The cold, endless expanse of the void stretched in every direction known to mankind and several they had not begun to understand. It was an expanse so vast and so ancient that distance and time, as concepts, began to unravel at its edges. There were places where one could travel for decades, if one who cared about things like distance and time could even exist here, and find they’d looped around back to their starting place. There were times that if one moved, they’d find themselves aged into nothing, or a decade younger, or perhaps they’d move perpendicular to time, and see themselves moving, an ant across pavement and realise they were their own god. Some would realise they were the ant.

  Sound did not exist. Here, matter did not exist, and so nothing could carry sound. Silence reigned supreme, but it was a cool and distant ruler, observing and judging but carrying out no justice against those who offended the sensibilities of its domain.

  Despite this, should one find themselves in this realm and not instantly be unmade, they would detect a sensation that would, in the primitive euclidean subjectivity of man, be interpreted as a hum. Omnipresent, continuous, and varying enough that one could feel it on their skin and almost hear music. Almost.

  This darkness where silence held court was not fully silent, then. And nor was it fully dark. Pinpricks of light stretched out, an unending sea with uncountable distance between each point, but still a swirling galaxy of varied light. Each dot moved, twirling into something orders of magnitude more complex than the three-body problem could even describe. When two stars twist in orbit, their paths can be predicted, but three objects behave chaotically, twisting and twining and shifting one another off course. Every point of light seemed to pull and push on its neighbours, and the result was an endless dance that made picking one light out and following it truly impossible.

  These, however, were not stars. They had no mass, no matter, and thus no gravity. Their weight, if it could be called that, was in correlation to their brightness, and their brightness directly related to the strength of this pseudo-hum they broadcast out. No, not stars.

  These were souls, singing out to each other, to the void, and to their minder.

  It was not a god. A god implied worship, and mortal minds did not worship this being. They did not understand it, did not know of it, and did not conceive of even a thing like it. Instead, they saw shadows of it, projected onto the walls of their reality, and gave these shadows names, power, and their praise. Like this void space, the entity had many names, but listing them would be as pointless as naming this space.

  It existed longer than any mortal. It existed before mortals could exist. Before time arrived and ordered the realms beyond this void, gave them structure. Humanity was a new thing. These pinpricks of light, these souls using this void as a between place, after death and before what came next, were restless, tiny… and fascinating.

  This shadow from before, light, amorphous and inhuman, was to anyone with sight a darkness that sometimes bounced light like matte walls. Sometimes they’d see it absorb the light, swallow it and end it, leaving only a deeper darkness between the watcher and the rest of this span of reality. Some would feel its mass pull on them, gravity in a realm without it, driving their attention as much as their matter towards it. And others would simply scream, unsure what they were experiencing.

  Especially if its eyes fell on the watcher. Even the void seemed to recoil from this being’s attention. Anything observed is thus changed, and even Nothing followed this rule when the Shadow looked into it.

  “Always more…” The voice was deep, and like the hum, not exactly sound. “They just… arrive.”

  The Shadow moved around the edges of this galaxy, the brightest souls that had pushed themselves away from all the rest, and were thus flung further and further out into the expanse. Those eyes focused on one of these bright souls approaching it, and a blossom of light and memory flared within the Shadow’s own mind:

  Family. Warm, calloused hands gently wrapping around the hips of a child, supporting them as they tried to walk for the first time.

  A curled fist. Hateful words in his ears. A man’s jaw against his knuckles, silencing those words. Righteous anger.

  Dignity. Kindness. Laughter.

  The Shadow hummed softly, synchronising with the soul’s own hum. The soul couldn’t hear him, they could not understand anything but the strength of their own memories, but still this Shadow sang with them, brushed against the core of the soul: a shell akin to stone, blazing with light. The power of those memories provided strength to the soul, and propelled it away from the others, into the void.

  The Shadow watched the soul fly off, deeper into the void, then turned away, back to the cloud of swirling souls. That soul would find its way onwards. The bright ones always did. They always broke free eventually.

  The Shadow pushed deeper into the cloud. It twisted and warped to avoid contact with the endless dance, choosing not to allow its own presence to affect things here. It was content to watch this new arm of the Soul Galaxy.

  There were patterns one could find, if they knew where to look. The brighter a soul, the faster and more aggressive its movements. Dimmer souls moved less, but pulled more. They changed the paths of the bright souls. One in particular drew the Shadow’s attention, and this one it reached out to.

  Laughter… but while hands held a man under water until the man stopped moving. Hands on hips, but this time it’s a grown woman being held, pulled onto a lap despite her struggling and the uncomfortable look on her face. “Chill out bitch,” the words roll out against the woman’s neck. “You want a tip, right?”

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  The Shadow pulled back, abandoning the dark soul to its vicious, vile memories. For those souls, consumed by evil and hate and greed, they would linger here, twisting this galaxy around itself… They slowed down the progress of the brighter souls, catching them in their orbit.

  “You’ll be there for eons, little cinder… Your glow will fade… Your will, will break...” The Shadow’s voice was in sync with this dim soul’s hum, but it was a mockery, not in celebration. The soul trembled in its core, recognising something from outside its shell.

