Altair was an ordinary high school student — quiet, analytical, always lost in thoughts too vast for his small classroom. While others played or joked, he often stared out the window, tracing invisible equations in his notebook, obsessed with probability and cause. On his sixteenth birthday, while taking a shortcut behind the library, he noticed something half-buried in the wet earth: a small, black stone, smooth as glass yet shimmering faintly, as if it contained a galaxy trapped inside.
When his fingers touched it, the world fell silent. The rain stopped in midair. The sound of the city was swallowed whole. For a heartbeat, Altair felt like he had been pulled out of time. Then, a voice — not heard but felt — resonated in his mind:
"Look, and choose."
The stone didn't command. It offered. And with that offer came understanding — not in words, but in truth. Probability wasn't just numbers; it was the structure of reality. Physical laws were sentences written in a language that could be rewritten. Life and death were merely values that could be flipped between zero and one.
At first, Altair thought he was dreaming. But when he returned home and focused on a dust particle floating under his desk lamp, he decided to test it. He imagined reducing its existence probability to zero. The particle vanished — not fell, not faded — simply ceased to be. When he reversed the process, it returned, exactly where it was, as if nothing had happened. Every test confirmed it: existence itself obeyed him. He could control the odds of any event, any object, any person.
Days turned into weeks, and the experiments grew bolder. Altair learned to reach beyond probability. One night, out of curiosity, he clenched his hand into empty air and pulled. Reality tore open like silk, revealing a rift darker than shadow. Inside that slit, space twisted like threads of glass, bending around his fingers. He could touch the fabric of existence. When he opened his hand, the tear closed — but not without leaving behind a trace of something vast, something waiting to be shaped.
Altair began constructing his own world — not a simple universe, but a multiverse. He called it Thalamos, a boundless architecture of existence born from his thoughts. Within Thalamos floated infinite bubbles, each one a universe with its own unique laws. Some bubbles flowed backward in time. Some had gravity that pushed instead of pulled. In others, light was liquid, and stars sang in colors never seen by mortal eyes. Each bubble branched infinitely, creating layers upon layers of possibility.
Altair could edit each of them like a writer revising his story. He could rewrite constants, alter the speed of light, change the sequence of cause and effect. He even designed worlds where death was not an ending — merely a transition. When a being's existence probability reached zero, Altair could restore it from the informational echo stored in his stone. Within Thalamos, nothing was ever truly gone unless he decided it should be.
Power changed Altair, though he didn't notice it at first. The human mind was not made to bear infinity. Yet curiosity drove him onward, and curiosity soon birthed something darker — a weapon not of matter, but of meaning.
He called it The Concept Eraser.
It was a self-guided strike, bypassing distance entirely — a pure thought that always hit with 100% certainty. When it reached its target, it didn't destroy matter or energy. It erased the concept of the target's existence. Every trace — name, history, memory — vanished, leaving behind an empty space where reality forgot something had ever been. A city struck by it would become a non-place; no one would remember it, no record would mention it. Even time would skip over it like a missing frame in a film.
By then, Altair realized that in Thalamos, distance no longer applied to him. He moved with infinite speed — or rather, without the need for speed. Wherever he thought, he was. He could stand in two universes at once, or step through layers of possibility with a twist of his wrist. Space obeyed his gestures; time folded beneath his gaze. To travel was no longer motion — it was decision.
Sometimes, he practiced creating and collapsing space between his palms. He could squeeze it until it became a singularity, or split it open and carry the void itself like a glowing sphere. The act felt natural, like breathing. But every time he did it, the air trembled, as if the universe recognized its own fragility.
One evening, standing amid the vast lattice of universes within Thalamos, Altair looked down at the stone resting in his palm. He wanted to test a small idea — to rewrite a single law. He imagined a world where light flowed like water, rippling in rivers across the sky. Instantly, one of the bubbles shimmered, and beams of liquid radiance began to cascade between its stars. The sight was beautiful — serene and terrifying all at once.
Altair smiled faintly. It was the smile of a creator and a prisoner both. He had crossed a threshold that could never be undone. Every decision he made birthed infinite realities, each spiraling into new branches beyond comprehension. And in every reflection, one truth echoed in his mind:
He no longer belonged to the world he came from.
The stone pulsed softly, like a heartbeat syncing with his own.
Altair whispered into the endless dark, "If reality can be written…"
He paused, feeling every law of physics bend around his breath.
"…then I will be the one to write it."
And with that vow, the first true god of the multiverse opened his eyes.
**
Altair thought he had learned the grammar of existence. Thalamos had taught him to write rules, fold space, and erase names from the ledger of being. But lessons rarely stop at what you first master. Some doors open into halls of doors; curiosity is a compass that always points toward more.
He returned to the Null Expanse one night, the stone warm in his palm, heartbeat steady. He wanted to push further — not merely to nudge probabilities or stitch a timeline differently, but to *touch the scaffolding beneath causality itself.* The Expanse had whispered of layers below sequence: a lattice that held possibilities before they became events. Scholars in worlds he had once observed called it many things—metacausality, the seam of becoming—but words were small here. Altair felt it instead: a tension in the air like wire under strain, a density that hummed when he brought his hand close.
This deep stratum was not one-dimensional. When he first glimpsed it, the pattern resolved into something his mind tried to force into shapes it recognized. The lattice was multidimensional, and the moment the stone granted him the language to name it, the number came like a cold bell: five. Five dimensions braided through one another in angles his eyes could not hold but that his hands could feel. Non-time, non-space, non-cause—call it what you will—was a five-dimensional weave. Each cut in it produced echoes across planes he had only just invented.
