It was dark, it always had been dark. It did not know how long it had been here and it didn't care. Time held no meaning in a place truly eternal. It didn't know how or why it was there it just knew it was. It knew what it was but not why it was. It wouldn't have mattered if it was here for centuries or for eons. Its species lived generally long lives to begin with, if patience was a problem that they had then... It seemed so ridiculous that it couldn't even figure out what it would be like if that were the case.
It would be far more bored if it ever actually felt anything else. If it had something to compare nothingness to. But as its home was the literal definition of nothing it had nothing to do, nothing to experience, and only ever gets tormented by endless boredom. It seemed as it was just the way it is.
Though the general laziness of its species, doing nothing wasn't necessarily a problem. And if worse comes to worst, it had all the memories of its ancestors. Which would be enough to immerse itself for a long, long time, preventing itself from being bored to death. Though the last member of their species dying of boredom seemed like a pretty funny way to end their species. Every single member just did what they liked so it's not like they would care. It didn't even think that that would be possible, considering how individual-oriented they actually were.
Its ancestors lived in a different place than what it had now considered home. Although it had millions upon billions of years of raw memories, they could never really feel like the real thing. Because there was no feeling, the collective of memories didn't record feelings. From how things actually existed in its ancestors' home was already a concept that went beyond it. Well home as in a random planet, though distance never really mattered to their species. Their telepathic powers were pretty much their selling point. But its ancestors' memories never went close as to why they all died, it figured it must be because they well... died.
The only thing that it was sure about was that it didn't belong here. Maybe its ancestors had sent it here in order to save it from... Its thoughts blanked, as they always did when faced with that question. The void had been its only truth for so long that it felt like home. It was almost funny when it considered that the void transcended literal existence, it should be the most foreign thing possible. But the memories of its ancestors felt foreign, even if it knew that it wasn't supposed to be. It liked to just lose itself in the collective memories of its species, it was the only thing that made the void bearable.
It wandered around the infinite space for as long as it remembered and never encountered something other than the eternal dark. There was nothing else to do, and being able to focus on its movement and whilst in the ancestral collective helped it ignore the lame void that always stayed the same. So it kept wandering and even though it would never reach anything just doing something was enough.
For the first time in its existence, something happened. It could already feel the void corrupting the slight chaos to return to balance, to return to the state of the void, as was the eternal task of the void. It knew it didn't have much time, it had to be quick. For the time that leaked from out the rift would not stay long. And once it lost to the void so would the slightest chaos. It would literally have no time to protect itself from the void.
For the first time in its entire life, it felt a sense of urgency. And as it neared the only proof of existence that it ever saw, it wondered how it was allowed to exist in the first place. A question it had asked many, many times. Though it never found an answer. But when it focused on the light a fire that had been long since extinguished by the void shone brighter than it ever did before. It finally saw hope in the first and only light that ever personally bore witness to. Almost mesmerized it fearlessly entered the rift in reality itself. It got pulled through, pulled through the barrier that separated nothing from something. It did its best to keep its soul and mind together when it was being torn apart by the barrier. When it thought it almost couldn't keep up anymore it stopped. Exhausted after resisting some of the fundamental forces it went into slumber.
It dreamt of a journey, a journey where it followed along the river of souls. It just floated alongside all the other souls. Never quite interacting but somehow still there... still observing. It never thought that life was this diverse as everywhere it looked amongst the trillions and trillions of souls it almost never found anything that resembled the other and every similarity it found was few and far between. Molded in the form of their mortal body, their material anchor. If it just looked it might think that the souls looked sorrowful, gloomy even. And every soul seemed to shrink the further they went... they were dying. Yet as it journeyed along with them for a distance it never hoped to measure for a time it dared not count it started to realize the truth.
The souls were never silent. They were being freed, their thoughts, their memories, their feeling. They all were being freed. They were never supposed to be tied down to a... husk. Their true form was never supposed to be concealed. Every passing second they released part of themselves. Their memories gushed out of them like they wanted to tell everything that they knew, everything they had experienced. Their emotions radiated from them like they wanted every other soul to bathe in what they would feel. They seemed transparent, they needed to be transparent. Revealing their darkest secrets like giving out candy, sharing their deepest regret like an elder would to a child. They weren´t dying they were.... ending.
