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The birth of the universe was a humble affair.
There was no bang, no explosion of atoms and fire into the great nothingness of The Before. There was no sound, there was no fury.
There was only a crumbling road stretching into the darkness. An old pickup truck, with a bright green paint job that peeled where it had begun to rust, pulled haphazardly into a muddy ditch. A semi-trailer, parked behind them so that its headlights illuminated the back of the car and left sweeping shadows of the two drivers as they lent over the side of its tray.
The night was silent other than the screams and panting breaths of a woman. Quiet assurances were murmured by the men at her side, one with hair of brown and the other silver. Around them, nature simply watched. The wind did not rustle as it brushed through the leaves, the glinting eyes of coyotes sat as silent guardians with the rabbits by their side. They were waiting, though for what they did not know.
Until a gasp, a waver across the silken weave of creation. The universe had been created in ripples, and at last the stone had been thrown.
Here was where the universe was born one November night, in the cargo bed of an emerald green pickup on the backroads of Pennsylvania. It was born to the chill of an upcoming winter. To the sound of the howling coyotes and the squelch of boots in the mud.
Eight thousand miles away a woman known only as The Ancient One would pause from ducking between the staves of the latest Kamar-Taj trainees, and, for the first time in her excessively long life, drop a perfectly good cup of tea, "It begins."
“Are they okay? It’s too early!” A mother huffed, throwing her head back against the walls of the tray with a metallic clang as she screamed furiously at the sky.
“I thought I had more time,” the old sorcerer agreed, ignoring the worried comments of the trainees she had been observing as the delicate china shattered across the sandstone pavers.
The universe’s first breath tasted of the loose musty oaten hay that perpetually lived in the back of any working man's truck, sweetened on the unseasonably warm night. The sky was overcast, and there was no star above their head to guide wanders their way, only the bright headlights of the semi-trailer pulled up behind them the illuminate the dark.
The triumph of the universe's screams sounded like fire in the dark. Across the great span of space, time screamed with it.
“Congratulations,” the elder man said, his weathered blue eyes misting as he turned to the new father, “It’s a boy”
He turned now to the mother, offering her a worn orange blanket he had grabbed minutes before, from where it had been carefully folded in the glove box cab of his semi. His mother had started to make it for him some thirty years earlier, after he announced his own wife’s pregnancy. A pregnancy that would take both the love of his life and his newborn daughter from him, and the grief of it had sent him running. Driving trucks for a living meant he never had to stay in one town more than a few days, that he would avoid home for as long as it took for that gaping ache to ease. The next time he returned home it was for his mother's funeral. This blanket was one of the few things he still had left of them.
He did not tell the new parents this, only offered it to the woman with a smile. “Wrap this around the boy, keep him warm until you folks can get to a hospital.”
Soul the universe would learn from the burnt umber of that woollen blanket as his exhausted mother wrapped it around his trembling frame.
“A son,” the father breathed, gentle fingers stroking the fine wisps of damp hair, “and he’s healthy?
It was one part a question, one part an utterance of disbelief. Too much could, should have gone wrong.
The boy was born early and too far from home. In the isolated darkness of the roadside, with only a first-time father and an aging truckie to help. Though help was too kind a term for their presence. No, his mother had done this alone. She had brought the universe into being kicking and screaming, and she felt the undamped pain of every explosion it had taken.
At that moment, with her purple dress dampened with a mix of blood and sweat, the universe knew power .
“Looks like someone was looking out for you,” the old man said, gesturing to the sky above with a smile. He said it with the vagueness of someone who knew religion like a long lost friend, bitterness and loving in both parts. Long had his belief lost its lustre with the reality of life, yet the memories of that comfort remained.
The baby’s eyes drifted upwards and saw the darkness of the sky as it slowly lightened with the upcoming dawn. Space , the universe would call that color, his own eyes unknowingly reflecting its brilliance. Though he knew not yet of the ground beneath him, he wondered still what lay beyond the ever expanding walls of that deep beyond. The universe created mind from the color of straw that littered the tray, and reality would be the bloody sheen across it.
The universe was a young and feeble thing, just like any newborn. The universe would have to grow up first, discover love and triumph, heartbreak and loss. He would have to learn what it meant to lose a thousand times over, to find the golden gleam of hope and life when the darkness seemed otherwise overwhelming. The universe was not a kind place, not even to himself.
He was creation. He was the beginning and the end, and the messy tangle that came in between it. He would learn to dance with reality, how to hold the power of a galaxy in his palm. And when he was ready he would paint with every color of infinity.
Time would be the first. A vehicle of sorts for all that would come next, for time was the same emerald green color as the pickup the universe had been born in.
“Do you have a name picked out yet?” The old truckie asked.
“No, not yet,” the father spluttered, still in a half daze from his panic, “We thought Donna for a girl, after my mother, but we hadn’t decided a for a boy yet, he’s so early -”
“Stephen,” The mother interrupted, trembling fingers rubbing absentminded shapes across the breadth of the universe’s brow as his eyes drifted shut, lulled by the hum of infinity settling into place. “His name is Stephen Strange.”