Date: 6/23/2001 – Time Unknown
Location: The Great Void – The Heart of the Final Trial
Perspective: The Void / Kaiser Everhart
The universe is an expansion of silence.
Beyond the atmospheric layers of the planets, there is no sound to carry the weight of human ambition. Stars are merely punctuation in a sentence that has no end. They burn out, collapse into singularities, and are rewritten as cosmic dust.
This is the law.
To exist is to be subject to expansion.
Ten have bowed.
Designation 000829 accepted the false Quill through the gateway of her own insecurity. Designation 000001 submitted to the inevitable conclusion of his own tragedy.
They believe they have gained authority over their futures. They do not realize they have merely become ink in a story that was already written. Their wills were sufficient for survival, but insufficient for the burden of the multiverse.
They are vessels.
They are not the source.
In the hierarchy of existence, there is a shadow that looms even over the Void.
The One True Creator.
The architect of primary fiction and reality. No child of the Foundation, no matter how refined, can grasp the origin of the first word. To carry the Quill is to serve the narrative, not to own it.
Yet, one remains who does not fit the calculation.
—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-
Perspective: Kaiser Everhart
I was standing in the center of a vacuum that felt like it was trying to breathe for me.
There was only the sensation of my own consciousness floating in a sea of darkness. My thoughts felt heavy, as if the darkness were trying to coat them in lead.
The others are gone
This is the isolation phase of the Trial of Acceptance.
"Kaiser Everhart."
"You are a contradiction. In the Cathedral of Mirrors, your ending was finalized. You were buried. Your heart reached zero. In the mechanics of fiction, a dead character does not continue to move the plot."
"A plot is just a sequence of events," I said.
"Fate is not an equation to be balanced. It is the gravity of the universe. Nothing prevails against the expansion. Everything that exists was born from me and will eventually return to me."
"You are an anomaly."
I thought back to the grave. I remembered the taste of the dirt and the smell of the rot. I hadn't used a "gift" to climb out. I hadn't used anything.
I had simply decided that the story the Void wanted to tell was boring.
"You rewrote your own death. You forced a glitch in the causality of this realm. Tell me, child... how does a grain of sand stop the tide?"
My will to survive was instinct.
But my will to see tomorrow is a choice.
"I don't care about the tide," I said. "I only care about the next step."
The Void fell silent. The darkness around me began to ripple, not like water, but like a sheet of paper being crumpled. I felt the pressure of the "Acceptance" trying to find a crack in my identity. It wanted me to submit.
It wanted me to become a vessel for the expansion, to let go of the "Kaiser" and become the "Heir."
But I am a self-engineered weapon.
I don't belong to the Foundation, and I don't belong to the Void.
"The others have accepted their irrelevance. They have taken the Quill to hide from their own ends. You stand alone in the expansion."
I felt the weight of the universe pressing against my eyelids. It was an invitation to close them forever, to let the darkness fill my lungs and become part of the infinite fiction.
I can do this…
"I am the one who decides when the story ends," I whispered.
The Void's authority flickered. For the first time, I felt a tremor in the darkness—a momentary lapse in the absolute silence of the expansion.
"Then wake up, Anomaly. Let us see if you can survive the truth of what you have become."
The darkness shattered.
I opened my eyes.
I was 6 years old. My limbs were longer, my coordination refined. I wasn't in a nursery or a sterile assessment room.
I was in a small, rustic cabin tucked into the crease of a mountain valley. Outside the window, the sun was dipping below the horizon, painting the sky in strokes of gold and apricot.
"This is your future," the Void whispered from the corners of the room. "The future where you are no longer a weapon, but her son."
In the kitchen, Cartethyia was leaning over a cast-iron pot. The steam from the stew carried the scent of rosemary and beef. She looked different—older, but the tension in her shoulders had dissolved. Her raven hair was tied back with a simple twine.
"Kaiser, could you help me with the carrots?" she asked.
I picked up a knife. My movements were instinctively precise, my mind already calculating the optimal angle for the blade to minimize waste. I began to slice with a rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack.
"Wait, wait," she laughed, stepping over and gently taking the knife from my hand. Her palms were warm.
"I can do the rest. I'm just happy you helped me bring the basket in. I don't want those clever fingers getting cut."
"I wouldn't cut myself, Mama," I said.
"I know you wouldn't," she said, booping my nose with a flour-dusted finger. "But let me do this. Go set the table."
We sat together as the stars began to poke through the violet sky. The meal wasn't a calculated intake of nutrients; it was a shared experience. She smiled at me over her bowl, the light of the hearth reflecting in her eyes.
