The first light in a place without light.
The first thought in a place without thought.
A life yearning to exist, yet never once having known the breath of life.
He was alone. Adrift. Suspended in the dark, where no voice dared to speak.
Demon, or god, or what nameless thing lingers beside him?
It was silence absolute.
No sound to mar the void.
Only small, wavering lights—black, white, gray, and red—smoke-like, drifting above the unseen heavens.
They glimmered faintly in the abyss, little flames wrapped in vapor.
They wandered without direction.
No hand to guide. No path to follow.
And the silence was so deep that even the faintest whisper of their drifting was loud as thunder.
Night had never ended.
The first dawn had never come.
Yet those small lights drifted still, and if one looked long enough, one might see sorrow in their glow.
Agony. Despair. Imprisoned within themselves.
They screamed without sound.
They wept without tears.
They spoke farewells that no ear would hear.
So long had they endured—days, months, years—until eternity itself grew old.
Until the waiting bled beyond number, beyond measure.
The lonely soul, the little light wrapped in smoke, felt nothing anymore.
“O, from whence have you strayed?”
A voice, the first voice in ages uncounted, reached out to the trembling light.
It stilled. It ceased its drifting.
It no longer moved, no longer stirred.
“Have you traveled far, o solitary soul?
How long since you have seen? How long since you have spoken?
Pitiful, that you have not even lips with which to answer.”
A voice not heard but thought.
A thought without question, quiet as the darkness itself.
“Where are we?”
The soul asked—though it had no tongue, no flesh.
Only a question without answer.
“Where we have always been.
Where we often dream.
That is the place of us, whether we will it or no.”
An ivory hand emerged, luminous, pure—if such words hold meaning in such a void.
It cupped the little soul, stroked it with a touch long forgotten.
So long had it been since touch meant anything at all.
“How long has it been?”
“So long, little soul, that even death itself would beg to die in your stead.”
Footsteps followed the hand.
Measured, soundless, yet heavy.
The faceless bearer walked, carrying the soul to a place unnamed.
A being with no face, no name, no form that could be spoken.
“Where do you take me?”
The figure gave no answer.
Only the warmth remained.
Warm as the hearth in the coldest winter, warmer still, as though all chastity had burned away in shame before it.
“Do not flee what you see, little soul.
Do not recoil from what you will behold.
Look only. That is your task.
Look, and light shall be given you.”
And then—it appeared.
For the first time in countless ages, the soul beheld.
Threads.
Millions upon millions of them.
Intertwined, tangled, colorless, pure.
They spiraled, converging, knotting into a vast and formless sphere.
“Do not fear. Look well, little soul. Look, and you shall know.”
The threads bled red.
Blood-red, like rivers bursting.
Screams of men and women tore the silence.
Children wept for mothers who would not answer.
The cries filled the sphere of thread.
The soul trembled before the sound.
“I am afraid.”
The faceless one embraced it.
The song of a lullaby, warm hands encircling.
“Warm,” whispered the soul.
The touch lingered, gentle.
“Fear not, little soul.
You shall not be alone.
Open your eyes. Awaken.
You shall be inscribed without name, without face, unremembered yet eternal.
See the light before you.
Smell the blood.
Hear the voices calling.
Taste the bitterness that awaits.”
And pain.
Sharp as needles through the ear, piercing the very essence.
The first true sensation: pain.
“Give what is yours to give.
Refuse what must be refused.
Go to the place that will not welcome you.
And when the time is ripe, you and I shall meet again. Farewell, little soul.”
The threads tightened.
They bound the trembling light, dragging it downward into the sphere.
Deeper. Tighter. Until every flutter of a butterfly’s wing was felt, until nothing was hidden.
The soul became a flame falling through the firmament.
Through stormclouds black, through rain like knives.
It fell, trailing as a dying star.
The stench met it first.
The stench of death.
The clash of steel by the tens of thousands.
The taste of mud and corpses in the mouth.
It fell before a burning castle.
Roots like serpents ensnared the young and pierced them with thorns.
The screams of the dying filled the air.
Skulls grinned in heaps, stripped of flesh.
And at last, the soul was buried beneath the weight of the dead.
Something moved there.
A corpse twitched.
Then another.
Rotten flesh sloughed away. Entrails, hearts, livers, brains spilled into the mass.
All drawn into the soul, all pressed into its form.
A body rose, tall before the ruined keep.
Its hair fell to the earth.
Its eyes—impossible eyes—red, black, white, and gray shifting like the visions of a mad painter.
It did not walk. It only stood, staring into a sky of black rain that fell like oil.
The scent of steel and rust choked the air.
And in its head, memories uncounted shrieked and tore until all thought was ruin.
Until at last—
“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”
It screamed. Not human. Not beast. Something other.
It screamed for hours, for days, for months, for unmeasured time, amidst the carnage of a war already ended.
It knelt.
It gazed upon the soil where blood thinned to rain, black and unclean.
It knelt, silent, save the rain that fell like weeping.
“It hurts. It hurts so much.”
The first breath tore its lungs.
The taste of filth and black water filled its mouth.
And it did nothing.
Only knelt, crushed beneath a thousand thousand memories, drowned in flesh not its own.
Every breath was torment.
And silence returned.