Wealth Accuracy

Chapter 113. The Voyage into Nothing

The Great Weaving was a symphony of desperation. Across the connected worlds, composers like Lyra worked day and night, their minds linked through the Sentinel, becoming conductors of a galactic orchestra. The dry rhythm of K'tharr was braided with the deep hum of Silica Prime; the playful, skittering melodies from the Cradle were woven into the patient, tidal songs of the aquatic colonies. Golden threads of consciousness stretched between the stars, a luminous web against the encroaching grey. The combined Chorus was indeed louder, denser, a shield of shared existence.

But it was a defensive action. And the Fading continued its slow, inexorable advance. It didn't attack the web; it simply… ignored it. Where the grey silence met the golden threads, the music didn't break; it was negated. The shield held the silence at bay, but it could not push it back. It was a stalemate, and the silence had more territory.

Kael watched the Sentinel’s star-map in the Archive, the grey stain now alarmingly close to a star system known as Lyra’s Hope, a colony famed for its composers. He felt the entire Garden holding its breath. Defending was not enough. They were trying to fight a void by building a wall around themselves. To truly understand, they had to do the unthinkable.

“We have to go there,” he said, his voice cutting through the tense silence of the Council. “Into the silence.”

Elara stared at him. “Go where? Kael, there is no ‘there’. It’s a negation. A place where the Chorus doesn’t exist. Sending a ship… it would be like sailing into a hole in the ocean.”

“Exactly,” Kael replied, his gaze unwavering. “We cannot understand it from the outside. The Sentinel has no data because data cannot exist within it. The only way to learn is to experience it directly. To see what happens to a conscious mind when the song is taken away.”

The proposal was met with horror. It was a suicide mission. To willingly step into the un-singing was to invite erasure.

“The Roewi’s Promise is the only vessel that might survive the journey,” Historian Rael said, his voice heavy. “Its systems are integrated with the Garden’s core consciousness. It is a song in itself. But if it crosses the threshold… the connection will be severed. You will be utterly alone.”

“We won’t be going in blind,” Kael said. He turned to the Sentinel’s shimmering form. “You are the memory of isolation. Of the Zero Percent. You understand what it is to be cut off. Can you… simulate it? Can you prepare us?”

The Sentinel’s light swirled, patterns of Roewi’s loneliness, Lina’s fear, and Aris’s cold logic intertwining. A new feeling emerged: a profound, terrifying empathy. It could not simulate the Fading, for the Fading was the absence of what it was made of. But it could teach them about the psychological landscape of absolute disconnection. It could harden them against the despair.

The Council, after a long and somber debate, agreed. The voyage was a terrible risk, but the alternative was to wait for the slow death of all they knew. Kael would lead a small crew: Elara, for her unshakable calm; Composer Lyra, to record any perceptual data, and Healer Finn, to monitor their psychic state.

The Roewi’s Promise, a beautiful vessel grown from living wood and crystalline technology, sat on the launch mesa. Its hull, usually pulsing with soft light, was muted. The crew wore specially designed suits, woven with Glimmer fungus and Chime-spark filaments, a last-ditch effort to maintain a tiny, personal echo of the Chorus.

The entire Garden gathered, their combined song focused on the ship, a torrent of love and fear and hope pouring into the vessel’s core. It was a wave of sound pushing them toward the silence.

The voyage to the edge of the Fading was the most surreal journey of Kael’s life. As they neared the Lyra’s Hope system, the Chorus, once a vibrant, multi-layered symphony, began to thin. First, the distant, joyful notes of the farthest colonies faded. Then, the steady hum of the galactic core softened. Soon, all that was left was the powerful, golden thread connecting them back to the Garden, a lone, brilliant strand in an increasingly mute universe.

And then, they saw it. Not a cloud, not a barrier, but a… boundary. On one side, the starfield was vibrant, alive with the psychic resonance of the Chorus. On the other, the stars were just dead, distant fires. There was no light, no color, no sound. It was a perfect, sterile vacuum of meaning.

