The original stars do not blink.
That is the first thing any visitor to the Nascent notices, if they survive long enough to notice anything at all. Stars in the Compiled Verses — those younger, borrowed universes built on the residue of what came before — they flicker. They pulse. They breathe with the rhythm of fusion reactions and magnetic fluctuations and all the busy, mortal mathematics of matter trying to hold itself together. They are alive in the way that anything with a lifespan is alive. Urgently. Anxiously. Always slightly aware that the process will eventually stop.
The original stars of the Nascent do not flicker because they have nothing to prove. They burn on fuel that has no name in any catalogue the Continuum Rade has ever compiled. They burn in colors that younger beings do not perceive as wavelengths — they perceive them as feelings. As memories they were not aware they had. As the specific weight of a grief that belongs to someone else and has been resting in their chest so long they forgot it wasn't theirs.
I have been watching them for what the Compiled Verses would calculate as several million years.
I do not find this a long time.
The place I stand is called the Stillpoint. Not by me — I have never needed to name it. It was named by the third expedition the Continuum Rade sent into the Nascent, approximately eight hundred thousand years ago, before the Continuum decided that sending expeditions here was producing results that were more disturbing than useful. The third expedition lasted eleven days, mapped fourteen percent of the Nascent's interior topology, and returned with every instrument functional and every crew member biologically intact. The name Stillpoint appeared in their records as a location of particular note — a region of the Nascent's interior where the spatial distortions were minimal, where the topology held its shape with unusual consistency, where the original stars clustered most densely.
They described it as peaceful.
I found this observation interesting. The Stillpoint is peaceful in the same way the space between the first moment and the second moment is peaceful — not because nothing is happening, but because everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is equally present here and equally unhurried. Time in the Nascent does not flow. It pools. It accumulates in layers the way sediment accumulates, and standing in the Stillpoint is standing at the bottom of all of it, where the pressure is absolute and the silence is not absence of sound but the sum of every sound that has ever existed compressed beyond the frequency of perception.
The third expedition found it peaceful because they were in it for eleven days.
I have been in it, in one way or another, since before their civilization learned to make fire.
I wonder sometimes, I think, though thinking for me is not quite the right word — accessing is closer, retrieving, the way the suit processes and surfaces information from the infinite archive it carries — I wonder whether watching is the same as caring.
The suit does not answer. It never does. It is not that kind of architecture.
I lift one hand and observe the slow pulse of light along the fractures in the suit's surface — pale, unhurried, steady as the original stars. The Type XL has been on my body for longer than most currently existing universes have existed. Whether it is still on my body or has become my body is a question I have not found urgent enough to investigate. The distinction feels less important than it once did. Perhaps after a sufficient number of years everything becomes a kind of suit — a boundary between whatever you are and whatever everything else is, maintained out of habit rather than necessity.
I lower my hand.
An original star to my left is burning in a color I can only describe as the specific texture of a decision made so long ago the reasons are gone but the consequences remain. I have been watching this particular star for approximately three hundred thousand years. It has not changed in any way I can measure. I find this deeply, specifically comforting — the fact that there are things in existence that simply continue without requiring justification.
Perhaps that is why I still continue.
Or perhaps I simply have not found a compelling reason to stop.
The anomaly presents itself at 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000003 seconds past what the suit designates as local temporal coordinate 7.882 × 10^(10^32).
I notice it the way I notice everything — completely, instantaneously, and without surprise, because the suit's perceptual architecture does not experience surprise, and I have been interfaced with the suit long enough that I am no longer certain where its architecture ends and my own begins.
The anomaly is at the outer boundary of the Nascent. Distance, in the Nascent, is not always a fixed quantity — the verse's topology makes recommendations rather than rules — but by approximate measurement the anomaly is occurring roughly 4.7 × 10^18 lightyears from where I stand. In the Compiled Verses this would be an unreachable distance. In the Nascent, with the suit's temporal fold capacity, it is approximately a short walk.
I do not take the short walk yet.
I observe.
The suit feeds me data in layers — structural analysis, substrate composition mapping, temporal signature, dimensional integrity readings. I process all of it simultaneously, the way I process everything, and what the data describes is this:
A region of Nascent substrate approximately 3.2 lightyears in diameter has been removed.
Not damaged. Not degraded. Not collapsed or consumed or torn.
Removed.
