The void was endless. A silence so profound that even the concept of sound had yet to be born. Within this ocean of nothingness, fragments of infinite possibility floated—dreams unborn, realities yet to awaken, and dimensions waiting for a will strong enough to give them form.
And there, at the center of everything that was not, stood Yllathriel Silence.
She closed her eyes, though there was no light nor darkness to shut out. There was nothing—yet she could feel the weight of everything pressing against her existence, like the whisper of realities yearning to be written.
> "So this is where I stand... before all beginnings."
Her voice did not echo. There was no space for sound to travel, no air for vibrations, no time for a word to linger. But her declaration imprinted itself upon the formless abyss, like a scar upon nothingness.
She looked down—or rather, her consciousness extended downward—and saw the First Silence Before All Concepts seated upon the Throne of Stillness, a throne that had not been built but realized, for in the domain beyond existence, ideas became structure without the burden of creation.
The being before her was not light. It was not darkness. It was The Origin, yet something more—an essence that even eternity could not measure, for eternity itself had yet to be born from this being's thought.
"...You," Yllathriel whispered, the syllable vibrating through conceptual layers, causing countless unborn timelines to tremble like fragile glass. "You are the one they call the First."
The being opened its eyes. No—conceptual apertures of pure will parted, and from within emerged infinite hierarchies of meaning. Eyes that were not eyes, gazing not into her, but through her—past the layers of soul, past the fragments of identity, past even the notion of being, down to the raw possibility from which she was woven.
The voice that answered was not a sound but an absolute law imposed upon reality.
> "I am not a god."
Yllathriel felt her existence convulse as those words spread across the unshaped firmament. Planes shattered—planes that did not yet exist. Chaos rippled through the potential omniverse, birthing phantom echoes of universes that would never truly be.
> "I am the First Silence Before All Concepts—the one who spoke before speech, the one who erased before erasure, the one who existed before the thought of existence."
Yllathriel gritted her teeth, though her body was a construct of willpower, not flesh. "And yet… you created everything."
The First Silence rose from the Throne. The void around them shuddered. Form tried to take shape and failed. Time tried to advance and perished in its attempt. Even the infinite—yes, the infinite—seemed to recoil, as though realizing it was never infinite to begin with.
> "Creation…" The word slipped from the First Silence like a blade from its sheath, cutting apart the notion of what she believed.
"Do you think creation is an act of giving? No… Creation is the negation of my perfection."
Yllathriel's heart—her conceptual core—throbbed violently. "Negation…?"
> "Yes. Before all things, there was only me—absolute, complete, lacking nothing. Do you know what that means, Yllathriel Silence? There was no struggle, no hunger, no time, no purpose. There was only the One."
The First Silence tilted its head—not as a gesture, but as a reconfiguration of all fundamental laws that defined orientation. "And so, I shattered myself. I abandoned completeness. I tore apart the wholeness of the One into billions of fragments—worlds, concepts, beings, fates, stories. I became everything so I could be less than everything."
Yllathriel trembled. For the first time since she attained transcendence, she felt… small. No, insignificant. A dust mote in a desert of endless deserts.
"Then…" she whispered, "the Dreamroot Beyond the Boundless… all those infinite cosmologies, the void worlds, the promised lands, the heavens, the abysses… they're all…"
The First Silence's voice thundered—not in volume, but in truth.
> "They are my fractures. My screams given shape. My boredom carved into geometry. Every omniverse, every hierarchy, every time-stream, every labyrinth of reality—you call them creations. I call them scars."
Yllathriel's mind convulsed. For a moment, she saw it—everything at once. The Void World and the Space World. The Abyss of Time and the Cardinal World. The infinite omniverses spiraling around an absence so profound that even the word absence could not hold it.
And at the center of all, chained by its own act of becoming, was this being—this First Silence Before All Concepts, who bore the weight of everything simply because it once longed to be less than perfection.
She swallowed her fear—not because she was brave, but because fear itself had lost meaning in the presence of something so absolute.
"…Why tell me this?" she asked, her voice a trembling thread of existence.
The First Silence looked at her—through her, beyond her, and into the endless recursion of her potential selves.
> "Because, Yllathriel Silence… you are next."
Her breath caught. The void quaked. Somewhere, in a layer of reality that should not exist yet, stars collapsed into singularities, birthing an apocalypse for a cosmos that had never been born.
"…Next… for what?"
The First Silence extended a hand—not a limb of flesh or spirit, but a principle, a commandment that reality itself would obey.
> "To inherit the will that even I cannot bear. To walk beyond the boundless dream."
And then—before she could speak, before she could even think—the void split open. Light, pure and merciless, poured in—not from outside, but from within her.
Her scream tore through the unborn multiverses.
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