Imagine the years falling like rain into the depths of time.

Imagine a spark flickering in those depths, so tiny as to be imperceptible were it not for the vast emptiness that surrounds it.

Imagine an… awareness, weak at first, formless, barely a breath on the wind.

Watch as it passes through the aeons, growing without movement. Tendrils stretch out from its core into the nothingness, indefinite and vague like smoke in the breeze. At times it contracts, sometimes gently, sometimes violently, but its slow, inexorable growth always returns.

It knows nothing of itself, for there is nothing by which to judge self. It does not perceive, it does not reflect. It only exists.

Now imagine that in one instant, after some incalculable expanse of time so close to infinite that it may be considered no different, in one instant all this changes.

An ethereal tendril stretches out as it has countless times before and meets… resistance. Something it has never felt before. Indeed, it has never felt before.

Now it feels. Now it experiences. Now it reacts.

The tendril retracts convulsively, then expands once again, exploring this intrusion into its solitary existence.

It experiences its first thought, though thought it barely is. The amorphous, indistinct sequence of sensations that pass through this being can hardly be termed so.

Nevertheless, it thinks. It thinks…

What are you?

As it feels its questing arm encompassed, entangled, and squeezed, it feels its first emotion.

It feels fear.