"Three hundred and twelve years," Vael says.
I do not look at her. I am looking at the Stillpoint — at the cluster of original stars burning in their nameless colors at the interior heart of the Nascent. We have walked back to it in the way that walking means anything here, which is to say the topology of the Nascent rearranged itself around our intention to arrive and we arrived. The ground beneath us hums its frequency below frequency. The crystalline dark surface catches no light because it is older than the concept of reflection.
"Three hundred and twelve years," I repeat.
"That is how long I have been mapping them," Vael says. "The excisions. I started when I noticed the second one. The first I dismissed as substrate degradation — it happens, even in the Nascent, even here. Material that old develops inconsistencies. I told myself it was a natural irregularity and I moved on."
"But the second changed your interpretation."
"The second was too clean. Too deliberate. Substrate degradation is messy — it frays, it crumbles, it leaves residue. The second excision left nothing. Not a fragment. Not a trace of what had been there. It was as if the substrate had never existed in that location, except the surrounding material remembered it had and was leaning toward the absence trying to compensate."
I look at the map she shared with me again. The suit has been processing it continuously since she transmitted the data, running projections, cross-referencing with the archive, building models of what comes next if the sequence continues uninterrupted. The models are not encouraging.
"Walk me through all seventeen," I say.
"Glasspost —"
"All seventeen, Vael. From the beginning. I want to hear you say it."
A pause. The text of her form cycles slowly. Then:
"The first excision occurred at boundary coordinate 7.441 by 2.093 by 9.887 in Nascent spatial notation. Diameter 3.2 lightyears. Depth of removal consistent with a full substrate extraction — not just the surface layer but the entire vertical column of foundational material, from the outermost edge down to the pre-causal bedrock."
"Pre-causal bedrock," I say. "It reached the bedrock on the first excision."
"Yes."
"That is not a system testing its capabilities. That is a system that already knew exactly what it was doing."
"Yes," Vael says again, and I notice the text of her form has slowed slightly. "That is what I thought too. The second excision, fourteen years later — boundary coordinate 7.441 by 2.093 by 9.901. Directly adjacent to the first. Diameter 4.7 lightyears. Same depth. Same precision. No residue."
"Fourteen years between the first and second."
"Eleven years between the second and third. Nine between the third and fourth. The interval is shortening each time."
I process this. "The acceleration is consistent."
"Perfectly consistent. Whatever this is, it is not random. It is not reactive. It is not responding to external conditions or opportunistically expanding. It is following a schedule it established before it began."
"Before it began," I say quietly.
"That is what the data implies."
"Which means it had a plan. Before the first excision. It knew where it was going and in what order and at what scale and it has been executing that plan without deviation for three hundred years."
"Three hundred and twelve years," Vael corrects, with the specific precision she uses when she wants me to understand that the extra twelve years matter to her personally. Three centuries of watching. Three centuries of mapping and calculating and sitting with the knowledge alone.
"Why did you not tell me sooner?" I ask.
"I told you already. You were watching your star."
"Vael."
"And I was not certain," she says, and the text moves faster now, a restlessness she is not quite containing. "I was not certain and I did not want to bring you something uncertain. You have enough of that already — the archive full of things that cannot be fully resolved, the questions the Nascent never finishes asking. I wanted to bring you a fact. A complete fact. Something I could lay in front of you and say — here. This is real. This is happening. I was not going to come to you with a suspicion."
"And now you have a fact."
"Now I have seventeen facts," she says. "Arranged in a sequence that points at the word I told you at the boundary."
We are quiet for a time. An original star to my left — not the one I have been watching, a different one, older, burning in the color that younger beings perceive as the feeling of standing in a place you once knew well and finding it entirely changed — pulses once, deeply, and returns to its steady burn.
"Tell me what you know about Dross," I say.
"I know what you know," Vael says. "Which is almost nothing. A name. A fragment in the archive. It was before. Three words from a stratum of memory so old it predates coherent record-keeping."
"I know more than three words," I say. "I know I have never encountered it directly. I know that in 55^032 years of existence I have never once opened the archive and found a substantial entry on it. And I know that my archive does not have substantial gaps. It has fragments and incompletions and records corrupted by time, but genuine gaps — true absences, places where something should be and is not — those are rare."
"And Dross is one of them."
"Dross is one of them," I confirm. "Which tells me one of two things. Either it predates my capacity to record — which would require it to be older than me, older than the period in which I developed the archive, which would make it —"
"Older than you," Vael says.
