Prologue: Void

‘What is this!?!’ A darkness as absolute as the end of the universe engulfed me.

‘Where am I?!’ Confusion resounds throughout my being.

‘Why can’t I move?!’ Panic sets in and starts to overwhelm the confusion.

Panic turns to fear. Fear turns to anger. Anger turns to madness. Madness becomes cold calculating sanity. Sanity turns back to Madness. The cycle repeats for an eternity, but also only for a moment. Time loses all meaning, memories are the only way to hold on to myself and yet, they to fade and disperse, only to be recalled after a brief moment, or an eternity.

Sometime during my drifting wait, I learned to move within the endless void. So I moved, first one way, then another, then circling in ever increasing circles, then in spheres. I moved a trillion light years in the space of a breath, and then moved not at all for aeons.

Then I learned to make my ‘Self’ encompass more space through expansion and then less through contraction. So I spread my ‘Self’ as far as possible. I covered the entire void and yet it seemed as though I covered it not at all, as it started to exist outside of me.

I existed for so long that my memories started to become a puzzle for me to explore, piece together to pass time. So I rebuilt my memories, all of them, from the moment my first sensations were felt and recorded, to the second my life seemed to have ended.

All the life lessons that I learned. All the knowledge that I gained. All the skills that I had trained to be muscle memory. All these things and more I regained, but they were no longer mine. They were the echoes of the past. Echoes of a person, a being that no longer existed.

I started to use that knowledge, conforming myself to a shape I no longer had, compressing my gigantic being into a shell no bigger than a trillionth of my size. Taking a shape which once may have been mine. Then I started to move, in a way I had to remember how to do so, in another I was learning from the beginning again.

Time passed, or at least my perception of it did, and I learned to apply all of the movements I had ever seen or done in my memories. They were my memories; I had claimed them as such now, adapted myself to match them. Things from simple gestures to the gracefulness of dancing or the ferocity of fighting. All of these actions I had seen and then remembered, absorbing them into my being and replicating them as my own abilities.

I don’t know how long that took, but at the end I could do everything from forming clay and working wood, to dancing and gymnastics, to the fighting of a dozen different styles and forms. All these actions had now transcended muscle memories and become soul memories, intricately linked parts of my being. Building blocks that made me into what I am. With the aspect of the physical completed all that was left was the mental, gaining my old knowledge, learning from it, and trying to extrapolate further upon it.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Time passed and I learned, languages, arts, science, all of my previous knowledge as extracted and used as a medium to learn and further my being. I focused solely to hold off the madness, to drive away the loneliness. To ensure that I was still myself.

But time flows on, and no soul no matter how powerful or stubborn or even gifted, can hold back the effects. The knowledge I had gained was slowly beginning to distort, to slip away from me, almost as if it wished to hide from something. Almost as if it knew that something was coming.

Then the madness descended, and the cycle began anew. Madness, sanity, loneliness, and back to madness again. An endless cycle of torment, almost as if it was designed to destroy the very being that is myself. But giving me even a moment of sanity is enough for me to secret bits and pieces of my knowledge away, turning it into a building block of my existence and so time passed. An endless cycle doomed to repeat itself until even my building blocks were crumbled to nothing and my being was allowed to leave, empty and new.

Then the wheels of fate and time began to turn again for me. All because I discovered a single blue light and with it a force which dragged me from this realm of formlessness.

Elsewhere beyond the blue light, “Hmm, what is this?” An old set of eyes that seem to have witnessed the whole of creation turn towards a place far away, so much so that it may as well have been smaller than a proton, “Someone, actually managed to tear themselves out of the void?” The eyes seemed to gain a bit of fire to them as they witnessed the momentary flash of the void opening and closing and a light instantaneously, falling towards a universe below.

The eyes watched as that light fell straight towards a particular planet, and then straight into a particular place, into a particular room, before solidifying into a particular type of being.

“Well now, isn’t this interesting. I guess that I will give it my blessing and see how fun things get.” The owner of the eyes smiled a deep and knowing smile, but to any being that might witness it, it was cold, calculating and just a bit too dangerous to be seen as a humorous smile.