The bus carried them homeward, its rattling frame a cage for a silence that was heavy, agreed upon, and thick with the scent of bus exhaust and Nathaniel's antiseptic clothes. Nathaniel sat with his head leaned against the cool glass, his eyes closed, but Mabel could see a muscle in his jaw twitching. The offer of "Option B" had not been made lightly; it had cost him. It was a door he had sealed shut centuries ago, and she had watched him, with a sigh that seemed to draw from the depths of a millennium, wrench it open again.
Mabel, for her part, clutched the bag of stationery to her chest like a holy text. The choice thrummed inside her, a volatile mix of terror and a fierce, defiant pride. She had looked into the abyss of a safe, orderly future and had instead chosen the chaotic, fascinating, and deeply unreliable man beside her. Her mother's words, "When the world was actually on fire, he was the only person you'd want at your back," were no longer a comforting memory; they were a bet she had just placed with her entire life.
The city outside blurred, lights smearing into streaks of gold and white. She risked a glance at her uncle. In the shadows, the cheap black dye in his hair was less obvious, and the stark white of his roots seemed to glow, as if a sun was peeking through topsoil. It was another secret, another question. Why did his hair do that?
They disembarked the bus, into the twilight. The air was cool, carrying the distant scent of rain and exhaust. Their building loomed, a concrete monolith that seemed to absorb the evening light rather than reflect it. The climb to the third floor was a slow, solemn procession. Nathaniel's movements were a study in profound reluctance than, as if the act of purchasing a future for her had drained the last of his uncanny vigor.
The apartment welcomed them with its profound neutrality. The door clicked shut, a sound that sealed them in a tomb lined with stone, but it's gonna change. The void had been challenged. Now, it waited to see what they would fill it with.
Nathaniel didn't even make it to the sofa. He slid down the wall beside the door, his long legs splaying out like a marionette with its strings cut. He came to rest on the floor, his head lolling back against the pristine drywall with a soft thud.
He collapsed onto the floor with a grunt, not even aiming for the sofa. "I'm running on fumes and spite, and the spite's about to go out," he mumbled to the ceiling. "I think I've met my quota for human interaction for the next decade. Wake me next year."
Mabel ignored him. She had a mission. She marched into her barren room, where the new mattress lay wrapped in its plastic shroud, a rectangular ghost in the gathering dark. It looked impossibly lonely, a testament to a life yet to be lived. With a rip that was shockingly loud, she tore open the packaging of her notebook and pencils. The crinkle of plastic and the scent of new paper were a declaration of war on the sterile silence.
She sat on the floor, her back against the unyielding mattress, and opened the notebook to the first page. The blankness was a challenge. It was the white void in miniature, and it was hers to conquer. What did you write at the beginning of a story that had just taken its most dramatic turn? What were the first words of "Option B"?
She uncapped a pencil—a simple, number two, non-scented pencil, as per his bewildering instruction—and pressed its point to the paper.
Inventory of the Void, she wrote at the top. Then, she began a list.
Uncle. Immortal (?). Prone to napping. Grumpy.Pot of phoenix ashes. (How do you know it's a phoenix? Can it be tested?)Voice in his head. (Can it be heard by others? ME now? Why?)White void (apartment). Features: profound emptiness, one sofa, one of everything in the kitchen. Air: tastes like nothing.
It was a start. It was data. It was her attempt to build a framework for the insanity that was now her life.
From the living room, she heard a low, pained groan. "You're thinking too loudly. It's… percussive. Each thought is a tiny, insistent hammer."
"I'm writing a list," she called back, not looking up. She added another point.
*6. Uncle can hear thinking. (Annoying. Useful?)
"A list?" He repeated, the word dripping with distilled horror."That's how it starts. A harmless notepad. Then, suddenly, you're enslaved by your own ambitions, a slave to pasteboard and ink, your life reduced to a series of checkboxes. It's a tyranny of the mundane."
"I prefer efficiency," Nathaniel muttered to the empty air in front of him. "Lists are a testament to a lack of faith in one's own memory. It is the crutch of the mediocre mind, terrified of the unscripted moment"
"You forget everything!" Mabel retorted, her voice echoing in the hard-edged room. The argument felt bizarrely normal, a slice of domestic squabble in the midst of the cosmic.
"A highly efficient filtering system," he shot back, a little life returning to his voice, a smile playing on his lips. "I only retain data with a high hassle-to-importance ratio. The location of the nearest horizontal surface? Critical. The date of the Norman Conquest? It failed the archival review."
Frustrated, Mabel stood up and went to the doorway. He was still on the floor, a fallen king in a smoke-scented suit. The pot of ash sat on the table, equidistant between them, the silent, judging third party in their awkward domesticity.
"What's the first thing you remember?" she asked, leaning against the doorframe. "I mean, the first thing. Before you were… like this."
Nathaniel closed his eyes. The faint light from the window caught the sharp planes of his face, making him look like a statue carved from moonlit stone. The silence stretched, and for a moment, Mabel thought he had simply chosen to ignore her, to fall asleep right there on the floor.
Then he spoke, his voice a low, resonant hum that seemed to vibrate in the very air.
"Sunlight," he said. "The feeling of it was… different. Heavier. It had weight and intention, as if each photon were a deliberate brushstroke on the canvas of creation. And the sound… the sound of a hammer on a forge, but it wasn't shaping metal. It was shaping… concepts. Laws. The underlying grammar of reality itself." He paused, and the ghost of a true, unguarded emotion—something like wistfulness—crossed his features. "It was loud. So very, appallingly loud. A relentless, percussive insistence. A demand, moment by moment, for things to be."
