But first, there was nothing.  Not light.  Not dark.  Only nothing spreading throughout everything and forever.

Sounds.  Sounds were everywhere and all about.  Sounds were everything.  The sound of my weeping and the sound of the animals snickering nearby.  The sound of footsteps turning to me with a blind heart.

Something dry, that too.  Dirt in the cracks of the cold stone road.  Walls of mud or rock or something unforgiving behind me and blankets of a suffocating eternity everywhere else.

I tried to cry out, but my throat did not feel the tremble of voice and my mind knew the words no longer.

I was the only one, the only soul in this flat sheet of emptiness that spanned on and on and always, just past arms reach, without end.

I remembered.  Remembered something before this.  I wanted to know, I wanted to say the names for these things, even if it must be contained within me, but the ideas eluded me.  The memories hopped just out of my range.

Dark.  Hot streams of water over my face and strips of stings pulsing atop my skin.  There was black.  Black but I knew what was mean to replace it.

Loud.  Ripples of noise sent to me with deep rumbles and barks.  So much loud that I could not hear.

And a churning weight inside me.  Stirring up and spitting out fear and sorrow and terror so quick I boiled over my edges but could not put out the fire beneath.

Pain.  Swift sharp pain and the blackness was gone, ran from the void that consumed the world a moment later.

With my bed of brick and lullaby of canine howls, I fell from one helplessness, one inability and one vulnerability to the next and back again to the first in instants that stretched into eternities.

Words.

Kind whispers and words I knew and words that broke through to me.

I struggled to make noise so that the words would draw nearer, close enough to shine past the oblivion.  Though I felt and heard and tasted things change around me, a dreamy quality still held strong in the air.

Silence ensued.

I was even further petrified to think they were gone.

Voices.  Soft and strong.

I reached into the world of empty to snatch from it these entities.

It left and I wept in the greatest despair I had known.

But one remained, one stayed and lifted me from my immobile place, and a quiet sigh asked for silence.  I obeyed and shivered, then stopped.  No need to move.

Time was not as it was, like this.  Here I thanked the gods for the moments I received and I prayed for nothing more than for the measured breathing beside me.

I was let go, placed back into that place deprived of depth, but it was warmer now, gentler, and not empty, with the other voice returning.

The soft one, the one that had traveled unknown eternities to bring me to the outskirts of existence, it retreated now and I choked in my alarm, but powerful words guided me through the absence of the other.  It stayed with me through that relived infancy, and when I slipped from the inattentive grasp of the void and into a stark and welcome white, the confidence it brought to me kept at my side.