The rain on Ceres Omega did not stop; it simply ceased to have a destination. One moment, the cold droplets were stinging my skin, grounding me in the reality of a muddy, alien field.
The next, the gravity holding the moisture to the earth vanished. The droplets suspended themselves in the air, trembling like mercury, before they began to vibrate at a frequency that made my teeth ache.
Then, the sky began to tear.
It was not a meteorological event. There was no thunder, no flash of lightning.
Instead, there was a sound—a jagged, dry screech of parchment being ripped by a colossal, invisible hand. A black fissure opened above the clouds, stretching from horizon to horizon. It didn't look like a hole in the atmosphere; it looked like the very fabric of the two-dimensional plane was being shredded.
Behind the clouds, there was no space. There were no stars.
There was only the Void Collapse.
I watched, paralyzed, as the blue of the atmosphere was sucked into the rift. It wasn't being inhaled; it was being erased. The color simply peeled away, revealing a raw, static-filled nothingness beneath.
Multiversal Perspective: The End of Authority
In higher planes of existence, entities that had spent eons as the absolute arbiters of their respective verses looked upward.
In one reality, a being of infantile stature but infinite reach raised its hand, intending to "erase" the anomaly with a simple gesture of its palm. Its power—an absolute command over the existence of its own multiverse—should have been more than enough.
But as the entity focused its will, its fingers did not glow with destructive light.
They turned into a grey, grainy static. The "will" to erase was overwritten by a higher authority. The entity did not die; it was simply edited out of its own story. Its entire universe, with its intricate hierarchies of gods and warriors, folded in on itself like a collapsing house of cards, becoming a single, pixelated point before vanishing entirely.
Ending of all stories.
Perspective: Kaiser Everhart
I felt a sudden, agonizing shift in my center of gravity..
Seal Status: 114/1507... Transitioning...Seal Status: 113/1507.
The removal of a single seal—a fraction of a fraction of my true self—sent a shockwave through the reality. It was enough to erase entities that ruled multiverses. The ground beneath me disintegrated into black squares. The trees, the mud, the rain—all of it transformed into a flickering, low-resolution mess.
I felt the terrifying weight of eternity.
I was alone. Not just "alone" in a room, but alone in the sense that the concept of "other people" was being erased from the history of time. Cartethyia, the Foundation, the nine other subjects—they weren't just dying. They were being un-written.
The fear was not a spike of adrenaline; it was a cold, clinical horror.
If nothing exists, then the word "I" has no meaning.
"Author," a voice echoed, or perhaps it was just the sound of the universe's final breath. "The Void is everything... reality... the multiverse... the first thing that existed and the last thing that will remain."
The sky-rip expanded until it consumed the horizon. The blackness was not dark; it was a lack of information.
It was the "Ultimate Authority" , the erasure of all things, even Void. I saw the envisioned closure constants of reality—the numbers that governed gravity, light, and life—drifting in the rift like digital debris before they, too, were scrubbed clean.
The world of Ceres Omega was gone. The rain was gone.
I found myself standing in a pixelated darkness. It was a landscape of jagged shadows and blinding, artificial light, where the floor was a grid of infinity that was rapidly fading into white noise.
I took a step forward.
I walked into the center of the nothingness, a solitary spark in the graveyard of all possible futures.
"What..." I whispered, the words echoing in the hollow expanse.
"What am I?"
"There is a distance between you and all that they'll never overcome," Void's voice resonated. It didn't come from a direction; it was the vibration of the darkness itself.
"The One Above All."
I looked out into the void. My eyes, though flickering with the grain of a failing reality, caught a flicker of light. In the distance, a single blue planet remained. It was vibrant, spinning with a defiant gravity that ignored the collapse around it.
If everything was erased—if the Void had truly consumed the multiverse—then why didn't that—
I stopped. The thought hit me with the force of a physical blow.
I was looking at the real world. The Foundation.
The year 2001.
I looked at my hands. They were translucent, composed of shifting infinity and white noise. I wasn't the boy who had sat on the white throne. I was the replica. The consciousness I currently inhabited was nothing but a high-fidelity projection sent into the gauntlet.
The real Kaiser Everhart—the creator for all reality—was still lying in the decayed foundation, possessing the mind of a 1-year-old.
I was the shadow.
He was the source.
"I see," I whispered. My internal narration felt suddenly light, stripped of the burden of existence.
"Even collapse falls short of his authority."
