And so, they built.
They built without a blueprint, without a plan, without a predetermined outcome. They built with the joyous, chaotic energy of a universe that had just discovered its own infinite potential.
The first world they built was a world of pure, unadulterated joy.
It was a world where the mountains were made of laughter, and the rivers flowed with tears of happiness. The trees bore fruit of pure, unadulterated delight, and the flowers bloomed with the colors of a thousand different kinds of love.
The beings who lived in this world were not the Children of the Symbol. They were something new, something that had been born of the question and the answer. They were beings of pure, unadulterated joy, beings who lived only for the pleasure of existence.
They danced in the mountains of laughter, and they swam in the rivers of happiness. They feasted on the fruit of delight, and they adorned themselves with the flowers of love. They knew no sorrow, no fear, no anger, no pain. They knew only joy.
And for a time, it was perfect.
But then, a strange thing began to happen.
The joy, which had once been so vibrant, so intoxicating, so full of life, began to fade. The laughter of the mountains grew hollow, and the tears of the rivers grew thin. The fruit of delight lost its flavor, and the flowers of love lost their color.
The beings of joy, who had never known anything but pleasure, began to feel a strange, new emotion.
It was a hollowness. An emptiness. A sense that something was missing.
They had everything they could ever want. They had a world of pure, unadulterated joy.
But they had no one to share it with.
And so, for the first time, they felt a new desire. A desire that was not for more joy, but for something else entirely.
It was the desire for another.
And in that moment, the first world of the new multiverse, the world of pure, unadulterated joy, began to dream.
It dreamed of a world of sorrow.