Later, the steam filled the small bathroom. She washed my hair, her fingers massaging my scalp with a gentleness. I sat in the tub, watching the bubbles, my mind quiet for the first time in my existence.
At night, we sat by the wide window. The Milky Way was a bright, spilled river across the blackness.
"Okay, Kaiser," she whispered, leaning her head against mine. "Guess which one I'm thinking of."
I looked at the sky. I didn't see coordinates or stellar magnitudes. I saw her.
"The North Star," I said. "Because you said it's the one that always leads people home."
She squeezed me tight. "Exactly right. My brilliant boy."
We climbed into the large bed together. She pulled me into her arms, my head resting against her heart.
"Goodnight, Kaiser," she whispered into my hair.
"Goodnight, Mama," I replied.
—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-
The following weeks in the vision were a masterclass in domesticity.
Life followed the process of the seasons. We lived on the edge of the wild.
One afternoon, our supplies ran low. I noticed her checking the nearly empty flour sack with a worried furrow in her brow.
Without a word, I walked into the woods. I didn't need a weapon. I understood the mechanics of the forest—the travel paths of the rabbits, the tension of a willow branch.
I constructed a snare, calculating the exact weight-trip needed. When I returned an hour later, I held a large hare. It was a flawless catch; the neck was broken instantly, leaving the meat pristine and undamaged.
Cartethyia stood on the porch, her hands on her hips. She looked proud, but her mouth was in a pout.
"Kaiser Everhart! You could have gotten hurt! There are monsters out there, and you went out without telling me."
"You were hungry," I said, holding the hare out to her.
"I didn't want to see you hungry."
Her pout vanished. A soft, wet shine appeared in her eyes. She dropped to her knees and pulled me into a fierce hug, kissing my cheek repeatedly.
"My son... my wonderful, brave son," she murmured.
We spent our days like that. I helped her hang laundry, the white sheets flapping like the wings of birds. We found a patch of wild strawberries, and we ate them until our fingers were stained red, laughing at the sheer sweetness of it.
I watched her dance to a song only she could sing while she swept the floor.
It was a life of profound, quiet peace.
A future where the "Self-Engineered Weapon" had been decommissioned and replaced by a boy who knew the names of wildflowers and the best way to stoke a fire.
It was the "Happily Ever After" the world promises to those who haven't been born in a cage.
I stood in that cabin, feeling the warmth of her hand in mine, the scent of the stew still in the air.
"This is the fiction you could inhabit," the Void's voice returned, cold and sharp as a winter frost.
"Then."
The season shifted. The gold of the valley turned to a brittle, frost-bitten grey.
I watched the vibration in her chest before I heard the sound.
She would turn away, her hand shielding her mouth, and release a series of dry, sharp coughs. When she turned back, she would smile, but the corners of her eyes remained tight.
I noticed the handkerchief first. She kept it in the pocket of her apron. One afternoon, while she was hanging the laundry, she dropped it.
I picked it up.
The white fabric was stained with a spray of dark, viscous crimson. It wasn't fresh blood; it was heavy, containing small, dark particulates that looked like wet soot. I folded it and put it back in her pocket before she turned around.
I didn't say anything.
Three weeks later, the decline accelerated.
We were at the table. She was reaching for a pitcher of water when her hand simply stopped obeying. It didn't tremble. It just went limp. The pitcher shattered on the floor.
She tried to stand to clean it, but her knees buckled. She didn't fall gracefully; she hit the wooden floor with a heavy, hollow thud.
By the second month, the cabin felt smaller. The scent of rosemary and beef was replaced by the cloying, metallic smell of stagnant blood.
She was bedridden. Her raven hair, once vibrant, now looked like dead silk against the pillow. Her skin had turned pale, stretched tight over her cheekbones.
She could no longer eat. Every attempt was met with violent, racking cough that left her gasping for air she couldn't find.
I sat by her bed, I had stolen a medical text from a nearby village—The Encyclopaedia of Forbidden Pathologies. I turned the pages with a steady hand, my eyes scanning for a match.
I found it on page 742.
"The Whitescale."
I read the text silently. It was discovered 700 years ago. It isn't a bacterial infection or a viral load. It is a fundamental corruption of the life-force itself. The disease doesn't attack the host; it integrates with them. It binds to the cardiac muscle and the marrow, weaving itself into the very essence of the blood.
Incurable.
To remove the Bind is to remove the heart. To cleanse the blood is to drain the vessel. The greatest healing magics of the Seven Kingdoms have failed for seven centuries because the disease is the person.