I reached inward. The 113th seal was a jagged, obsidian lock in the center of my being. I didn't try to pick it or break it.
The unsealing did not happen with a bang. It happened with a sigh.
The 113th seal dissolved into liquid light. The pressure of the 1,507 restrictions began to unravel, not because I was becoming stronger, but because I was returning the energy I had stolen from the Void. The pixelated darkness began to knit itself back together. The shattered realities of the sky rushed back into place, re-forming the stars and the firmament.
Seal Status: 113/1507... Transitioning...Seal Status: 112/1507.
The "Void Collapse" reversed.
The erasure was overwritten.
"One Above All," the Void stated, the words sounding like a final prayer.
"As I've kept my purpose, I shall continue you to your path. You shall not worry about the Quill."
"The second best shall be handed to one beneath your authority. The war is irrelevant to the architect."
The light from the blue planet grew blinding. The replica-body I inhabited began to flake away like ash in a hurricane.
"You shall live once more as who you wish to be," the Void gleamed, its presence expanding until it was the only thing I could perceive. "To see your own tomorrow."
"Nobody can dictate your story."
The transition was instantaneous. The cold wind of Ceres Omega was replaced by the muffled, rhythmic thumping of a life-support system.
Date: 6/29/2001 – 3:12 PM
Location: Foundation Research Facility – Sub-Level 9
I opened my eyes.
The world was blurry. I was suspended in a thick, viscous liquid that tasted of minerals and ozone. Beyond the thick glass of the test tube, the laboratory was a blur of sterile white and blinking consoles.
Where..?
I was back…
And the story was finally mine to write.
But… I don't.. remember anything…
5:44 PM
The transition from the tank to the medical bay was a blur of fluorescent lights and latex. Hands—too many of them—lifted me from the cyan fluid. The air felt abrasive against my skin.
For hours, I was a specimen again.
Lab-coated researchers cycled through. Reflex tests. Blood draws. Retinal scans. I was a one-year-old child; I possessed no words to explain where I had been. My mind was blank.
Director Vance appeared briefly behind a reinforced observation window. He looked older than he had eight days ago. He wanted answers I couldn't give through a pacifier.
A sedative was administered. As the real world faded, the construct of my inner mind expanded to meet me.
—--------------------------—--------------------------—--------------------------—--------------------------
The Dreamscape Conversation:
I stood in a gray, featureless room. I was 10 years old back in the dream realm. My height was a relief; my voice was a tool I could finally use. Vance sat across from me in a leather chair that didn't exist.
"You've been in a coma, Designation 981," Vance said. "8 days of flatline brain activity. We almost designated you dead."
"I don't remember being asleep," I replied.
"The other Designations—000001 through 000829—were affected as well. They fell into a deep sleep for exactly twelve hours. None of them remember a thing."
"But you... you were gone for over a week.
"What did you see?"
I searched. I should remember seeing something… one thing… There was nothing but white noise.
"It's fuzzy," I said. "There is nothing but a single phrase."
Vance leaned forward. "Tell me."
"Void's Heir."
The Director's face remained impassive, but his eyes narrowed. He lingered on the words, weighing them against his own classified data. After a long silence, he stood up. The disappointment in his posture was palpable.
"That'll be enough. Return back to your designation."
The Return:
The guard carried me down the familiar white corridors. I was back in my infant body, carried like a piece of luggage. He didn't speak, but his pace was steady. When we reached the door to my quarters, he swiped his card and the lock hissed open.
Cartethyia was sitting on the edge of the bed.
She looked decimated. Her dark eyes, usually sharp and protective, were lifeless. Deep, purple lines traced the skin beneath them—the mark of a week without rest. When the door clicked, she didn't just look up; she lunged.
She took hold of me with a strength that bordered on desperation. Her breathing was ragged, a suppressed sob catching in her throat as she buried her face against my shoulder.
The guard watched for a second. A faint, uncharacteristic smile touched his lips—a brief acknowledgement of a duty completed—before he stepped back and let the door slide shut.
I sat in her arms, feeling the tremor in her hands. I was safe.
I was back.
But as I looked at the white walls of the room, a cold calculation began to form in the back of my mind.
The gap in my memory was not an accident.
Why…?
I wanted to know what happened.
"You're back, you're actually back, I kept telling them—I told Vance, I told the guards, I said he's just thinking, he's just busy in his head like he always is, but then day four happened and your heart rate dipped and I—I think I actually broke a chair, Kaiser, I'm so sorry, I'll pay for it eventually but I just couldn't sit still..."
