Buy me a coffeeThe Void Between Universes
The Void Between Universes
After the Last Universe ended, the next creation had not yet begun.
Later minds call what followed an interval, although it possessed no measurable duration. They call it a gulf, although it contained no distance that could be crossed by ordinary means.
Direction, duration and physical form held no dependable meaning. Light and darkness could not yet be separated from one another.
Yet the Void was not peaceful.
The Horror Between Creations
The Void Between Universes was not empty.
It existed beyond the structures by which ordered reality would later define place, time, identity and form. Nothing remained stable unless it possessed the strength to preserve itself against the surrounding unreality.
For any mind exposed to it, the Void was an immeasurable horror.
Thoughts could become detached from the minds that formed them. Memories could return altered or cease to belong to the beings that remembered them. Identity could fracture without death, while terror endured without any dependable sequence of moments through which it might pass.
No natural shelter could form there. No route remained fixed. No boundary could be trusted.
What endured within the Void did so through power, hunger or refusal.
Nihros in the Silence
Nihros endured within the seal forged at the end of the Last Universe.
The powers that bound her were gone, but their final act remained. Their identities, authority and sacrifice formed the restraints that held her beyond the creation they had failed to save.
Nihros remained contained.
Around her persisted impossible traces of the Last Universe: broken memories, abandoned purposes and echoes whose original beings and meanings could no longer be recovered.
Some endured.
Others were lost within the Void.
No surviving account can distinguish them with certainty.
The Qlippoths
The Qlippoths arose from the Void Between Universes.
They were not survivors of the Last Universe. They arose within the Void itself and were native beings of the horror between creations.
The Qlippoths possessed distinct identities where identity should have failed. They maintained form where form had no dependable law and retained will where thought could dissolve into the surrounding unreality.
They were not innocent beings later corrupted by the Void.
They were evil from their beginning.
Their natures were defined by hatred, hunger, cruelty and rejection of ordered existence. They required no common ruler, law or purpose to make them dangerous. Each was an independent horror capable of preserving itself where lesser beings would have lost memory, form and will.
Ordinary chronology cannot determine which Qlippoth arose first or how long they existed before the present cosmos. The eldest among them remember the Void before measurable time, but their memories cannot be arranged into a reliable sequence.
They came from between creations and carried something of that horror within them.
The Unformed Possibility
Amid the Void, the possibility glimpsed within the final star endured.
Nihros did not command it. The Qlippoths did not create it. The Void did not shape what it would become.
It possessed no substance, direction or name.
It was neither light nor darkness.
It was neither matter nor energy.
It was neither thought nor life.
It was undivided possibility: the capacity for something to exist, although nothing within the coming creation had yet become separate from anything else.
Then, for the first time, possibility acquired the capacity to become distinct.
No division had yet occurred. No opposing forces had yet emerged. Distinction had only become possible.
The silence between creations ended.