Silence.
Not the comforting kind. Not the soft hush that follows rain or the pause before dawn. This was the suffocating kind—the kind that pressed against Erevan's eardrums like the world itself had decided to stop breathing.
The air—or what passed for it—felt thick. Heavy. Like syrup clinging to his lungs. Every inhale scraped against nothing. Every exhale dissolved before it could even make a sound.
He blinked once.
And for the first time since the Citadel collapsed around him… there was nothing.
No sky. No ground. No light. No dark.
Just an endless, blank white stretching forever in every direction.
Featureless. Weightless. Terrifying in its perfection.
He took a step forward. His boot scuffed against nothing, made no sound, left no mark.
"…Okay," he muttered, voice dull and muffled, like it had been wrapped in cotton. "This is new. White screen of death. I hate it already."
A ripple of static shimmered beside him, and Kaelith materialized—bow drawn, an arrow of light hovering midair before she realized there was nothing to shoot at. Her gaze swept the void, sharp and wary.
"What… is this place?" she whispered.
Before Erevan could answer, another flicker of distortion split the air. Vega emerged, their form glitching violently—half their body fading, then snapping back with a burst of sparks that scattered across the blank expanse like fireflies.
Their voice rasped, broken between frames. "I… know this. Or—no. I shouldn't. This is… the White Null. The gap between reality and the system. It's not supposed to exist anymore."
Erevan blinked slowly. "…The Null. Right. Cosmic glitch limbo. Perfect. Exactly where I wanted to vacation."
A soft pop sounded above him. Sir Quacksalot blinked into existence upside-down, flapping helplessly before landing squarely on Erevan's shoulder. The duck gave one uncertain quack—muted, smothered by the strange air—and went completely still.
Then a familiar tone pinged inside Erevan's skull, flat and unnervingly calm.
(System Alert: Emergency Relocation Complete)
(Location: NULL//SPACE)
(Stability: 5%)
Erevan groaned, dragging a hand down his face. "Five percent? I'm literally one sneeze away from ceasing to exist. Love that for me."
The White Null didn't stay empty for long.
At the edges of his vision, shadows stirred. Not shapes, not quite—more like impressions, ghostly afterimages burned into the white. Faces flickered into being and vanished: the looping citizens of the Citadel, skeletal dancers frozen mid-motion, the twisted grin of the laughing beast.
Each appeared for an instant… then dissolved.
Kaelith's grip on her sword tightened. "It's watching us."
Vega shook their head, voice faint. "No. We're watching it. The Null reflects everything. It's the residue of what the system erased. The things it decided shouldn't exist."
Erevan squinted into the glare, trying to anchor himself in something—anything. "So… a haunted trash bin of deleted realities. Cool. Cool cool cool."
Something stirred in front of him.
The Codex hovered a few paces away, pages fluttering without wind. The leather cover pulsed faintly, as if breathing. Words shimmered across the open page—then twisted, rewriting themselves faster than he could read.
He caught a few before they shifted again:
Here lies the Archive of Abandoned Realities.
Those who wander the Null walk the bones of dead worlds.
His stomach turned cold. "Dead worlds? Nope. Don't like that phrase at all."
Kaelith's voice was tight. "That implies…"
"...this isn't the only simulation," Vega finished quietly.
Erevan's pulse skipped. "Oh, great. Infinite apocalypses. Love that."
The Codex pulsed again. New text spilled across the white, glowing faintly.
Warning: The Whisperer feeds in the Null.
Beware the smile in the silence.
A sound—if it could be called sound—curled through the air like a blade dragging backward across glass. It was laughter, but twisted, broken.
Erevan froze. A chill rippled through him despite the absence of cold.
"…Nope. Nope, nope, nope." He took a cautious step back. "I vote we leave White Photoshop Hell immediately."
The system's tone pinged again, far too calm for the situation.
(System Notice: Exit Locked)
(Condition: Stability > 25% Required)
Erevan closed his eyes, exhaling through his teeth. "Of course it is. Because why make anything easy? Guess we're doing the 'almost die until things work out' route again."
The Codex glowed brighter in his hand, reacting to his irritation. Its pulse echoed faintly through the empty air, like a heartbeat trying to return to life.
At the edges of the endless white, shadows began to gather—slow, deliberate. One of them coalesced into a humanoid figure draped in static. Its face was smeared beyond recognition, pixelated into unreadable ruin.
It moved closer.
The Whisperer hadn't left.
