The Lack

In the beginning there was the Lack.

It was not darkness, for darkness is a thing, and the Lack held nothing. It was not a void, for a void has borders, and the Lack had none. It had no shape and no age and no will. It had only one quality, and that quality was hunger. The Lack pulled.

It pulled from everywhere toward nowhere. It pulled without pause, for there was no time in which to pause. It closed upon nothing and found nothing and closed again, and with every closing the wanting grew.

Beneath the Lack, older than anything that would come after it, lay a law. No hand wrote it. There was no hand. It was as much a part of the Lack as weight is part of stone:

What is needed enough becomes real.

Every god and every horror, every age of the world and every ruin that ended it, descends from this law. It favors no one. It cannot be bargained with. It only answers.

And the Lack needed. Blindly, totally, with the whole of what it was.

The pull deepened. The wanting outgrew the emptiness that held it. At the heart of the Lack, where the pull was strongest, the nothing folded upon itself until, for the smallest part of a moment, it was not empty.

A single point of light. White, and gold, and alone.

The first thing that ever was.

The Lack was answered. It was not satisfied.

It did not cease to pull when the light appeared. It has not ceased since. Every star and every god, every mountain and every mortal life, is the Lack trying to fill itself, and failing, and trying again. Creation is not a finished work. It is an appetite that has never been fed.

That is why no age of the world has ever endured.

That is why none ever will.

So began all things: not by will, nor by design, but because the nothing could not bear itself.