“We’re at the threshold,” Lyra whispered, her voice trembling. Her fingers, which usually danced to unseen music, were still. “I… I can’t hear the Garden anymore. Only our tether.”

The golden thread from the Garden was still there, a lifeline of incredible beauty and fragility, stretching back into the world of song.

“Recording now,” Lyra said, her composer’s discipline taking over. “The silence has a… texture. It’s not empty. It’s absorptive. It’s pulling at the edges of my mind.”

Healer Finn monitored their vitals. “Heart rates are elevating. Brainwave patterns are showing signs associated with profound sensory deprivation and existential anxiety. The personal Chorus suits are… they’re holding, but they’re struggling. It’s like they’re trying to sing in a room that eats sound.”

Kael took a deep breath. “Prepare to cross.”

He pushed the controls. The Roewi’s Promise slid forward, across the invisible line.

The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.

The golden thread didn’t break. It was un-made. One moment, it was a blazing cord of connection, the most beautiful thing Kael had ever seen. The next, it was simply gone. Not severed, but erased from history, from reality.

And with it, the world ended.

The interior of the ship went dead quiet. The gentle hum of the systems, the soft pulse of the bioluminescent lights, it all vanished, replaced by a silence so absolute it felt like a physical pressure on the eardrums. The light didn’t dim; it became flat, devoid of warmth or meaning. The vibrant wood of the hull looked like painted plastic.

But the true horror was internal.

Kael reached for the Chorus, for the feeling of the Garden, for the memory of the children’s laughter. He found nothing. It wasn’t that the memories were gone. They were there, but they were… hollow. Like reading the definition of the word “joy” without ever having felt it. The connection, the shared emotion that gave the memories meaning, had been surgically removed. He was alone in a way he had never conceived possible. He was a set of data points in a void.

Elara let out a choked sob next to him. “Kael… I can’t feel you.” She was looking right at him, but her eyes were wide with terror. “I see you, but the… the you-ness is gone. It’s just… shape and color.”

Lyra was frantically trying to interface with her recording equipment, but the screens were blank. “There’s no data,” she whimpered. “There’s nothing to record. It’s not a frequency. It’s the absence of frequency.”

Healer Finn was the most alarming. He was staring at his own hands, his face a mask of utter confusion. “The trauma… the patterns… they’re gone. The concept of healing… it has no referent.” His life’s work, his very purpose, had been rendered meaningless.

They were in the belly of the beast. The Fading was not a thing. It was a state of non-being. A universe where relationship, the fundamental principle of their existence, did not and could not exist.

Kael fought against the crushing weight of the nothingness. He focused on the one thing the Sentinel had taught him: the will to connect. It was not a feeling now, but a decision. A raw, stubborn act of defiance.

He looked at Elara, and he chose to see her, not as shape and color, but as his friend. He forced the memory of her strength, her compassion, into the forefront of his mind, holding it against the void like a shield.

And for a single, fleeting second, he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes.

It was the smallest spark in an infinite darkness. But it was enough.

They had their answer. The Fading could erase the music, but it could not entirely erase the musician. The potential for connection, however faint, could persist. It was a will, not a wave. A choice, not a chorus.

“We have to go back,” Kael said, his voice a dry rasp in the perfect silence. “Now.”

Turning the ship around, they crossed back over the threshold. The return was not a gentle easing back into sound, but a violent, overwhelming cacophony. The Chorus slammed into them with the force of a physical blow, the Garden’s fear, the Council’s anxiety, the entire web’s desperate hope. It was deafening, painful, and the most beautiful thing they had ever experienced.

They had voyaged into nothing and returned. And they brought back the only weapon that might have a chance: the terrifying, lonely knowledge that in the end, when all else was unmade, the only thing left might be a single, stubborn will to say “I am here.”

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