115

115
Astella's POV

“The links are fixed” I wheezed, holding onto my shaman connections taking everything here and across the universe. “Although the forces at play are massive, and all those silk threads of the spider web are torn off here and there by cosmic winds. And I don't know how long I can do that. These void entities didn't only exist as an assault on our network — they were attacking the very idea of being connected.”

So I can sense the Original Void lapping at everything through my broader perceptions, and know it as an oncoming tidal wave of pure nullity that would carry away all that there was or ever would be. Its existence prompts the child growing inside of me to shrink back within my belly, a personification of potential instinctually recoiling from transcendental annulment.

“Think about the infant,” one says, its ethereal shape flickering even as it itself dissolves into the void of eternity. “Your child's the key — it represents nothing but potential, limitless possibility for something to come from nothing. That is the one thing that the Original Void cannot fathom or defeat.”

"Except that using the baby sniffs could mean killing me and possibly you," I protest, my motherly nature battling my need to save all of reality. The pale hands clasp too tightly; every night I can feel them probe the edge of outer reality, this place that should not be with constellations crafted in realtime by void nature.

The long-lost male counterpart drops in, just briefly to correct me as he is swallowed up by a time and space vortex “Your child and you are ever becoming — always expanding, always transforming, always generative. A void is an absence; static and empty. Dynamic, however, it will always be opposite to something as a nature of its existence.”

Our mate bond carries Thane's deep voice over the void of my indecision and his Alpha King resolve grounds me in my confusion. “Do what you have to do and we'll back you up. The whole network will harness their energy through our bond, giving you the force to be whatever this requires.”

“They're testing our bonds — I can feel it," Yvonne strains, focusing intently while she takes stock of the cohesiveness within the network with her young mind. “The void entities… they're like acid wearing down our connections – every place they connect with no longer is no longer a connection in and of itself either.”

“Then we must alter the very essence of our tethers” I realize and with that everything comes rushing to a head as if it were any other self-evident fact.

Lord Valerian nods, a greying pallor of understanding washing over his face even for something this cosmically impossible. “Like a river that is always a river, although the water in it returns time and again. So even though the substance is always in motion,the form is permanent.”

“That's right” I growl as the idea takes shape in my mind. Not connecting to each other,we connect with each other as if we are the connection. Not that we're in a relationship, but it's more that we are the process of a relationship, rather than people separate from one another who just happen to have linked-up.

However, as I try to make the transformation, then suddenly the original void looks right in my direction. The only way this can be experienced is believed to be unimaginable — experiencing a sensation from abroad of the nothing that tries to convince you that never was.

I whisper, “as a weight more encompassing than ultimate nothingness bears down upon the sanity in my mind like an annihilating force that was primal yet undefined " I can feel it in my head… It is not trying to kill me or even convert me — it is trying to unmake me, to make me so I was never born and maybe never conceived, a Tyranturo that existed only in the past tense.”

"Fight it!" His love is so blazingly warm inside of the encroaching darkness, Thane roars through our bond. "Remember who you are! Think about the first time we met, our first kiss and when you told me you were pregnant for God sake. Those memories are real, they took place, and never he undone!”

"But what if they're wrong?" Original Void licking my brain with its voice composed of no sound. “What if none of it was ever real? Is it possible — was all of you maybe only a dream that reality is finally waking up from? How nice it would be to quietly slip... away. To never have been? To let Exhaustion of Existence Finally Die?”

There is a truly terrifying moment where that seductive logic almost sweeps me away. The very thought of having never existed, of just letting it all go and melting back into blissed-out oblivion without a care or chore in the universe, well… It's almost worth doing, isn't it?

Until I feel the baby kick from inside me, a flicker of life with all the potential in the world. But in that movement, I also remember: why life matters — not because it is easy or painless; but because it a beautiful and meaningful existence worth saving regardless of how much we have to pay for it.

I scream “No!” My voice takes on a bit more power in each syllable. "I choose to exist. I choose to have existed. I choose to continue existing. I do it and I will continue to do it with whatever strength remains, because the choice has been made and I aim to make sure everyone takes that same choice, no matter how hard it gets.”

The Original Void curls in upon himself at my proclamation, away from him like when an abrupt light clobbers darkness. During this retreat, I become aware of the only thing that can save us all—the void is not stronger than presence. It is only that it's older and more insistent. It has forgotten the one thing that makes it worse than oblivion: its very existence.

“…it can be made,” I gasp, as awareness bursts within me like the sunrise at the end of a very long night. Nothingness can only consume that which already exists but existence creates something from nowhere. The cosmic void remains the same forever but life grows; evolves beyond what it is.

I think this epiphany is now vibrating out again through the connected consciousness of every other reality. But then, rather than just fighting off the assault of the void on our too-material lives, we start to give the void something it has never had — freedom from being nothing.

We are not here to fight you, I manage to call out to the entities closing in on us or what feels like us from some impossible angle of thought away. "We're giving you an option that you never had. Opportunity to live. Not just survive. The chance to make instead of take. The chance to turn into something lovely instead of an endless void.”

The impact is instantly striking. Many stop their attack, and the formless things flicker between non-existence and merely-existing as they ponder this unheard-of proffer.

“No” the Original Void screams, in a voice coloured with overtones of anger and something like terror. "There is no choice! There is only a return to entropy in the end! "Existence is a perversion to be rebutted!"

“Then show me”, I challenge my awareness reaching out to encompass our reality.The world on the other side of every mirror in creation.

However, as I push our unity magic out towards the void entities, giving them the option to join instead of ruin us all... something incredible happens. It is not simply a matter of the stuff of reality being recast, it starts to sing, in harmony with its existence and non-existence that materializing reality could never achieve.

I can hear something shifting within that cosmic song as the Original Void itself begins to doubt its own permanency.