Chapter Zero

epilogue
\THE BEGINNING/

Everything goes black.

Time marches relentlessly forward.

The universe is fractal, doomed to flourish and decay. The same stories play again and again, mechanically, like a flower opens each day to soak in the sun. The bonded particles dancing, separating, coming together, and annihilating one another. Moths scorching their wings on every flame they see.

Fire. Ice. The unremarkable ruin. The savior children. The entangled pair. All of the dust. All of the stardust. All turning to ash. And then, nothing.

Within its eternal cycle, the emptiness contracts, condenses, and flows out once more. Stars and suns, planets and moons take shape before crumbling away to enter new forms. Everything that comes together falls apart, and is eventually made whole again, somehow, someway.

;; ;; ;;
;; ;;

;; ;;
;;

;;
;;

;;

;

In a time where there is no time, in a place that is no place. On a fading seashore bathed in honey, there are butterflies. The scent of rain lingers like fog. Grand castles of sand brush against the sky. And there is a little girl holding her father's hand. They are round. They are bright.

Here, where nothing ends, they remain unchanging.

A/N: Why yes, I did wait until the 1st to post so the update/publish dates match.

The beach can be whatever you choose. A parallel universe. The afterlife. A story imagined upon death.

I don't know why I wrote this. It started as a way to organize and externalize the thoughts in my head, but it turned into searching. Now that it's over, I don't know what to search for, or if there's any point in searching at all. I am drained. I am done.

If you have for some reason read this far, thank you and I'm sorry. Maybe someone will get something out of it. You'll probably just think I'm nuts.

There are a million different ways I wish I had taken this, and I hate almost everything about it. Knowing me, I'd hate it no matter what I did. So, fuck it, I guess.

I wish I had more time.