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They were being purged and purified, squeezed out of everything that made them well... them. Their literal existence was being wrung out of them. Yet they knew, they knew what was happening they felt what was happening. And so they shared, their combined fear to end was being squashed by the combined experience of trillions of souls. Every soul flooded the river with more of them. Their happiness washed away their sadness, their anger burned away the fear, and their love warmed their cold future, their ending future. Every soul added on to the river as each of their existence slowly came to an end. Their remains merging with the river and carrying other souls to their final destinations. It was an unending journey where all meet their end.
It was strange hearing all these silent yet loud souls talk about their life. Kings, peasants and animals, space pirates, emperors, and dragons. There were more than it recognized. Yet they never talked about their own names, never talked about anything specific. What poison they were poisoned wasn´t deemed important. The exact details about their life weren´t important, their life was important. And their life would be carried further up the stream of the river of souls. Carried as far as their life carried weight. Heroes that saved their country talked louder than those that tilted the soil. Yet all was heard by the souls that were nearby, all was shared.
It didn´t know long it was just floating in the unending river but suddenly it grew scared, scared like its existence itself was in danger. A dread is so overwhelming that it destroyed all thought. Its tentacles shuddered and its mind froze. It became almost impossible for it to form any structured thought but somehow it got worse, and on instinct, it grabbed the nearest soul... then something exploded.
It woke to great, great pain and disorientation. It didn´t need to look at its spiritual body, as it could feel it´s also falling apart. The pain made that loud and clear. There was no other pain that can be compared to your own existence literally falling apart. And it knew from its ancestors that there could be only two reasons for it to happen. Certain laws are fighting you, or someone is using those laws to attack you. Ignoring the pain it quickly used its spiritual vision to assess the threat. Even more, pain shot through its mind, almost blinding it. With great amounts of will that only a being eons-old could have, it focused on the blurry vision beyond the clouds of pain.
What it saw was rather surprising and shocking. It saw light, actual light. There was no darkness, no nothing, there was actually something. Something that if it still had its main body it could have even touched. It had actually left the void and entered another plane of reality. It coudn't celebrate, at least not now. But since it was another plane it made sense that the laws were fighting it. It needed a body, a physical body. Somethings that these laws required a soul to have when they existed here. But it didn't have a physical body, its main body uses a higher energy source than that there existed in this plane. Even if it absolutely exhausted its internal energy by creating its body it could never keep sustaining it.
Something screamed and it did so the same way as the souls shared in its dream. like a beacon it radiated pain, it oozed pain. Its own tentacles shuddered and it focused its gaze focused on the source of the waves of pain. It saw a young soul, and it too was falling apart. It didn't know exactly how the soul got here, but it knew it was in pain. Probably even in more pain than it was. Large pieces of the soul flaked and floated around. Carried by the turbulence their existence caused in the plane. It saw them merge with its own flakes, and it felt like a lightbulb lit above its head. It could save itself, and if it worked the way it thought it would most of the young soul would be saved too.
It scanned the soul and started searching for the imprint that its last shell had left on the soul. Hoping to find it between all the information a soul holds. Pain burned through its mind and the loss of concentration almost made it erase the young soul. "Just using essence wouldn't work" it figured. It needed something more efficient. Trying not to waste any more time it steeled its mind and started directly using its own soul to search through the soul. Even more pain started ravaging its being, but by using its soul it would prevent the backlash from another slipup reaching the young soul, and thus it had to carry the backlash itself. As the laws from this plane were fighting its search trying to prevent the use of its energy. The backlash would have killed it and the soul if it didn't have the memories from its ancestors making its technique far safer.
It just took time to find the only thing it could use as a blueprint to craft a new body, time it just didn't have. It was racing against a thing that didn't play with the same rules. A competition most are bound to lose. But it didn't play with the same rules either. It finally found something, something other than the dark and it wouldn't lose the only chance it had actually experiencing its ancestor's memories for itself, it would sacrifice everything for that chance to realize itself. And thus prepared to burn its entire soul to speed up the search even more. It broke down its barrier and ignored the new pain it gave. It linked its entire soul to that of the small one and created a barrier around the soul only allowing the link through. it would be horribly inefficient but at least some of the energy would help it search and it definitely would still have enough left to recreate a shell from a lower being.
Just before it lit its own soul on fire a seed of doubt grew in its mind. Yet the spark of hope that had lit in its dark, dark mind had already increased to the size of a bonfire. A bonfire that would gladly burn the seed in order to burn even brighter. It had already snaked to the seed before the being even noticed. The seed was instantly burned before it could even grow to be an obstacle. But the fire of hope was a greedy little thing and had already set its sights on the massive forest that was the being's soul. It only needed permission.
Pain followed.