Norton Is A Void God Now. (Creation fic)

Chapter 1 — Norton Is A Void God Now.

(General)

The bus smelled like sweat, engine grease, and the faint chemical sting of floor cleaner that had failed to hide the staleness of fifty kids riding it every weekday. Norton sat three rows from the back, as always. Not because he liked the spot. More because no one ever told him to move, and he didn’t see a reason to change something that wasn’t broken.

The usual morning noise pressed in: laughter, phone speakers playing tinny music, a handful of shouted insults disguised as jokes. He had headphones in, but the cord dangled uselessly. No music was playing. Just silence, insulating him from having to look like he cared about anything.

Then the driver missed the curve.

Norton didn’t feel the skid so much as he saw the glass shatter, his mind too tired to panic, too used to the idea of accidents happening whether or not you saw them coming. A crunch, a scream, a weightless second.

And then nothing.

When sensation returned, it wasn’t air in his lungs but a strange suspension, like his body was gone but he was still being carried. Around him stretched a line—no walls, no ground, just a procession of faint human outlines, drifting in the same direction like spilled ink caught in a current.

He glanced down. No hands. No feet. Just a dim silhouette shaped like him, rippling when he moved.

So this was it. Death.

Ahead, a glow burned—a gate of white, tall as mountains, wide as oceans. Before it stood a figure, wings spread out in radiant arcs of feathers so bright they hurt to look at. A halo of gold hovered above her head, humming softly like a ringing bell.

The Administrator.

Her voice carried across the void, not loud but absolute. “Your deaths were not planned. For that, you are given passage into Paradise.”

Murmurs passed through the line of souls. Norton could pick out familiar shapes—classmates, the driver, even the teachers. And yes, the bullies. The same rotten mouths that had made his days smaller, grayer, now lined up for heaven on what amounted to a clerical error.

He would’ve laughed if the thought didn’t feel so hollow. Paradise for them. All because the system had sneezed. Did that mean some good soul somewhere was denied heaven because a box wasn’t ticked? Probably. If it were him running the place, rotten apples would get tossed. Otherwise, rot spreads.

The Administrator began to read names. One by one, students walked forward and passed through the shining gate. Each time, the white light shimmered, welcoming them. Each time, the angels behind her smiled softly, faces serene, untouched by doubt.

Until she spoke his name.

“Norton.”

The gate did not shine white. It flared black.

The line shuddered. Soul-shapes shrank away from him as though distance might save them from contamination. Even his classmates—his teacher—shifted, their features twisting with fear.

The angels behind the Administrator dropped their masks. Their eyes sharpened, lips curling into disgust.

“Void Soul,” one spat.

“Unclean,” hissed another.

The Administrator’s glow dimmed. Her voice, when it came, was stripped of its warmth. “A foul soul. Born without the Spark of the Creator.”

The crowd recoiled further. Norton stood still.

She went on, “Across all existence, only one other Void Soul has been recorded. It became an Existence Devourer.”

Norton snorted. “Sounds dramatic. Doubt it’s that simple.”

No one laughed.

His classmates’ faces blurred into sneers. The same voices that once taunted him now muttered things worse than they’d ever said alive. Monster. Freak. Even here.

So, even in death, he was alone.

The Administrator’s verdict came like a knife. “A Void Soul cannot be allowed into the Afterlife. Such entities consume others’ pure emotions, as they lack their own. The sentence is erasure.”

Norton’s form trembled. Erasure? Not punishment. Not rebirth. Not even hell. Nothing.

“That’s unreasonable,” he argued, his voice brittle. “You’re saying I just—stop? I could be reborn, start over.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Taboo. Risk to the Creator. The system allows no exceptions.”

Rings of light unfurled from her halo, descending like chains, wrapping around him. He struggled, soul-light flickering, dragged toward the black gate.

“At least send me to Hell!” His voice cracked. “I’ll take fire, torture, whatever—just not this cold.”

She did not flinch. “The Wheel has judged. You are a bug in the system. It is nothing personal.”

The bullies laughed as he was pulled. Pointing, their soul-faces warped with glee. Laughter that made his being tremble, not from fear now, but from anger.

The black gate yawned wide.

Pain hit like nothing he had known.

