Foreword. Out of Nothing Comes Everything

This most astonishing of tales begins
When space and time were just a fleeting reverie
Within forgotten nothingness
So what befell that divine serenity to give way
To such fanciful and painfully elaborate chaos

We piece together this tale
From the runes of a language still in its infancy
You'd be forgiven to think this is the tale of reality itself
Though hear the withering echo of the universe
Laughing at this archaic notion
In the primordial forces and primeval whispers
That reverberate through the nethermost dominions of the universe

The irony, that this is a tale
Nothing and no one really understands or believes
Yet by simply existing
Everything and everyone affirms the absurdities it chronicles
This tale
Engraved on your genes
Suspended in beams of light
Interwoven in the very fabric of existence
This is the tale of how it all came to be
And how it will be

This is a tale the universe has read
To every young atom and every nascent galaxy
To all of matter and all energy
To all that is luminous and measurable
And all that is dark and unknowable
To all that has awoken to sentience
And all that is still in slumber
And to anyone and anything that has ever existed
Or will exist

This tale
Written in ink dried painstakingly
By each flap of the humble wings of the butterfly
With no protagonist too insignificant
No antagonist too unformidable
From infinitesimally small subatomic wonders that are uncontainable
To unimaginable supermassive giants that are inescapable
From the most wondrously brightest
To the most disturbingly darkest
And everything in between

Behold if you can trust your senses
The only shared heritage of everything that has ever existed
Or will exist
But can you believe even the most trusted when they tell you
That out of nothing comes all of space and time itself
Reality, you see, is far stranger than all fiction
When out of nothing comes everything