The Void That Waited

by Christopher W. Quigley

Long ago, before stars knew how to shine and before time dared to tick there was only The Void.

It had no name, because nothing had ever been said.

It had no edges, because there was no thing to press against it.

It had no temperature, because warmth requires touch, and there was no thing to touch it.

The Void simply was, is.

Silent. Still. Infinite.

And in that perfect, endless nothing, something happened.

A rupture, a tiny tear.

No louder than a whisper.

No larger than a sigh.

A tremble, perhaps, or a flaw in the stillness.

From this shiver, a small bubble formed— not a clean or polished sphere, but a dirty bubble, a scum of hot matter and light clinging to itself in the way foam clings to filth.

It burst outward, violently, into the infinitely frictionless, infinitely cold, infinite vacuum of nothingness.

And so, It began. At first, It didn’t know what It was. But quickly, It realized it was full of things: light, heat, atoms, gravity, motion, life.

It wriggled and rolled and roared, giddy with its newness.

It called itself Something. It called itself The Universe.

The Universe danced in delight, unaware that it had intruded.

The Void watched, patient and unchanged.

It did not mind. It had no opinion.

But as time passed, The Universe grew uneasy.

It was stretching, expanding—not from ambition, or desire or hunger but because it was falling outward.

There was no thing to stop it. No walls to contain it. No friction to slow it down. It screamed into The Void, “Who is pushing me? What force is driving me apart?”

But the Void was silent.

It had no voice.

Scholars and the stars gathered to argue. “There must be something!” they said.

“A great energy! A pressure! A force we do not see!”

So they gave The Void a name: Dark Energy.

They treated it like a god, or a ghost, or a trick.

But still, the Universe stretched.

Eventually, an old beam of light—one of the first created—approached the edge where The Universe dissolved into The Void.

“What are you?” the beam of light asked. “Why do you unmake us?”

The Void did not answer.

It simply received the question, and in doing so, dissolved it.

Because the Void is not cruel. It is not kind. It is nothing.

The Void is the absence of all things.

The canvas before the painting.

The silence before the song.

The nothing before something.

As the Universe spread wider and wider and thinner and colder, chasing the illusion of meaning…

The Void waited. As It always had. As It always would. As It always will.

For in the end, all things return to nothing.

And nothing, unlike everything else, is patient.