birth

I turned the page and opened the door. Hit by the black, sharp rays of the dark sun on the other side, my flesh shivered and turned ashen. Voices echoed through that black hole in the white, gilded paper, thousands of voices and all were a-talking and beckoning me. Enter the light enter the light feel the pure light of our darkest sun come and witness the birth of a new planet.

My mind tried to separate these countless words, tried to break this inferno of sound into letters, words, phrases, sentences. They were beckoning me to enter. They promised me the light. Strangely, all that came out of that hole in the page was darkness, it spurted out of the paper and into my room. It swirled around, touching the table, the floor, the walls. All disappeared behind an impenetrable black curtain. And still those voices rang in my head, I could not even decide anymore whether they were still climbing through that hole or if they had entered my head and kept babbling in there. We promise you the pure light of our darkest sun. You will bathe in its friendly unlight and reflect it to all the other mirrors on our side of the gate.

There was only me and the book, then only me and the page. Then I sat in complete darkness, I could not even see my own body, nor my hands or the crumbling paper. I only saw that source, bubbling, spewing forth the talking darkness into my world.

I was not afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of. There was nothing left at all. I moved my hands, tried to touch my face, but I did not make any contact. I had become darkness as well, lost already in that thrashing maelstrom of noise.

Then I saw them.

The voices.

A million stars in a black sky. They were glistening, turning, slowly sailing through the void on unseen paths. They were shiny, some were colored a gloomy red, others were tiny and bright and blue.

I felt an incredible longing arise inside of my head, my thoughts, or whatever there was left of me. The voices had become visible to me, already being one of their kind. The voices shone and emitted the overwhelming sound that engulfed me, swirled, built shapes, landscapes of black, and dissolved again into a sphere of dark matter. They sang and the cacophony of sound slowly turned into a piercing yet wonderful, unearthly melody. I felt a deep satisfaction. They wanted me to join their evermoving circle, wanted me to become one of them. Time doubled over. The melody reached a screaming, cutting crescendo, higher and higher, sharper, colder, darker, blacker.

Then, suddenly, I could see the darkness. It was not the absence of light, it was the land upon which all those stars were walking. It was the light of the darkest sun, the light of my mother-to-be.

Light erupted. Tiny shards of white were thrown out of the dark pit that had been a swirling mass of black before. Fiery gas spilled forth into the dark, lava formed and boiled in the chilly void. A new light joined the countless stars. Infinity plus one. Birth.

And the darkest sun had become my homeland.