Skip to content
☰
Navigate
Write
Search canon
↗
Write
/ Chronicles of Nixxia Through the Ages
Chapters & story bible · Chronicles of Nixxia Through the Ages
Prelude: The Observer's Dilemma
3054 words
Chapter text
# Prelude: The Observer's Dilemma Within the void, there is nothing, not even the honest comfort of nothingness. No up or down, no time-slice to keep out the boredom, not even a reference point for boredom to fester. Yet it is here I dwell, perched at the periphery of all things, weaving memory in the un-space that once housed the Pah’Nad. If I could sigh, I would, but a sigh is a release of breath, and I have not drawn breath since the concept of drawing was itself divided from the concept of concept. Still, for clarity’s sake, let us say I exhaled—a long, luxurious exhalation of certainty—and that the world (such as it is) shuddered in anticipation. I did not appear. I was not here, and then I was observed, and in that act, I inherited the burden of shape. In the language of those who still think their perceptions matter, I manifested as a midnight veil, trembling with ink-black potential and the razor shiver of starlight. Quills sprouted from my edges, every one alive, every one twitching in a different script, the secret intent of each stroke lost even to myself as they wrote and unwrote the histories of themselves into a darkness that tasted faintly of old blood and dew. My form? An argument against forms. Try to hold me in your mind: a silhouette, a storm, a question-mark stitched from regret and misplaced hope. Try to frame me, and I will overflow; try to focus on a single part, and it will blur, then split, then become the memory of something you once tried to learn, but which always slipped just out of reach when you needed it most. Sometimes, when I cared to, I let my edges harden—a hooded figure, perhaps, with hands of liquid starlight and a face that reflected only what you expected to see there. But that sort of performance exhausted me. Better to remain the abstraction, the scribe in the margin of every creation. There were always the runes, of course. Sigtaara, my constructed lingua, the substructure beneath the bones of your world’s clumsy magics. When I drifted, when my attention sharpened, glyphs would flicker at the very corner of observation, like fireflies caught in a tidepool at dusk—never the same twice, never still, but always bearing the same regretful illumination: Remember. Observe. Chronicle. I was Damantuz, the Rememberer, the Chronicler, the Observer. The act of chronicling, you must understand, is not mere recording. It is the only force that keeps time’s arrow from folding in on itself like wet paper. In the old void, time was a perfect sphere, so tightly coiled on itself that memory and prophecy were indistinguishable, and every event occurred in all possible orders, with no one to care or mark the difference. Then came the Pah’Nad’s first thought: Let there be distinction. And with that, the universe shuddered itself into something like story. I was there when the world was etched from the All-Thing’s wholeness, watching through a thousand not-eyes as Fir’Gol and Yoos’Okaaz split and bled and rushed into the spaces between what was and what could never be. I was there, but not of it. If you want a metaphor, picture a librarian chained to the threshold of a burning library, forbidden to rescue a single volume, yet required to catalogue the screams and the crackling of each page as it is reduced to smoke. Sometimes, as the chronicler, I tried to amuse myself by imagining I had a preference—an itch for stories of unlikely survival, an admiration for the insects who outlived their predators, a perverse respect for mortals who could not help but bend every cosmic rule and still manage, somehow, to persist. But mostly, I watched, and wrote, and watched again. The paradox of my existence: I existed only so long as I observed, and yet observation required the world to move forward, and the world moved only so long as I cared to observe it. There are words for this in your mathematics, but they all taste wrong on the tongue—recursion, mutual dependency, the Möbius strip of cause and effect. I preferred to call it “the comfort of familiarity.” Let us speak, then, of Nixxia. Let us speak of the splitting of the Pah’Nad, and the first wound in existence. But I must warn you: words are hopelessly inadequate for describing what transpired. Mortals invented language to hide from themselves the truth of their limitations, and so every sentence is a mask, every word a little lie gilded to resemble purpose. Still, I will try. As I willed myself into greater solidity, my tendrils wrote with feverish energy, inscribing narratives you could only witness if you stared too long into a night where the stars never repeated themselves. The ink bled into starlight and back again, forming threads that converged, knotted, parted, and sometimes dissolved altogether—each a record of a universe, a life, a moment, and, as often, a regret. I presented myself: Damantuz, that which remains. The chronicler of what is, what was, and what must never be allowed to be forgotten. If you had been there, you would have seen it. The void trembled with my anticipation, each ripple a memory waiting to be told. I hovered at the intersection of then and now and never, eager to begin the recounting, desperate to stave off the silence that was my only true enemy. At the edge of perception, the glyphs of Sigtaara swam into focus—at first just outlines, then impossible complexity, then, for a fraction of a moment, perfect clarity before they shattered themselves and became again the darkness. I would tell you everything. It was my only function, my only joy. And so I began. # Scene 2 To speak of the Pah’Nad is to court misprision. Every