1. Arcadia

                                    

                                          



From whence did creation come from?
                          
Surely it must have started from somewhere, some small isolated point in all of time and space that would later expand and give way to all of reality as it was currently known. The multiverse could not have been the way it was now, a vast collection of different universes that chattered about and were annoying background noise in the Void, the space in between all the universes. Once upon a time, a very long time ago in fact, there must have been no noise, when the entirety of all creation was very young.
                          
But how creation came about, how the multiverse popped into existence and thus eventually every other universe in existence along with every living creature that crawled, hopped and walked, that remained a mystery that not even the painter could solve, for he was the only living thing that could rival the age of the multiverse. Though in reality, he had not been alive since the beginning of creation.
                          
Ink was not entirely sure about the origin from where he came from. Like the rest of reality, why he had suddenly popped into existence without any real reason was hidden from his mind. He had come into being when creation was very young, when there was only one universe and none more. The original universe, Undertale as many call it, was the first universe that popped into being. Perhaps if the painter had not been there at all, than it would have continued to be the only universe in existence.
                          
But the painter had seen loneliness in the Void, with its heart of white and silence that knew nothing of music or sound. He had taken it upon himself to create more universes, to fill up the empty space of white with as many things as possible for the Void was a blank canvas and he carried a paintbrush. He created hundreds of thousands of worlds in the time he had been alive, crafting each and every detail of every universe with such detailed precision that he could remember each and every thing that he had ever made with the work and magic of his paintbrush. He could tell you a story about how he sat for hours in the universe of Underswap, fretting over what blue hue he should have used to paint Blueberry's trademark outfit just as easily as he could recount a tale of painting some lone blade of grass that would seem almost indistinguishable amongst the thousands of others like it in a forgotten meadow that might never again be seen by any other living creature. 
                          
It was why this was especially hard for Ink, why it felt like killing a part of himself every time he slammed his fist on the Erase button, eradicating whole universes whose coding was deemed to be too instable to exist. But it was necessary, as Dream often reminded him. It was impossible to create anything if this much damaged coding existed, floating about like a cancerous substance in the white hell of the Void.
                          
But what the painter and his friend did not take into account was the unnatural properties of the damaged coding, the way that the war between Ink and Nightmare had unleashed unchecked amounts of energy that had forever altered the corrupted coding, forming it into something new. And when coding such as this interacted with one another, they began to merge, to come together to form something, to create a being when it was thought impossible for the multiverse to create any living thing in particular. 
                          
The creature that was created from these strange pieces of coding found themselves lost in a world of white, inside a hell where there was no time and no space, no nothing. This did not bother the creature for it had not known anything different in the last few seconds that it had been alive, so why would it want to find anything different? As far as the creature was concerned, this was reality, a vast empty sheet of nothingness.
                          
The creature wandered around for a bit, wondering what it would find inside a world where nothing existed. Though there was nothing special about this world of white, the creature was sensitive to a profound feeling of pain and chaos that seemed to be woven inside the world that it walked in, as if the whole of reality had been ripped wide open and was bleeding. But was that a bad thing, a good thing? The creature did not know for how could it be expected to know anything different when this was all it had ever known?