I was two years old the first time I walked to the forest on my own.
This was not an authorized excursion.
Mara had put me down for what she expected to be a nap in the early afternoon, which I had allowed her to believe was likely. I waited until her footsteps moved to the other end of the house and then I got up, which I was now capable of doing without difficulty, and went out through the side door that did not close all the way when the weather was dry.
I want to note, for the record, that this was entirely deliberate and not reckless. I had been planning it for approximately three weeks. I had scouted the route from every angle available to me from inside the house and from the yard. I had assessed the distance, the terrain, the time I would need, and the window before Mara came back to check on me. Everything had been considered.
The forest behind the house was not large. It was the kind of secondary growth that accumulates at the edges of agricultural land, dense enough to have interior shade but thin enough that you could see through to the other side on a clear day. The Duren family used the nearest edge of it occasionally for firewood.
I walked into it.
The change was immediate. Not dramatic, not frightening, just a shift in the quality of the air and the sound, the way forests always feel different from open ground. There were birds in the upper branches. I could hear them clearly.
I walked to a tree that was larger than the others nearby, an old one with bark that had grown thick and furrowed over what I estimated were several decades at minimum. I stood in front of it for a moment.
I was testing something specific. The plant deaths had all occurred with living things in close proximity to me without any deliberate action on my part. I wanted to understand whether deliberate action changed anything. Whether I had any control over this at all.
I put my hand against the bark.
The tree did not die.
I kept my hand there. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Nothing dramatic. The bark was rough under my fingers. Something very small moved in the roots near my feet, a beetle or something similar, moving away.
Then, slowly, the moss on the bark directly under my hand began to gray.
Not the bark itself. Just the moss. The small living layer on top of it, which went from green to a dull, faded gray over the course of about thirty seconds while I watched, in a roughly hand-sized patch that corresponded precisely to where I was touching.
I moved my hand six inches to the left.
The new patch of moss began to gray.
I lifted my hand entirely.
Everything stopped.
I stood back and looked at the tree. The two patches of faded moss. The bark underneath, which was completely fine. I processed what this meant.
It was not random. It was not indiscriminate. It was proportional to contact, and it stopped when contact stopped. This was not a passive radiation of destruction in all directions. It was a surface effect. An interaction.
Which meant it was, in some form, controllable.
I was two years old and had just conducted what was, to my knowledge, the first empirical test of Void energy ever performed with a living subject. The subject being me.
I noted, secondarily, that every bird within a radius I estimated at twenty meters had gone silent at some point during the test. I had not registered this consciously until I noticed the silence. Now I noticed it completely. Not a single sound from above. They were still there. I could see shapes in the branches. They simply were not making noise.
They started again slowly, a few at a time, once I had stepped back from the tree.
I turned and walked back to the house.
I made it inside, up onto the sleeping mat, and into a plausible sleeping position approximately four minutes before Mara came to check on me. She looked at me for a moment with the particular expression she used when she was not quite sure what she was looking at, smoothed my hair, and left again.
I stared at the ceiling.
The moss patch would recover or it would not. The birds would settle or they would not. These were acceptable outcomes either way.
What I had learned was that I was not a passive phenomenon. Whatever this was, it responded to intention, at least partially. That was not nothing.
That was, actually, the beginning of everything.