The Pleroma

Every other story in this archive begins after something went wrong. This one is what went right, and it is told at length and on purpose, because a fall is only as far as the height you fell from.

The Invisible Spirit is not described, it is un-described: not vast, not small, not good, not nameable, since every word you would use is a word borrowed from the world it has not made yet. But it is surrounded by its own light, and it looks into that light, and the light looks back. The returned gaze is Barbelo, the First Thought, the first other, and the first instant in which the All is no longer alone.

From that looking comes the Autogenes, the self-begotten Son, and around him four great Luminaries, and within them the Aeons, unfolding in pairs, mind with truth, word with life, each pair whole, until thirty of them stand in a harmony so total that the Fullness has no word for want. Nothing here is withheld. Nothing here is owed. This is a civilisation with no history, because nothing has ever happened to it.

And at the far edge of it, last and outermost, one Aeon looks past the boundary at the Invisible Spirit she has never seen, and feels something no one in the Fullness has a name for. The story stops there, on the held breath. The reader already knows what she does next. That is precisely why it hurts.