I could no longer tell if it was my head that was spinning or the world itself. That was how distorted my sense of time had become. The days passed in a manner of minutes, although the exact period was always shifting, and I felt it a miracle I had not yet been flung off into the expansive void of space. My legs would not respond to my will, although otherwise I did not feel distinctly uncomfortable.

I questioned whether or not I was the only one who found myself in this rather compromised position. Ever since I had entered this delirious state I had not seen another example of humanity, although sometimes I believed I heard them. However any manner of unrelated noises can resemble the murmur of another man to one as disconnected as I was, so I dismissed these as merely the noises the Earth made when it thought no one was listening.

As the sunrises and sunsets continued to pass at a fantastic pace, the fluctuations of time (or at least my perception of it) became less scattershot. Where before it would speed and slow such as a car going through the streetlights and traffic of a town, it now moved as though the car had made it through to the freeway and was now accelerating down the open road. Soon I could no longer distinguish the passing of night from a blink of my eye.

Those murmurs, for their part, continued. Curiously, as time sped they seemed to become clearer. The delays between each grew shorter, and they came to sound less and less like obscure grumblings and began to form a sort of low, halting speech. Altogether the effect was somewhat ominous, but I was glad for something other than mundane thoughts to occupy my mind. I began to pay close attention to the sounds, trying to decipher them even though I didn't really expect that they meant anything.

I am unsure just how many days had passed at this point. It was probably a number less than it had felt, but still had to have been within the tens of years worth. Oddly, I felt no worse for the wear. My body showed no signs of aging, I was not hungry, nor did I feel the need to sleep. All that I did was watch and listen, a captive in this mysterious occurrence as the entirety of existence accelerated around me.

I was now certain that those sounds were indeed something other than entirely random. Words started to form from them, and the pauses between them space separating those words. Admittedly, they were not of any language I knew of, although I am anything but knowledgeable in the field of linguistics. They didn't even seem to be composed of any letters that I could use to imitate them here. But somehow I knew there was a level of heft behind them, that they simply could not be an unintelligent collection of the natural undertones of the universe.

Never did the question arise within my mind of whether the voice was speaking directly to me. I knew from the beginning that it was not. What it felt like instead was that I was of no more importance than a child with his ear pressed to a keyhole; hearing in as the room's inhabitant spoke to himself of whatever was on his mind. So therefore the actual question became why it was he was speaking. What was the purpose of these far-permeating ramblings? They did not seem to carry any particular emotion with them, although I doubt I could recognize it if they did. Similarly, they did not invoke any such emotion in me. I was not fearful, I was not anxious. The murmur at not point made me feel as though I were in danger.

Perhaps, then, it was the voice of God. Maybe it was the voice of a lonely Creator, alienated by his omnipotence, passing the millennia away in his heavenly realm. I decided at that point I no longer wished to remain silent in my odd experience. I pushed my own voice through my lips, and it came out as a high-pitched squeal, melting away into the flickering Earth. Again and again I spoke, lowering the pitch and the tone, accustoming myself to talking in this accelerated world. When I felt confidence in my abilities not to form words, but to at least declare my existence, I called out to the murmur. I scratched out a low guttural moan that ripped at my throat, but I kept it up, proclaiming my presence to whatever it was which rumbled through the universe.

The murmur stopped, and so did time. I moved my legs and I stood up, feeling as though I had just slept for centuries. I spun around in place, observing the frozen world around me, one that was now unrecognizable from the one I had so well known before. It appeared to be evening; the sky above painted a fiery orange by the descending Sun. Slowly, creakily, like a train inching forward after a sudden stop, the Sun began to fall further. Soon it rose behind me, and then fell again, and the process repeated over and over, reaching speeds it had not touched before. The murmur returned, echoing off the boundaries of the galaxy in a piercing, singing shriek. All of Creation whirled before me, and I watched as the sky filled with supernovae, as the sun expanded and grew red, as the oceans boiled and the mountains were ground to dust by the wind. Then everything went dark, the stars left the sky and the ground below my feet trembled. The universe tore itself apart, atom by atom, as I stood there in the growing nothingness.

The murmur halted once more. The void of presence and time that passed afterward were longer than anything I had to this point experienced, yet it felt like nothing in the calming absence of all else. Then from blackest of black arose the whitest of whites, at first but a shimmering oasis piercing the bare canvas of oblivion. I moved myself towards it, although I do not know how as my body seemed to have abandoned me. I felt more like a cloud, floating through the sky on a gentle wind. The oasis drew closer to me, and as it did so I felt a sort of electrical power flowing through my being. As the blinding whiteness overwhelmed my senses, I came to the realization that this power awoke certain compulsions within me. I wanted to create, I wanted to build, I wanted to set in motion an new universe where the old one had fallen, and like one is aware of his ability to think, I now knew that I could.

The murmur returned, though now it seemed to be fading away in a direction unknown. It whispered a few final words; words that I could now understand perfectly and knew were directed towards no one but me.

"Now it is your turn," it said.