"This Land", Part 1

Before the beginning there was not. After the beginning there was nothing and there was potential. Not even the status of formless chaos had been attained.

Time passed, of a brief and insignificant duration.

Into this nothing faded the form of a girl with chestnut hair and green-gold eyes. She wore a dress of yellow and a floppy hat that spoke of summer. Looking about as if direction actually meant something, she smiled. There was much for her to do, none of it questioning the wisdom of how she might be visible without illumination.

The first shaping is easiest to gloss over, yet it took her long and hard study before she was able to realise even the most basic of forms. Impatience pushed her to quit many times, tempting retreat back into herself where at least her imagination had no waiting period, but of course she did not give up with finality and learned at last to give shape to the nothing.

It took the size and the form, more or less, of an island. A very crude island of mostly flat solid rising to a vague peak in the middle and bordered not by water or indeed anything at all, just nothing. The underside was a rough mirror image of the overside, so that from a distance it might seem as though a great spindle of land had uprooted itself to go adrifting wherever the wind might take it.

The girl examined what she had made. She saw it was the best she could manage for now, so it would have to do. She landed herself near the edge – it could not honestly be called a shore – and announced to no one in particular “I shall call it 'This Land'”. And then she laughed, because she was precisely the sort of person who would laugh at her own jokes.