Chapter Text
By the time ████ was ready, the laboratory no longer resembled a place of research.
It had become a shrine.
Not of reverence, but of obsession. Every surface was covered in sigils etched with painstaking care, not crude desperation but calculated precision. The floor bore a vast circular array, inlaid with alchemical silver and darkened resin drawn from leyline condensate. Symbols spiraled outward like the growth rings of a tree, each one corresponding to an identifier, a resonance, a record. Names were not words here. Names were coordinates. Anchors. Threads tied directly into Irminsul’s memory.
████ stood at the center of it all, unmoving.
He had not slept in two days. His hands trembled only when still. When he worked, they were steady, frighteningly so.
He had convinced himself of one simple truth. Irminsul could not govern what it could not remember. Fate required reference. Reference required a name. If his name could be severed, not erased violently but gently unlinked, then the weave would lose him. The prophecy would fail not through resistance, but through absence.
He was not trying to destroy fate.
He was trying to step sideways out of it.
The Abyss had been quiet that night. That alone should have frightened him more than any whisper.
He took it as proof that he was right.
████ knelt at the edge of the circle and began the invocation, voice hoarse but controlled. He did not speak his name. That was intentional. To speak it aloud would reinforce the very tether he sought to dissolve. Instead, he invoked lineage, contribution, and recorded existence. Each phrase corresponded to an Irminsul index, a way the world remembered him without saying who he was.
“I renounce the continuity of record,” he said softly. “I sever the bond between action and attribution. I release the right of memory to claim authorship.”
The circle responded.
Leyline energy surged, not violently, but with a slow, grinding pressure, like roots shifting deep underground. The symbols began to glow faintly, one by one, a pale blue light tinged with something darker beneath. ████ swallowed, heart pounding, but he did not stop.
He reached for the final component.
A small, carved token bearing his family sigil. Old. Passed down. The mark of ████’s lineage, tied not just to him, but to generations before him. He hesitated only briefly.
“This is necessary,” he whispered to himself. “Only the name must be lost. Not the blood.”
He placed the sigil at the center of the array.
The moment his fingers left it, the circle reacted.
The glow deepened. The air thickened, pressing against his lungs. The leylines did not snap. They did not break. They bent inward.
████ frowned.
That was not expected.
Irminsul did not resist erasure with force. It resisted with reinterpretation.
He felt it then. Not pain, not yet, but a sensation like being misfiled. Like a book placed on the wrong shelf. His thoughts blurred for a moment, memories slipping slightly out of alignment. He forced himself to remain focused, completing the final binding phrase.
“I am unrecorded,” he said. “I am unbound. I am not a constant.”
The circle collapsed inward.
Not explosively. Silently.
The glow extinguished itself, leaving behind scorched silver and inert resin. The leyline pressure vanished as if it had never been there. ████ gasped, falling forward onto his hands, breath coming in ragged pulls.
For a long time, he stayed there, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did.
No pain. No scream of reality tearing. No Abyssal laughter. Only silence.
A shaky laugh escaped him.
“It worked,” he whispered, disbelief flooding his voice. “It worked.”
He staggered to his feet, heart racing, exhilaration cutting through exhaustion. He expected to feel different. Lighter. Detached. Instead, he felt the same, which he took as success. Irminsul had not rejected him. It had simply let go.
He did not notice the hairline fracture running through the family sigil at his feet.
The consequences did not come immediately. That was the cruelest part.
In the days that followed, ████ felt unmoored, but not threatened. His work proceeded uninterrupted. No visions. No whispers. The Abyss remained distant, muted. He took this as confirmation. Fate had lost its grip.
It was only later that the first absence revealed itself.
A colleague who had once greeted him warmly now passed him without recognition. When ████ spoke, the man startled, apologizing stiffly, eyes sliding away. Others followed. Conversations shortened. Invitations ceased. It was subtle enough to be dismissed as coincidence.
