On a boundary between Void and Substance, a soul perceived a blue box without comprehension. What the soul was doing there was a mystery. Perhaps it was a former mage, a victim of one of their own dimensional experiments gone horribly wrong. Perhaps it was accidental, the soul somehow falling out of the natural cycle of reincarnation, lost and alone. Perhaps it was a victim of a cruel manner of execution, since some evil demanded a more permanent punishment than a simple death and, in the end, the Void always took everything. However it had ended up in the space between worlds, Void had stripped away much of its sense of self, such that the soul could remember neither its name nor its reason for being, and yet, circumstance had brought that soul to the boundary of another reality before it was lost completely.

  The soul attempted to blink. An instinct. A simple expression of confusion, but one foiled by its lack of eyelids.

  The instinct stirred up something. The soul remembered what it was to be confused. A mere memory of a memory, yet it spoke of a time before the nothing.

  The continued stimulation roused the soul from its slumber. A pause from its slow decay, and perhaps even a slight reversal. A thought echoed from it, unheard by any. It was not in words, for no memories remained that contained such things, but if the raw thought was to be wrapped in the vaguity of language, perhaps it could be best summed up as, "I am."

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Reality pulled upon the soul with a gravity that may have been metaphorical or imaginary, but was nonetheless inescapable. The soul had been caught by the drifting universe, and now its absorption into that universe had become an inevitability. The circle of reincarnation stuttered for the smallest moment as a space was made. History was rewritten; a new soul spun from the firmament to occupy a new child became nothing. It did not vanish, for how could something vanish if it had never existed? The outsider was simply there instead, ready to turn what would otherwise be nothing more than a series of interesting chemical processes into the miracle known as 'life'.

  The universe waited for the moment when that life would come into being.

  The moment occurred.

  The soul once again felt the pull of darkness, but this time the darkness was a comforting blanket instead of an all-consuming nothingness. The darkness called to sleep, for the soul to once again fall inactive until its new flesh was ready to accept it fully. Until it had a heart to pump its lifeblood and a brain to house its mind.

  The soul slept.