Jenna's Sacrifice

In the beginning, all was shapeless and still, filled with darkness and emptiness. Then with a single low, tolling note, a pale light appeared that quickly grew to fill in the cracks in... everywhere. It grew in intensity as the note was sustained, then it seemed to fade away once more, leaving seemingly countless specks of itself behind that would form the patterns later races would one day call the constellations.

The pattern of light and sound wove itself into the spaces between the gradually coalescing motes of dust, the rising and falling of the sound nudging cosmic dust — as yet innocent of life — around in new ways as the song continued to grow more complex, and even the passage of Time meant both everything and nothing at all.

As it had swelled, the light had caressed the darkness in a lover’s embrace— and, at the infinite point where they had been equal — they had danced at the edges of newborn stars, and around the slowly spinning discs of flaming dust that would one day be the planets that would circle those stars. And with equal grace, galaxies coalesced all around them as the slow song rose around them, almost unnoticed, singing reality into being and setting into motion the laws that would govern the universe for the rest of Time.

The song rose and fell for many wordless verses, and other stars formed, growing visibly warmer and casting their light over the dust fields around them as planets grew from clouds of spinning dust to lumpy uneven balls of red hot rock. In some places, the balls of rock wouldn’t hold together, no matter how the song shifted the notes, higher or lower, and those were permitted to drift apart again for another try later, in a different combination. But in others, the conditions were right for the next stage of the song.

In a distant corner of one of the sparkling pinwheels, near where the light had begun, something new was happening. Around a point of light so bright green that it appeared to be almost yellow, most of the multitudes of spinning balls of red hot rock were beginning to cool, but there was something special about the third one from the point of light as the song rose and fell all around them.

And in the surrounding darkness, a new world was born, amid the spirals of pulsing light and swirling dust drawn together by the slowing notes of the song that still filled in the gaps in the laws of physics in this particular pinwheel of light as more dust coalesced into two — much smaller — satellites to circle the growing world, satellites that would later control the tide of the nascent seas of that world.

Then the multitude of notes abruptly coalesced into one voice once more, and words began to form in the flow of the notes. And as the words spoke their true names, the small ball of rock began to change, growing mountains in some places, the land shifting to sink in other places. And at the same time, great swathes of forest — hundreds of miles wide, with thousands of different species of tree and plants contained within them — were springing into being like an entire spring happening in an instant in still other places, as the low places began to fill with bright blue-green seas and sparkling lakes and rivers in all the right places.

And with another slight shift of the softly singing voice, clouds began to swirl across the surface of the planet in the first instance of life-giving rain to fall on those thirsty lands as within the seas began to bring forth the life that was beginning to show itself within them.

It was a lush world, a perfect world, and life continued to grow and change for many happy millennia, but it couldn’t last; their utopia was shattered by the smallest of them, a virus that suddenly went mad, killing millions of the dominant life form. But the planet recovered, and life continued for the strong who had survived the plague. However, there were... changes and life wasn’t quite the same as it had been before the plague had struck.

But even then, some changes were deeper than might have otherwise been, and the path of life had been forever shifted from the course it had been on. And eventually, those that had changed became the dominant species of their race, and their new utopia was greater than it had been planned by the Singer of the Song that had Sung the multiverse into being.

But that wasn’t all that happened on that world, and that story is yet to be told.