Z is for Zero-year

As the walls began to fall around me I concentrated harder than ever on removing my thoughts. I didn’t know what it would do but it felt like the right thing. As the rocks fell their journeys echoed around the chamber like long-buried thunder, deep and rich. As I pushed harder on my thoughts, forcing them from me, the sound lessened until it was inaudible. I was completely within my own mind and I had removed from it all of my thoughts. I had had no reason to fear the void — I was the void. It had no colour; not even solid black or white as neither of those colours existed anymore. It was not silent either, but instead devoid of all noise including silence. It was removed from all of the senses. It was eternity and it was a micro-second. It was everything and nothing.
In a moment the natural order returned and the vacuum was filled with a flood of images, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings. Like a surfer battling the roof of a wave I felt myself suddenly deluged. But just as the void had pushed my sanity to the limit so too did the rush of information. I was overwhelmed to the point of instant exhaustion — my mind torn to shreds by trying to follow so many different sources at once. I felt pressure pushing me out, causing me to grow so that I could accommodate all of this data. When finally it seemed as though I could take no more and that my mind and body would explode under the pressure it all stopped. It was still in me but it wasn’t jostling to be seen, heard or experienced. Instead it waited to be selected just like any other memory.
I finally opened my eyes and looked down at the oval through which Death spoke but it was gone. The void had transferred from inside of me to the outside. Somehow, the entire world had been eliminated. I hovered in the air, above and below nothing, and felt tears come to my eyes. Until that moment I wasn’t aware that I could cry but when I did it felt amazing. It felt as though I was crying out all of the data that I had collected. It was like a relief valve had been activated and I could remove them from me. The weight had near destroyed me and now it would go. I would be free.
I felt a tear wander down my face and onto one of my tentacles, leaving behind it a line of cold clarity in a place where heat and crowd had been the norm. I felt the tear leave me, jumping down toward the nothing that surrounded me. I was fascinated by the concept of unending nothing so I watched the droplet fall away with interest. It hovered a few feet away, stopped by absolutely nothing, and then it started to spread. It bloomed across the nothing and created real versions of the thoughts that had rushed into my head. I was rebuilding a world of tears.
I want you to know now that the yonder-realm is here and it is open to you should you need it. Welcome to the birth of an entire universe — year zero.