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In the beginning, there were trees.
This will be important, later. Remember: in the beginning, there were trees. An entire forest of bone and foliage and rock and the sharp edges of the newly but not properly dead.
The denizens of this forest, they call themselves almas sin sombra. They were a little lost, is all: their afterlives on hold. This sharp, silent forest is just the rest stop in between.
Some of them are ancient and awe-full, warriors of ages long past. Others are younger and ambitious. They are souls, of all creeds and kinds, but they are not rightfully dead. They do not age and they do not create waste, but their bodies still ail them. They wait and wait and wait, the only sound in an empty forest.
Soon, they grow hungry.
Never thirsty, never tired. But, oh, they grow hungry.
They turn on each other, with wild eyes and sunken faces and the frantic human need to evade death – a true, final End – even as it looms overhead. They sink their teeth into each other, desperate to fill the deep ache within; the deep want to be alive. Their bodies contort, warp and stretch as they consume each other greedily. They have forsaken their afterlives even further, becoming slavering, hungering creatures.
Mudas, they call themselves. Hollow shells.
It changes like this: one day, a new soul arrives. Remember, this is still a beginning. There were trees. A whole forest of them, spread as far as the eye could see. Tall, crooked things with leaves like arrowheads.
New souls were a joyous occasion, in that the almas sin sombra gathered in hopes of greeting a new friend (and less joyous in that the Mudas were lying in wait, in hopes of partaking in a new feast).
But not this time. This soul changes everything.
A new soul arrives, and the forest becomes a desert.
(This is what arrives: a soul so strong, so bright, so plentiful, that other souls cannot help but be drawn to it. Or is it a soul so dark, so twisted, so malicious that all others are consumed by its presence?
Either way, there arrived a soul, so very much something that it brushed against all the souls of the forest—the Mudas and the remaining almas sin sombra—and gently, kindly, crushed them into dust.
Every twisted carapace and body was almost lovingly soothed out of existence, and that eddy of a hundred thousand souls became part of the new one, their memories and wants and individuality swept away until nothing was left but raw energy.
The new spirit, having assumed the form of a creature with many eyes and sharp teeth, shudders in its newly dead flesh and wonders at the emptiness of the desert around it.)
Socavón, it eventually decides to call itself. A cavern, collapsed. Empty. Alone.
This is what it comes to know: loneliness.
There were no other souls when it arrived, only sand and the faint echo of screams on the wind. How curious this afterlife is, it thinks. How cruel.
The first time a new soul arrives, the creature is so ecstatic. So happy to not be alone again.
The sands of the desert stir as the new soul begins to materialize a short distance away, and the creature’s joy quickly turns to horror; before the soul is even fully formed, fully-present in this barren half-afterlife—it begins to scream.
You must understand: such a strong soul, so much energy, so close by? It’s like being drowned in boiling water, like being dragged down into the depths of the ocean, slow enough to feel the air being crushed out of your lungs. It’s like slowly being smothered beneath a planet of enormous size.
That soul—not even truly cognizant, only knowing an instinctual, merciless pain—burst into dust, its energy broken down and consumed without a thought.
That creature, horrified and now even stronger, but still painfully alone, howls up desperately into the barren desert sky.
After the two hundredth soul, it changes its name: Agujero. A void that consumes all.
This is how centuries pass: the creature with too many eyes and too many mouths and too much soul, that calls itself a void, runs until it is exhausted, paws raw from the sting of the sand of the dead twice over. It runs to the very edges, the farthest stretches of the desert (that used to be a forest, with trees). It runs and runs and runs, but the new souls still die again and again, screaming.
That is the only sound in the desert: the screams of dying souls and the horrified screams of their killer.
One thousand, seven hundred and thirty-one souls consumed and it resolves itself into they. Still too many eyes and too many mouths and now with souls innumerable, but a they nonetheless. From the depths of the swirling tide of consumed souls, another consciousness breaks the surface.
It’s so quiet, one says.
I’m so alone, whispers the other.
It is better, they decide, to be alone together.
Agujero y Colmillo. Void and Fang. Both bared, and consuming.
It gets better, for some measure of the word.
They have run until their paws dripped blood, until their claws split and their mouths gasped, dry tongues lolling. Instead of running out of desert, it was as though the desert spread with them, and sprawled out into something… larger. That rest stop, that used to be a forest, had become its own dimension. Its own world.
An empty world, barren of life because of them. A little dimension carved out of nothing and full of the half-dead and they who unwillingly consumed the half-dead. Hueco Mundo.
They have long since mapped out these new spaces, its far reaches and its hidden landmarks. There are crystalline caverns to the west, and sharp cliffs to the north. The sands have risen and shifted and risen again, and in the east they find a forest, full of sharp, silent trees.
There is space, and with it, half-life.
They have not spoken to another living soul, ever. All they know are the screams, and the way the sands shift. At least now, though, there is enough distance—enough space—that the new souls are not immediately dying. They test the distance, crawling closer and sprinting away, ears perked forward to catch any sounds of life.
In the middle of the desert, too far to see but close enough to feel and hear, the new souls have started settling, marking territories and fighting amongst themselves. These new souls call themselves hoyo, after the holes that mark their bodies as incomplete.
The hoyo are interesting, enough that they almost want to move closer, but they don’t dare. The other spirits—those many, many souls crushed and consumed by the ever-growing Void—never had holes. They were just as spiritually incomplete, as evidenced by their presence in this idle-world, but the almas sin sombra, the mudas, and all the spirits in between had all been physically whole.
Something, somewhere, has changed.
Perhaps, the hoyo are different, Agujero thinks. Maybe, we could…
Maybe, Colmillo agrees.
But they keep running further and further away, spreading their overwhelming presence thin across the vastness of the desert. They do not trust themselves. Not yet.
What they do not know—could not know—is this: amongst the hoyo, who fight and kill and eat each other, thriving like wild parasites, there is only one irrefutable belief, and that is el oleaje. The invisible, rolling wave of pressure and presence that sits low in the desert sky, heavy and languid. It gazes down at the hoyo with eyes unseen, but it is an undeniable strength that cannot be ignored or avoided, with the exception of escaping to the World of the Living.
That pressure is most bearable—thin and breathable—in the middle of the desert, so the hoyo cluster there and create a pueblo that they call El Remanso. Over time, as the wave continues to thin in concentric ripples, the hoyo split off into groups and packs as the small town furls outward.
The serpentine hollows—nomads who know the patterns of desert as intimately as they know their own scales—hiss their warnings not to stray too far out, no matter how idle el oleaje seems. The further into the desert, they whisper, the heavier el oleaje grows, as sudden as anything and it is like being smothered, like drowning in invisible sand, like being swallowed whole.
That, the hoyo whisper to themselves, is surely their God, their Keeper, the Lord Sovereign of this sprawling, quiet desert.
That, they shudder, is surely Death.
The sands rest at ease, for a while. Far off, where the edges of the desert fall away into crystalline trees and empty caves, a creature with too many teeth and too much soul listens and waits.
The population of the hoyo booms, until the desert feels nearly full. Thriving, if the dead could thrive.
And then the Shinigami come.