Until it was not.
Vedrfolnir did not return even after.
No letter. No message. No prophetic warning. It was as if ████ had never mattered enough to warrant closure.
The realization struck slowly, painfully.
He watched people drift away, not with conflict, not with hatred, but with quiet inevitability. Bonds thinned. Promises dissolved. Even casual familiarity seemed to slip through his fingers. And it was not only him.
A distant cousin wrote once, confused, speaking of friends who had suddenly grown cold, of engagements dissolving without reason. Another message followed weeks later, shorter, more resigned. His dad once a very influencial person would loose contact with his colleague and he ended up disowning ████ out of the family because he though it was because of his experiment. (He wasn't wrong tho)
████’s blood ran cold.
He returned to his notes, frantic now, tracing the aftermath of the ritual with fresh eyes. Irminsul had not erased him. It had corrected him.
This was a different outcome...
The curse had not targeted him alone. It had flowed along lineage, along association, along memory itself. Where a name once created continuity, there was now erosion. Where bonds once formed, there was now attrition. By trying to erase his names instead he stained it.
They would not be hated.
They would be forgotten.
Not erased, but abandoned.
████ collapsed into a chair, hands clutching his head as the truth settled like a suffocating weight.
“This was it,” he whispered hoarsely. “This was the failure.”
The experiment had not defied fate.
It had fulfilled it.
A cautionary tale... A failure that reshaped the world not through destruction, but through absence. He would endure, yes. He would watch relationships wither, names fade, lives unfold without companionship, again and again. Now... He didn't understood what vedrfolnir meant by stabilizing point of irminsul but he was too tired to think further.
The voice of the Abyss returned then, quiet, almost gentle.
“You chose absence,” it murmured. “And absence is not freedom.”
████ did not respond.
For the first time since the prophecy, he did not reach for calculations or countermeasures. He sat there in the dim light of his ruined laboratory, staring at the fractured sigil of his family name.
A thought surfaced, unbidden, terrifying in its calm.
If he were gone entirely, truly gone, perhaps the erosion would stop with him.
Perhaps death was the only erasure Irminsul could not reinterpret.
His hands curled slowly into fists.
The thought did not bring relief.
Only a deeper, more final kind of despair.
The laboratory lay in stillness.
The faint ticking of a clock marked the passage of time with merciless consistency, each second falling into the next. Somewhere above, condensation gathered and slipped from a forgotten vial, striking stone with a hollow sound. ████ sat hunched at the edge of the ritual circle, unmoving, his gaze fixed upon the fractured remains of his family sigil. The lines that once carried meaning now lay broken and distorted, their symmetry ruined beyond repair.
For the first time, he felt truly powerless.
Not powerless over Irminsul alone, nor over fate or the voices that haunted his thoughts. He felt powerless over everything. Over the world. Over consequence. Over himself. He had attempted to bend reality, to step aside from the path laid before him, to erase his own name from the weave of existence. And all he had accomplished was to prove how tightly bound he truly was.
All the precision. All the calculations. All the sleepless nights and relentless obsession.
Worthless.
Meaningless...
His hand closed around a vial resting near the edge of the circle. It was small and slender, filled with a clear, shimmering liquid prepared long ago for a purpose that no longer mattered. Its use now was simple. Final.
Killing himself.
He studied it as though it might offer understanding, or comfort, or even mercy. It offered nothing.
“This is all I can control,” he whispered, his voice trembling as it echoed faintly against stone. “This is the only thing left. Only this can end it.”
The vial wavered in his grasp. His pulse thundered in his ears. Leylines, diagrams, warnings, whispered futures, all crowded his thoughts at once. None offered guidance. None offered reprieve.
Fear did not drive him.
What gripped him was recognition.
Recognition of how completely powerless he had become.
“I failed,” he murmured. “I am nothing. I cannot change the world. I cannot change Irminsul. I cannot even change myself. Not even my fate.”
