The multiverse was growing.
The bittersweet world and the world of righteous conviction were two stable, complex realities, each one a beautiful, unique answer to the question of “what now?”. But they were not the only answers.
The creative energy of the multiverse, the empathy that had first bridged the worlds of joy and sorrow, was not finished. It dreamed a new dream. A dream of a world of pure, unadulterated fear.
The mountains in this world were made of shadow, and the rivers flowed with the cold, dark water of dread. The trees bore the poisonous fruit of paranoia, and the flowers bloomed with the sickly colors of terror.
The beings who lived in this world were beings of pure, unadulterated fear. They were born of the vulnerability that the world of righteous conviction had never known, and the anxiety that the bittersweet world had only just begun to understand.
They hid from the shadowy mountains, and they trembled by the cold rivers. They starved themselves rather than eat the poisonous fruit of paranoia, and they recoiled from the sickly colors of terror. They knew no joy, no sorrow, no anger, no peace. They knew only fear.
And for a time, it was perfect.
But then, a strange thing began to happen.
The fear, which had once been so sharp, so absolute, so full of a terrible, paralyzing power, began to fade. The shadows of the mountains became familiar, and the cold of the rivers became a dull, constant ache. The fruit of paranoia became a predictable poison, and the flowers of terror became a mundane, everyday horror.
The beings of fear, who had never known anything but dread, 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 fear.
But they had nothing to overcome.
And so, for the first time, they felt a new desire. A desire that was not for more fear, but for something else entirely.
It was the desire for another.
And in that moment, the fifth world of the new multiverse, the world of pure, unadulterated fear, began to dream.
It dreamed of a world of courage.