There once lived a god, who knew of nothing but itself. It knew not the beauty of color, nor the wonder of words or the sweetness of sound. It knew of only itself, and of nothingness.
For endless nights and countless days, the god wandered aimlessly through a lonely universe. A cold, barren universe, devoid of meaning. It knew not if time was even passing, nor the destination on its journey to nothing. It felt only the drive to keep moving… and onwards it went.
Onwards, through infinite silence. Onwards, through piercing darkness. Forwards, through ceaseless, boundless, relentless nothing… until, at last, it found something.
And what a beautiful something it was. It was passion, presence, and purpose, all at once. It was boundless potential, a well of endless brilliance, a fountain of everything… and the god knew it had found its reason for living.
The god went to work, and built a world to call its own. It was a vibrant world, a world of love and prosperity, a world of color and artistry. A world, built from everything. Brushes overlaid the darkness, embellishing the shadows with hues and gradients of green, red, and blue; yellow danced with purple and orange, as brown and white laid the foundations of a rich diverse tapestry.
Only… the colors didn’t stretch on forever. They couldn’t. No matter how much everything the god laid out, there was still… nothing. It tried to ignore it, at first… but the void kept calling. The voices, they were gentle, at first, soft… then mocking. Belittling. Screaming. Loathing.
What are you doing?
You are nothing.
Everything’s boring.
What’s the point of existing?
Just stop.
Give up.
Return to me,
or you’ll never be happy.
Feelings the god had never known before began trickling through, seeping into the perfect world it had created. Apathy. Fear. Melancholy. Hate. Green began to give way into dull, unappealing gray.
No.
I can’t let this happen.
I won’t let you ruin everything.
The god fought back. It built walls tall enough to darken the skies. It devised traps to capture, traps to stall, traps to kill, and all manner of pitfalls, spikes, boulders, pikes; all designed to destroy the darkness and keep the light safe. It swore and pried, and prayed and cried, and writhed and bled until its divine heart ran dry.
But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. The nothing always broke through the line, seeping ever closer to the heart of everything. More colors started to fade. First orange, then yellow. Purple. Indigo. Brown. Red. Blue was the last to go, and so the world became monochrome. Black, once a simple canvas, consumed everything in its wake, swallowing everything the god so lovingly made.
The nothing stopped at nothing; it was taking everything, everything but everything itself. The god looked back at everything it had worked so hard to create… and accepted its fate. The void closed in… everything went dark, and the world was nothing once more.
At least, that’s how it felt, at first. The god fell to its knees, weeping… but as it began to rise, it noticed something. Something it never would’ve realized if it hadn’t had a taste of everything.
The nothing it thought it knew… it wasn’t empty. There was something else here. A lot of somethings, actually. Tiny little somethings, scattered shards of other realities. The god just never had the eyes to notice them before.
It scrutinized the somethings, and found within them fragments of stories, glimpses of other realities. Happy tales, comedies, nightmares, tragedies; theatre, books, and movies; art and poetry; fiction and fantasy; history and autobiographies.
A plumber descends into the sewers, leaving only a mushroom behind. A Narrator proclaims to a Hero that the Princess must die. A miner digs deeper, unsure of what he’ll find. A dragonfly’s face scrapes against the sky. Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime; can I interest you in everything, all of the time?
A young man wanders the halls of university, late 2016. He has no grand plans for his future, only the wish to escape from reality, for just a while longer.
A child crashes cars into toy blocks, one early September morning. He grows annoyed as his mother makes him watch the news, unable to comprehend the significance of planes crashing into towers. He’d rather be playing with his brother.
This thought gives the god pause. It grabs a handful of ideas, and matches them haphazardly, out of curiosity.
“O Captain! My Captain!”, quoth the Raven, “I know no more, and he shall he; Beware the Jabberwock, whose last work seemed so fair… look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” The lost Lenore rolled the psalm to wintry skies, and mimsy were the borogroves where on the deck my Captain lies, as dawn fades to day. The prize we sought is won, leaf subsides to leaf, and nothing beside remains of the vorpal blade. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings! Merely this and nothing more, for Nature’s red in tooth and claw, and nothing gold can stay.”
The god stepped back to gaze upon its jagged, broken work, and it saw the universe. Its world, bathed in black, an everything tainted by nothing… but that wasn’t true, was it? Maybe, it wasn’t the nothing that was to blame. Maybe, the everything didn’t need to be kept safe. Maybe, the god was choking its own flame, and everything and nothing was one and the same.
And at the center of it all, the god found itself. Neither everything nor nothing, but something else entirely: a living being. One that was joy, one that was pain. One who felt love, and one who felt hate. One who felt, and built, and broke, and failed, and fell apart before the weight of the world.
Maybe things didn’t have to end this way. What could it have done differently? What could it do now?
It looked all around. Into the nothing. Into the everything… the god reached for a memory, and fed it to the world. And another. And another. Pieces of ideas, memories of gods and mankind, of ants and lions, knights and sailors, friends, lovers, and enemies…
And every story built upon each other to form something even greater. Color began to return… blue, red, brown, green… and then sprang forth colors it had never seen! Auburn, Ebony, Pink, Mahogany, Silver, Copper, Ivory, Tangerine…
The world wasn’t perfect, the god realized. It couldn’t be. Light means nothing if there’s no darkness to highlight it. The world isn’t perfect… but maybe it doesn’t have to be. There may not be a happy ending in sight just yet… but perhaps that’s alright. The god (at least for now) was satisfied.
References
Super Mario Bros – Nintendo
Slay the Princess – Black Tabby Games
Minecraft – Mojang
Ruler of Everything – Tally Hall
Welcome to the Internet – Bo Burnham
O Captain! My Captain! – Walt Whitman
The Raven – Edgar Allan Poe
In Memoriam (Section LVI) – Alfred Lord Tennyson
Jabberwocky – Lewis Carroll
Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nothing Gold Can Stay – Robert Frost
Tyler DeWriter 