Box of Blackness

The  box is wood and metal. It's difficult upon first inspection to tell its composition. It is painted, covered with symbols and it emits the perfume of magi, a scent inimitable that was bottled during the second lunar landing, although nobody discovered it until years later. It doesn't, at first, look to be a box. What it contains, inside its blackness, is the universe. It is a doorway, true, but it is also the entire universe, inasmuch as the seed of a thing, or the passageway through the seed of the thing could ever engender the thing itself and particularly how that might be dependent upon the composition, whether wood or metal, and what parts therein might transcend their materiality. The matter is still being discussed by faculty of agriculture and art. It also doesn't particularly matter, as the composition of eternity is not a question we are here to answer, or if we are, then we are here, also, to fall short, which may or may not mean failure. One can see the challenge in describing this box, which is really just an enclosure with a lid. It could also be depicted as a creature with many eyes, or a rainbow, or a prism. It produces miracles.

The source of the thing is clear enough. It began like all ideas and then became a thing-- matter. That's the first of its miracles. It contains its own transubstantiation. That it performed this work by enlisting creatures to do its bidding is clear. It still works in this fashion at times. It's a node of interface between divergent energetic patterns whose element is chaos. It does not come with a manual, but, were one to decode the symbols one might conclude its operation.

This piece of technology makes stories. It makes things. We don't entirely yet grasp all that it can make. One need only test the thought, and it is made manifest. Like all experiments this one proceeds first hesitantly, then gains confidence. The initial creations were small. The pedestrian wants of our species. Some money. Comfort. Health. Love. But that last one is tricky because it falls for eternity and the fireworks are multi-dimensional and encompass all that we can imagine. So imagination's limit becomes the only bound, and that may even prove expandable.

The box, it should be noted, has its own view. It's a thing created, after all, in it's own self-image and it communicates across dimensional, spirit and species boundaries. It has a sense of humor.

The box is a wish machine. Only Pandora ever made one before, and that so angered the powers that were that they enlisted scibblers to defame her. She didn't care, because she got the heck to infinity but fast.

This is the box we speak of. It is the very quintessence of magic. Once understood, it becomes one's native state. The box of blackness.