Her voice was a torrent. It was a relentless stream of her own anxiety.
"And then the doctors, oh, those doctors with their clipboards and their 'we don't know' and their 'prepare for the worst'—I wanted to bite them, I really did, I sat by your tank and I whispered every story I knew, did you hear me?"
"I talked about the academy, I talked about your curiosity about Celestine and I even sang my lullaby to you every night so you'd have a reason to wake up and tell me to shut up—"
I opened my mouth to attempt a vocalization. A simple "Ma" or even a grunt of acknowledgement would have sufficed.
"No, don't even try to talk, you're exhausted, you've been doing... whatever it is you do when you stare at nothing for a week," she interrupted, pressing my face into her shoulder.
"I haven't slept, Kaiser. Not really. Every time I closed my eyes I saw your tears of blood and I thought, what if he's lonely? What if he's in there and he's cold? I made the guard bring me three extra blankets even though it's warm here, I was convinced you were freezing."
Oh man I sure love waking up.
"I even tried to pray," she whispered, her voice cracking as she tucked her chin over the top of my head.
"I don't even know who to pray to in a place like this, so I just prayed to the walls. I told the Foundation if they let you die I'd burn the whole sub-level down."
"I was so scared, Kaiser. I was so, so scared that I'd be the only one left who remembered you were more than a 'Designation'."
Her hold tightened. She was shaking—small, rhythmic tremors that betrayed how close to the edge she had been. The "lifeless" look in her eyes I had seen at the door was being replaced by frantic words. Filling the silence that had terrified her for 8days.
"But you're here. You're safe. You're breathing. Don't ever do that again. If you're going to go into a coma, you give me a three-day notice. You hear me? A written memo. I'll put it in the fridge we don't have."
She let out a shaky, hysterical little laugh that died into a long, heavy exhale. Slowly, the torrent of words began to dry up. Her grip didn't vanish, but it softened from a "restraint" to a "cradle."
6:52 PM
The weight of Cartethyia's sleep was heavy—a physical manifestation of the exhaustion I had caused her. As she drifted off, her grip remained a vice, her breathing finally slowing into a rhythmic, fragile peace.
I lay there, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, processing the information she had explained to me in the past hour.
Brain-paralysis.
A clumsy, clinical term for a phenomenon the Foundation couldn't measure. According to her, every designated child had plummeted into that state. Their brain activity had spiked into the red, an overclocking of the human mind—except for mine.
Mine had gone silent. A flatline that wasn't death, but an absence.
They were coming back for more tests soon. They wanted to know why the "Lowested Designation" had been the only one to vanish completely. I didn't care about their results.
Soon the retests for the Year 2 Examinations would begin.
"Goodnight, Kai," she whispered into the crook of my neck, her voice thick with the onset of deep sleep. "Sleep tight. Mama loves you."
I looked at her face—the dark circles, the raw worry still etched into her brow even in sleep. I reached out, my small, clumsy hand hovering over her cheek before gently settling there.
"Goodnight, Mama."
I didn't know what had happened in those 8 days. My memory was empty.
I do not know the uncertainty of the future, but the objective is fixed. I will keep her safe. I will keep her happy.
When the walls of this decayed Foundation finally crumble into the sea, I will be the sole survivor standing amidst the wreckage.
I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me.
Location: White Room
The curriculum waited for no one.
We were the raw material, and the Foundation was the forge, working tirelessly to create the ultimate weapon for a war they didn't understand.
Unfortunately for them.
I had no intention of being their 'weapon'.
I was self-engineering myself to be my own.
I sat at my desk, my 10-year old dream body bolstered by a specialized chair. Amelia was already there, sitting at the desk next to mine.
She was my partner—the only other tool that mattered until the climb to the top was complete.
Winning wasn't a goal; it was the only outcome.
…
[...The Quill... it seeks the blood of the Architect...]
The voice was fractured, laden with a hatred that felt ancient.
[Subject 7... the one who remembers the betrayal... the revenge that will not end until Kaiser Everhart has lost everything…]
[Can The Sovereign of Reality Defeat The One Above All?]
[Arc: The Void's Tale — END]
Kaiser has survived the Void, but a new enemy—the user of the Quill—is coming for him with a vengeance born from a timeline Kaiser can no longer see.