Multiverse (Mythology)
At the very beginning of creation a gene for long life was stitched through the fabric of the multiverse. It was freely given to all forms of life. But a second element was placed in a central location and kept from the rest of creation--the knowledge of good and evil, or the power to become like God. For millions of years the multiverse existed in peace and harmony. Soon after the origins of humankind the ban on the second element was violated in an event remembered only as “The Schism.”
As a result chaos and disorder entered the multiverse. Each universe started to take slightly variant trajectories. Across the multiverse much of the human population was wiped out in cataclysmic events. Environmental changes and discord continued to gradually altered the fabric of creation. A guardian class was established whose role was to isolate the twitch and preserve the lost gene until a time when the multi-verse could be restored. Also the guardians of each universe where given a single piece of the multiverse key—later known as relics.
Over thousands of years the guardians split up and traveled with different tribes and groups of people. All of the great societies owed some of their success to these mysterious, long-living folk. But never during this time did they violate their single most important directive--never to combine the twitch and lost gene in the same person. It is an abomination.
Around 1000 AD a group of the guardians decided they would combine the elements in order to establish a utopian society. (They would take the restoration of the multiverse into their own hands). It worked for a few hundred years in every verse of the multiverse. Eventually one of them fell in love with a commoner and led a rebellion. In 7 verses he was put down before the matter got out of hand. But in 1(the dystopian-verse) he spread the twitch virus too far and wide to be easily stopped.
One of the divine guardians argued they should keep fighting in that verse even if it meant wiping out half of the human race. (Eventually known as DMB). The others overrule him and decide to kill off their dopple-gangers in all but one verse in order to nullify their shifting ability and thus become single verse guardians (as we know the folk of Everlast).
DMB tricks the others and spares the lives of his dopple-gangers. Good on his word, he pursues the rebel guardians in the dystopian-verse and kills them, but is unable to eradicate the lost gene and twitch completely. The verse spirals into a living hell. DMB is eventually killed in the dystopian verse. Soon after that, one of the other verses suddenly goes dark, every telepathic connection cut. The remaining guardians suspect DMB must have killed either most of the population or all of them in a mad attempt to do what he failed to do in the dystopian-verse.
For hundreds of years the other 6 verses each maintain relative degrees of normalcy as the guardians work to squelch any and all occurrences of the twitch.