It wasn’t skin or bone breaking—he had none. It was the unraveling of his very being, each thread of memory ripped apart, fed to invisible teeth in the void. Every moment of his life burned at once: the therapists his parents sent him to, the drugs, the indifference, the bruises at home and at school. Each torment multiplied until it broke past pain into something worse.

Norton tried to scream but even sound was torn away.

One memory clung stubbornly: his name. Norton. That, and anger. Cold, hard, simple. Not anger at himself. Not at the curse of existence. Anger at them. At everyone who had failed to accept him, to leave him alone, to let him be.

Defiance stirred. The Administrator had called him a bug. If so, then he rejected their system entirely. He wanted no part in their “existence.”

So he let the void in.

Where his soul unraveled, the nothing filled him. Instead of dissolving, he absorbed. The cold became fuel.

His sight snapped back.

A shattered reality sprawled before him. Shards of matter drifted like broken glass, energy storms crackled, and carcasses of creatures too vast to name floated weightlessly. At the center, untouched, hovered a black throne.

It pulsed, calling.

Norton moved. Instinct guided him. His shape—what was left of it—sank into the throne’s embrace.

The universe outside creation quivered, and with it came memory not his own. The legacy of the Existence Devourer. Fragments of hunger, power, void.

Across his vision bloomed golden letters on black:

[Welcome, Void Creator, to the Primordial Void. The First of All Realities.]

Norton sat back, letting the cold settle deep.

Finally, something that felt like home.

(Norton)

The memories came to me the way broken glass comes back together if you shake the box hard enough. Edges, flashes, fragments — nothing in order. The throne wasn’t just a chair; it was a tether. The one who sat here before me had been… like me. A Void Soul. Cast down, or out, depending on your angle. Their ending had been bloody, full of shapes I couldn’t name and a fight that made the universe itself bleed. I didn’t get the details. Just impressions: claws the size of continents, burning eyes, an endless scream swallowed by the dark.

The last thing they did, before whatever passed for death, was weld their own essence to this void. The throne was both monument and lifeboat. A flare sent out into nothing, waiting for someone unlucky enough to inherit it. That unlucky bastard was me.

I leaned back, and the throne leaned back with me. It was colder than stone and warmer than skin, depending on where my mind wandered. It didn’t care if I wanted revenge against whatever things had torn the Devourer apart. That was their baggage. I had enough of my own.

Revenge wasn’t my style. I’d never been good at playing hero, and I wasn’t about to start cosplaying as a dead monster’s heir. No, what I wanted was simple: a place that was mine. A home. Something I never had when I was alive, not really. Now no one knew I even existed, which was both terrifying and… freeing.

“Interface,” I said, unsure if I was talking to air.

A thin black-golden script shimmered across my vision.

Awaiting command.

“Functions of this throne.”

The words flowed like they’d been waiting for someone to ask: seated here, I had almost full control of the Primordial Void. Wild energy. Shattered matter. Dead husks of things that looked like nightmares someone had erased halfway. All of it malleable if I willed it.

I almost laughed. Not because it was funny, but because the first thing that popped into my head wasn’t building stars or rewriting reality. It was a house.

So I tried.

It didn’t go well at first. The void answered like a drunk construction crew. I thought of wood; it gave me something closer to bone. I thought of stone; I got obsidian with veins of light running through it, too brittle to be useful. When I reached for marble, I accidentally generated something that looked like melted plastic. The memories of the Existence Devourer gave me vague handholds — their attempts at shaping whole worlds, creating battle-arenas bigger than planets — but none of that helped me design a roof.

“Too much calcium,” I muttered, watching a block crumble into dust.

Seven tries later, I managed to pull together walls. They stood at angles that made sense, which was progress. The throne fed me energy, the void fed me material, and I fed both my stubbornness.

At some point, I stopped aiming for the marble mansion I thought I wanted. The weight of the word “mansion” tasted wrong on my tongue. It wasn’t me. Never had been. Pretension was for people who still cared what the world thought of them.

So I shifted gears. Smaller. Warmer.

The result wasn’t perfect — uneven planks, mismatched window frames, a chimney that leaned like it had arthritis. But when I stepped through the doorway and saw the inside — a single room with a bed, a stove, and shelves waiting for books I didn’t have — something eased in my chest.

