A great wave seemed to flow through Aysus, briefly sending a ripple through its silken folds before bringing the entity to an even greater level of stillness. It rolled faintly to the side, moving away from the wellspring, but paused almost immediately as the infinitesimal pieces of matter that now scattered the universe touched it. Aysus seemed to draw in on itself, almost reflexively, before the weave of matter began to move. The pieces of matter skirted away from it, and even though space was not the same as nothing, it was, like darkness and silence, the closest to nothing of which Aysus knew.

Slowly it moved further and further away from the wellspring, and the number of threads around it began to fall back to a normal number. The matter moved aside in front of it, and came back together behind it. Only once it had reached a familiar and comfortable level of threads did Aysus settle to a stop and try and relax. But its own need to keep the matter from coming in close and continually bumping and brushing against its self kept Aysus from truly obtaining peace. That was, at least, until Tahaan moved in around it, swirling quickly in the gap between Aysus and the matter, instinctively understanding what its counterpart needed at that moment. Tahaan's actions kept the pieces of matter from touching Aysus, and left it with nothing but space. Then Aysus was able to truly relax, and it settled into itself, exhausted, unnerved, unbalanced, but still ultimately ready to face the constant challenge of the notion of change.

Gradually, as Aysus relaxed, the equally weary Tahaan began to move in closer to its counterpart. They settled into each other's presence, and assumed the closest thing to sleep that either of them had ever known. And so they drifted, Tahaan swirling lazily around Aysus, who floated in its bubble of space.

Aysus returned to presence second, and instantly noticed the restlessness of its companion. It shivered slightly in thanks, truly grateful to Tahaan for creating a space of relative safety and familiarity even as its own instincts drove it to go play, and explore this new world that they had created together.

[i]~You can go now. Thank you.~[/i] Aysus murmured gently, freeing its companion to exploration. Despite their affinity for each other, they were, in the end, different beings, and they each had to explore this new reality in their own way.

As soon as Tahaan left, the matter began to move back in. Aysus tried to ignore it, tried to pretend that it didn't care about the things that were constantly bumping up against itself, but it could only hold that pretense for so long before it forced the matter to once more scatter away from it by forcefully tugging on the weave of space and matter. Once more it was left with a bubble of space, and the shivering of its form wherever a piece of matter touched it quickly faded away.

This was so very different from the light and the noise, because there was no way for Aysus to escape it. Tiny pieces of matter spiraled away into the edge of infinity, as omnipresent as the threads themselves. The lights that Aysus and Tahaan had made were somewhere in the distance, concealed by the threads of dimness, but there was nothing Aysus could use to conceal the matter.

It knew it had to find a way to adjust, to understand, to accept. It had thought it accepted back before it had been done, because it had understood that they had been making something it had never experienced before, but the space between the idea of different and the reality of different was far greater than Aysus would have imagined.

Slowly it began to draw the matter closer to itself, and even though it was hesitant about the action it was also very deliberate. This time, when the matter ran into itself, Aysus did not allow it to scatter back out and away. I theld them together, bonded the little pieces until the little piece became a slightly bigger piece, and bonded those slightly bigger pieces together as well. 

Aysus did not know exactly what it was doing. Aysus was a creature of contemplation, not of experimentation. But there seemed to be no other option for this strange new thing that was matter, and Aysus could not help but hope that, if it experimented enough, it might be able to find something that it could understand.

Slowly the pieces of matter began to grow and grow, until it had a piece large enough that it could watch it slide through the universe, a wrecking ball that knocked all other pieces aside. And it was, at that moment, that Aysus realized something truly astonishing. The matter was still.

It was not that it did not move through space; it most certainly did that. But the matter itself did not move. The pieces that were in the center stayed in the center, the pieces that were at the edge stayed at the edge. Despite being new and chaotic, the matter was the most still thing that Aysus had ever truly experienced. It drew closer to it, and reached out to it hesitantly. This time, no shiver coursed through its body, because it felt the strange, foreign likeness of the thing before it. Matter was not a foe, not something to be escaped or destroyed, but a like thing, something about which Aysus could truly understand. They were two things, floating through vast infinity, trying to find the stillness of a constantly moving and shifting world.

Slowly the matter that Aysus had been holding back, holding away, began to drift freely again. This time, Aysus drifted with the pieces, no longer bothered by their brief, flitting contact. This time, somehow, it felt comfortable.