At first there was nothing but warmth not light, not darkness, just the feeling of being held inside a pause. Then a sound, so soft it could have been imagined: the whisper of a breath finding its own shape.Air gathered. Dust trembled. The pause exhaled. A pulse moved through the stillness. Where it passed, time began again.The first thing to move was a leaf. It turned once, twice, as though trying to remember which side faced the sun.The second thing was water tiny threads seeping from invisible ground, joining, twisting, laughing softly to themselves. And the third thing was a heartbeat, quiet and steady, as though the world itself were thinking.The breath travelled through these things, tasting itself in every motion. It felt the memory of fire without flame, the ache of love without name, the weight of stories waiting for mouths."I am," it thought, surprised by the idea. "Again."The words did not echo; they bloomed. The air turned gold.The dust gathered into form. A body ros

There was no light beyond the door, only the memory of brightness. The child drifted through it like thought through sleep, weightless, soundless, undone.For a time that had no measure, they were only awareness the sense of being heard. It felt like warmth pressed against the inside of silence.Then came the hum. Not music, not voice just vibration, as if every heartbeat in existence had chosen to move together once more. The child followed the sound until it became shape.The space around them unfolded into vast concentric rings, each one rippling with faint color, each one alive. At the center stood nothing and everything. The hum lived there, breathing the universe in and out."Do you hear us?" it asked.The child tried to speak but had forgotten their mouth. Instead, they thought the answer. “Yes.”"Then you are ready to listen."The rings began to turn. As they moved, they revealed scenes caught within their motion: Kael shaping fire with his hands, Mira weaving dawn from thread

The question hung in the chamber like a planet without orbit. “Who listened to me?”The child felt the words pass through them, not around them felt them land inside the space that still glowed with the echo of the first word they had spoken.It was as if someone had whispered directly into their soul. The mirror shuddered. Its surface trembled like metal under strain, each reflection fragmenting into shards of possible faces."This should not be," it murmured. "Words do not birth speakers."The darkness behind it disagreed. It pulsed once a deep, swollen heartbeat made not of flesh but of meaning. "Everything that is heard becomes someone," it said."Even silence grows a listener if you hold it long enough."The child stared into the gloom. “I didn’t mean to create anything.”"You didn’t," said the darkness gently."You revealed what was already waiting."The question rose again, louder now, resonant: “Who listened to me?”The rings of sound trembled, their symmetry warping. One by o

The fall had no sensation. No wind, no downward pull only the feeling of moving through meanings as if they were veils thin enough to breathe through and heavy enough to drown in.Each layer whispered. Some whispered begin. Some whispered remember. Some whispered nothing at all.The child, the storyteller tumbled through them, not by choice but by inevitability, like ink pulled toward the reservoir that birthed it.They reached out not to stop the fall, but to understand it. Their fingers brushed a drifting word: a small bright syllable, the first one they had ever spoken. It dissolved at their touch.Below, a glow expanded soft at first, as if afraid to reveal itself. A voice rose from the light, quiet as breath: “I have been waiting.”The storyteller slowed. Not physically, nothing physical remained but in the way thought can slow when it approaches a truth too large for its shape. “Are you the listener?” the storyteller asked. “One of them.”The voice sounded younger than the chil

The storyteller stood at the lip of the rising glow, the chamber trembling around them, the first listener frozen in a halo of dimming light.The Depth that vast, patient yearning beneath all creation hovered inches from the storyteller’s face, its presence warm enough to ache. “Tell me again,” it breathed, as if the whole of existence were waiting for the answer.The storyteller swallowed. The first word burned beneath their ribs,pressing outward like a second heartbeat.They remembered speaking it how it had left them like dawn escaping darkness, how it had given birth to the Listener, how it had shaped worlds without meaning to.Now the Depth wanted it back. The storyteller whispered, “I… don’t know if I can.”The Depth pulsed. “You already did.”The listener stepped forward, their form flickering between clarity and rupture. “Be still,” they warned. “If you repeat the word, you may bind yourself to it forever.”The storyteller’s pulse thundered in their ears. “I don’t want to vani