  “... until you cannot keep out the void… and then you will be undone…” The Shadow moved on, the dark core of this part of the Soul Galaxy stretching out ahead of it. The bright souls that came through here often were propelled out the opposite end with relativistic velocity, the burning light shifting in color from the speed of its movement. This core twisted slowly, endless. Sometimes souls would bump into each other and that shell would crack slightly. These chips and cracks exposed the souls to the void, and more and more of their light stripped out and away.

  Shattered shells bumped against the Shadow’s body, their matter, or whatever analogous structure gave them some form, coming apart at the contact. That was part of the Shadow’s task, a task it had taken upon itself while wandering these galaxies. If it had to explore this realm and tend to its borders, secure it from intrusion… it might as well clean it on the way.

  “Wicked, wicked things… you feed things you do not understand. Your heavy souls not only draw in your kin, but things from beyond that -”

  The Shadow stopped, suddenly. Its eyes scanned a section of void, then the galaxy. A section of this galaxy was moving oddly. Twisting around empty space. It stared into that section of void, and the void rippled, clenched… and refused to retreat.

  “Hmm.” It came closer, reached out with senses, but could not pierce the void. It clung, miasma-like and magma-heavy, to something. Something that did not belong here. “You like this one, don’t you? What a feast for you… but what is it?”

  The Shadow marshalled power it usually only had to muster in battle. Its shape warped, turned, inverted. Blades of its own void slipped into the deeper, immobile darkness, and sliced it away, carefully. It recalled a memory from an archaeologist, who had taken pride in carefully, gently prying secrets from the ancient earth, and the Shadow hummed, enjoying this moment of connection with a soul long past… and then freed something from the clutches of the void.

  It was a soul. It was pitch-black. Almost void-dark, but it reflected light. The obsidian shine, smooth and glass-like, of its shell was alien to this creature that had wandered these soul galaxies since the first souls slipped into this strange between-space.

  The Shadow’s gaze unveiled nothing to it. That shell was impenetrable, and that… that was startling as well. No soul had ever prevented The Shadow from peering into it. It leaned in closer, then reached out… and touched the soul. Fingers of darkness wrapped around it, squeezed gently, curious.

  That contact put the full force of the Shadow’s awareness on the shell, and as powerful and curious as this soul seemed to be, it could not keep out that ancient curiosity.

  Blood. Screams. Body after body, hewed down with steel, teeth, and hand. Joy, twisted into this violence. Rage. A refusal to back down. To rest. Vengeance. A craving for revenge. Betrayal on both sides. A traitor who turned on the traitor.

  The Shadow withdrew as if burned.

  “What are you, lost one?”

  “You… have held out the void. I cannot tell why, or how, or for how long…” It reached out again, grabbed the soul, less hesitant, less careful. –

  – It bore down, squeezing its essence against the sphere, worming senses and strength into its surface. After a moment of this pressure, more thoughts flared across its mind.

  A crown, not worn but seen. A face beneath it. A trusted face. Treasured face. A friend.

  A command, startling in its suddenness. A sharp shock of steel. Drowning. Pain. Pain and rage. Rage and pain. Swirling and twisting, mirroring the souls outside and -

  The Shadow withdrew again, out of breath. Not really, these beings did not breathe, but the sensation it was feeling, the posture and the way it felt, were reminiscent of that feeling.

  “You’re aware. In some fashion you can see this void. That… that is fascinating.” The Shadow reached out again, but a tremor in the void, far away, drew its focus, and the Shadow was drawn to its true duty, away from the Soul Galaxy.

  ~

  It visited once. Many of the souls in this arm of the galaxy had moved on, and most of the dark souls had crumbled. This place was not empty, though. There were always more.

  The obsidian orb remained, the void pressing to it, seeking a way in. The Shadow cut it away and wrapped its awareness around it.

  Battlefields. Burning homes. Soldiers piling bodies, retching in the smell, but he didn’t care. He’d grown accustomed to the smell. To the death. It was no more interesting to him than the crap he left behind in the shitter. Like the leftovers of his meals, this was simply the final product of him carrying out his purpose. He’d been made for this, and he would do it to anyone, everyone, whomever he felt like pointing this at, and nothing could stop him.

  The Shadow withdrew again, shaken once more. Vile souls it had encountered before. It recalled the first human to commit murder. Even that soul had not been this… dark. The Shadow pulled back and turned its attention away to more pleasant matters.

  Not long after, though, while it still grappled with that curious revelation of the depths of darkness in that obsidian soul, wind rolled through the void. The galaxy twisted, distorted by this pressure, and The Shadow spun, casting its awareness out for the source…

  There. It was not light; it was not darkness, but a third thing, perpendicular to those two extremes. A rift of it opened and swallowed up something at the heart of the dark core of this wing of souls, and instantly the entire pattern shifted. Bright souls suddenly flung outwards as a tension was released from them. Dim souls caught in narrow orbits suddenly crashed together. The sudden noise-but-not-noise of this event drew shrieks from the outskirts, and the Shadow raced off to deal with the intruders.

  When it returned, it found only one thing out of place. The Obsidian Soul was gone.

  “Who in all the realms would pull such a black spirit out of its eternal reward?” The Shadow’s voice was not angry, just even more curious. “Which of my kin needs someone like you?”

  The Shadow turned away, then eyed the swirling lights as they attempted to return to as stable a configuration as they could.

  “Perhaps you will return and tell me yourself…”