"And then?" Mabel prompted, her own voice a whisper, afraid to break the spell.
"And then I realized it was going to be every day. Forever. The same metaphysical heat, the same cosmic noise, the same relentless doing. The sheer, unending effort of it all." He opened his eyes and looked at her, a faint, weary smirk twisting his lips. "And I was… tired. So I found a quiet, forgotten corner of the firmament, behind a nebula that hadn't yet been named, and I went to sleep." The smirk widened a fraction. "I overslept. By a few epochs. Woke up with a terrible crick in my neck and a note pinned to my tunic that said 'Keeper of Truth.' Worst promotion I ever got. No raise, infinite responsibilities."
The story was absurd, mythological, and yet the feeling underneath was palpably real. A being fundamentally crushed by the sheer, endless effort of existence.
"So you just… quit?"
"I delegated," he corrected, with a flash of his usual dryness. "To myself. A later version. I left a note. He's been doing a terrible job. I'd fire him, but the paperwork is a hassle. So I did the next best thing. I forgot"
Mabel's gaze was drawn back to the pot of ash. "Is that what the phoenix was? Another one of those… jobs?"
"The phoenix was not a job," he said, his voice softening, losing its defensive edge and becoming, for a moment, simply sad. "It was a promise. A promise that some fires are worth tending, even when they gutter and go out, because the embers remember how to burn. It was a beautiful, singing, chaotic fire. A fire that celebrated its own cycles of death and rebirth. It was hope, made manifest in flame." He sighed, and the sound seemed to end the conversation, drawing a veil over the brief glimpse of his past. "And I… I found the song distracting. The constant cycle, so much drama. It was easier to let the music fade."
He pushed himself up from the floor with a grunt of genuine effort, as if gravity had personally increased its pull on him in retaliation for his confession. He shuffled past her, into her room, and looked at the mattress on the floor, the open notebook, the single, determined list.
"This is wrong," he stated, frowning.
"What is?"
"The geometry." He gestured vaguely at the mattress. "It's adrift. It has no context, no locus. A bed requires a defined space. A place to be. This is just… an object in a void. It's aesthetically offensive."
Before she could ask what on earth he meant, he walked to the corner of the room farthest from the door. He placed a single palm flat against the wall, his fingers splayed.
"What are you doing?" Mabel asked, a thrill of apprehension and excitement running through her.
"Correcting the geometry. Hold onto your list."
He closed his eyes. There was no flash of light, no sound of grinding stone. But the room… bent.
It was a subtle, deeply nauseating shift, not in the room itself, but in Mabel's perception of it. It was like the world took a soft, deep breath and held it. The wall he touched seemed to retreat just a foot, the straight lines bowing inward to create a shallow, perfectly proportioned alcove. Simultaneously, the ceiling in that corner descended slightly, creating a more intimate, sheltered space, a ceiling that felt like a protective hand rather than a distant sky. The mattress, with a soft, whispering scrape, slid smoothly across the bare floorboards and nestled itself perfectly into the new alcove. It was no longer a shipwrecked raft; it was a berth. A nook. A defined place to be.
Nathaniel removed his hand, staggering back a step. He was several shades paler, his breath coming in short, shallow gasps. He leaned against the newly formed wall for support, looking as though he had just run a marathon.
"There," he wheezed, wiping a bead of sweat from his temple. "Now it has a nexus. The chaos is… contained. For now."
Mabel stared, her jaw slack. He had just reshaped reality. Not with a dramatic spell, but with a sigh and a touch. Because a mattress on the floor was aesthetically displeasing to his slothful, yet profoundly ancient, sense of order. It was the most insane, unnecessary, and wonderful thing she had ever seen.
Nathaniel sank onto the corner of the mattress, his energy utterly spent. "Don't get used to it," he managed, his voice thin. "Interior decorating is a slippery slope. Next you'll want a pillow. Then a reading light. Then a bookshelf for the books you'll inevitably acquire. It's a cascade of demands, a vortex of domestic need that will swallow us both."
Mabel walked over and sat next to him. The alcove felt safe. It felt like her corner of the void. The walls he had made seemed to hold the silence at bay, making it feel peaceful rather than empty.
"Thank you," she said, meaning it more than she could express.
He waved a dismissive hand, but he didn't move away. They sat in silence for a long while, the Keeper of Truth and the niece who kicked loose floorboards, in a room he had bent to his will, staring out at the living room where the pot of ashes held a forgotten song.
"The first thing I remember," Mabel said quietly, breaking the comfortable silence, "is the smell of my mom's perfume. It was like oranges and cinnamon. And the sound of her laughing. It wasn't a little laugh; it was this big, loud thing that took over the whole room."
Nathaniel was quiet for so long she was sure he'd finally succumbed to exhaustion. The city lights had fully taken over outside, painting the white walls in shifting patterns of blue and gold.
Then, in a voice so low and rough it was barely more than a vibration, he said, "Ruan always did like loud things."
It was the first time he'd spoken her mother's name. It hung in the air between them, another spark in the darkness, another piece of geometry defined in the void. It was not a solution. It was not an answer. The phoenix was still ash. The Voice was still silent. The void was still vast.
But as Mabel looked from her uncle's weary profile to the sad-faced stick figure in her notebook, she thought it was a good start. It was the first line on a very, very blank page