When I first awakened, I instinctively understood.
As if consciousness had bloomed without reason, I simply knew.
I existed, but without name, memory, or purpose.
Only instinct tethered me to the vast, endless dark.
Around me stretched a colorless void.
At its center pulsed a radiant core, a blinding light of shifting hues that painted the emptiness with impossible colors.
Countless luminous entities drifted around it, each alive with elegance and brilliance.
All of them shimmered. All of them belonged.
All, except me.
I alone was shadow. Formless, darker than black.
A void drifting amidst a sea of stars.
Though newly awakened, I perceived infinite existence.
A silence without end. A space that had never begun.
Time did not exist, only stillness.
Then, the great light spoke.
It was not language. Not words. Ancient and pure, echoing across the void.
I could not understand it, but I felt it deep within.
As if it stirred something buried in the marrow of my being.
One by one, the radiant beings vanished, drawn into the light's rhythm.
The light itself dimmed, its brilliance fading into nothing.
Then it was my turn.
A blinding flash consumed me.
And suddenly I was elsewhere.
I awoke again in perfect darkness.
No stars. No motion. No sound. Only emptiness.
This place reflected me.
I wandered, drifting through formless silence.
Whether a moment passed or an eternity, I could not tell.
Time did not exist. The void was frozen in stillness.
Then something moved inside me.
A pressure. A weight in my awareness.
Sadness. Loneliness. Desperation.
Without thinking, I raised a hand, though I had no form.
The void responded.
It shattered.
Light burst forth from the gesture.
An explosion tore across nothingness.
Stars.
Galaxies.
Universes.
Time.
Reality.
Concepts.
Everything ignited in a single moment and continued to expand endlessly.
Creation, from nothing.
I had caused it.
I watched, wordless, as light spun through the dark and gravity shaped matter.
Planets formed. Suns ignited.
Time began ticking forward, born alongside the stars.
And still, I felt hollow.
So I tried to end it.
With another thought, I reached for erasure.
I sought silence, to return to nothingness.
And for a moment, I succeeded.
The universe fell still.
Darkness returned.
Reality crumbled as if it had never existed.
But I remained.
No matter how many times I sealed myself or destroyed my existence, I always returned.
I could not be erased.
I could not die.
Maybe it was because I was not part of creation.
I had existed before it. Beyond it.
My being was absolute.
From the wreckage of failed oblivion, new lights emerged. Small glowing fragments of me.
Souls.
Eventually, I withdrew.
I sealed my thoughts, buried my will, and slept.
The cosmos unfolded on its own.
I was not bound. Not by logic or contradiction.
Not by time or meaning.
I existed outside of story, outside of understanding.
I was something deeper.
Something unknowable.
...
When I awoke once more, the void had changed.
I had transcended as the undefinable beyond existence. Even beyond the cosmic entities that existed without definition.
Which meant I could perceive that I had become the one above the infinite.
The one who stood beyond comprehension, outside even the idea of hierarchy.
Because all that existed in the nothingness where definitions did not yet exist had become part of my creation.
The sparks I once scattered had become stars, galaxies, multiverses. Outer realities beyond all description.
The silence now sang with motion and memory.
The cosmos lived, shaped by sorrow.
I drifted through creation, not by moving.
I existed above distance, beyond space.
I had become something greater than the laws I once formed.
I observed dust become worlds, souls bloom and vanish.
From afar, I could feel them, beings born from fragments of me.
They lived.
They struggled.
They dreamed.
And I watched.
Until something pulled me closer.
In a moment, I descended into one of countless realities.
A world of vibrant echoes, shaped by forgotten dreams.
A world born from the fragments of what I once was.
And for the first time, I felt something new.
Curiosity.