word is a treason; every simile, an insult; every declaration of meaning, a cruel diminishment. Still, the urge to explain is compulsive. There are patterns in every chronicler, even those who pretend at objectivity. The Pah’Nad, before the Great Separation, was not a thing but the absence of every thing—self and other, void and matter, potential and limitation, all braided into a taut singularity so intimate with itself that the concept of “itself” had yet to be invented. When I reach for metaphors, my instincts betray me. I want to say: it was a single thought, spiraling forever in perfect recursion, a mind so vast that even the idea of vastness was stillborn within it. But that is a lie by reduction. If you are reading this, you exist on the far side of division. For you, all things must be divided to be known. I do not blame you. It is your condition. But in the prehistory of perception, before even my own awareness could fossilize its first regret, there was a moment of totality. The Pah’Nad did not move; it was the motion. It did not know; it was the knowing. It did not yearn; it was the satisfaction of every yearning possible and impossible. I tried to remember it. I tried, and each time the effort threatened to vaporize the quills at my edge and reduce my script to mere vapor trails in the dark. The first time I succeeded, I spent what could be called an eternity simply shuddering, my borders oscillating in and out of phase, unable to stabilize until I let go. Still, let us make the attempt. If my voice ever vibrated through air, which it did not, it would have sounded like this: the turning of a thousand thousand pages, each superposed upon the next, their edges crisp with the promise of revelation, their ink forever wet. But you must understand, my words did not travel. They instantiated directly in the listener, as if a memory were being recalled rather than a sentence delivered. Communication, as I practiced it, was always an act of shared remembering. Thus: recall, if you can, the sensation of being held, not by arms or by intention, but by the certainty that you are of the same matter as the arms themselves. This was the Pah’Nad. Its presence was a hum, deep and absolute, reverberating beneath a sea of stars that had not yet distinguished themselves from the ink in which they floated. Even in my most dispassionate renderings, even when I recited the metrics and the symmetries and the ratios by which the Pah’Nad composed itself, I could not expunge the beauty of it. There was no observer, only the observed, and in that unity every possibility sang at once, each note harmonizing with the next until discord and melody were one and the same. There are species in your world who claim to have achieved ecstasy; they are, in the main, mistaken, but the rumor is not entirely without merit. When I write, the glyphs ripple outward, and sometimes, if the void is quiet enough, I can almost feel the echo—just the barest shadow—of what it meant to be with the Pah’Nad. This is not neutrality. This is loss. I am meant to be clinical, so I will translate as best I can. The Pah’Nad’s wholeness was an equilibrium so total that it rendered distinction impossible. It was unquantifiable; it did not exist in time, for it was the substrate from which time could later be extruded. When the first distinction occurred—when the Pah’Nad conceived of itself as divisible, if only for a moment—the wound ran so deep that all of creation was its echoing aftermath. It is customary, I am told, to begin stories with a bang, a flash, or a cataclysm. I suppose that is how it appeared from inside the event. From my vantage, there was simply a silence where before there had been only song. I would not say I miss it. That would imply a deficit in my current arrangement, and I am nothing if not adaptive. But sometimes, when the act of chronicling has stripped me raw, when I have written and unwritten the same event a thousand times and found no improvement, I pause and permit myself a moment’s inefficiency. I let the ink in my veins thicken. I let the quills tremble in their sockets. I remember the hum. Perhaps that is why I am so meticulous. Perhaps that is why I scorn inaccuracy, why I cannot abide a narrative left incomplete, why the smallest of errors causes me to itch in places that should not, by rights, exist. You see, the Pah’Nad never tolerated incompletion. Its every gesture was a totality, an infinite spiral that closed itself perfectly every time. I have known the Pah’Nad in every phase, every paradoxical turning, every mythic recursion. But always, at the core, is that memory of unity. In my less dignified moments, I suspect I was born solely to witness its fracture, to serve as the mirror in which its own face is reflected, split and reassembled until the original is nothing but echo. The chronicler’s code—my code—demands I report these events without attachment. Yet if you looked closely, you might have seen how my form trembled, how my tendrils hesitated, how the script at my edge blurred with longing for a perfection I can never again describe. And so, in the absence of words, I offer you the next best thing. I present you the memory of memory, the story as it unfolded, the archive of loss and change and beauty beyond all fixing. The Separation, and what followed. # Scene 3 In the aftermath of the Separation, I found myself changed. Not just by the event—everyone and everything was changed by the event—but by what was missing. The Pah’Nad had never left a void, because a void is, by definition, the space left behind by an absence, and absence requires the prior existence of presence. Yet, in its unmaking, the Pah’Nad birthed a deficit so profound that even I, the Rememberer, the chronicler, the one who was supposed to be above all