"Older than me. Yes."
"And the second possibility?"
I am quiet for a moment.
"The second possibility is that the gap in the archive is not natural. That the information was there once and is no longer there. That something removed it."
Vael's text stops moving entirely for the second time since we began this conversation. The first time was when she said the word Dross at the boundary. Now, again, everything in her goes still.
"Something removed information from your archive," she says slowly. "From a storage system that predates most of the physical laws governing information theory."
"It is a possibility. I am not stating it as a fact."
"But you are stating it as something worth considering."
"I am stating it as something I cannot rule out," I say. "And I find I am disinclined to rule things out today."
"Glasspost," Vael says.
"Yes."
"I want you to understand something before we go further."
"Tell me."
"I am not — I need you to understand that I am not bringing this to you because I expect you to fix it. I am not bringing it to you because you are the oldest and the most powerful and the one with the Type XL suit and the infinite archive and the ability to fold time like a letter. I am not bringing it to you because I need a solution."
I look at her. The column of silver-black text, rotating slowly in the Nascent's non-light. The language that predates all scripts, cycling through its endless reformulation.
"Why are you bringing it to me?" I ask.
"Because it is happening to our home," she says simply. "And you are the only one left I can tell."
The weight of that settles between us the way weight settles in the Nascent — slowly, completely, pressing down through all the layers of time pooled at the bottom of everything.
"The others," I say. "The remaining Maldovians."
"Orveth concluded himself eleven thousand years ago," Vael says. "Quietly. Without announcement. I noticed his absence the way you notice a sound stopping — not immediately, but eventually, when the silence has gone on long enough to have a shape."
"I know," I say. "I noticed too."
"Syrenthis concluded forty thousand years ago. Mauldavar, eighty thousand. The Pale Three — all three of them, within a century of each other, as if they had agreed on a date. Kelunth concluded so long ago I cannot give you a reliable figure. And the rest —" she pauses. "The rest concluded so early in my memory that I only know them as names in records, not as presences I actually felt leave."
"We are almost the last," I say.
"We are almost the last," she agrees. "And I want to be clear — I do not begrudge them. Conclusion is a choice. A legitimate choice. We always knew it was available to us and we always knew some would take it and some would not. I do not stand here and say they were wrong."
"But."
"But I am not ready to conclude," she says, and the text of her form is moving very fast now, faster than I have seen it in centuries, every character cycling through its endless transformation. "I am not ready to conclude and the Nascent is being eaten and the only other Maldovian I can still talk to spent the last several million years watching a star, and I have been sitting with seventeen data points for three hundred and twelve years and not saying anything to anyone, and —"
She stops.
The text slows.
"I am telling you now," she says. "That is all. I am telling you now."
"I know," I say.
"Are you going to do something?"
"I am already doing something," I say. "I am listening to you. That is, at this particular moment, the correct thing to do."
A long silence.
Then Vael says, with the particular dry quality she has carried for as long as I have known her: "You are occasionally almost bearable, Glasspost."
"I have been told this before."
"By whom?"
"By you. Approximately once every hundred thousand years."
"A generous schedule," she says.
"I have always thought so."
We sit — if sitting is the word for what two beings without conventional bodies do when they choose to remain in one location — in the Stillpoint for a time, and I work through the archive with a thoroughness I have not applied to it in longer than I care to calculate. I go back through the oldest strata. Past the records of civilizations so ancient the Compiled Verses have no knowledge of them. Past the memories of universes that rose and fell before the current generation of reality was constructed. Past the records of the Hollow Intervals and the Compiled Verse boundary formations and the early mapping of Nascent topology that I conducted so long ago my methodology would be unrecognizable to the being I am now.
I go back to the Unremembered Interval stratum.
This is where the archive becomes difficult. Not corrupted — I do not believe the archive corrupts in any conventional sense — but thin. Sparse. The Unremembered Interval is called that for a reason. It is the period before stable memory architecture existed, and what records I have from it are fragmentary, impressionistic, more feeling than fact.
"I am in the earliest strata," I tell Vael.
"What do you find?"
"Fragments. The usual. Partial impressions of the Nascent in its earliest coherent phase. Observations without context. Sensory records with no analytical framework attached because the analytical framework did not yet exist in my development."
"And Dross?"
"I am looking." A pause. "There is — here. A cluster of references. Fragmented but multiple. More than the three-word entry I found earlier. The archive has more than I initially accessed."
