Darkness…

  There was nothing… the void around me wasn’t darkness like I had once known. This was the absence of… everything. There was no light, sound, vibrations, nothing at all. I had no form, no body, nothing to reference where I ended or where this void began. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t panic, couldn't understand. Everything was gone.

  I could tell that there was something… or that there used to be. Something had existed before, but it was gone now. Destroyed so absolutely that all that was left was a memory of a feeling… not a true memory itself.

  But even with that memory… I drifted through this void, feeling all the things that used to be. It went on for an eternity. Time had no meaning, and I just became numb to it.

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  A realization struck me about this feeling. The remnant essence of all the things that used to exist made up this place. It no longer existed, but was unmade, and it created this place. This place used to be real, but now it was nothing.

  Destruction was the first thing my mind could link with this feeling. But then a name for it appeared in my mind, as if it had been whispered to me by an unheard voice. Like someone else wanted me to hear the word.

  A thunderous crash rolled through the void like a heartbeat, echoing where no echoes should exist. A surge of reddish-orange light tore through the emptiness, staining the nothingness with impossible color. It wasn’t light. It wasn’t fire. It was finality, burning across the abyss in a pulse that shook what remained of my being.

  The word arrived like a revelation, whispered by no mouth, spoken by no tongue, yet thundered louder than the previous silence of the void. It filled me, tore through me, branded itself into what I still was.

  A name older than the world, able to exist inside the nothingness that engulfed me.

  Annihilation!