Kaelith stepped forward, blade glinting against the blank light. Her voice was steady, though her knuckles were white. "Erevan. Protect the Codex. I'll handle—"
The Null shuddered.
The white cracked beneath their feet, sharp lines like fractures in porcelain. Through the splits, something pulsed. Not darkness. Not light. Something in between—something that hurt to look at.
Vega dropped to their knees, clutching their head. "Don't look at it! The Null fractures under observation!"
Sir Quacksalot puffed up on Erevan's shoulder, feathers bristling. The tiny duck let out one indignant quack, as if daring the void to come closer.
The cracks paused. For a moment, impossibly, the space steadied.
The Codex spun faster, orbiting Erevan, each page glowing hot white. His shard responded in kind—vibrating, pulsing. The two began to harmonize, faint lines of energy flickering between them.
(Codex Resonance: 70%)
(Stability +10%)
(Current Stability: 15%)
The laughter returned, sharper now. Closer.
The Whisperer grinned from the fracture line, its teeth made of broken static.
Erevan clutched the Codex tighter, breath shallow. "Okay. You want stability? Fine. Just tell me how before the smiling glitch monster eats my soul."
A whisper pulsed directly into his mind, not sound but meaning.
Remember.
And the White Null shattered into fragments of memory, swirling around him like snow made of light.
The fragments of the White Null spiraled around Erevan like shattered glass suspended in time. Each shard reflected something—faces, cities, moments that didn't belong to him. Echoes of lives erased. He could feel them brushing against the edges of his mind, whispering, flickering, begging to be remembered.
The air hummed with pressure, like a storm that had forgotten how to break.
Erevan turned slowly, trying to orient himself, but there was no direction anymore. Just the infinite white, stitched together by floating shards of lost memory.
A child's laughter echoed from somewhere close. Then it cut off abruptly, replaced by the brittle sound of static.
He swallowed hard. "Okay. Cool. So the afterlife is run by bad coding. Fantastic."
Kaelith stepped forward beside him, her hand hovering near her blade but not drawing it yet. Her expression was unreadable—somewhere between awe and quiet fear. "This place shouldn't exist," she murmured. "The Architects purged it after the first collapse. If it's here again…"
"…then we're walking inside a ghost," Vega finished weakly.
They were glitching worse now—their outline flickering like a bad projection, sparks jumping from their joints. "The Null wasn't supposed to hold consciousness. It's where data comes to die."
Erevan's fingers tightened around the Codex. The book's glow had shifted from gold to a pale, trembling blue. Pages fluttered open on their own, as if anxious. Words appeared, reshaped themselves, then dissolved before his eyes.
He caught only fragments.
You are not the first.
The Null remembers what the world denies.
Every erased truth leaves a shadow.
Erevan's throat tightened. "Okay, that's… comforting. Totally not ominous at all."
The Codex pulsed harder, reacting to something unseen. Threads of light arced from it, connecting briefly to the floating shards around them. For a moment, the fragments flashed with color—each showing a glimpse of a lost world.
A city suspended upside down in a crimson sky.
A forest made of mirrors.
A sea that reflected no stars.
Then each image collapsed in on itself, vanishing into static dust.
Kaelith flinched. "They were… worlds. Entire worlds."
Vega's voice cracked, layered with static. "Deleted ones. The system culls what it can't control. Everything here is… residue."
Erevan rubbed his temples, overwhelmed. "So, just to recap: we're in the cosmic junkyard of existence, surrounded by the ghosts of deleted universes, while a smile-happy void demon lurks nearby. Great. Best Tuesday ever."
Sir Quacksalot gave a single solemn quack, which, in context, sounded like agreement.
The Codex vibrated in his grip again. A new entry scrolled into view, words etched in soft light that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.
Warning: Stability remains insufficient.
The Null is unstable. Observe carefully.
Every glance reshapes it.
Erevan frowned. "Every glance reshapes it? Wait—what does that mean?"
Before anyone could answer, the space around them shifted. The white rippled like liquid. Shadows stretched and warped, mirroring their movements with slight delay—like reality lagging behind.
Kaelith reached out, and the shadow of her hand reached back a second too late. When their fingertips touched, the entire world flickered.
The reflection screamed.
Kaelith yanked her hand back, breath catching in her throat. Her reflection lingered for a heartbeat longer before it melted away into static, leaving a smear of black code dripping upward.
Vega staggered back, eyes wide. "Don't interact with them! The Null's memory reflections—if you touch them, it tries to overwrite you!"
