Chapter Four: The Stars and the Realms

After Divergence Prime and before sentient beings, the universe entered its first long silence. There was no sound, no language, no civilization, no history. There was only boundless darkness, and within that darkness all phenomena slowly taking shape. Divergence Prime could no longer be seen. No one knows whether it dispersed, merged, withdrew, or continued to exist in some incomprehensible way. But it left traces scattered throughout the universe, like footprints abandoned by a traveler, or patterns left in the sand after a great wave retreated. Later, sentient beings called those traces worlds.

Difference began to settle. Rules began to stabilize. Energy gained direction. Matter gained form. Space gained boundaries. Time gained direction. For the first time, the universe learned how to sustain itself. Then the Stars were born. The first light tore open the darkness. The first fires ignited deep space. Countless stars burned in the void. Countless galaxies flowed through silence. They formed the oldest skeleton of the universe. As later scholars said, the Stars were not first the cradles of life. They were first the bones of the universe. The star-seas, galaxies, stars, planets, black holes, and nebulae together formed the earliest order of the cosmos.

Yet not every difference took the same road. Some differences settled into matter and formed the Stars. Other differences settled into rules and formed another ancient kind of existence. Later ages called them Primordial Realms. Their origin remains disputed, but most schools believe they were not created by Great Beings. Primordial Realms are older than known history, and older than most civilizational records of Great Beings. They are as ancient and natural as the Stars, only born in a different way. If Stars are the result of material difference settling over vast time, then Primordial Realms are the result of rule-difference settling over vast time. They are one of the strangest inheritances of Divergence Prime.