There is no light in the realm of The Perpetual—not the kind one would recognize. Stars exist here, but they do not burn. They flicker like dying embers, weak and distant, their glow vanishing into the infinite void almost as quickly as it appears.

The Perpetual does not see the stars. It knows them as it knows itself—an endless, crawling thought, a sensation felt deeper than any perception of sight. It knows them the way a dreamer knows the shifting of their mind in sleep—without reason, without direction. In this place, there is no distinction between perception and existence. Everything is the same: endless, without beginning or end.

And The Perpetual has been here since before time itself. Before the birth of stars. Before the first breath of the universe cracked the silence of existence. Before anything. It was here before the universe came to be, and it remains after the last one has passed.

It remembers everything, though it does not know how. Memory is strange here, an echo that reverberates through the void, slipping through the cracks of an ever-expanding awareness. It is not the remembering of moments or specific events, but the feeling of existence stretching so far back it becomes indistinguishable from the fabric of its being. It is a knowing that transcends time itself, for time holds no meaning in this place. Time, like everything else, is merely a thought—a fleeting, ungraspable thing.

The Perpetual’s awareness stretches across the endless dark, where there is nothing but its own presence, an isolation so vast and constant that it has no name. It is not loneliness, for loneliness implies the possibility of change. There is no change here. There has never been another, and there will never be one. It is the silence of eternity, unbroken and eternal, the absence of anything but itself.