The cosmos is never empty.
What is often misunderstood as void is merely a region where meaning ceases to speak.
Between clusters of stars bound by laws of precision, there lies an expanse of space that is never truly silent. It emits no light, reflects no sound, reveals no structure, yet all Hayzarim know its name.
Khaos.
Not God.
Not a creature.
Nor merely nothingness.
Khaos is the primordial state, the original emptiness before all things were given limits. It fully exists, yet possesses no will, no purpose, and no meaning. It does not create; it precedes creation. In Taurari mythology, Khaos is depicted as an infinite mass of cosmic gas, drifting without center, without edge, without intent, the ruler of empty space that never asked to be worshipped.
Unlike God.
If God dwells in Fotèy, Khaos dwells nowhere.
If God transcends space and time, Khaos fills space before time knows how to flow.
And between those two realities, the Absolute and the Empty, lives a creature cursed by consciousness.
The planet Taurari rotates in an order that is almost too perfect. Its atmosphere is layered with a thin greenish glow, the result of particle interactions long understood by Hayzarim science. There are no unpredictable storms, no earthquakes that cannot be modeled, no natural phenomena without mathematical explanation.
Taurari is a world that has succeeded rationally.
And that is precisely where the problem lies.
The Hayzarim have long accepted that God exists. There is no ontological debate, no sect of denial, no war of faith. God, who is nameless, is acknowledged as the foundation of existence itself. He is known through conceptual epithets: I Yu'os, ʻO ke akua, Diosawa, Taqi ch'amani, K'anon, not to define Him, but to mark the failure of language when confronted with the Absolute.
God is All-Powerful and All-Exalted, Mana & Nui.
God is One and Holy, Musamman & Tsafta.
God is All-Knowing and Most Near, ʻIke & Pili.
And yet, He remains Indi makita, untouched, unperceived, never present as phenomenon.
There are no temples on Taurari.
No altars.
No prayers of request.
There are only observation towers, rising toward the cosmos, not to seek God, but to understand the limits of the self.
In one of those towers stood Mea ʻimi.
He stood still, both eyes following the curved line of Taurari's sky as it slowly shifted color with the planet's rotation. Before him stretched a cosmic map, not an image, but a mathematical representation of space, continuously updated. He knew exactly what he was seeing. He knew the laws operating behind every light. He knew the probabilities of stellar birth and death.
And precisely because of that, his chest felt tight.
Mea ʻimi did not seek God because he doubted His existence. He sought because he could not live as though that existence demanded nothing. For him, accepting God as an ontological fact without asking how creatures ought to live beneath Him was the most subtle form of intellectual dishonesty.
Khani'a teaches tranquility.
Mea ʻimi felt unrest.
He knew that God could not be made into an object. He knew that every attempt to force God into language, numbers, or models would end in the collapse of meaning. Yet he also knew that consciousness created by God was not created to remain silent forever.
"If God is Most Near," he thought,
"why does experience feel so distant?"
The question was not considered heresy. There was no prohibition against thinking. Yet there was also no encouragement to go further. Most Hayzarim had made peace with that tension, living productive lives beneath a God who never intervened.
Mea ʻimi could not.
Beyond the observation towers, within the discursive space of Khani'a, the name Khaos was rarely spoken, yet always present. It was not God's enemy in the sense of a cosmic war. It was the logical consequence of reality: that before meaning, there is emptiness; before will, there is directionlessness.
Khaos does not oppose God.
It is ontologically opposed.
If God is the source of meaning, Khaos is the absence of meaning.
If God is existence that requires no cause, Khaos is a state without cause and without purpose.
And what unsettled the Hayzarim was this:
Khaos fully exists, and can be detected.
Empty space responds to instruments. The void has structure. Khaos, in its primordial form, is a cosmic fact that can be studied. It is phenomenologically real.
God is not.
That is where the conflict begins.
Mea ʻimi realized something many Hayzarim did not wish to admit: that conscious beings live between two asymmetrical certainties. On one side, God who exists absolutely yet cannot be touched. On the other, Khaos that fully exists as measurable emptiness, yet offers no meaning.
He asked himself, in a silence that was too honest:
"Is consciousness created to incline toward an unreachable God,
or will it slowly collapse toward Khaos, which is fully empty yet present?"
The question was not merely theological.
It was existential.
And at that point, Mea ʻimi made a decision that was not spectacular, yet determined everything: he would leave Taurari. Not as a missionary. Not as an oppositional force. But as a conscious being who wished to test how far reality permits a search before consciousness itself fractures.
He knew the risks.
He knew that this search was not neutral.
He knew that God was not waiting at the end of the journey.
But he also knew one thing he could not betray:
"Stopping the search is not a form of faith.
It is obedience without honesty."
As Taurari continued to rotate calmly, as God remained in Fotèy without movement, and as Khaos continued to expand as primordial emptiness that fully exists, Mea ʻimi stepped into the cosmos, not to find answers, but to bear the question to its limit.
And in the distance, empty space did not welcome him.
It merely opened itself.
Because in this cosmos,
not everything that exists wishes to give meaning.
And not every creature is able to live with that.