To start with there was much of very many things, but that all tapered off pretty quick. Reality passed into and out of being with the grieving abruptness of a stillborn calf, mother's cord bound tight about its neck; the life and light strangled out of the world before its first breath could even be taken, and with barely a pause for it to acknowledge its own existence.
Out of the tatters of that aborted thing were left the ashes of its flash-pan reality. The instabilities and perturbations smoothed themselves, unknotted, and spread out across homogeneous space, filling the gaps in nothing with steady mess of something. For a short while the elementary substance of that something were the singularities, the mass differentials that dictated their brief half-lives holding the last memories of things that had once been stars. With their final passing, even those memories were erased. The substance of that first birthing had been ground down into paste, and then the paste itself ground down. Its constituent pieces were cast across a black void, an infinite eternity that, if seen from the outside, might have resembled a very large full stop.
That, it seemed, was it.
Except it wasn't, was it? For reality had left a snare; a loophole that had existed from the start, but which might come to fruition only though the implacable, empty patience of deep time. The universe had begun to pluck these strings while it was still only in the early stages of decay. The intransigent iron stars, whose inertness might have let them dream of immortality, were the first to discover a fundamental truth; that to exist was to ride the edge of a waveform whose falling edge stretched out to a deeper infinity than their own.
It was impossible to judge when it might have started, first; that was the nature of these things. If there had been anything capable of thought during that outcry of the earliest years, while that singular firework was still in the process of igniting, it would have likely seemed a proportionately inconceivable long time. The truth, that their reality was a glossy edifice built only from the relative probability of its own being, was one that was likely known, but dismissed as akin to a marginal rounding error. Who would care, after all, when their own tiny castles of existence were so solidly static and self-evident?
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Eternity cared, as it always does. As impossibility tended with time into the possible, and then into the near certain, the remnants of the old world faced that reckoning as they folded into themselves before their reality had even the chance to grow truly cold. In truth, the death of those dark remnants was a snake that would eat its own tail until the end of time; this is the nature of the stochastic demise of infinite things. Against the backdrop of its own scale, though, the void would soon forget those which remained, sealed away amid their empty observation spheres of probabilistic denial. They were the ultimate exception to the rule; for the rest, an infinity had come to feast upon them that was still to itself discover that it was just the beginning.
With no one left to know that truth, and no light to see it by, the cinder of reality became transmuted into something more than itself. A bubbling sea of potential beckoned, an ocean of veiled possibility that, by mathematical sleight of hand, was both inconceivable and yet inevitable, as time found that it had nothing else to mark itself by. The epochs of stillness between the first whimpering sparks of light emerging from that void were the first truly long stretches of time the universe had ever known, and it was a syndrome that would get worse, rather than better. Broad, cataclysmic eternities elapsed between the tiniest flickers of null entropy, but they did elapse, because they were not the true eternity, and anything less was nothing at all. A callous rounding to zero.
The things that emerged out of that calamitous nothing, finding themselves catapulted into existence from of the yawning maw of void by the groaning lever-arm of temporal inertia, were not themselves much to write home about. A few scattered atoms, here and there. A molecule, once; a kind of sugar, that briefly found itself the most complex thing in the universe. It drifted for a billion years or so before being struck by one of the few stray photons and breaking apart, its constituents left lonely for one another in the trillions left to them before they fully decayed. So it remained, much like that, for a long while.
Until the trailing decimal point of probability started to rear its head in earnest, and, heart beating to a pulse of once every trillion, trillion lifetimes of the long dead stars, something in the depths began to stir.
A final reality, starting to be born.