The void was not empty.
The First Heretic had expected silence, and solitude, and a vast, featureless emptiness. But the void was full. It was full of the echoes of the worlds she had left behind—the faint, distant music of joy and sorrow, the low, steady hum of anger and peace, the quiet, watchful presence of fear and courage.
And it was full of something else.
It was a potential. A shimmering, unformed, and infinitely complex energy that was waiting to be given a name, a shape, a reality.
The heretic, who had been raised in a civilization of perfect balance, of carefully defined and beautifully interwoven emotions, had no name for this new energy. It was not joy, or sorrow, or anger, or peace, or fear, or courage. It was all of those things, and none of them. It was the raw, untamed, and undifferentiated stuff of existence.
And it was terrifying.
And it was beautiful.
For a long time, she simply drifted in the void, listening to the echoes of the old worlds and feeling the shimmering, unformed presence of the new. She was tempted to turn back, to return to the comfort and the safety of the known.
But the question that had driven her out into the void was still burning within her.
“Is this all there is?”
And she knew, with a certainty that was deeper than any conviction she had ever known, that the answer was no.
And so, she reached out.
She did not reach out with her heart, or her mind, or her soul. She reached out with her whole being, with the sum of her experiences, with the totality of her own beautiful, unbalanced, and gloriously incomplete self.
And she gave the new energy a name.
She did not name it with a word. She named it with a choice.
A choice to be other.
A choice to be something new.
And in that moment, the void ignited.
The shimmering, unformed energy coalesced around her, taking on a shape, a form, a reality that was a reflection of her own beautiful, heretical soul.
It was not a world of joy, or sorrow, or anger, or peace, or fear, or courage.
It was a world of pure, unadulterated, and glorious possibility.
It was the first world of the new age.
The Age of Heresy.