The Lost Artifact Of Spode

000 Intro

Deep in the white abyss, the large, vast space isn't completely empty. Thick blobs of colour orbit one another, brightly contrasting the area which it lives. Like oil paint that had spilt onto a blank, white piece of paper. Forming, twisting, and merging with one another, but never do the colours combine with the others.

These blobs form familiar shapes, then dissolve for a moment. They try forming again, as if the colours are attempting to create something recognisable, before falling apart yet again. One more time, these blobs throw themselves together. They create a sphere with swirls of red, yellow, and blue. The colours separate once more, now revealing a black figure.

The blobs of paint dance around this shadow, as if they were happy to have created something to join them in this blank abyss. But what is this creature doing here? He wondered the same as two white eyes appeared on the figure's head. At first, the shadow's eyes followed these blobs of colour dance around him, then they trail to the blinding white surrounding him.

While this world is completely unfamiliar to him, he felt as if he somehow knew where he floated. As jarring as the liminal space is, it's also oddly comforting to the creature. As if this place were a home he was ripped away from when he was too young to remember it.

The splotches of colour suddenly knock this creature out of the trance they put him into as they created a ground below him to stand on. Gravity slowly returns to the shadow as he's carefully placed on the swirl of colour below him. Swirls that struggled to stay in their coherent shape. While it didn't affect the shadow at all, the colours couldn't stop swirling, clashing, and dancing around one another and the figure before them.

Without a thought, the shadow begins to walk on the new surface with no destination in mind. On prompt, the colours jump from behind the creature to where he steps, allowing him to walk the path he chose. While he could go anywhere, in any direction, he chose to continue the path in front of him, as if he were following a script with no say for change.

Eventually, he reached his destination. The blobs of colour no longer formed a path before him, but instead began to tower on top of one another. The closer the creature steps, the more colours are added to the mass, eventually creating a coherent shape of a pedestal. The shadow's steps falter, curious as to what's appearing in front of him.

It's not until the figure is directly before the pedestal that another shape begins to take form above it. But unlike the times before, the colours were finally able to combine with one another. The blobs are sucked into a single point above the pedestal, slowly destroying the colours that once made it up, and swirl into that singularity with a bright glow. The creature has to turn away to shield his eyes from the light, but instinctively places his hands below the shine, expecting to catch this light.

It's not until a mass is dropped into the shadow's hands that he finally looks back to what's before him. In his hands in a faintly glowing star of a rich golden yellow. Not the kind of stars one would find in the night sky, but a five pointed one, with a red, matte jewel resting in each point. The star is roughly the size of the creature's chest. The mass is heavy, but not enough to put stress on the shadow's arms. For the first time since arriving here, the creature felt warmth. While he wouldn't have called the place he stood in cold before, feeling the star radiate against his body had him reconsider.

Suddenly, noise came from the white abyss. An incoherent noise barely audible, but compared to the harsh silence that followed the creature in the very beginning, that noise stabbed him in his ears. He looks around the emptiness, trying to find the source of the noise.

"Help," it barely whispered. "Help me."

If the figure had a mouth to open, he'd ask back, "Where are you?" However, he couldn't speak, and all of the colours that once gave him a path to walk on had all disappeared into the star he now held. The voice continued to speak, but the creature couldn't make out anymore words. He could hardly make out a voice. Or, was it several? Is that his name he heard? He began to wonder if he even knew the language the voices spoke in.

The noise gradually grew louder and more chaotic, but never anymore coherent. As the noise surrounded the shadow, the world around him grew darker and darker. When the abyss turned as dark around him as the shadow himself, the star began to crack. The figure couldn't stand the noise anymore. He drops the star to cover his ears.

As if a ground existed below him, the star loudly breaks at his feet. The creature tightly shuts his eyes, as if he could will himself to disappear from this situation.

Suddenly, from the chaos surrounding him, the creature is able to pick up a single world.