"Read them to me."
"It was before the counting. That is one fragment. The substrate remembers its function. Another. We did not name it — naming implies we had authority over it and we understood, even then, that we did not."
"We," Vael says sharply. "We. That is plural. That is the Maldovians speaking collectively in your archive."
"Yes."
"Which means this is not a record from your individual experience. This is a record from the collective memory of the Old Race. This was known — shared knowledge — among the Maldovians of the Unremembered Interval."
"The Maldovians of the Unremembered Interval knew what Dross was," I say slowly, processing as I speak. "They had a relationship with it. They spoke about it in the collective. We did not name it. They made an active choice not to name it. Not because they could not but because naming it implied an authority they recognized they did not possess."
"Keep reading," Vael says. Her text is completely still again. All her stillness, I have learned over the eons, is not the same stillness. This one is the stillness of listening so hard that motion becomes an unnecessary expenditure.
"It does what the substrate cannot do for itself. This is its function. This is what it has always been for. Then — a gap. A genuine gap, not corruption, a space in the record that feels deliberate. And then: The question is whether function and choice are the same thing. We have not resolved this. We may never resolve this."
"Function and choice," Vael says.
"Yes."
"They were asking whether Dross chose to do what it does or whether it simply — operates. Whether it is an agent or a process."
"And they could not answer it," I say. "The oldest beings in the existence of the Nascent — the Maldovians of the Unremembered Interval, beings of a depth and complexity that makes even my current self feel provisional — looked at Dross and could not determine whether it was a who or a what."
The Nascent hums around us. The original stars burn.
"That is terrifying," Vael says quietly.
"Yes," I agree. "It is."
"And the gap," she says. "The deliberate gap in the record. After the question is whether function and choice are the same thing. Something was there and is not there now."
"Something was there," I confirm.
"What do you think it said?"
I consider this for a long time. Long, even by my standards.
"I think it said what they decided to do about Dross," I say finally. "I think it said what action the Maldovians of the Unremembered Interval took in response to understanding what Dross was. And I think that action is relevant to what is happening now — to the excisions, to the sequence, to the path moving inward toward the Stillpoint."
"You think whatever they did is related to what we are seeing."
"I think whatever they did stopped working," I say. "Or was stopped. And Dross is doing now what it was doing before they did it."
"Glasspost," Vael says.
"Yes."
"Are you afraid?"
I look at the Stillpoint. At the original stars. At the color of old consequences burning steadily in the dark that is not dark but the sum of all darkness that has ever existed.
"I am interested," I say carefully.
"That is not an answer."
"It is my answer."
"Glasspost."
"Vael."
"Answer me honestly. I have known you longer than most universes have existed. I have watched you watch stars for millions of years. I have watched you stand at the edges of dying realities and observe their collapse with what everyone around you interpreted as calm and what I always interpreted as something more complicated. So answer me honestly, because I am asking as the being who knows you best and not as someone you need to perform certainty for."
A long silence.
The star I have been watching for three hundred thousand years burns in its color with no name at the far edge of my perceptual range, steady and permanent and utterly indifferent to whether I am watching it or not.
"Something is eating my home," I say. "Something that my archive cannot fully identify. Something that the oldest beings who ever existed — beings older than me, beings who were here before I was born — could not fully understand. Something that has been operating on a schedule for three hundred years and is accelerating and is moving toward the center of the only place in any verse that has ever felt, in any meaningful sense, like mine."
I pause.
"Yes," I say. "I am afraid. In the way that I am capable of being afraid, which is not the way younger beings are afraid — not urgently, not with physical response, not with the particular animal terror of something that knows its life can end quickly. But in the deep way. The way that comes from understanding rather than instinct. The way that knows what loss at this scale would mean."
Vael is quiet for a moment.
"Good," she says.
"Good?"
"I was worried you were going to say you were not. I have been afraid for three hundred years and I did not want to be afraid alone."
"You have never been alone," I say. "You were simply not telling me."
"I was not telling you," she agrees. "Which is functionally different but emotionally equivalent."
"I will keep that in mind," I say.
"Please do."
"What do we do?" Vael asks. And there is something in the way she asks it — stripped of the sardonic quality, stripped of the dry precision, just the question itself laid bare — that reminds me she is younger than me. That 30^018 years, vast as it is, is still younger than 55^032. That she has been mapping these excisions alone for three hundred years and carrying the word Dross in her form the way you carry something heavy that you are trying not to drop.
