Member-only story
Fiction
The Listener in the Lacuna
The Silence Between Stars
You will never find it on the map. Not because it’s hidden, but because the concept of place simply doesn’t apply. It is the Void Realm: the Emptiness Between Breaths, the blank page upon which the faint impression of existence is barely visible. There is no light because there is nothing to carry that light. There is no sound because there is nothing for the sound wave to travel within. There is only the deep, black quiet of Before.
And before that, there is a listener.
If there were a way of translating the meaning of his name into the sounds your lungs could make, it might go a little like this: Kaelen. He doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t there. His body is not made of flesh and bone, but from an amalgamation of intention and memory strung together in the semblance of a human figure from a galaxy of starlight which fell asleep and forgot to sparkle. He moves, not through space, but through the potential of it.
His job is to listen.
Something happens in the Void. It is not empty. It is a womb. And universes are created there. They explode into existence with a silent mathematical bang! A cacophony of the formulation of laws of physics. And then their stories start. The stories that Kaelen listens to. Not with…
