Before the Stillness, there was not silence.

  There was not darkness.

  There was not void.

  There was Unknowing.

  A realm without shape or boundary, where nothing could be named because nothing yet existed to do the naming.

  No time.

  No form.

  No witness.

  Only a drifting, endless Maybe.

  In this pre?realm, possibility slept like an unhatched egg.

  It did not dream.

  It did not stir.

  It simply was — a presence without presence, a thought before thinking, a seed before seeds.

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  Some say this Unknowing was the first ancestor of all things.

  Others say it was the last remnant of a universe long forgotten.

  But the truth is simpler:

  It was the condition from which existence could one day emerge.

  Within the Unknowing, faint tremors of potential gathered.

  Not sounds.

  Not movements.

  Just the earliest hints of what might one day become sound, become movement, become life.

  These tremors did not seek creation.

  They did not resist it.

  They simply drifted, waiting for something — anything — to disturb their endless Maybe.

  A ripple.

  A vibration.

  A question.

  Something that would break the Unknowing and give it direction.

  Something that would become the first cause.

  Something that would one day be called a croak.

  But that moment had not yet come.

  The Unknowing rests.

  Waiting.