At first, it comes as wind.
A slow exhale from nowhere, rippling through the half-born streets, dimming the light until even shadows forget how to behave. The river of mist below us trembles, its surface collapsing inward.
Serephine's eyes open.
"It's begun."
The words scarcely leave her lips before the horizon cracks — a thin, perfect fracture running across the sky. From its depths, a dark brilliance seeps, neither smoke nor shadow, but the idea of absence given form.
The void is waking.
Not the passive emptiness I once ruled, but the living hunger that I kept asleep by feeding it the world's stories. My rebellion has starved it; my doubt has made it aware.
It speaks without words. Its voice is the sound of everything ceasing to be:
You were mine.
The air folds inward. Every surface begins to unwrite itself — walls liquefying into ink, streets curling like burned pages. The phantoms of Velara scream without mouths, their forms dissolving into raw memory.
Serephine steps forward, her hand lifting, the page she saved flaring like a miniature sun. The radiance pushes back the darkness, for a breath — one fragile heartbeat.
"It knows we've broken its covenant," she says.
"And it wants correction."
"Or obedience."
"Which are the same thing."
The void surges. The world buckles.
Velara begins to collapse — not crumble, but revert, unwriting itself faster than we can watch. The towers recede into nothing, streets retract, rivers invert. Time itself staggers, losing direction.
The ledger at my side spasms open, pages flaring with light and darkness intertwined. The words on them blur, some clawing to remain, others eager to vanish.
Serephine turns to me.
"If you face it, you'll be consumed."
"So will you."
"I was born to remember. You were born to erase. Perhaps together—"
Her sentence shatters as the ground beneath us tears apart.
The void speaks again — not to us, but through us:
There is no mercy in contradiction.
The sound isn't sound. It is gravity of thought. My body, or what remains of it, bends toward the fissure. Memories pour from me like blood. The ledger thrashes in my grasp, desperate, alive.
Serephine calls out, her voice cutting through the storm.
"You can't fight it by becoming it! You have to name it!"
Name it.
For centuries I have erased names. Now I am asked to give one to what devours them.
The darkness spreads — swallowing form, swallowing sound. Only light from Serephine's page remains, a fragile core of meaning in an ocean of unbeing.
I stagger toward it. My voice breaks as I whisper:
"Then let it bear the name of what it truly is."
I lift the ledger. The quill forms in my hand — not of ink, but of memory itself.
And I write.
Each stroke burns the air:
Oblivion.
The void recoils as though struck. The sky shrieks — a sound like ten thousand memories resisting deletion. The fracture spreads into a spiral of light and shadow, folding inward.
You cannot define me, it hisses. I existed before definition.
"But you existed because of it," I answer. "You are nothing only because there was once something to forget."
Serephine steps beside me, her voice joining mine — not shouting, but steady, reverent:
"And we are both what remains when the universe remembers itself."
The page in her hands flares. The ledger's glow intertwines with it. The city, though half-vanished, rises one last time — towers of light, streets of sound, people made of echoes.
The void screams again — not in rage, but in realization. It knows.
It cannot erase what names itself.
The air shakes with paradox. For a moment, all is light. All is sound. The fabric of existence stretches to breaking — and then, with infinite gentleness, begins to mend.
The void retreats, folding back into its wound in the sky. The seam seals, leaving only a faint scar, black and radiant.
Silence follows — not the hungry kind, but the kind that listens after a story ends.
Serephine lowers her hand. The page in her grasp is blank now — the last light spent.
I look at the ledger. It, too, is empty. Not erased, but waiting.
"It isn't gone," I say quietly.
"No," she answers. "It's simply learned to sleep again."
We stand at the edge of the terrace, watching what remains of Velara flicker in and out — the city uncertain whether to stay or fade.
"What happens now?" she asks.
I trace the spine of the ledger with my thumb. "Now, perhaps, the story begins instead of ends."
Serephine smiles faintly. "And who will write it?"
I close my eyes. "Neither of us, I think. The world must learn to remember and forget without us."
She nods, and for a moment, I think she might dissolve into light again. But she stays.
The void breathes once more, faint and distant. Not a threat — merely a reminder.
The silence it leaves behind is no longer emptiness. It is space.
A place for stories to begin again.