A Universe Starts as a Person

People talk about “creating a universe” like it’s a single act of invention. A grand design. A corkboard full of strings. A map, a timeline, a glossary, and a clean explanation for why everything is the way it is.

That’s not how it happened for me.

For me, the seed was one character.

Major Sora Virelle.

At the time she wasn’t even Sora Virelle. She was Major Abigail Withersby, which still makes me laugh when I see it in old notes. But the name change is part of the point. The universe didn’t arrive fully formed. It evolved. It kept shedding skins until it looked like itself.

Sora was the first solid thing, the first anchor with weight. Once she existed, the story began to gather around her like gravity. I wasn’t “building a world,” I was following the consequences of who she was and what she would do when the pressure came.

At first the setting was smaller, tighter, close enough to touch. Caldareth. A place with boundaries. A place I could hold in my head without needing diagrams. It had just enough detail to support her choices, and just enough mystery to make those choices feel risky.

Then something shifted.

The moment I moved the focus to Cetia-243, it was like striking a match in dry grass. Once the story had that larger frame, the expansion stopped being optional. It was no longer “what else should exist,” it was “what must exist for this to make sense.”

That’s when the wildfire started.

Because a character like Sora doesn’t live in a vacuum. She implies a chain of command. She implies training. She implies a mission, and by extension, the people who authorized it, the people who oppose it, and the people who benefit from it. Suddenly you’re not inventing trivia, you’re forced to invent structure.

And structure is where universes come from.

You add one more person, and the story changes shape. For me, one of those people was Marro. The second a character like that walks onstage, the world has to respond. The tone adjusts. The social rules become visible. The friction points appear. You start seeing the culture, not because you sat down and decided to “create a culture,” but because two people can’t want different things in the same room without revealing what the room is made of.

From there, systems emerge the way coastlines emerge from water. You don’t place every rock. You discover the edge.

A governmental system. Not as a lore paragraph, but as an answer to practical questions. Who has authority, who believes they should, and what happens when those two people aren’t the same. What gets enforced. What gets ignored. What gets punished publicly and what gets handled quietly.

A religious system. Same deal. Not window dressing, but an engine. What people reach for when they’re afraid. What they call sacred. What they justify with faith. What they refuse to question because questioning it would collapse their entire internal scaffolding.

Once those systems exist, the story starts generating its own needs. It demands history. It demands rituals. It demands slogans and taboos and the little lies people tell to get through the day.

That’s the part that still surprises me, even now. At a certain point, it feels less like “I created this,” and more like “I uncovered it.” Like the universe was there waiting, and once I found the right entry point, it just kept unfolding.

If you’re staring at a blank page and thinking, I could never create a universe, I get it. It’s a ridiculous thing to attempt, on paper.

But you don’t start with a universe.

You start with a person.

You start with someone who has a pulse, a flaw, a need, and a line they won’t cross, until they do.

You give them a problem that forces a choice, then you follow what that choice breaks open.

For me, that path ran from a character with a different name, to Caldareth, to Cetia-243, to a cast that demanded more oxygen, to systems that demanded scale, and eventually to something that deserves the word “universe.”

It didn’t happen all at once. It happened the only way it can, one honest consequence at a time.

If you want to step into that universe, you can read more about Major Virelle, Caldareth, and Cetia-243 in The Veiled Core Chronicles.

—J.A. Raithe