Erevan swore under his breath. "Right. No touching ghost versions of ourselves. Adding that to the growing list of 'nightmare physics.'"
The Codex's glow grew harsher. Another line appeared.
Do not seek reflection.
It remembers what you forget.
He looked up sharply. "What does that even—"
And then he saw them.
A cluster of figures standing in the distance, perfectly still, perfectly silent. Dozens of mirrored people—each one a reflection of the three of them, down to the smallest detail. Except their eyes.
Their eyes were empty.
Kaelith froze, voice barely a whisper. "Preservation… They're preserved echoes. The Null keeps copies to fill the gaps."
Erevan's skin crawled. The mirrored Kaeliths smiled back at them—wrongly. The motion was too slow, too deliberate. Like puppets trying to remember how to be alive.
He took a careful step backward. "So, uh… question. How do we politely un-preserve ourselves and leave before I lose my mind?"
No answer came.
Only the mirrors stared back, patient and waiting.
And somewhere in the far distance, something laughed again—quiet and cruel—like glass breaking in reverse.
The laughter didn't fade this time.
It deepened—layered, vast, echoing through the white like a cathedral collapsing in slow motion.
Then came the sound of footsteps.
Not echoes. Real ones.
Erevan's pulse stuttered as the mirrored horizon peeled open. The figures—their reflections—turned in unison, heads tilting toward something walking between them. A silhouette of impossible proportion stepped into view, its body flickering between outlines, fractal geometry folding over itself.
Where it passed, the Null bent.
"Is that—" Vega's voice glitched. "—the Architect?"
Kaelith went perfectly still. "No. Not entirely."
The thing was tall—inhumanly so—but not in the monstrous way of the Whisperer. It radiated design, not hunger. Its surface was made of architecture: towers, sigils, entire mechanisms turning beneath its translucent skin.
When it spoke, its voice wasn't a sound but a resonance—felt more than heard.
"THE THREAD RETURNS TO SOURCE."
Erevan's head rang with the weight of it. He staggered back, clutching the Codex to his chest. "Okay. Great. Cosmic voice of judgment. Totally what I needed today."
Kaelith's hand tightened on his shoulder. "Don't—mock—it."
"I'm not mocking! I'm just… processing through sarcasm!"
The Architect's gaze—or the suggestion of one—fell on him.
"YOU HOLD THAT WHICH REMEMBERS. YET YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO."
The Codex shivered violently, pages flaring open. Threads of blue light lashed out, connecting the book to the Architect, to the mirrored citizens, to everything.
Reality groaned.
Kaelith shouted something—her voice drowned by static. Vega's outline dissolved into particles and reformed halfway across the white, screaming as the Null folded inward like paper burning in reverse.
"Erevan!" Kaelith's voice broke. "It's linking to you—stop it—!"
"I'm not doing anything!" He could feel it pulling—threads burrowing through his skin, into his veins, into his memory. Every moment of his life flickered behind his eyes like shattered film: laughter, loss, fear, triumph. All of it being copied, stored, rewritten.
"THE SYSTEM REQUIRES BALANCE."
The Architect's hand—if it could be called that—extended, enormous and blinding.
"THE DEBT OF CREATION IS PAID IN MEMORY."
The Codex screamed.
So did Erevan.
And then—something answered.
A voice that wasn't a voice, breaking through the static like a heartbeat in the void.
Soft. Familiar. Unyielding.
"Not yet."
The Codex's light shifted again—no longer blue, but gold, deep and defiant. It pulsed once, twice—then exploded outward.
A shockwave tore through the Null. The mirrored people shattered like glass, the Architect's form faltered, and the entire world convulsed.
Kaelith dove for Erevan as the ground split beneath them. Vega's distortion stabilized just long enough for them to throw a shimmering barrier around the group.
Through the collapsing light, Erevan saw the Architect's face—or the closest thing to one—flicker into clarity. It wasn't alien. It was human.
His own.
He gasped, unable to look away.
"YOU WERE THE ARCHITECT," the voice thundered, overlapping with his heartbeat.
"YOU BUILT THE SYSTEM YOU NOW DEFY."
The Codex's pages tore free, swirling around him like feathers of molten gold.
Kaelith shouted his name, but it was fading—everything was fading—light turning to static, static to silence.
Then, through the dying hum, one last whisper reached him—soft, gentle, human.
"Remember."
The light consumed the world.