Altair had learned quickly that power was not a single act but a vocabulary. The stone at his chest did not simply grant force; it taught grammar — how to speak to existence, how to make laws bend politely, how to carve verbs out of abstractions. Each lesson arrived with the same cool clarity: the cosmos responded not to brute strength but to articulation. He could now not only touch matter and space, but the language of reality itself. He could interact with rules, concepts, and laws as if they were objects in a room.
After years of secret experiments — in the Null Expanse, in the small bubble universes he folded and kept on shelves of thought — Altair's abilities had grown into uncanny fluency. He could put his hand through a law of physics the way a locksmith slips a pick into a lock. He ran his fingers along inertia, felt its grain; he cupped causality and felt its heartbeat. Abstract things had texture to him now: the curvature of morality, the density of a legal code, the tensile strength of a superstition. He could prod an axiom like a sleeping animal and it would turn over, sometimes purring, sometimes snapping.
This faculty — the power to interact *physically* with the conceptual — was the first change that made the world outside his workshops tremble. He could approach a principle and yank it free of its context. He could unpin the idea of debt from a society, leaving the people bewildered and oddly liberated. He could pluck the color from a myth, watch it crumble into shards of forgotten metaphor. He learned to wield such interactions precisely, because concepts are fragile things: pull too hard and consequences pour through like spilled ink.
But power has a shadow, and Altair's shadow was lethal in its intimacy. His energy — the emanation of the stone and of his will — was not benignly radiant. It was corrosive to things that *sensed*. Any entity, biological or mechanical, that perceived the energy of his presence found its sensing apparatus overloaded, burnt, or simply annihilated. A bird that flew into the aura convulsed once and hung limp. A camera that tried to read him shorted and smoked. A sensor network attempted to map his signature and failed, its circuits fried as if struck by a silent lightning. Machines that relied on detecting fields were charred in the attempt; brains, wired to pattern-recognition, often collapsed in the face of the singular signal. In certain cases, the effect was immediate death; in others, it was tissue ruined, neural pathways reduced to static. The stone taught Altair restraint by making the world around him dangerous simply by existing.
He learned to cloak the radiance, to soften the edges of his presence, to pass through crowds like a shadow who did not disturb anything but the air. Yet there remained a core of the phenomenon he could not wholly conceal: those who *felt* him — not through instruments but by the low, animal sense of being watched by something impossible — experienced a terror that infected perception. The terror manifested as hallucination and, in extreme cases, neurological collapse. People described seeing their lives re-thread themselves into grotesque tapestries, hearing the weight of their names being plucked out of the ledger, or feeling time reverse in the chest. For a few, the glimpse was too much: their minds hemorrhaged, their cortexes frying as if the imagery had been a chemical toxin. He never sought such outcomes, but the stone had no sympathy for intent. Presence was a hazard like volcanoes are hazards: magnificent and indifferent.
The Null Expanse taught him other, blunter skills. He learned to slice non-time itself. Non-time was not temporal; it was the substrate beneath causality, a dark lattice where potentialities waited in patient rows. Altair fashioned a blade from the Expanse — invisible, humming with the absence of sequence — and learned to swing it. When he cleaved non-time, the cut propagated outward into timelines like a tremor in a lake. A fracture in non-time left events palindromic, allowed causes to loop back, or created regions where A preceded B and then followed it again. To slice non-time was to make history jagged; to weld it back together took immense care. He practiced on false histories first, on tiny bubbles where the stakes were low. When he swung clean, entire chains of events reversed their arrows: bullets un-fired, illnesses un-diagnosed, wreckages un-happened. He learned to respect the way even non-time defended its integrity: whenever he punched or sliced it, he felt the muscle of reality tighten reflexively.
