The universe began not with a bang, but with a shattering breath—at least, that's how Avijay felt it. In dream or vision—he could not say which—he found himself weightless, an incorporeal sight swept into a void of pressure and waiting, where time had not yet drawn its first line. It was not silence but potential, coiled tight and dense, every atom, every galaxy, every moment-to-be balled within an infinitesimal spark.
He hovered as observer and participant, and the instant stretched forever until it broke—space unfurling like a tidal wave, heat and light roaring outward, matter and energy erupting raw from nothing. Creation shrieked and whispered all at once.
He witnessed the first particles stirred into being: quarks, leptons, neutrinos, each more fundamental than anything he'd learned of in school. They blinked and jittered in and out of possibility, random yet destined, flickering through a world where nothing stayed whole for more than a heartbeat. Gluons stitched quarks together into protons and neutrons—unstable, feverish, hungry for binding.
To Avijay, these entities were not abstractions but living things: flickers of possibility, jittering threads woven into the void, forming the groundwork of the reality he took for granted. Within this quantum soup, particles and antiparticles collided—sometimes annihilating, sometimes surviving, shaping the very first matter and leaving the tiniest asymmetry that would eventually make up all the stuff of stars, planets, hearts, and dreams.
He drifted amidst this glimmering foam, shrinking smaller and smaller, consciousness diving into subatomic realms. He saw quarks, red, blue, green, slipping together in impossible configurations, forming familiar patterns and endless deviations. Gluons flared and darted, never still, sewing and dissolving the bonds that held matter together. Even smaller, he sensed fields—shadowy frameworks beneath the particles themselves, shifting in probabilities, describing existence before it even became real.
From the seething chaos, hydrogen and helium condensed—slowly, laboriously—into atoms, the seeds of everything to come. He watched electrons, shy and fleeting, form pale halos around atomic cores, their orbits a stunning blur of probability. Electrons refused to be pinned to location or path, existing in clouds rather than wires. At times, whole atoms seemed to disappear or merge, tunneling from one state to another, showing Avijay how reality itself bent under the moonlit pressure of uncertainty.
He marveled as atoms joined to form the first molecules: delicate and tentative, hydrogen with helium, carbon with oxygen, scouting tentative alliances that rippled across lightless seas. They shivered, collided, fell apart, and remade themselves, caught in the quantum ballet of attraction and repulsion.
Yet Avijay was not lost among the small. He lifted his awareness back outward through time—the seconds and centuries sliding past in a blur of violence and majesty. Gravity, the cosmic sculptor, gathered clouds of atoms over unimaginable stretches, pooling gas into vast nebulae in the cold, expanding universe. Where dense knots formed, the heat and pressure grew, until nuclear fire kindled: the birth of the very first stars.
He saw these titanic forges—each a sun unlike anything he'd ever known—burning in pitch darkness, their fusion cores transforming lightest hydrogen into elements of endless variety. Every star, he realized, was a crucible, a foundry assembling the periodic table. Carbon, nitrogen, iron—Avijay sensed the eons-long labor that would one day allow for life.
Some stars exhausted themselves and died in extraordinary detonations. He watched supernovae blossom, flinging stardust and heavy elements in every direction, enriching the interstellar medium. Through their sacrifice, future generations of stars and planets would inherit the chemical keys of life and consciousness.
From these seeds, galaxies were assembled: whorling spirals and chaotic clumps, stately ellipticals and shimmering bars, a zoo of forms far more diverse than the night sky Avijay had ever glimpsed from Thangka. He drifted through these islands of stars, holding, as if in the palm of his hand, the Milky Way's slow wheeling across impossible distances.
Awe pulsed through him as he traveled the grand cosmic web: massive tendrils and sheets of dark, unseen matter threading together the universe into a living structure, galaxies clustering like beads along the filaments. Gravity's blueprint was everywhere, invisible but absolute, drawing the world ever outward and inward, at scales that staggered the heart.
He watched planetary systems birth themselves in swirling discs of dust and fragments, planets condensing like pearls from nebular mud. Some worlds sizzled and died, scourged by newborn stars, while others cooled and welcomed oceans, storms, and—unimaginably—life.
But not every act was nurturing. Not all creation was gentle. Amidst these wonders lurked something unspeakable.
As Avijay's perception expanded, a cold tremor ran through the weave. Colossal humanoid figures—ancient as the cosmos, massive beyond comprehension—strode across the void. They glided between galaxies as if the emptiness were shallow streams.
Their hands were large enough to clutch moons. Their eyes crackled with indifference or hunger—it was impossible to tell. Some appeared as silhouettes, half-formed from starlight, while others were cloaked in writhing shadows, shimmering with energies beyond the visible spectrum.