"We find out what we are dealing with," I say. "Completely. Not a fragment. Not a three-word archive entry. Not a gap where information should be. The full picture."
"How?"
"The Remainder," I say.
Vael's text stutters. A rare thing — a genuine disruption in her cycling. "You want to consult The Remainder."
"The Remainder was present in the Unremembered Interval. It existed before the gap in my archive. It may hold memories the archive does not — memories from the collective knowledge of the Old Race, from the period before I was born, from the time when the Maldovians knew what Dross was and made a decision about it."
"The Remainder speaks in geological time," Vael says. "A sentence takes centuries."
"I can fold time," I say. "The suit can compress our subjective experience of the conversation."
"You have tried to talk to The Remainder before and found it —"
"Difficult," I say. "Yes. But not impossible. And the situation has changed."
"Changed how?"
"Before, I was visiting The Remainder out of curiosity," I say. "Now I am visiting it because I need to know what the Maldovians of the Unremembered Interval decided to do about Dross. Because I believe whatever they decided is the key to what is happening now. And I believe the gap in my archive was not created by time or corruption."
"You think someone removed it deliberately," Vael says.
"I think someone removed it deliberately from the most durable information storage system in the history of the Nascent," I say. "And I think the only beings who could have done that were Maldovians. And I think the reason they removed it is connected to why Dross has been sealed away — and why it is no longer sealed."
A long silence.
An original star somewhere to our right pulses in the color younger beings perceive as the specific grief of recognizing something too late. It has been burning that color for longer than any Compiled Verse has existed. It will continue burning it after whatever comes next has concluded.
"Someone unsealed it," Vael says. Not a question. The text of her form is very still and very slow and each word comes out with the weight of something she has been thinking for a long time and only now permits herself to say aloud. "Someone among the Maldovians. Someone who knew what Dross was. Someone who knew where the seal was and how to undo it and chose — deliberately chose — to undo it."
"That is what the evidence implies," I say.
"One of us," she says.
"One of the Old Race," I say carefully. "Someone who has since concluded, most likely. Or someone still present. I do not know which. I do not have enough information yet to know which."
"But if it was someone who has since concluded —"
"Then conclusion may not have been what it appeared," I say.
Another silence. Longer than the previous ones. Deeper.
"Glasspost," Vael says.
"Yes."
"When we find out who did this —"
"Let us find out first," I say. "Let us understand completely before we decide what to do with understanding."
"You are very calm about the possibility that one of our own kind chose to erase the Nascent."
"I am not calm," I say. "I told you already. I am afraid. In the deep way."
"Then why do you sound calm?"
"Because," I say, "I am 55^032 years old, and one thing I have learned in 55^032 years is that the moment you stop sounding calm is the moment you lose access to the part of yourself that knows what to do next. I will sound calm for as long as it takes. And underneath it I will be afraid. Both things are true simultaneously and I have made my peace with both things being true simultaneously."
Vael's text resumes its normal cycling speed. In my experience of her, this is the equivalent of a very long exhale.
"All right," she says. "The Remainder. When do we go?"
"Now," I say.
"Now," she repeats.
"Is there a reason to wait?"
"No," she says. "There is not. I simply —" a pause. "I wanted to say that this is not nothing. What you are doing. Turning away from the Stillpoint. Choosing to move toward this rather than archive it and return to your star. I know you and I know it is not nothing for you and I wanted to say that before we go."
I look at the Stillpoint one more time. At the star that burns in the color of old consequences. At the place I have stood for what the Compiled Verses would call an incomprehensibly long time, watching, archiving, persisting.
"No," I say. "It is not nothing."
"Good," she says.
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it," she says. "Come on, old man. We have a conclusion to interrogate."
"The Remainder has not concluded."
"Not fully," she says. "Which means it is neither here nor there. Which means it is in a worse position than either of us and deserves our immediate attention."
"That is one interpretation," I say.
"Do you have a better one?"
I consider.
"No," I say.
"Then let's go," says Vael Orindus, the only Maldovian who still speaks, the column of silver-black text that carries the weight of three hundred years of watching alone, and she drifts forward into the Nascent's shifting topology and I walk beside her and the original stars watch us go the way very old things watch anything move through them — completely, patiently, and without surprise.
The Stillpoint recedes behind us.
Somewhere in its interior my star continues burning in its color with no name.
It does not need me to watch it.
I go anyway — and this time I do not look back.