Silence was the first sound.
It pressed against the stranger's ears like the weight of a thousand unspoken truths. When they opened their eyes, the world around them was gray — a vast plain of shifting dust and slow-moving clouds, lit by a sky with no sun. The ground pulsed faintly beneath their palms, like something sleeping just under the surface.
They did not remember their name. Not their birth, not their death, only the sensation of falling — endlessly, softly — through darkness until this place caught them.
Etched across their skin were lines of light. Runes, old and alive, pulsed in quiet rhythm with their heartbeat. Each throb sent a shimmer of energy through the air, stirring the dust into faint spirals. When they tried to stand, the runes brightened, and the ground answered — small tendrils of light crawling outward, rooting into the earth as though the world recognized them.
Then came the voice.
"Traveler," it said, echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once.
The stranger froze. "Who speaks?" Their voice felt unused, as though borrowed.
"The soil itself," the voice replied, soft and ancient. "You have crossed the Veil of Forgetting. You are newly sown."
"Sown?" the Traveler repeated.
"Yes. You are seed and sower both. Your essence has taken root here, and from it, your power will grow."
The Traveler looked around, seeing now faint shapes in the mist — ruins half-swallowed by the dust, shadows that might have been mountains, or the bones of forgotten gods.
"What is this place?"
"The First Stage," said the voice. "The Garden of Beginnings. Every soul who touches the Infinite begins here. You are not the first, nor will you be the last. But your soil is different. It remembers."
The Traveler knelt, pressing a hand to the ground. Beneath the surface, warmth stirred — a deep pulse, slow as the heartbeat of creation. For an instant, images flared behind their eyes: stars blooming like flowers, worlds unfurling from threads of light, voices singing in languages older than time.
Then it was gone.
The Traveler's pulse quickened. "What am I meant to do?"
The voice smiled — they could hear it, somehow. "You must farm power. Feed this place with will, with emotion, with the fragments of what you were. The stronger your harvest, the greater the world that will bloom from you."
"And when I have enough?"
"Then you will plant your first Worldseed. And from it, you will birth your own reality."
The voice faded, leaving only silence again — that patient, living silence.
The Traveler looked to the horizon. Somewhere in the mist, light flickered — distant, beckoning. They took their first step into the unknown, unaware that with it, the soil beneath them began to breathe.
The world was listening.