When the walls of its reality fell to dust, the creature that had been trapped within it was instantly faced with so much more than its previous existence could have prepared it for.
There was shock. After spending the whole of its existence filling all available space, the fact that it didn’t instantly expand to the new endless volume around it came as a surprise, even if there was no reason to assume it would. It was just what it was used to, the idea that it wasn’t going to get to experience everything around it all at once seemed almost unnatural.
Through that feeling of surprise though was something else, something it hadn’t experienced before and could barely understand, even if it was growing to know that it didn’t like it. It was feeling pain.
As confined as it had been, it was a creature of a universe, born to a reality with its own set of rules which it had lived under for the entirety of its being, but now that was over. It was in the primordial chaos, its body being swarmed by infinitely shifting rules with nothing to protect it, each change twisting and warping its form in ways it couldn’t know or understand, only granted the small mercy that was its limited knowledge. Due to the reality it had been born into, it barely understood itself in a way that others would find meaningful, freeing it from the horror that being so changed would have otherwise caused it, and as it slowly adapted, the pain subsided.
It wasn’t just growing accustomed to the chaos, without knowing it, it was forcing its rules on the space around it, the nature of its lost reality providing just a bit of structure that the endless void had lacked, keeping it safe from the greatest of dangers of its new environment and with that bit of peace, leaving it with a question it had never gotten to ask itself before.
What to do? With an infinite expanse before it, for the first time in its life it had options beyond just carrying on, options it wanted to explore while it suffered under that newfound freedom. If it could do anything then where would it start?
Time wore on as it struggled under that freedom of choice, but eventually it picked randomly. There was something off in the distance that it would explore first and it decided to make its way over.
…It first just needed to figure out how to move.
After it realized that the straining it had done to help break its reality could propel it further, the expanse opened up to it as it stretched out to its target, ages passing as it made its way there.
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Distance was another new idea to it, but it wasn’t long until it fully understood that the target it selected was far. Impossibly so. If it weren’t for the stimulation that came with the new environment, it would have felt identical to the first part of its time, trapped within walls with nothing to do.
Within the chaos though, something was always happening around it.
While not constant like the thing it was coming upon, stuff was endlessly coming in and out of existence, born from shifting rules that a lack of reality operated on, the chaos living up to its name as it showed itself to be a place where anything could exist, even if only briefly.
Watching things flicker in and out had become a pastime on its long journey, every bit of it interesting and exciting enough to make the trip smooth until it finally arrived at a new wall.
Unlike the one that had been its original home, this one was huge, endlessly so. When it was close enough to touch it, it seemed to stretch across in all directions, even if it had seemed like a dot when the journey to it had first started, but now it was finally there and pushed forward to break it down.
For only a moment, it had caught a glimpse. Not a reality like it had been born to, nor the chaos it had traveled to get there, instead it found a universe that was filled with curiosity. With its senses, it could feel things within those walls moving and shifting, interacting with themselves and changing each time in a beautiful, unending dance, enrapturing the beast born to solitude at what had the potential to exist beyond its frame of reference, briefly being exposed to the unending beauty the multiverse contained until a sensation pulled it from its wonder.
Pain, unlike anything it had felt when it first entered the chaos, assaulted it as it tried to keep pushing its way through to whatever existed on the other side of the wall as its body faced a new challenge. It had managed to adapt to the constantly shifting rules of the chaos to an extent but the fixed rules beyond that wall were a different matter. They were too strange, too alien compared to the reality it had been born into or the new place it needed to call home. It was a place that was rejecting it on a fundamental level, letting it get only a glimpse of what laid beyond before it had to leave as its body slowly repaired itself.
The pain of living in the chaos had been nothing in comparison, essentially just a new stimulus for it to wonder at, but that had been different, a suffering unlike any other that left it rushing away from the wall for fear of what it held despite the beauty that had captivated it.
It didn’t know or care about where it was going, all that mattered was that it was away, somewhere safe from the harm that had just been inflicted upon it, but little by little it calmed down.
As awful as it had been, it had been just one time, it could already see more destinations in the distance and as the pain it went through slowly faded from memory it journeyed out to its next one, ready to see if they would be different.