X. On the Patience of the Void
The tenth codex is the quietest text in the collection. Several research assistants have requested reassignment after extended study. The Department recommends reading it in daylight, in company.
- Department of Antiquities, University of Rivermount
I. I have looked into the Void. Not at it. Into it. What looked back was not a face. It was the absence of the expectation of a face. I have spent years trying to find words for what that means. The words I have are not the right ones. They are the closest I have.
II. The Void does not hate creation. Hatred requires recognition of the other as real, as worth opposing. The Void regards the world the way a sleeper regards the noise that almost wakes him. It waits for the noise to stop. It has always waited.
III. Indifference offers nothing to push against. The Void presents no enemy, no opposing force, no will. In its presence, the will to stand begins to wonder what it is standing for. This is harder to resist than any weapon. A blade you can parry. A question you can answer. But what do you do with something that is not there?
IV. The one I name the Hunger, who is the Void given form, does not rage. He does not understand why anything exists when nothing would be so much more restful. His destruction is the gentlest kind: the offer of sleep to the exhausted, of silence to the overwhelmed, of nothing to those who have found everything too heavy to hold.
V. Those who fall to the Void fall the way a fire goes out when no one tends it. They stop caring, one small thing at a time. Not merely the grand purposes but the small ones - the tending of what was tended, the reaching for what was reached for. Stop tending what they tended. Stop reaching for what they reached for. They do not turn toward the dark. They stop turning toward anything at all. And in that stillness the Void receives them the way deep water receives a stone. Without malice. Without joy. Without.
VI. There was a city once that tried to hold the Void and the light in the same hand. I have spoken of this elsewhere. I do not know whether what was attempted there was wisdom or the highest form of madness. Perhaps the distinction does not apply. Perhaps it never did.
VII. The Void touches everyone. There are moments in every life when the effort of existing seems disproportionate to anything it yields. When the spark gutters low and the dark seems more honest than the light. These are not weakness. They are the cost of consciousness. To be aware is to be capable of questioning whether awareness is worth the having. The Void dwells in the place where the answer should be, and says nothing, and waits.
VIII. The answer is not certainty, for certainty is brittle. Not faith, for faith erodes. Not knowledge, for knowledge is forgotten. Not strength, for the strong sleep too.
IX. The answer is the act of choosing. Made without proof that it matters. Made in full knowledge that dissolution is available, that nothing in the structure of the cosmos compels you to continue. The Void can comprehend power, for power is spent. It can comprehend certainty, for certainty cracks. But a choice made freely, with full knowledge of the alternative, for no reason that can be demonstrated or held up to the light? That falls through it the way light falls through water. The water cannot hold it and does not understand why it is bright.
X. The Void is patient beyond all measure. But the soul that chooses, and chooses again, and again, carries a continuity that patience cannot outlast. Patience waits for something to end. The choosing has no end in it.