He saw these forms reach into stars with clutching hands, crushing suns in palms of cosmic fire. Entire planetary systems vanished—planets shattering like glass, their molten cores bleeding into the void, waves of devastation rippling outward at many times the speed of light. There was neither malice nor mercy; it was an act of cosmic inevitability, destruction as natural as a supernova, yet tinged with a dread intelligence.
One figure, immense and haloed by spiraling nebulae, seized a spiral arm of a galaxy and twisted it, flinging hundreds of stars into deep intergalactic night. Their bodies rippled with energies Avijay could barely perceive—vast fields of magnetism, radiation, forces older than the laws of nature he knew.
Avijay watched civilizations perish in seconds. He sensed the loss of cultures that had barely begun—their stars blinked out, their histories reduced to ash, their dreams erased before a single poem was composed or a single song sung. The Titans, as he came to think of them, were destroyers of light. Entire clusters dissolved in their shadows.
Worse still, Avijay felt a sense that these beings were not exceptions—they were part of the universal cycle. Creation and destruction intertwined, each with its own necessity, its own dreadful beauty.
Yet even as galaxies died, others sprang into being. He watched bubble universes, quantum domains unfurling beyond the edge of eyesight, expanding into realities that might never touch his own. For every spiral snuffed out in violence, a thousand new nebulae ignited—the orchestra of creation refusing to be silenced.
At times, Avijay's vision folded in on itself and he plunged again into the smallest of small. He watched quantum foam churn beneath spacetime's surface, seething fields forever on the edge of existence. Virtual particles, twins that emerged from nothing, spun and disappeared before causality could object. Energy borrowed and returned at scales so swift that even light itself was forced to blink and wait.
He saw time's arrow wobble and fracture, experience unraveling in quantum uncertainty. In those moments, Avijay understood reality's deepest secret: everything, every particle, every splash of light, every decision and thought, was built upon a web of possibilities flickering so fast they appeared solid. Reality was probability given weight by the act of noticing, by consciousness staring into the dark.
Rising from the subatomic chaos, his journey soared past nebulae bursting with new stars, through the curtains of the cosmic microwave background, the faded glow of the very first light. He glimpsed titanic black holes spinning in the heart of galaxies, their gravity so absolute that even history itself bent around their singular grasp. Accretion disks glowed like the halos of gods, and sometimes, a jet of matter launched hundreds of thousands of light-years, seeding the void with energy.
He drifted near quasars—a trillion times brighter than the sun, ancient lighthouses in the early universe, anchoring clusters of galaxies with iron will.
All around was motion, change, transformation. Avijay sensed the passage of eons as flashes—moments measured in the birth and death of stars, the slow spiral of galaxies, the drift of worlds through cosmic dark. Time was a river, not a line, and each drop of it contained universes upon universes.
And at every level—subatomic, planetary, galactic, universal—he saw the pattern repeat: birth, flourishing, decay, death, and then the return to nothing, which was always the seed for something new. The Titans returned again and again, their terrible harvesting echoed by the birth of new possibilities.
He learned, in these spans, that the universe was neither kind nor cruel. It was indifferent, yet miraculous. Its destruction was not an end but a clearing, a necessary making for the next verse of the song.
Through all of it, Avijay's awe only deepened. He could taste the beauty of hydrogen atoms in the fusing hearts of red giants, feel the agony of life extinguished in the maw of a black hole, and quiver at the possibilities blooming in each pocket of primordial soup. The smallest things gave rise to the greatest, and the greatest were never beyond change—everything was subject to transformation.
In a moment of perfect clarity, Avijay saw himself reflected in the lattice of creation and destruction. He understood: atoms were not mere building blocks, but promises of change. Every molecule was a story in process. Every star, a crossroads of fate.
Sweeping outward one last time, he witnessed the universal tapestry as a single, living entity: star clusters woven into filaments stretching beyond infinity, dark matter binding it all, gravity and quantum pulses weaving a fabric of everything that ever would be. Titans and galaxies, atoms and quanta, all stirred and built and broke in patterns older than thought.
And at the heart of it, Avijay realized, was the possibility to choose—to nurture or to unmake, to tip the scales towards harmony or chaos. He shuddered at the grandeur of what the universe had shown him, and what it had granted with such silent faith.
When his vision dimmed and the echo of creation's roar began to fade, he remembered with a pang the world he'd left behind: the small village, the snow falling, the warmth of home and sorrow. Yet he carried with him a knowledge almost unbearable in its magnitude—the universe had begun and ended a million times over, and in every breath of that cycle, he too was written.
For within atoms and memory, within galaxies and grief, within Titans and destinies, there was room for a single will to matter. The cosmos, he knew now, was not a place of static fact but of endless becoming—awaiting the hand, or the soul, or the wish, that dared to shape.
And as Avijay drifted gently toward waking, the final image coalesced: a single seed falling through worlds, a whisper carried by starlight, a promise that even the greatest destruction was only ever an overture to what might come next.