At first there was nothing. Not dark, not light—only absence.
Nora drifted, or perhaps she did not drift at all. Without direction, without body, she could not tell. She reached for her sword, but no sword answered. She tried to breathe, but no breath came.
She was unmade.
Thought itself began to thin. Images fractured: the battlefield, the faces of the fallen, even her own reflection in water—slipping, dissolving. Her name was the last to falter, a whisper unthreaded into silence.
Do I still exist?
The void gave no answer.
Time lost meaning. A heartbeat might have been an age; an age might have been a blink. She was certain she would unravel completely, swallowed by the same hunger that had devoured stars.
And yet—
A spark stirred. Not flame, not light, but a trembling warmth, buried deep where even the void could not reach. A presence. Small, stubborn, alive.
Nora clung to it.
Her spark pulsed once, twice, then flared. The void shuddered around her. Cracks of light split the silence like fractures in glass. Through them seeped color—red, gold, silver—swirling into forms that bled together. The nothingness collapsed.
She fell.