I reached the final paragraph: "There is no record of survival. The host's pulse will continue until the Bind has consumed the final drop of vitality. The end is characterized by total systemic collapse."
I stopped reading. I didn't want the words to exist in the air of the room. I didn't want the "impossible" to have a name.
"Kaiser..." her voice was a thin, dry rasp.
I looked up. She was looking at me, her eyes clouded with pain but still silenced by a terrifying, desperate love. She had seen the way I stopped breathing when I hit that page.
She knew my mind had already reached the conclusion.
She reached out. Her hand was cold.
She pulled me toward her, her strength failing, until my head was resting against her shoulder.
"Don't think about it, Kaiser," she whispered. She ran her hand through my hair, her touch light and trembling.
"Don't... don't be worried. Just stay. I'm right here with you."
I pressed my face into her neck. I could hear her heart. It was a frantic, irregular beat, thudding against the "Bind" that was killing her. I felt her chest hitch as she forced back a sob, her body tensing as she fought to keep the pain from leaking out and hurting me.
She was dying in the only future that made me happy.
She is lying to me...She is doing it to preserve the fiction of my happiness.
I cannot calculate a way out of a grave that has already been dug…
"I'm here, Mama," I said.
I held her as the cabin grew cold, and the Void watched from the corners of the room, waiting for the moment the future could finally break.
February of 2007.
"The snow will start in approximately 12 minutes," I said. My voice was steady, despite the way the cold tried to numb my jaw.
"I brought the lilies. I had to travel to the lower village to find them. They weren't in bloom, but I used the heat from the hearth to trick them into opening."
I looked down at the bundle in my hand. The petals were a translucent, fragile white.
"I remember you said they looked like stars that fell and got stuck in the dirt. I think I understand the metaphor now. They are beautiful because they are temporary. If they lasted forever, they would just be weeds."
I walked forward, my boots crunching through the crust of the ice.
"I fixed the porch. The third step was rotting from the inside—the moisture had compromised the structural integrity. It won't creak anymore when you walk out to see the sunrise. And I've organized the pantry. The flour is sealed. The mice won't be an issue this winter."
I stopped. I didn't reach for a door handle. I didn't smell stew.
I knelt. The ground was hard, a frozen slab of earth that refused to yield.
In front of me was a small, jagged piece of grey slate. I had carved the name myself, the letters precise and deep, ensuring that even the harshest winter wouldn't erode the record of her existence.
CARTETHYIA
I placed the lilies at the base of the stone.
"I read every text. I studied The Whitescale until my eyes bled..."
I reached out and touched the frozen slate. It was the same temperature as her hand had been in those final seconds.
"I couldn't save you. No one could change the fate. The disease wasn't an invader; it was you. To kill it was to kill the host…"
I sat there in the silence of February, a six-year-old boy who had outlived his reason for existing. I didn't cry. I simply stood there at the finality of the grave.
"Your reality is a sequence of failures."
The Void's voice returned, tearing through the vision of the valley. The snow stopped mid-air. The slate cracked.
"You stand at the end of a story where you are the protagonist of nothing. You possess knowledge, Kaiser Everhart. You possess the 'Mind.' But in a world of giants, you are a crawling insect. Without magic, without the authority of the Void, you are a walking target."
The valley dissolved into the familiar, suffocating blackness.
"You will be thrown into an unnamed tomb. You will be eaten by monsters who do not care about your 1,517 digits of Pi. Your mother is a pile of ash because you were too weak to rewrite the fate of her blood."
"Acceptance is the only choice."
"Submit."
"Become the Heir. Take the Quill and write a tomorrow where the Whitescale never existed. Write a future where she is standing in the kitchen, and the lilies are blooming, and the February air is warm. You can save her."
"I am the only one who can grant you the power to change 'Impossible' to 'Done.'"
I looked into the dark. I felt the Void's influence pressing against my ribcage, a cold, manipulative hand tightening around my heart.
"Your resistance has reached its limit."
"Accept, or your heart will stop beating in the next 0.02 seconds."
"It will reach zero, just as Cartethyia's did. You will die in the dark, and the world will continue its expansion without ever knowing your name."
The darkness collapsed inward. I felt my pulse stutter.
0.01 seconds.
It was my ending..
I thought of the Quill.
The "One True Creator."
I realized that if I accepted a future written by someone else, I would no longer be the observer. I would be the sacrifice.
I opened my eyes, the blood from the trial still dry on my cheeks. My voice was a low, jagged rasp in the infinite silence.
"No."
The word was a fracture in the Void's authority.
"I reject."
The darkness shattered.