114

114
Thane's POV

“Now they're pulling back,” I snarl as my green gaze follows the architect entities ceaselessly retreating from our connection network of preferred togetherness. And yet the way they take off has every Alpha instinct in me howling, because it sends warning bells off in deep-rooted places and causes the hair on my neck to prickle.

“This isn't just a position. Seems they're planning something that makes everything else they ever attempted seem ultimately childish."

We have a bond that I'm fairly sure now transcends anything in human history, feeling her consciousness inside me as well as the spirit of the child growing within her — an unborn life somehow existing simultaneously in two states, unreal potential and future being. I sense her exhaustion fighting with resolve; I hear the fear of hope in a never-ending emotional tango.

“Me too,” she whispers softly, her brown eyes reflecting an understanding that seems to reach across myriad dimensions. There she takes on a softness, her inner light shining through pale skin in undulating waves as if pulsing with each pulse of her heart rustling up ripples like rings on water across the expanse of our provinces. They are not simply retreating—they are drawing power from another place, one beyond even the multiverse.

Lord Valerian leans forward, his ageless face creased with effort as he extends the senses that have been honed over hundreds of years. The dimensional barriers are not only weakening, for a second time he reports this back in his communiqué -- only now all the signs point to alarm in his voice. "They're being systematically destroyed. They need unfettered access to the void between realities, whoever or what those Architects are planning.”

"The void?" My queen, confused and afraid. “But the spaces between dimensions have nothing to grow on. It is simply nothing, nothingness; not even to the point of being no existence, it is void,"

“Unless you are something fundamentally broken,” Matthias sneers, his emergent deformation squirming with the shotgunned memories of a corrupted voice. Oh yes — I recall now- bits of what they fed me when they tried to assimilate my being. The Architects are fictioneers from no dimension. They are voidborn parasites, creatures of the space outside of decisions.

This revelation travels on our Unity network like a bolt of Thunderclap Awareness igniting all who it touches, setting consciousness alight with vibrational waves. The Architects want to rule over reality, but if they came from the void, then it also means that their true desire is to dissolve all of creation in nothingness.

The pieces fall into place with the dread feeling of a cosmic puzzle,"That's why forced conformity is their aim. Everything is dead and lifeless where they live, and there is nothing to do for them. They can only consume, take in, break down everything to fit within their own lack."

“They’re unsleashing the obstacle course,” Elder Raven warns as her aged hands shake, observing the cords.

“I can tell," other void entities are starting to answer their call. Things that would make the Architects appear benign by comparison – entities whose very existence is to undo reality.

The twins coalesce next to us as we have never seen them, their ghostly figures now fierce almost palpable energy crackling around them in the air. “The Alpha King does understand,” the female twin says, and her voice has cords of perilous alarm.

“The Architects have renounced their Tranzarchical aims of a perfect sentient trust. Now they only wish to pull the rest of existence into that hole with them — if they can have perfection, let oblivion be in its stead."

“how are we supposed to fight against that?” Then Yvonne, in the same level voice I had always associated with her youth, asks. My sister is so weary from her swooping, swerving journey through life's suffering that she has grown features of ancient beings in strength and wisdom.

“How do you fight against the forces that seek to unmake creation?”

“We show them the definition of existing,” says Astella, her snow white hands covering her stomach, which grows a human life inside it with each breath.

“They are something that comes out of nothing, so they forget the beauty in everything for something. The joy of choice The human warmth The satisfaction of creation We remind them what they wish to annihilate.”

“how will they comprehend a question that has never been asked?” The ancient mind of Lord Cassius questions. “How do you teach color to that which has never seen light, music to one that has never experienced sound?”

"Through connection," I proclaim, receiving the resolution with Alpha certainty that takes no for answer. "Supernatural creatures across two parallel worlds – the same way we reimagine our unity magic to encompass them. Not to make them do the right thing, but to give them a choice they never had."

“Wow that is way too risky,” High Priestess Morgana gasps, her tired face glistening with sweat as the realization sinks in.

“We risk corrupting the entire network if we could somehow manage to connect directly with void entities. We all could get pulled into the nether regions with them.”

“Or we might present them something they've never had,” I argue, my tone reeking of the identifier of an Alpha King who has brought about unimaginable agreements previously. “A possibility of being something instead of being nothing. That is the chance to be a creator and not a consumer. The chance to select life over mere nothingness.”

However, as we concern ourselves with whether or not this reckless idea is a good decision, reality itself explodes in unimaginable ways around us. The Architects, the void entities they've conjured begin to emerge, with their mere presence existence itself would prefer not exist. Color loses its vibrancy, sounds fade into the background, and existence is called into question any time he shows up.

“They are here…” Astella whispers seeing their ever-present link to the infinite possibilities such as others cannot.

Hundreds of them, thousands, all coming through the rents in reality the Architects have made. And that beyond them is something even worse — the First Void, the nothing from which not even the Architects can escape in time.

I sense her fear through our mate bond ballooning to a level that would suffocate anyone. And whatever it is she sees occupying the dimension crease, it's so utterly abhorrent that her shaman powers reject it out of sheer reflex.

“The Original Void doesn’t just want to unmake reality,” she whispers, her brown eyes wide with cosmic horror. “It wants to unmake the possibility of reality ever having been in the first place. If it gets what it wants, everything will not only stop being; it will never have been. No memory, no echo, no trace. It will be as if existence was never allowed to occur.”

The full weight of that revelation settles over our unity network like a blanket of despair. We’re not just fighting to live, to preserve our realities, even our multiverse. We’re fighting for the right for anything to be in the first place.

“Then we give them a reason to choose being over not,” I growl, my Alpha King powers flaring to life with an intensity that insists that reality acknowledges it.

“We show them what they’re trying to erase. We show them love, hope, joy, connection, the endless beauty that can arise when beings co-create rather than consume.”

“How do you show beauty to something that they have never seen?” Queen Titania demands, her voice light in the face of total negation.

“You become the beauty,” Astella answers, her skin literally shining with a light that seems to come from the very seed of possibility.

“You become weaponized goodness. You embody all that is lovely and pure and meaningful about existence. You give yourself living evidence that anything is better than nothing.”

And as our unity network prepares for its final encounter, the Original Void makes its presence known by making a silence so profound that it consumes sound. Where its attention falls, everything doesn’t just stop existing; it stops having existed. And in that dread quiet, I listen to something so chilling that my skin erupts with the strength of the Arctic. The original Void is exploiting our unity network; the void entities are looking for our weakest connections, our weakest ties.

“They’re going after our bonds!” I realize in horror. “They’re not merely destroying them; they’re making it so the connection was never there in the first place. If they succeed, we’ll be alone, powerless, helpless! We won’t be able to recall whatever gave us the courage to unite!”