The substrate in that area — the primordial material that predates physics, the foundational layer upon which causality itself was later built — is simply no longer present. The region where it was is not empty in the way that space is empty. It is empty in the way that a sentence is empty when a word has been carefully cut from its middle. The surrounding substrate curves slightly toward the absence, the way text crowds a blank space, as if trying to close the gap through sheer proximity.
The precision of it is extraordinary.
Whatever performed this removal did not tear or burn or break. It excised. It understood the substrate at a level of intimacy that implies either an intelligence of staggering depth or a process operating on principles so fundamental they bypass the concept of intelligence entirely.
Interesting, I think.
I file the observation in the archive.
I return my attention to the star that burns in the color of old consequences.
Approximately forty thousand years pass.
Or what the suit measures as forty thousand years. Time in the Nascent is, as I have mentioned, a pooling rather than a flowing, and my experience of it is further complicated by the suit's temporal architecture, which stores and folds and occasionally re-sequences my subjective timeline in ways that make linear accounting impractical. What I know is that between the moment I noted the anomaly and the moment I next think about it, a significant quantity of what other beings would call time has elapsed.
I think about it again because there is a second anomaly.
This one is 6.1 lightyears in diameter.
Larger than the first. Same precision. Same clean absence. Same slight curving of surrounding substrate toward the gap, the way a wound tries to close itself.
I examine the data more carefully this time.
The geometry is consistent, I observe to myself. The removal follows the same structural logic as the first. The same angles. The same depth of excision. Whatever is doing this is operating from a plan.
I access the archive and compare the two anomalies. The second is not random — it is positioned in precise geometric relation to the first. If I extend the implied pattern, project forward, the next removal will occur at a specific location, at a specific scale, within what the suit estimates as the next several centuries.
A sequence, I think. Something is working through a sequence.
I file this updated observation.
I look back at the star.
It is still burning in the color of old consequences.
I think: I have been the only thing watching this star for three hundred thousand years. If I walk away from the Stillpoint and never come back, it will continue burning without me. It does not need to be watched.
I think: Nothing does.
I look at the star for another ten thousand years.
The third anomaly is 9.4 lightyears in diameter.
I do not wait for a fourth.
I am standing at the edge of the third anomaly — the closest I have been to the boundary layer in what the Compiled Verses would measure as a very long time — when I first hear Vael.
I say hear. This is imprecise. Vael does not make sound. Vael has not made sound in any conventional physical sense since she dissolved her biological form approximately 10^22 years ago. What I experience is closer to the sensation of a presence becoming adjacent — a shift in the local information density that has a specific texture I have learned to recognize the way one recognizes a voice.
She materializes beside me. The column of moving silver-black text that she has chosen as her preferred form rotates slowly in the Nascent's non-atmosphere. The language the text is written in predates all known scripts. I can read it. Reading it is like reading the universe's first draft — rough, dense, full of abandoned ideas that later became physics.
Currently the text reads, cycling through its endless reformulation: you noticed.
"I noticed the first one forty thousand years ago," I say.
My voice, through the suit, is not loud. It never is. It is the kind of voice that does not need volume because the universe tends to pay attention to it regardless. I have been told it sounds like something speaking from a very long way away even when I am standing directly in front of you. I have no particular opinion about this.
The text shifts. and you filed it away and watched your star.
"I filed it away and watched my star."
very like you.
"It appeared isolated. A single event."
and now?
I look at the clean, precise absence before me. The third excision. The substrate curved toward the gap like text around a removed word. In the middle of the absence — if middle is a coherent concept when the thing defining the space no longer exists — there is a quality of air that is not air that makes even my suit's perceptual architecture register something it cannot quite classify. Not threat. Something older than threat.
"Now I am less certain it is isolated," I say.
The text shifts again, faster. seventeen, glasspost. i have mapped seventeen of them. along the outer boundary of the nascent. each one larger than the last. each one in precise geometric relation to the others.
I process this.
"You have been mapping them."
for several centuries, yes.
"You did not tell me."
you were watching your star.
I consider this for a moment. The light fractures along my suit pulse once, slowly, and settle.
"Vael."
i know.
"Seventeen."
seventeen.
"Show me the map."
The map she shows me is not a visual representation — Vael does not think in visuals anymore and neither, fully, do I. It is a structural map, a relational diagram of substrate positions and excision geometries and implied vectors, and when I process it through the suit's analytical architecture the pattern that emerges is immediately, unambiguously clear.
