Before history.
Before stars learned to burn.
Before the first mind opened its eyes to the universe—
There was only the Gulf.
A vast, silent ocean of nothing where galaxies drifted like lanterns set upon dark water. Nebulae shimmered like half-remembered dreams. Time itself lay dormant, curled like a sleeping serpent.
And within this place—older than entropy, older than memory—
two beings met.
They had no names, only truths.
The Woman
Veiled in starlight, she was the quiet hum of creation, the promise hidden in every budding star. Where she walked, galaxies blossomed. Her eyes held the reflection of ten thousand futures—most bright, some terrible, all possible.
The Man
Cloaked in entropy, he was the shadow cast by existence itself. His voice was a low tremor of collapsing suns, the cold certainty of endings. Wherever he gazed, civilizations shivered, sensing the weight of their mortality.
They regarded each other across the void.
A conversation older than suns began anew.
"It comes again," the Man rasped, the void vibrating with his words.
"The cycle. Creation rising, then falling into ruin. You shelter them too well."
The Woman's radiance pulsed gently.
"And you prune them too eagerly."
Her voice was a soft wind across the void.
"Life is not a garden to be culled when it grows inconvenient."
"Life becomes weak without adversity," the Man replied.
A dying galaxy crumbled behind him, its core collapsing into a skeletal star.
"They grow complacent beneath your light."
"And they die screaming beneath your shadow."
Galaxies turned in silence as the two eternal forces weighed each other—creation and destruction, possibility and inevitability, the unending dialectic of the cosmos.
At last, the Woman extended a hand of shimmering nebulae.
"Then let the question be answered."
Her voice echoed with ancient power.
"Let us test your truth and mine."
The Man's hollow gaze narrowed.
In the dark folds of his cloak, supernovae flickered out like embers.
"A wager, then."
The Terms
Two souls.
Two fates.
Two distant galaxies.
One shaped by her light—
One forged in his darkness.
Each soul would be reborn into a mortal vessel.
Each would rise, build, conquer, fall, or transcend.
Their triumphs and tragedies would ripple across their worlds, shaping epochs.
Whichever champion's civilization endured the longest—
that truth would stand as the foundation of the next cosmic age.
The Woman closed her eyes.
Stars gathered at her fingertips, swirling into a luminous spiral.
"I choose a dreamer born of the stars," she whispered.
"A builder of futures. A child of reason."
A soul appeared, suspended in a sphere of light—
fractured, brilliant, longing.
Aaron Aserion.
Prodigy of the Terran Federation.
Soldier slain in the System War.
A mind of mathematics, strategy, and impossible dreams.
The Woman smiled with quiet sorrow.
"May this dawn be kinder to you than the last."
With a small motion, she released the soul—
and it streaked away like a falling star,
descending not toward heaven, but toward a world forgotten.
A world named Olon.
The Man lifted a hand of spiraling shadow.
From its depths rose a soul darker than night—
scarred by atrocity, sharpened by betrayal, hollowed by ruin.
A warlord, a tyrant, a conqueror whose empire once stretched across three star clusters before collapsing in blood and flame.
"I choose the one who survived his own extinction."
With a gesture, he hurled the soul into the gulf.
It vanished toward another galaxy—one far older, far more scarred, where empires devoured empires in endless night.
Two stars falling into two different universes.
Two fates already echoing through the fabric of the cosmos.
The Woman looked toward the path Aaron's soul followed.
Beyond the horizon of the void, a faint ring encircled a blue world—
the derelict skeleton of an ancient megastructure.
"Olon," she murmured.
"A world divine, broken, and waiting."
The Man's cloak billowed with dying starlight.
"Let them build," he whispered.
"Let them burn."
Their voices merged, resonating across the infinite dark.
"Let the Wager of Worlds begin."
And with twin streaks of light—
one white as the first dawn,
one black as the last night—
their champions plunged toward their destinies,
toward two worlds separated by ten million years of starlight…
…toward two galaxies forever changed by their arrival.
Thus began the age in which mortals would answer the question the gods could not.
What future should creation bow to?