By Jonathon David Hawkins
In the period before the Void had been touched by Time, a woman who did not exist sat in a place that wasn’t. As time didn’t pass the woman who didn’t exist grew great with child. The Void was father to the child and the perfection of Vacuum was companion to the woman who did not exist.
Her empty womb grew, swelling as the child matured within the nonexistent body. After a period of time during which no time pass there came the need for a birthing. It was the Vacuum who was to play midwife. As the child left the security of the empty womb a double chorus of agonized wailing commenced as mother and son were sundered. Their screams were the first to be sounded into the Void, the first screams in all of creation. They would not be the last.
That primeval scream drew the curiosity of Time, and where his gaze fell time passed where originally there agelessness. Feeling the first touch of Time upon his once timeless body, Void grew furious with rage and indignation. He blamed Vacuum for the loss of his immortality, for he said it was she who had failed to prevent the pain of the childbirth. He struck his sister a mighty blow, destroying forever her perfection and leaving the infinite vacuum cluttered with the debris of her scar tissue.
His anger smoldering, Void withdrew into solitude. Here he brooded, and the brooding fanned the coals of his anger and indignation. In his absence the child was raised by the nonexistent woman. She cradled him in her empty arms and Vacuum in turn sheltered them both. She did this because the mother was the only friend she had in the emptiness and the child was her ward. And, secure in the silence of passing time, the mother who did not exist pacified her restless child by telling him stories of things that had never happened in other places that had never existed in the time before time had begun to pass.
But with each passing day Void new that he was growing older, weaker. He had once been ageless, but he new that the moment that time had touched him he had become mortal and one day his endlessness would come to an end. Even in his growing infirmity he was omnipotent, but the fact that he should have any weakness where formerly there was none filled him with rage. As the Void’s anger grew so did his desire to gain vengeance. He decided that he would punish his wife and child.
But when in time he finally succumbed to his desire for revenge and lashed out, the Void found that it was too late. The woman who was not had foreseen his anger and his actions and had fled deep into the Vacuum. She left her child behind, for she knew that he was partially of the Void, so the child’s sire would not be able to harm him.
When the Void had discovered that he had been thwarted, he let slip a mighty yell and his anger wracked the Vacuum, bringing even more scarred matter to the surface of here empty skin. But he could not find the woman who was not to harm her.
He could not harm her son either, as she had predicted. So he instead trapped the boy in a empty room that did not exist on the very rim of his infiniteness. And here the boy was forced to exist on his own. Abject in his loneliness, the sought to find his mother. Trapped in that empty room he had but one tool at his disposal: the stories his mother had left him. So he commenced to use his fingers to scratch the tale of the passing of time on the walls of his empty room. And in doing so, the power of these stories, the first stories, he was able to cast a small part of himself out into the Vacuum to search for the nonexistent woman had given birth to him. Wherever this small fragment of himself passed, a splinter would separate and the first stirrings of the consciousness that is life would begin. The fragmentation of his own soul brought life to the empty Vacuum, and that life beget more life.
The Void watched always, and he realized that through this new life he could strike back at the boy in the written room. For in this fragmentation came weakness - a weakness he could exploit. He reached out to each living being across the expanse of the Vacuum and touched the fragment within it that had given it conscious life. With his touch came the aching emptiness of the Void, the emptiness of realization.
His touch had brought a realization to these previously blind fragments: the realization that they were alone and incomplete. And this realization was the most exquisite of tortures, for now these creatures would be driven to make themselves whole. And they would fail. One in seven million would be able to able to locate another fragment that would match them in the lonely puzzle of existence, bringing some surcease to the emptiness and incompleteness. But most would go through their entire lives alone.
But the boy in the written room still searches for the mother that does not exist. Until then he will continue the write the tales of Time within the Void and the Vacuum and his soul will continue to fragment and the living creatures will exist in their loneliness. But one day he will locate the mother, and she may make whole what has been sundered...