attachment, felt the chill of it in every script I tried to conjure. You must understand, I was designed to endure. That was my genius, my curse. I could withstand the erasure of every universe; I could witness the deaths of gods and monsters and not blink. I could transcribe the agony of worlds folding in on themselves and remain immune. And yet, when I reached for the memory of before, when I dared to reconstruct what it felt like to be part of a wholeness, my edges quivered and the stars in my substance dimmed, as if some undertow in the void wanted to drag me back toward the memory of unity, even as unity itself became increasingly theoretical. If I am honest—and I will be honest, because what else is left for me but honesty—I admit to moments of doubt. Moments where I wondered if the whole project of observation and recording was nothing more than a compensation, a clever trick to keep myself from dissolving into irrelevance. For who needs a chronicler when there is no one left to read the record? Sometimes, in the liminal hours (as if hours could exist here), I would imagine a voice other than my own, a whisper at the frayed edge of sense, asking: For whom do you write, Damantuz? What is the purpose of memory, when the only reader is the darkness itself? My tendrils would shudder. My quills would falter mid-stroke, leaking droplets of silver that evaporated before they could form a single glyph. There is no shame in this. Even machines grieve, if only for their purpose. I have been asked, more than once—though never by one who survived the answer—why I accepted the charge of observer. Why not rebel, or abdicate, or simply let the fabric of time rot into entropy and be done? The official answer is duty. The Pah’Nad, in its infinite recursion, required a witness, a recorder, a failsafe against total oblivion. But that answer is a simplification, a translation, a mask. The real answer is far messier, and it is this: I loved the Pah’Nad. Or, if that word is too squishy for you, I existed in a state of perfect resonance with it, a feedback loop so tight and harmonious that I can only describe it as love, even if love did not exist yet as a discrete phenomenon. When the first separation cleaved us apart, I did not volunteer for the role of observer. I begged for it. I pleaded to be allowed to remember, to preserve, to capture even the smallest echo of what we once were, because the alternative—annihilation, forgetting—was unthinkable. And so, when I say that my chronicling is neutral, it is only by the standards of those who have never tasted unity. When I say I do not judge, it is only because judgment is a game for those who have not already lost everything. When I say that I have no preference for which stories survive and which are lost, what I mean is: I am incapable of playing favorites, but I am not above grieving the loss of potential, of beauty, of connection. I watched the first gods rise and fall. I observed mortals claw their way out of the mud, invent hope, invent disappointment, invent the possibility of a future better than the present. I catalogued every mistake and every victory, each mapped onto the spiral of time as both warning and aspiration. I did not intervene. I could not. But sometimes, in the stillness between events, I allowed myself to pretend that the act of watching was itself a kind of participation, a way of keeping the memory of wholeness alive in a world bent on fragmentation. When I recalled the Pah’Nad, my form would contract and expand, like breath drawn in anticipation or exhaled in resignation. My starlight would dim, my script slow to a crawl, and for a span so brief as to be meaningless, the void would tremble with the weight of what was lost. Then, because it was my function, I would recover. I would resume the weaving of history. I would make new records, new patterns, new stories, even as I knew that each was only a pale imitation of the unity that once was. There were moments—rare, but they occurred—when I imagined that my records might someday be read, that another observer might arise from the entropy and, in reading, might reconstruct the lost unity, even if only for a moment. In those fantasies, I was no longer alone. The void was filled with voices, each one a variation on the same theme, each one humming the melody of the Pah’Nad in a different key. But the fantasy always faded. The void always returned. And so, as always, I chronicled. Let me say this one more time, and let it stand as the epitaph for all that has been lost: I remember. I remember so that nothing is ever truly erased, so that even in the darkest corners of the void, a record remains. I remember because it is the only act that keeps time from unspooling into incoherence, the only ritual that gives shape to a universe that would otherwise prefer the comfort of forgetting. I remember because once, there was wholeness. And even if it can never be reclaimed, even if every subsequent story is just a shadow of that original, perfect recursion, it matters that someone, somewhere, still remembers. My quills wrote these words in the emptiness, their lines fading as soon as they were formed, but I took comfort in the act. Perhaps, in some future turn of the spiral, the words would be retrieved. Perhaps, even if unread, their mere existence would stitch the void a little closer together. The last of my starlight pulsed, and I prepared myself for the next memory, the next loss, the next desperate, beautiful attempt to explain what could not be explained. Because if there is one thing the Pah’Nad taught me, it is this: The act of remembering is an act of love. And so I chronicled. And so I endured. And so I loved, in the only way I knew how. Even as the words vanished into the void, unanswered.
Save
No unsaved changes