I sat on the bed. It didn’t collapse.

The void outside the walls still boiled with fractured energy, the throne still pulsed with power far beyond my understanding, and the memory of being condemned as a “bug in the system” still itched like a burn that wouldn’t heal. But here, inside this cabin I had wrestled into existence with my own hands, I felt the faintest suggestion of a word I hadn’t believed in for years.

Home.

The cabin held. That was the first surprise. Even when the void around it writhed like boiling tar, the walls didn’t collapse. That gave me confidence, or maybe arrogance. Either way, I started wondering what else I could pull from the nothing.

The throne whispered possibilities — not in words, but in impulses. Wild energy filled the void like static before a storm. Shattered matter drifted, sharp and directionless. It wasn’t so much raw material as it was noise. If I wanted a universe, I had to tune the noise into something structured.

The memories of the Devourer surfaced again, fractured but clear enough this time to give me an idea. They had tried to tame the void with elements. Not bricks and mortar, but essences. I decided to start there.

The first one came almost by accident. I thought of heat, of friction, of all the times anger had burned in me even when I had no words for it. The void responded with fire — not the campfire kind, but a roiling sphere of crimson-white plasma that wanted to devour anything in reach. It hovered above the throne like a hungry sun.

Next, I thought of stillness. Of holding my breath under bathwater until my lungs screamed. The void twisted, shivered, and coalesced into a column of water that fell but never splashed, as though gravity hadn’t yet signed the contract to exist.

Earth followed. I wanted stability. A floor under my feet. What I got was a spinning mass of rock and dust, chunks slamming together until they locked into a jagged ball. Its weight pressed on me even though it floated meters away.

And then air — or wind, more accurately. I called it by remembering all the times I wished I could disappear, dissolve into nothing. A storm took form: invisible currents lashing against the fire, the rock, the water.

Four essences. Fire. Water. Earth. Air.

They didn’t sit quietly. They fought. Fire tried to boil the water. Water tried to drown the fire. Air fanned the fire higher, but also eroded the rock. Rock crushed fire into ash, water into mud. Each one insisted it was the first and only law.

The cabin rattled as though it could feel the argument outside.

I realized quickly that the void didn’t like rules being written. Its natural state was chaos — shifting, breaking, never resting. Dropping four structured energies into it was like throwing rival gangs into the same cell.

That gave me an idea.

The Devourer had fought to destroy things. I wasn’t interested in war. But creation required violence too, just of a different kind. If the elements wouldn’t cooperate, maybe they needed a single event to break them apart and spread them evenly.

A beginning.

The interface shimmered at my command.

Command accepted. Define scope of detonation.

I thought small at first. A few miles. Maybe the size of a planet. But the throne pulsed, impatient. No half-measures.

“Fifty percent,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “Half of everything I control.”

The void groaned.

Billions of light years bent inward, energy funneled into a single point above the throne. The elements shrieked as they were crushed together. For a second, I thought I’d made a mistake — that I’d just built my own eraser.

And then the point burst.

The explosion wasn’t fire or light the way mortals would know it. It was raw becoming, a tide of existence that rushed outward in every direction. Fragments of void matter caught in the wave fused, splintered, and fused again, each collision birthing structures that didn’t exist a moment before.

I gripped the throne and let it anchor me while the void tore itself apart and remade itself in the same breath.

When the storm finally settled — if you could call a rushing tide of newborn stars “settled” — I noticed something new. Two currents ran through the aftermath.

The first was brightness. Radiance clung to half the expanse like dawn breaking forever. It gave shape to what I’d made — stars, worlds, seas of dust waiting for form. I called it Light, though the word felt too small. Order fit better.

The second was shadow. Not absence of light, but a living counterpart to it. It spread through the half of my reach untouched by the blast, curling, restless. Chaotic, but not aimless. Darkness. Chaos.

They balanced each other without my forcing it. Two halves of a coin I hadn’t known I was minting.

I leaned back in the throne and stared at the horizon — not that horizons existed here, but I made one anyway.

Light and Darkness. Order and Chaos.

For the first time since my bus veered off the road, I felt something close to pride.

This wasn’t heaven. It wasn’t hell.

It was mine.

-2533 words-