Altair did not hesitate. A blade formalized from the Expanse hummed into being under his intent, not metal but a line of absence he could swing. He raised his hand and *chopped.* The blow opened like a letter slit, and the five-dimensional lattice tore with a sound he felt in his bones more than his ears. For a moment, reality rearranged: timelines buckled, probabilities folded inward and then flatlined. He struck again, again and again, cleaving the multi-layered seam as one would cut through stacked cloth. Each stroke unspooled strange cascades: histories that paled into different colors, causal arrows that looped in new knots, and entire branches of future possibility curling like vines under the blade.
It was intoxicating—and destabilizing. When he lashed the five-fold lattice repeatedly, he noticed that some strands did not simply rearrange; they *unmade* themselves. Certain sequences completed the act of undoing and then refused to be woven back. Altair could feel the absence of those threads as a chill at the edge of perception, a negative space in the music of existence. He had expected to be able to reweave everything he cut; the Expanse reminded him that even omnipotence met resistance.
From those first wounds came a new power, frighteningly simple and horribly absolute: he learned to summon an **Absolute Null**—a region of pure non-being he could plant like a seed. The Absolute Null was not merely less; it was the active presence of nothingness, a domain in which matter lost its definitions and concepts dissolved into silence. Within that sphere, atoms refused to hold together; energy decayed into unreadable patterns. More subtle: the Absolute Null operated as a control at the deepest level of substance. It allowed Altair to command matter at its most basic — to reorder substructures, to make chemical affinities rewrite themselves, to coax quantum states into new agreements by fiat. He could make metals behave like water or make voids cling together like magnets. Where he placed the Null, the physical laws in that locality obeyed his whisper.
The hand that cleaved non-time became the same hand that sculpted the Null. He punched the lattice and watched causality shudder; he punched again and found that the blow could invert the arrow of events. A strike meant that cause could follow effect; wounds knitted before the blade touched them; sentences read themselves backward in the mouths of those who lived through them. He practiced with care, first on the small, carefully nested simulations in Thalamos, then on the fragile edges of his own memory. He learned the taste of retrocausality: it was metallic and dizzying, like being in a dream where you remembered the ending before beginning.
As his palette of power expanded, Altair began to feel his boundaries blur. The stone's geometry had fitted a scaffold for him—a locus to return to when erased—but it also fed his sense that he was more than flesh. One night, surrounded by the hush of floating bubbles and the susurrus of unwritten laws, he tried an experiment that had nothing to do with destruction and everything to do with identity. He pushed his essence into the Expanse and watched what happened when intention was stripped down to pure pattern.
His body collapsed into a silhouette of information. Where once there had been bone, muscle, eyes, there remained only the shape of a human—an empty shell—a hollow casing that retained the contours of his face but none of the living textures. His true self had receded into the Null Expanse, growing thin and vast like an ink stain spreading across pages. He found he could unhook his awareness from the shell and move as raw concept: thought without metabolism, will without weight. He was still Altair, but no longer primarily as a body. He had become a *conceptual entity,* and the physical form he left behind was merely a vessel, an echo that could sit in a chair and show the world a familiar face.
This shift altered how realities responded to him. Concepts are contagious; once he occupied the status of a living idea, laws bowed preemptively. The more he let himself be not a person but *the idea of Altair,* the more the universe treated his presence as a principle rather than an event. Physical shape could be donned and discarded; what mattered was the pattern he radiated. In Thalamos, he could step into any bubble and be recognized not as a stranger but as an axiomatic operator whose very existence implied change.
Yet with change came costs. The hollow shell was tempting as armor—the body immune to most insults, able to be left behind if a Nullfang struck—but it also estranged him. Emotions, which had once passed like weather through a skin tuned to pain and comfort, now arrived as abstract models he had to simulate if he wished to feel. The taste of rain, the ache of a friend's hand—these required effort to reconstruct. He saved them deliberately in pocket universes and revisited them like a traveler returning to a favorite inn.
With the power to sever five-dimensional threads, to plant Absolute Nulls, to reverse causality with a punch, and to become a conceptual entity, Altair stood at a precipice. He was no longer a boy translating equations on a desk; he was an architect of meta-reality and, increasingly, a force whose mere name bent rules. The temptation to test limits tugged like gravity.
He chose, for a time, to temper that pull. He confined experiments to the inner gardens of Thalamos, to places where a misstep would alter only unrealized probabilities. There, he practiced cutting and healing the fivefold lattice until his hands learned the rhythms of restraint. He let the Absolute Null be a surgical instrument rather than a weapon of erasure. He kept his shell at hand—sometimes empty, sometimes inhabited—so he would not forget the weight of being human.
Still, every night the Expanse sang to him with possibilities: a thread you could cut that would end a war before it began, a null you could place that would turn a tyrant's army into harmless shadow, a punch that would move a genocide backward until it was merely a rumor. Great acts hung like ripe fruit on impossible trees. He had learned to be meticulous. He had learned to be patient.
But even patience is a tool. The stone, and the lattice beyond it, taught him that restraint is itself an act of writing. To refrain was to shape as surely as to cut. Altair folded his hands and, in a voice that tasted like the first cool air of morning, he whispered to the Null Expanse: *"I will hold this line."* The five-dimensional weave settled around his promise like a cloak.
For now. The multiverse watched, and the hollow shell waited on a bench, empty and patient, a reminder that what he had become could be lost as easily as it was found.