The Genesis of the Void

The clamor of the demos and the clash of Roman blades rise to the parapets of my terrace. Kemet is dying; my city burns. Below, those traitors fancy they have brought the incarnation of a goddess to her knees. Let them drink deep of that illusion. My gaze is turned not upon the ashes of my kingdom, but toward the vault of heaven.

Behind me, hidden in the darkness, keeps watch the only wonder in this world that is my equal. The priests of my temples revere in her the manifestation of a beast-god. I have never contradicted their fables; men require chimeras if they are to be kept on a leash. Yet I was raised in geometry and the study of the stars, and I know the truth. I know her blood harbors a marvel, an insult to time itself, a survivor from an age before the dawn of our world.

Without warning, the Kosmos tears open.

No meteor falls like this. Fragments of a dead creation are raining upon our heads. Trails of blinding Golden Yellow and tainted Lightning Blue slash the night. One of those celestial stones crashes onto the porphyry of our terrace.

The reaction is instantaneous. Devastating. Before my voice can break the silence, an archaic instinct has driven her forward. The beast springs, paw outstretched, and strikes the stone’s molten crust.

Then, nothingness.

The shock wave cuts me down. Not a sound. The silence of this collapse is a hundred times more terrifying than the din of war below. Before my eyes, the true Ma’at descends upon her—not the goddess my priests implore, but the absolute Balance of the Kosmos.

The sundering chills my blood.

It is not her soul that the Balance has come to claim; it is her very flesh that it divides. A part of her is torn away—not cut, not burned, but subtracted, with the cold obscenity of an account being settled. Ananke has ruled; fate is in motion.

What was taken from her collapses onto the porphyry and burns into an ash so black it smothers the faintest reflection. A hole in my sight, as though reality itself had just been erased from the marble.

And what remains of her does not fall. I watch her dwindle, drawn into a breach my eyes refuse to admit, expelled from our reality like an intruder. No body remains on the terrace. Nothing but one woman fewer, and this ash. She is not dead—I know it with a certainty that flays me. She is elsewhere. And she is incomplete.

I sink to my knees. I mourn neither my scepter as Basilissa nor my own imminent end, but the only eternity that ever deserved to exist, taken from me without even the dignity of death. With trembling hands, I gather the baleful ash to my breast and pour it into a heavy lead casket, which I seal forever.

My final decree. A paltry mausoleum for matter so purely destructive that no human prison will contain it forever.