The stone also revealed to Altair an ability that bordered on theological blasphemy: he could deliver a blow that reversed causality itself. It was not metaphorical. He could strike a thing — an event, a creature, an outcome — and cause would turn backward. The blow traveled not through space but through the relations that bound cause to effect. When he struck a man in the Null Expanse with that fist, the man's future unspooled into his past; victories became failures, words unsaid rewound into silence, broken bones knit themselves before the impact that had caused them. Reverse-causality punches created paradoxes and demanded careful governance; in daily life they would be a catastrophe. Altair practiced with simulations, then with small, contained histories: the bloom of a single flower undone by a rain the flower had not yet felt; a word unsaid and then never spoken. The feeling of punching through the mesh of cause and effect was like punching through wet paper — messy, wet with consequence.
Furthermore, Altair could rewrite concepts of reality as if he were editing a manuscript. "Gravity" for him was now a paragraph to be deleted or rewritten. He could take the notion of solidity and transform it into a suggestion; he could convert "distance" into a rumor. If he wanted to make the city of Liran run on magnetized ethics rather than steel, he could. He had become a conceptual editor whose remit extended to metaphysical grammar. His rewritings could be subtle — a tweak to the word "danger" in a small culture that made them braver — or devastating — a rewrite of "identity" that unraveled a people's sense of continuity. He grew deft at making edits in drafts no one else would see, in the interstitial spaces between cause and observation.
Breaking the space of minds, punching holes through spiritual topology, came as naturally to him as folding a handkerchief. He could shatter the spiritual space — a lattice of collective beliefs and psychic resonance that communities arrange themselves around — and watch their inner worlds spill into the open. When he broke such a space, people's inner sanctums were exposed: memories leaked into others, doctrines colluded, private fears became public storms. The effect could be cleansing, terrifying, or annihilating. In some cities he parceled the power out like medicine; in others he had to lock the Expanse's gate and walk away for the safety of the world.
He was not unbounded. The stone demanded accounting. Every correction required tolls in attention, in self, in the erosion of his solitude. Each time he rewrote a concept or unwound a causality thread, a part of his inner map became more complex; he could remember more times, more selves, more versions of the same event. That is how he discovered the endlessness of his own reflections: altairs who chose mercy, altairs who chose carnage, altairs who never found the stone. Each reflection was a potential he might become if he let drift the tapestry he had built.
Absorption had become one of his darker arts. He could take a concept — say, the idea of kingship — and inhale it. It condensed into something like quicksilver inside him, and when integrated, the society that had birthed kingship felt it as absence. The crown's meaning thinned, legitimate rule collapsed into contestation, and new forms of governance emerged, untethered from old metaphors. He could feed on energy — the thermal roar of a sun became a thought in his head — on souls (which preserved their stories as patterns), on matter and the idea of matter. When he consumed, he did not always kill; sometimes he folded the eaten thing into a memory, sometimes he repurposed it into a seed for a new law or a small, private universe. Absorption was neither wholly annihilation nor entirely preservation. It was transmutation.
There were weapons he kept folded in his sleeves. The most notorious was a self-guided conceptual strike he called the Nullfang. It was less an arrow than a doctrine: a directed collapse of the predicates that underwrote an adversary's existence. When released, it sought the schema that made one *be*, and where it bit, identity unwound into absence. Entire histories lost their references; people lost their names as if names had been burnished away. The Nullfang did not mutilate bodies so much as the maps that pointed to them; if it hit a city, the city would no longer be able to be described as a city. The attack had been conceived in private, then practiced on the Expanse's dummies. He had used it once, and the memory of that use coated his mind like a scar: clean, necessary, terrible.
The stone's resurrection economy made him reckless in ways and cautious in others. He could be undone—in truth, he had been—reduced to conceptual zero, his thread excised. Each time, the stone's geometry restored him by restoring the pattern that was Altair. Resurrection decoupled him from mortality in cruelly interesting ways: he could experiment freely because his annihilation was rarely permanent; yet with the safety came the temptation to test limits that would break others. He weighed such experiments with a new ethic: a recognition that he could not unmake the moral cost by unmaking himself afterwards. The ledger of consequences did not accept personal absolution.
