From the ether, I watched.
Not through the universe. Not through the serpent.But from the quiet place where creation could be observed without being touched.
The anomaly had wandered for an age that the young gods could not yet measure. A whisper of silver-light drifting between galaxies, slipping through nebulae, brushing against the laws of existence without ever touching them.
It grew.
Not in size its form remained small, barely larger than a child. It grew in presence.
In gravity.
Its essence deepened as the universe whispered around it: energy bending subtly, starlight flickering when it passed, destiny's threads vibrating in patterns even Destiny could not see.
And then, for the first time, the anomaly paused.
In the space between two spiralling galaxies, where the dark was soft and the light was thin, it lifted its trembling hands.
Not knowing what it was. Not knowing why it existed. Not knowing that it was alone between two realms that had never meant to meet.
A pulse left its body.
Small.
Tender.
Silent.
But potent.
The universe stirred, recognising something not born of itself yet carried by its breath. The anomaly reached again, fingers trembling like a child touching water for the first time.
The dark bent inward. Stars dimmed. Matter folded gently around the creature, responding to a voice it didn't know it possessed.
And then a realm bloomed.
Not a god's realm, deliberate and shaped by identity.Not a Night-child's realm, crafted from fundamental power. This one was… something else.
It shimmered between silver and starlight, edges blurring as if undecided whether to exist at all. Its mountains rose and melted into rivers that floated like ribbons across the sky. It's ground pulsed with life but held no creatures. Its light breathed in and out, always changing.
A realm without laws.
A realm like the anomaly itself.
Born uncertain. Born between. Born without precedent.
I felt its creation ripple through reality, and though I would never cross the boundary, the vibration brushed the ether like a shiver through my castle walls.
I turned my gaze toward the universe.
Night felt it too.
Across the cosmic veil, her shadows stiffened. She stopped in the middle of tending a collapsing star, head lifting sharply as though someone had whispered her name.
A force brushed against her familiar yet alien.
Silver…and something else.
Something that did not belong to any god, any beginning she knew.
She drifted through the dark, searching the threads of shadow for the source. When the pulse came a second time, her eyes widened.
She called to her children.
Dream was the first to arrive, drifting softly from a nebula, their hazy form glowing with curiosity. "Someone is dreaming in the waking world," they murmured.
Destiny arrived next, stepping through a fold of space, their eyes flickering with paths they could not decipher. "I cannot see it," they said, frowning. "It is hidden from possibility itself."
Destruction-and-Creation appeared in a flare of stormlight, restless. "A new force? Something to break? Something to rebuild?"
Night did not answer.
She already knew.
Death emerged last silent as the void. Their presence calmed the cosmos around them. "A soul unlike any other has moved," they whispered.
Night turned to them all. "There is something… someone… out there. Not god. Not mortal. Not one of us." Her shadows wrapped around her children like a protective cloak. "I felt silver. I felt the universe. Both. Woven together."
Destiny's eyes widened faintly. "Impossible."
Dream drifted closer to Night. "It might be afraid," they said softly.
"It might be dangerous," Destruction muttered.
"It might be lost," Death replied.
Night lifted her hand, and the shadows parted like a curtain revealing the faintest ripple of silver-starlight in the distance.
A call.
A plea.
A signature of something both living and broken.
"Our universe is not alone anymore," she said quietly. "Find it."
Her children swept into the cosmos Dream tracing its echoes, Destiny mapping impossible paths, Destruction-and-Creation cleaving through storms seeking its pulse, and Death following the quiet currents where endings gather.
They went to seek the anomaly.
They did not know what it was. They did not know what it meant. They did not know what it could become.
But they knew this much:
Something new had been born. Something unbound by law or lineage. Something that did not come from the universe… yet now had a realm of its own.
And as they began their search, far from them, the anomaly sat at the centre of its shimmering, shifting world, small, trembling, staring into the light it had somehow created.
It did not know its nature.
It did not know its origin.
It only knew one thing:
For the first time since its birth, it was not afraid.
Not anymore.
Because it was not alone.
It had a realm. It had a place.
And the universe…was coming for it.