The year was 3022.
Earth had always ran on a series of fragile ideals — unity, peace, progress — a story the nations told themselves until the soil cracked, and the skies folded inward. In the end, they did not lose a world. They lost the world. The first. The only true home.
And when Earth fell, something deeper broke.
No mind — not human, not alien, not machine, not divine — has explained what happened next. Some call it retribution. Others, an error in the fabric of what was. But explanations no longer matter. What followed cannot be repaired.
That was the birth of the Voidlands.
Where once stretched a universe, infinite in scope and seething with stars, now only a single island remains — suspended upon a slow-drifting cloud, afloat in a breathable, boundless sky. No sun. No stars. No up or down. Only wind. Only weightless silence.
Only two remain.
One is a force of creation — radiant, shifting, forever dreaming of worlds that refuse to solidify.
She does not walk. She arrives. Where she moves, the air warms — not with heat, but with the ache of a forgotten embrace. She has no face, yet those who gaze upon her swear they've seen a mother. A lover. A storm at dawn. A sunrise that never came. What they see is not her, but themselves, echoing through her. And yet, no one remains to look.
She does not create by choice, but by yearning.
Each movement leaves behind a miracle:
A garden of fruit bearing trees.
A staircase spiraling into a hallow tree.
A beast with no eyes that sings lullabies before fading into the wind.
She never reacts. Perhaps she cannot finish what she begins. Or perhaps she dares not, knowing that to finish is to end. Some say she is the void — that the island floats only because she remains upon it. Others whisper she is imprisoned, not by walls, but by laws erased from memory. Even the Temple denies her. Its doors stay sealed when she draws near. Sometimes, when the wind hushes and even the stars seem to hold breath, one might hear her think. It sounds like a wordless hymn — a resonance inside the bones. Those who hear it forget something sacred. But have no knowledge that it happened.
Legends say she dreams the Voidlands into being, and that when she wakes, it will all be gone. There are whispers that her opposite — the destroyer — was once her companion. Or her creation. Or her undoing. But she does not answer. She simply watches.
She is not a god.
She is not a being.
She is the ache between what was, and what could have been.
And she is waiting.
The other is a force of justice — cold, precise, dissolving all that dares persist too long.
He is stillness without peace. Where he moves, sound folds inward. Not silence — but absence. The breath before the scream. The hush before judgment. He wears shape like a curse: a figure draped in layers of ash and rusted armor, faceless but for a single slit of red flame where a mouth might once have been. His presence carves the air, as though reality itself makes way for him in fear.
He does not build. He ends. Not in rage, but in precision. In purpose. With a hand that does not tremble. With a love so old, it no longer resembles mercy.
He believes in justice. But not the kind mortals begged for. To him, all things must reach their proper end.
And if they do not, he brings it to them.
Where the Shaper dreams, the Severant remembers. And memory, he knows, is a wound that must be burned shut.
With a motion, he can unmake anything — matter, thought, cause, effect — stripped away with no fire, no violence. Just… gone. His voice, seldom heard, is a blade of truth. Lies die beneath it. Minds fracture in its presence. And when he marks something — a being, a building, a feeling — it fades slowly, irreversibly.
He watches the Shaper always, not with anger, but with sorrow.
Or perhaps remorse.
They do not speak. They do not strike. But they revolve around one another like dead suns, bound in orbit, waiting to fall.
He, too, is barred from the Temple. Not because he lacks power. But because he remembers what waits within. And even he would not survive it.
Some say he was once a guardian — a cosmic judge, tasked with order. But the universe collapsed, and he endured. Others claim he is the echo of an ancient war, the weapon that outlived its wielder.
Upon the Temple's sealed threshold is carved a single phrase, in a language none remember:
He ended what could not bear to continue. He preserved nothing — and in doing so, saved everything."
He is not evil. He is not merciful. He is the answer to a question no longer spoken.
And he is waiting, too.
Not to build the Voidlands…
…but to end them, if the time comes.
And between them stands the Temple. A monument from a forgotten age, built by hands no longer remembered. It holds every memory, every name, every wound ever carried. But neither of the two may enter. Neither recalls why.
Time has splintered.
Now it is Year Zero.
There is no light.
There is only air.
There is only void.