The void was eternal.
No stars or time neither was light except the kind that should exist — the kind that bled rather than shine, pulsed rather than illuminated, that had been old when the concept of old was still learning to crawl.
Only the slow, deliberate heartbeat of something that had never begun and would never end. A rhythm felt in the marrow of reality itself, in the spaces between atoms, in the silence that existed before silence had a name.
In the centre of that boundless dark floated the Red Door.
It stood alone.
Thirty metres tall.
Its surface was the colour of a wound that had never been allowed to heal: deep, living crimson veined with shifting black sigils that moved like smoke given purpose, forming and unforming constellations that had died before the first galaxy was born.[1]
