Elder Gods

Elder Gods are the highest entities in the multiversal structure of Multiverse A.

There are three types of Elder Gods, the first being the Originator, a unique entity which rests atop the foodchain, followed by a long, branching tree of Parents, with each branch ultimately ending with one or more buds - the Children. The Elder God most relevant in my worldbuilding so far is Emdes, who holds the aptly named Emdes Universe.

The Originator
The Originator exists within a complete void and has the sole purpose of creating, growing, and ultimately destroying and consuming as many different universes as possible. As the basis for this he has the Seed, which contains all that he needs to know, albeit in an encrypted form. In the beginning, he was only able to create one universe at a time and had to wait for it to grow, a slow, and tedious process. However, with each universe created, his power grew - a universe took an investement in the beginning, but ultimately returned more than he put in, if he did things right.

Parents and Children
At some point, he decided that he would create multiple universes at once - however, he was only able to keep one within him at a time, so he instead created a universe within himself that held only two entities, aside from the usual Creator and Destroyer, namely, two new Elder Gods. These were the first Children and, for him, they created universes within themselves from the Seed fragments given to them. At some point they grew powerful enough to do what the Originator had done before, and each of them created two more Elder Gods within themselves, becoming Parents in the process.

As such, the difference between and Parent and Child is that a Child merely holds a universe, while a Parent holds two or possibly more Elder Gods within themselves, which do the work of growing universes for them. Of course, supporting their Children needs power, especially once these Children become Parents themselves, and, as such, each Parent constantly demands a share of their Children's gathered power, rewarding those that are especially efficient at growing universes with the permission to become Parents themselves. This, however, does take multiple cycles of growth, as, once a Child has become a Parent, their Parent needs significantly more power to uphold them.

Even the Originator himself seems to be unable to uphold an infinite amount of Elder Gods within himself, as his power is limited by how much of the Seed he has already analyzed. Fortunately, the growth of power of the Elder Gods seems to align well enough with the growth of power demanded to uphold them, so, for the next few eternities, the multiverse does not seem in danger of collapsing catastrophically. What the ultimate purpose of The Originator is, and why the Seed has him grow more powerful the more it is analyzed is unknown.