Before the first whisper, before shape or dream or wound, there was only the Stillness.
It was not peace.
Not silence.
Silence implies the memory of sound. This was something older, something that had not yet forgotten because nothing had yet begun.
It did not move.
It did not think.
It did not need to.
There was no time to count its endlessness, and no place to contain its presence. In that stillness, there were no gods, no voices, no light. Not even darkness had yet remembered to form.
And then, something shifted.
Not an act.
Not a choice.
Not even a sound.
Just the faintest change, the softest inhale between two things that did not yet exist. An impulse that was not born from desire, but from inevitability. A tension too deep to hold itself. The First Breath.
It was not a scream.
It was not a birth.
It was a mistake — a ripple in the unmoving, the first contradiction. A question with no words, so raw that it tore through the Stillness like a Faultline made of unshaped thought.
And from that rupture, the River flowed.
It did not begin, because beginnings had not been invented. It simply moved, a current with no source, spiraling through the void like a thought dreaming of becoming real. It flowed not through space, but through potential, carving paths through the unformed where direction had never existed.
It did not glimmer or roar. It pulsed, a rhythm older than light, stranger than death, colder than memory.
Wherever the River passed, it left behind threads. Not of water. Not of substance. But of something deeper: Flow.
The Flow was not a thing. It was not even motion. It was the law behind motion, the melody behind existence. The unseen hum that allowed contrast to take shape, that allowed nothing to stop being alone.
And with the Flow came consequence.
Structure.
Edge.
With it, reality opened its first eye. Not fully. Not clearly. But enough to blink, enough to dream. Space stretched, coiled, split into layers. Possibility folded into itself. Time, if it could be named so, began its long slow march not forward, but outward, curling in spirals across the rising skein of creation.
Each beat of the River gave birth to realms, not lands, but strata of being, sheets of reality strung along the River's spine like lanterns in a hall that no one had built. And within them, the Flow stirred, weaving through possibilities, choosing what could be and what must not.
But perfection, if ever it existed, was short-lived.
For in the wake of movement comes disturbance.
And in the wake of order… comes error.
It was not seen.
It was not named.
But where the River bent, something leaked.
A 'howl', not of voice, not of pain, but of hunger unbound. It was not a creature. It was not an act. It was a flaw in the pattern, a spiral that spun against the Flow, an echo of the Breath twisted into a curse.
Where the Flow carved harmony, this thing birthed imitation.
Where the Flow created paths, it spawned 'labyrinths' fractures in logic, concepts that did not know how to obey. It spread not as fire, but as false rhythm, infecting the melody like a shadow beneath a note.
The Flow resisted, but resistance implied strength.
And strength implied boundary.
And boundary… meant weakness.
Thus, from the crack came the first chaos.
Not madness. Not noise. But the ache of contradiction.
A realm was born from that flaw, if it could be called a realm. A Hollow. A place not beneath creation, but beside its rejection. A 'Realmsphere' that bled not color but distortion, that twisted the Flow into forms it never sang. The Flow did not move through this place. It recoiled from it.
In that Hollow, mimicries bloomed.
Unreal things, not quite alive, but alive enough to remember what they were never allowed to become. Beings that learned to echo power, to twist law into parody. Not evil, for evil implies design, but wrong, in a way that defied every thread the River had spun.
The Flow continued anyway.
It had to.
It flowed faster, tighter, weaving new layers to cover the wound, forging more 'Realmspheres', more patterns, more laws. It spiraled outward like a web spun in haste, each thread more fragile than the last. The Flow danced, building elegance atop fracture, hoping that movement would bury memory.
But the Breath remained.
The same one that broke the Stillness.
It had passed once. But it had never faded. It hid, nested in the silence between realms, in the pause between one law and the next. And there, in the hollows the River could not see, it waited.
But nothing flows without consequence.
The River, now awake, began to ripple with more than harmony. The echo of its first stirrings gave shape to tension, to rhythm not yet tamed. It was not dissonance, not yet, but the possibility of dissonance. And possibility, even in its gentlest form, is dangerous.
Something stirred beneath the first currents.
Not in resistance. Not in rebellion.
But in hunger.
This hunger did not come from outside the River. It was of it, the byproduct of flowing too far, too freely, too soon. From the River's deepest troughs, where the light of the First Breath never touched, arose the earliest murmur of distortion: a tremble without rhythm, a shadow without source.
The Flow had not erred. It had not failed.
But it had forgotten.
And in that forgetting, unremembered truths began to coil in silence.
It began with questions. Not spoken, for speech had not yet earned its shape, but carried in pulses between waves. They were not questions of wonder, but of refusal. Refusal to harmonize. Refusal to yield.
Refusal to be part of the song.
And so the River bent.
It bent to contain what it could not expel. It carved hollows in its own foundations, places where light was forbidden and echoes were sharp. Places where even silence grew claws. It was in one of these hollows — vast, nameless, unseen by any will, that the first rupture bled into being.
It was not a birth. It was not a death.
It was a scream.
A scream that had never been voiced, yet clawed through every ripple in existence. Not fury. Not grief. Not pain.
Possibility denied.
The scream did not end. It stretched into form, then into formlessness, then into the memory of a form that could never be. It devoured direction. It whispered backward through the current. It licked at the seams of what would become structure.
And from it, chaos took root.
Not the chaos of storms or violence. This was deeper, the kind of chaos that remembers too much, that forgets with purpose. The kind that swells in stillness and gnaws at everything with a name.
Creation flinched.
The River hesitated.
The Flow shuddered, not in fear, but in recognition.
Because it understood, in that moment, that every song gives rise to its silence. That every truth will one day tremble in doubt. That even the purest current casts shadows if it runs too long.
And yet, the River did not stop.
It carried on.
Not because it could conquer what stirred beneath — but because it had to be witnessed. Even if it was flawed. Even if something old and unspoken gnawed at its roots.
So it flowed.
Over hollows. Past screams. Around truths not meant to be kept.
It flowed, knowing something followed in its wake.
And deep beneath the Realms it would one day spawn...
...in the fractures of a world unchosen...
...a breath was taken.
It was not part of the Flow.
And yet, it moved.
And in that motion, the current trembled once more.
The River had passed through here once, long ago.
But it did not return.
And into this place, the breath fell.
Not a prophecy. Not a design. Just a single beat from before the Flow, from before anything knew what should be.
And in that place, a child cried.
No sign marked his birth. No voice whispered destiny into his ear. No current recognized him. But in his breath, something rippled. Something the Flow had tried to forget.
Not rebellion. Not fate.
A mistake.
And from that mistake, a story begins.
But not of greatness.
Not yet.
Only of a boy...
…who should not have been.