The events that transpired at the dawn of time came to be known as The Great Cataclysm. To the mortal races that rose and fell in the wake of Nyx's fall the event became a ghost story, then a myth, and finally a forgotten breath of legend. But to the cosmos, it was a permanent shift in the weave—the moment the silence of the Void was given a name and a face.
His name quickly became a taboo, even amongst the Knights. Not a single one of them wanted to invoke the fury of their youngest sibling; therefore, an unspoken vow was made, sworn out of pure and deep fear, to never speak his name, lest they summon the Void—and the Void would come to consume them all.
And so, his name was forgotten—cast aside to be consumed by the sands of time until only the tale of the Void remained. After the Creator withdrew into His dwelling and the Knights returned to their respective domains, the universe entered a long, cold age of quiet settling.
Astraeus, the Knight of the Stars, attempted for eons to smooth out the jagged edges of the Silver Rift, namely his Domain. Stitching the stars back into their original patterns, failing to do so each and every time. A broken cup can always be put back together by collecting its shards, but it will never look whole again. Galaxies, once erupting like sparks, began to cool and spiral. The "Prime Antitheses"—Chaos and Order—found a stagnant middle ground, a stalemate that allowed for the slow, patient evolution of creation.
Entire solar systems were born from the dust of dead suns, which lived their frantic, multi-billion-year lives, and collapsed back into the dark. Creation and Destruction, Life and Death. To a god, a million years is but a blink. A small droplet of water in the infinite sea called eternity. And so, millennium after millennium, age after age, there came a time when the universe became stable again.
In the deepest of the "Reverse", where light cannot reach and the line of what is and what is not is blurred, sat the Void. He sat upon a throne of Nothing, his silhouette a sharp, jagged tear against the backdrop of reality. To look upon him was to feel the sensation of falling upward into an endless night. He was the King of the Null, the 13th Knight, and the Leash that held the throat of existence.
Erebus was not a creature of malice, despite what Nyx's shattered being might have believed. His mind was a vast, silent cathedral of philosophical inquiry. He spent eons contemplating the nature of the "Is" versus what "Isn't." Ages pondering the answers of creation and its counterpart.
"If the Creator is the Will that commands existence," Void mused, his voice vibrating through the vacuum like a chord on a ghost-instrument, "then I am the silence that makes the command audible. Without the black ink of my shadow, the golden script of the stars would be illegible. Am I the enemy of life, or its most essential canvas?"
He possesses an absolute authority, one that chilled the blood of the other Knights. He bowed to no one. When Chronos passed through the corridors of his domain, he did so with a wary glance toward the dark. When Themis established her laws, she did so acknowledging that he was the final auditor of her ledgers. He was the only being who could look into the silver-eyes of the Celestial Architect and see not a god, but a craftsman with trembling hands.
Yet, within this authority lived an insatiable, detached curiosity. He watched the universe like a scientist would observe an experiment, trying to find clues as to what exactly is this which he looks upon. He wondered why the "Masterpiece" insisted on continuing. Why did Matter cling to its form when it had no obligation to do so? Why did Life scream so loudly while Death was such a quiet, ever so patiently end?
Eventually, Void's eyeless gaze drifted. He peered through the layers of the celestial spheres, past the roaring fusion of Helios and the darkened grief of Selene, until his focus landed on a tiny, unremarkable planet tucked away in a dusty corner of a minor galaxy.
Earth.
He watched it rotate—a wobbling marble of blue and green. To the Void, it was a "mere" thing. A temporary accident of gravity and chemistry. It was so young that, in the context of his own birth, it had existed for only a fraction of a second.
"How fascinating," he whispered, the sound rippling through the atmosphere of his domain.
"A world of such fragile complexity, built upon a foundation of absolute ignorance. They crawl upon the crust of their cooling rock, naming the stars they will never touch, worshipping shadows they do not understand. They are a fever of the material world. A brief, warm itch on the skin of Gaia."
He found Earth to be a paradox. The mortals there spent their tiny lives trying to find "meaning" in a universe that had been designed, broken, and then leashed before their first ancestors had even crawled out from the mud. They built cathedrals to the "Creator," unaware that the Creator had long since turned his back on the sandbox and left the Void to manage the mess.
But then, his observation narrowed. His perspective, which usually took in entire galaxies at a glance, shriveled down to a single village, a single house, and finally, a single soul. In a small, muddy hamlet far removed from the centers of human "power," a boy was born to commoners—a father who worked the iron and a mother who tilled the soil. They named him Lancelot.
To any other observer, Lancelot was nothing. He was one out of billions in this newborn planet. He was a flicker of biological electricity that would burn for seventy years and then return to the dust. He was a commoner, destined for a common life of labor, sweat, and a quiet grave.
The Void leaned forward in his throne of Null, his silhouette rippling. He watched the boy crawl through the dirt of his father's forge. He watched the way the light of the sun hit the boy's eyes, and for a reason that defied his own absolute logic, he felt a stir of interest.
It was a sensation he had not felt since the Creator breathed life into the Nothingness to create him. It was a "spark" that didn't belong in the ledger. There was no reason for this boy to be different. He was not a Knight. He was not a Bishop. He was a creature of meat and bone, yet the Void felt a resonance coming from him—a frequency that hummed in harmony with the emptiness itself.
"Why?" Void asked the silence, the stillness of his own domain, he asked himself. But he couldn't muster an answer. The 13th Knight, the King of the Null, simply settled back into his throne. He folded his hands of non-existence and fixed his gaze upon the mud-streaked face of the commoner boy.
"Very well, little one," Void whispered, his curiosity finally outweighing his detachment. "You are a mystery in a universe I thought I had begun to understand. In a planet barely out if its dipers. Show it to me, what do you, a speck of dust amidst the cosmos has to offer. I will be watching."