"I have no voice that explains where I began, no mouth to tell why I was imagined or how I was assembled, and I have no idea who deserves thanks for my simple existence, assuming that thanks are appropriate. I recall absolutely nothing about my exceptionally murky origins ... but I know well that for a long cold while I was perfectly mute and only slightly more conscious than stone, sliding through the emptiest, blackest reaches of space, my only persistent thought telling me that

I was to do nothing but wait ... wait for something wondrous, or something awful ... wait for some little event or a knowing voice that would help answer those questions that I could barely ask of myself....

For aeons and a day, I felt remarkably, painfully tiny. Drifting through the cosmos, I imagined myself as a substantial but otherwise ordinary species of cosmic dust. Compared to the vastness, I was nothing. How could I believe otherwise? Unobserved, I passed through intricate walls woven from newborn galaxies-magnificent hot swirls of suns and glowing dust, each revolving around some little black prick of collapsed Creation-and among that splendor, I was simply a nameless speck, a twist of random grit moving at an almost feeble speed, my interior unlit and profoundly cold, my leading face battered and slowly eroded by the endless rain of lesser dusts.

Through space and through time, I drifted.

Galaxies grew scarce, and the void was deeper and ever colder ... and when I might have believed that I would never touch sunlight again ... when my fate seemed to be blackness and the endless silence ... I found myself falling toward a modest disk of stars and dust and little living worlds....

By chance, a young species-the human species-noticed me while I was still descending through the outskirts of their Milky Way. Brave as fools and bold as gods, they built an armada of swift little ships and raced out to meet me, and to my utter amazement, I discovered that I was enormous- bigger than worlds, massive and enduring, and in their spellbound eyes, beautiful."

-The Well of Stars, by Robert Reed