The world learned to watch him the way sailors watch storms. In corners of the Null Expanse he kept gardens — places where he allowed small, stubborn probabilities to bud into life, where entire species learned to exist under rules he had not prescribed. He prized those gardens because they reminded him what his power could not manufacture: surprise. Even omnipotence found joy in being surprised. In a small bubble he watched a species invent a poem he had not thought to include; in another, a child who looked at him from a distance and did not crumble at the sight. Those exceptions were rare, but they were proof that some things defied total control: love, accident, the quiet wrongness of an unscripted laugh.
Yet he carried the knowledge that his mere existence skewed physics everywhere. A clock that had sheltered its hands in the angle of his presence would afterward tell a story the world could not fit into its history. Markets, tides, memories — all acquired a soft warp. Regions of sky shimmered like the mirage over asphalt whenever he walked through them. Communities built temples to the strange things that happened in Altair's wake; others wrote laws forbidding anyone to look at the hedges where he had once stood. Scientists who attempted to instrument the anomalies either perished in sterile episodes of neural collapse or emerged with theories too dizzy to publish.
And there were nights when he stared into the ripple-plain of the Null Expanse and felt the weight of the people he had eaten, erased, rewritten. Those faces threaded into him; they became a chorus he could not silence. In quieter hours he would open a tiny window in his hand and let the echoes out as stories, letting the souls he could not restore narrate themselves to one another. These narratives often soothed him more than the Expanse ever could. They reminded him that even when he rewrote a world, the residue of story insisted on returning.
Once, in a fit of reckless curiosity, Altair traveled to a universe where causality was a religion and time was worshipped as deity. He walked in and felt the worship-pulses coat his skin. He tried, for a moment, to be neutral, to stand as a scientist among the devout. They saw him and screamed — not because he moved too quickly or because his energy burned their sensors, but because his presence dissolved the very grammar they used to address their god. Priests convulsed, elders fell into hysterical tautologies, congregations rethreaded their liturgies to exclude the concept of someone who could unmake names. He watched and felt sorrow. They had written their lives around a scaffold he could tip over with a whisper.
By then, he had learned a hard lesson: sometimes restraint was not a refusal of power but the only way to prevent the world from becoming a brittle thing that would snap and scatter like glass. He had, in some ways, become a gatekeeper — not by mandate but by necessity. He closed doors he had once opened, pulling curtains on experiments that had no ethical return. He refused to try certain edits, certain Nullfangs, certain reversals. He kept his hands busy on smaller, quieter work: coaxing ecosystems into resilience, sewing back a narrative here, untearing a small memory there.
Altair discovered, in the end, that the ache at the center of omnipotence was not boredom but loneliness. Resurrected a thousand times, he possessed more lives than he could wear. Attuned to concepts, he often felt the dislocated tug of beliefs he had never held. He could make gods and destroy them. He could write futures that pulsed like arteries. Yet few stood beside him who could truly look and not be undone.
So he cultivated a practice of not looking at everything at once. He learned to be present in smallness: the rain's cadence on a window he did not anesthetize, the small laugh that did not hesitate, the fragile astonishment of a child who had not been conditioned to fear miracles. He became, paradoxically, a guardian of tiny improbabilities — the moments that remained stubbornly unmeasurable. Those moments, in their small stubbornness, kept him from becoming only the cold editor of existence.
And sometimes, late in the Null Expanse, he would take the blade that sliced non-time and lay it down like a violin at his feet. He would sit in the hush and listen as the multiverse hummed — not in terms of what could be cut or changed, but in the faint music of what already was. He had, by then, learned that real power carried a language of limits as well as permissions. The stone had given him grammar; the world had given him punctuation. He held both, awkwardly, beautifully, and began, at last, to draft a future that did not only answer to the boy inside him but also, in small luminous ways, to the infinite chorus that had once been eaten and might one day sing again.