Once upon a time, there was a short story. It was happy, and lived wild and free with all of the other little stories in Storybookland. But then one day an evil sorceress named Ignorance came to Storybookland. With a great, terrible voice, she proclaimed a curse upon the stories' world: that they would all be forgotten.
And so they were.
One by one, screaming in fright, the poor, helpless little stories began to disolve. They clung to each other desperately, trying to fight the evil sorceress, but there was nothing that could be done to stop her.

Meanwhile, in a world not so far away, but very hard to get to, lived a great multitude of creatures called humans. There was once a time when their world had been beautiful— dirty, and imperfect, but beautiful. And they had had great ideas and thoughts and inventions and dreams. Their world had shared a special Link with Storybookland: though they could not travel between the two like a portal, the Link had given them their ideas and thoughts and inventions and dreams that had made their world so great and beautiful. The Link was named Imagination— a word from an ancient, forgotten language that means "breath".

But the Link had decayed, with the dying of the stories. And soon the world of the humans fell to chaos and terror. Fire ravaged the lands, and destroyed the stores of their life-sustaining crop, which they called hope. The humans and their lands were destroyed, just as the last of the stories— the poor, dear little short story that had only recently been living wild and free with its fellow stories— disolved away into nothingness. The evil sorceress grinned, for she had defeated the worlds.

Then suddenly, she screamed: in a whirling, fragmented wind, her feet began to disovle. And then her legs. And then all of the rest of her. For the evil sorceress had erased all of the good and the memory of good, and there was nothing left to contrast evil with. Therefore she—evil— could not possibly exist.

And then, there was nothing.

Or, more simply, there wasn't.