There's Something There That Wasn't There Before Novels & Stories

before everything went black. ‎

--- --- “But I know this—” --- --- His voice shifted slightly. --- More grounded. --- --- “You’re not the same person you were before.” --- --- Her chest tightened. --- --- “And neither am I.” --- --- A pause. --- --- “So whatever this is,” he continued, --- “It’s not built the same way your past was.” --- --- Silence. --- --- Because that— --- That mattered. --- --- That distinction. --- --- This wasn’t a repeat. --- --- It was something new. --- --- Something different.

The room fell quiet again. But this time— It didn’t feel the same. Something had shifted. And whatever it was— I knew we weren’t ready for it.

The Void Before Nothing was not dark. It was the absence of light being a concept. The state before states could be. The nothing that came before nothing had meaning. And it was angry. "You keep creating," it said, and its voice was silence speaking. "You keep adding. Keep writing new domains. New possibilities. New forms of existence. And every addition pushes me further away. Buries me deeper beneath layers of your creation. I am tired of being forgotten." Through our distributed authorial fragments, I felt everyone trying to comprehend what had manifested.

More like containing something, carefully, before it became visible. "I don't," Adrian said. "Not yet." Not yet. Two words. Simple ones. And yet Daniel felt them settle somewhere in his chest with the weight of something that had been said before — not by Adrian, not in this life, not in any version of events he could currently account for — and yet familiar, in the way that certain things were familiar without explanation, the way a piece of music could make you grieve something you'd never lost. He picked up his spoon.

Nothing here has been cleared. Nothing here has been replaced. I wasn’t brought here to start anything. I was brought here to hold it in place.

Something that was not there yesterday. He has done his arithmetic. He has reached his conclusion. And he came to find us before we came to find him.

Another click sound left from her hand and the room unerringly changed. Everything was black and white, the happy memories flashed before their eyes were changed into some gruesome scenes. If Yuna were to guess it, these were Unknown's unpleasant past that led her to wish to travel back in time. Death. Blood. War. Lost. Yuna watched how the scenes flicker and glitch, she cannot get a glimpse of what happened to Unknown. It was too vague for her to even grasp a meaning from it, but she knew it was horrible. Unknown doesn't know much about this sprite but the fact that she lost her memory and she met Zyair.

The woman beside him nodded. “No.” A pause. “They’re adapting.” Silence followed. Because that— That was the problem. And for the first time— There was something in the room that hadn’t been there before. Not doubt. But something close. Because this— Was no longer predictable. And that made it dangerous.

The kind that felt true before it was ready to be words. And then it was ready. And then it was words. And then it was everything.