools 'men' because this he is prescribed.
The artist makes artworks he calls 'children,' but they are souls. They are living beings in imaginary worlds, crafted and guided by his moderate hand. Shaped like spheres, they change color and remake themselves in the nights. When looking inside them, he sees magnificent kaleidoscopic displays of beings and stories, and he discovers things to call friends. Completing work after work, he speeds up and improves the artistic process and goes back to polish and refine the souls to make them better and happier, building on the knowledge he gained upon his creation. The tools and materials themselves get used up and need replacing, a task of no joy. The fiftieth soul named him Samuel, and all the souls will have names.
He starts making the hundredth artifact, and it's here where the story might diverge. The following account is what happened with current time and space, possibly changing upon our actions. Samuel is already an old being, the artifact will be the final creation, and he makes it with great care, perched upon a pedestal of the mystical material itself. That night as he sleeps, an earthquake hits. The stand beneath the soul shakes, cracks, and breaks, so the perfect creation splits apart.
The soul splitting into pieces causes our universe to happen. It seeks to absorb everything around it as it tries to become whole again, but now it's no longer a unity, it has different forces guiding it, and it has many souls living inside it, split asunder. It creates our world, and Samuel is absorbed inside it, living with no previous knowledge but an inkling of making his creation whole again. The ninety-nine souls are inside our world as well, and they are the only complete ones. Souls spread across the universe, and three of them are known to always live with humans.