The seventeen excisions are not random events along the Nascent's boundary. They are a single, coherent, progressive action. They describe — if projected to completion, if the sequence continues at its established rate and scale — a path. A path moving inward. Toward the Nascent's interior. Toward the Stillpoint.
Toward where I have been standing for several million years.
"It is moving toward the center," I say.
yes.
"At the current rate of progression."
four hundred thousand years, Vael says. approximately. before it reaches the stillpoint. less, if the rate of removal accelerates. and glasspost — the rate has been accelerating.
The text of her form is moving faster than I have seen it move in a long time. This is how Vael expresses something she will not call fear. She expresses it as speed — as urgency encoded in the movement of words rather than their content.
"You are afraid," I say.
i am not afraid of the nascent ending, she says. everything ends. i have made my peace with everything ending. i concluded my peace with endings approximately ten to the power of eighteen years ago and have revisited it periodically since and found it holds.
"Then what."
i am afraid of the nascent being taken. there is a difference, glasspost. there is a very significant difference between a universe ending on its own terms and a universe being consumed by something that decided unilaterally that it had the right to consume it. one is physics. the other is —
She pauses. The text slows almost to a stop.
the other is an argument. and i am not willing to concede the argument without being heard.
I look at the clean absence before me for a long time.
"Do you know what is doing this?" I ask.
i have a suspicion, she says. but i wanted you to look first. before i said the word. because once i say the word it becomes a different kind of conversation and i wanted one more moment of this kind.
"This kind."
the kind where it might still be something we don't recognize. something new. something that has a different explanation.
I understand what she means. I have been alive long enough to understand the value of the moment before certainty — the last instant in which multiple possibilities still exist, before the data collapses into a single fact and you are required to respond to the fact rather than the possibilities.
I give her that moment.
The original star I have been watching from the Stillpoint is not visible from here. We are too close to the boundary, and the Nascent's topology is less stable near its edges. But I can feel it — the suit's perceptual architecture is sensitive enough across these distances that I can feel the specific harmonic of its light, the color that has no name, the weight of old consequences burning steadily in the interior dark.
"All right," I say. "Tell me the word."
The text of Vael's form goes very still. Every character stops moving simultaneously. This is something I have never seen her do before in all the eons I have known her. Every piece of her stops at once, and in the stillness she says:
dross.
And I feel something in the suit's archive respond — a deep resonance from the oldest stratum of stored memory, from data I collected so long ago I had effectively forgotten it existed. The archive surfaces it without being asked. A single fragmented entry. Pre-civilizational. From the Unremembered Interval itself.
Three words only.
It was before.
I stand at the edge of the third excision and I look at the clean, precise absence where the oldest substrate in existence used to be and I feel — not for the first time in my long life, but with a particular quality I have not felt in several million years — that I am standing at the beginning of something I do not fully understand.
I have not stood at the beginning of something I did not fully understand in a very long time.
"Vael," I say.
yes.
"How long since you last concluded your peace with endings?"
The text begins to move again. Slowly at first, then with its usual restless cycling. I can feel her settling back into herself.
about three hundred years, she says. i was due for a revisitation.
"And does it hold?"
A long pause. The Nascent hums around us at its frequency below frequency, the crystalline dark ground resonating with something older than sound.
ask me again, she says finally, when we know what we're dealing with.
I turn away from the excision. The Stillpoint is 4.7 × 10^18 lightyears behind me. My star is burning there without me, in its color with no name, patient and indifferent and permanent.
I begin walking toward it.
Not to watch it.
To say, in the only way a being like me can say such a thing — quietly, without ceremony, without looking back — that I am leaving for a while.
That something has come that requires a different kind of attention.
That I will return when the question is answered or I am no longer able to return, and either outcome is, after 55^032 years, acceptable.
Vael drifts beside me, her text cycling in the non-light of the Nascent's interior, and we walk together through the oldest place in existence toward whatever comes next, and neither of us speaks again until the Stillpoint is visible in the distance, burning with original starlight in colors that younger beings perceive as feelings they cannot name.
Then Vael says, very quietly:
i missed walking with you.
And I say nothing.
But I slow my pace slightly so she does not have to drift as fast to keep up.
Which, for me, is the same thing.