The thought of drinking the liquid felt almost logical. A conclusion reached through reason rather than despair. The final decision in a universe that had denied him every other choice.
He raised the vial to his lips.
Then the noise came.
At first it was distant, barely discernible beneath the ticking clock. A muted clamor echoed through the halls of the castle. Raised voices. Hurried footsteps striking stone. Doors thrown open. Commands shouted with rising panic. ███ froze, his heart lurching violently in his chest.
Something had shifted.
He did not know why, only that the world beyond the laboratory had begun to move without him. His fingers trembled. The vial slipped from his grasp and shattered against the floor, spilling a shimmering pool across the stone.
Then the sensations began.
They were not memories, not in any form he recognized. No clear images. No lived moments. Instead, emotions flooded into him without warning, overwhelming and indiscriminate. Love not his own surged through his chest, deep and aching, bound to someone he had never known. Hatred burned through his thoughts, raw and ancient, as though he stood at the receiving end of a grudge that had endured centuries.
Anxiety coiled tightly around his lungs. Then, without reason or source, warmth bloomed within him, a longing that belonged nowhere and everywhere at once.
These feelings did not come from the present.
They were fragments drawn from impossible timelines, from people who should not yet exist, or perhaps had existed long beyond the fragile reach of now.
████ staggered beneath their weight. He tried to name them. To anchor them. But there was nothing to grasp. No faces. No origins. No meaning he could impose. They might have been warnings, or remnants, or echoes of futures that would never be realized.
They were simply too much.
He rose abruptly, heart hammering as though it recognized a truth his mind could not yet form. Smoke drifted beneath the laboratory door. Guards ran past without noticing him. Frantic voices echoed through the halls. A cry rang out, sharp with betrayal. A name followed, cracking like stone underfoot.
The king was dead.
████ did not understand how... He was so obsessed with his destiny that he didn't understood what was going in this present. Conspiracy, rebellion, treachery, none of it assembled into sense. All he knew was that the castle had fractured. People fled and fought and screamed and fell. His breath caught painfully in his throat.
This was no longer the future.
This was the present.
He turned toward a high window, unsure what he sought. Outside, the sky was bleeding.
It was not the pale red of dawn. It was deep and sickly, like an open wound. A terrible crimson mist swallowed the sun, spreading across the horizon and staining everything it touched. The world shimmered beneath the hue of catastrophe, as though reality itself burned in slow motion.
████ stared, horror rooting him in place.
He recognized it.
Not through sight alone, nor through the foreign emotions overwhelming him, but through something deeply personal. A memory of words spoken long ago, vague and heavy, once shared by Vedrfolnir.
This was the fall of Khaenri’ah.
The sky before him matched every description.
The emotions surging through him shuddered in recognition.
████ fell to his knees. His hands shook uncontrollably. His breath came in shallow, broken bursts. Time fractured around him. He could not tell whether he stood in the present or between moments, between histories colliding.
The red sky blazed over distant mountains and unseen lands. The world convulsed beneath the weight of ruin. Horror and wonder warred within him. Love and grief tangled like thorns. Hatred burned where he could not reach it. Anxiety roared like a storm trapped in his chest.
He was drowning in emotions that were not his.
He was breaking beneath them.
████ cried then, not for himself, but for something far greater.
As his knees pressed into the cold stone and the red sky burned brighter with every heartbeat, a final thought pierced the fog of terror.
Nothing he had done mattered.
All his attempts to defy fate, to rewrite Irminsul, to remove himself from history had been futile. He had failed.
Not only in his experiment.
But in purpose.
He had tried to change destiny and only bound himself more tightly to its darkest threads.
The weight of that truth crushed him.
His tears ran dry. His legs went numb. His mind teetered on a precipice more terrifying than any ritual circle.
And ████, haunted by emotions not his own, watched the world unravel beneath burning heavens, unable to tell where his fate ended and the world’s began.